A busy life I led, on Dover Street; a happy, busy life. When I was not reciting lessons, nor writing midnight poetry, nor selling papers, nor posing, nor studying sociology, nor pickling bugs, nor interviewing statesmen, nor running away from home, I made long entries in nay journal, or wrote forty-page letters to my friends. It was a happy thing that poor Mrs. Hutch did not know what sums I spent for stationery and postage stamps. She would have gone into consumption, I do believe, from inexpressible indignation; and she would have been in the right—to be indignant, not to go into consumption. I admit it; she would have been justified—from her point of view. From my point of view I was also in the right; of course I was. To make friends among the great was an important part of my education, and was not to be accomplished without a liberal expenditure of paper and postage stamps. If Mrs. Hutch had not repulsed my offer of confidences, I could have shown her long letters written to me by people whose mere signature was prized by autograph hunters. It is true that I could not turn those letters directly into rent-money,—or if I could, I would not,—but indirectly my interesting letters did pay a week's rent now and then. Through the influence of my friends my father sometimes found work that he could not have got in any other way. These practical results of my costly pursuit of friendships might have given Mrs. Hutch confidence in my ultimate solvency, had she not remained obstinately deaf to my plea for time, her heart being set on direct, immediate, convertible cash payment.
That was very narrow-minded, even though I say it who should not. The grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplied our table could have taught her to take a more liberal view. We were all anxious to teach her, if she only would have listened. Here was this poor grocer, conducting his business on the same perilous credit system which had driven my father out of Chelsea and Wheeler Street, supplying us with tea and sugar and strong butter, milk freely splashed from rusty cans, potent yeast, and bananas done to a turn,—with everything, in short, that keeps a poor man's family hearty in spite of what they eat,—and all this for the consideration of part payment, with the faintest prospect of a future settlement in full. Mr. Rosenblum had an intimate knowledge of the financial situation of every family that traded with him, from the gossip of his customers around his herring barrel. He knew without asking that my father had no regular employment, and that, consequently, it was risky to give us credit. Nevertheless he gave us credit by the week, by the month, accepted partial payment with thanks, and let the balance stand by the year.
We owed him as much as the landlady, I suppose, every time he balanced our account. But he never complained; nay, he even insisted on my mother's taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays. He knew, as well as Mrs. Hutch, that my father kept a daughter at school who was of age to be put to work; but so far was he from reproaching him for it that he detained my father by the half-hour, inquiring about my progress and discussing my future. He knew very well, did the poor grocer, who it was that burned so much oil in my family; but when I came in to have my kerosene can filled, he did not fall upon me with harsh words of blame. Instead, he wanted to hear about my latest triumph at school, and about the great people who wrote me letters and even came to see me; and he called his wife from the kitchen behind the store to come and hear of these grand doings. Mrs. Rosenblum, who could not sign her name, came out in her faded calico wrapper, and stood with her hands folded under her apron, shy and respectful before the embryo scholar; and she nodded her head sideways in approval, drinking in with envious pleasure her husband's Yiddish version of my tale. If her black-eyed Goldie happened to be playing jackstones on the curb, Mrs. Rosenblum pulled her into the store, to hear what distinction Mr. Antin's daughter had won at school, bidding her take example from Mary, if she would also go far in education.
"Hear you, Goldie? She has the best marks, in everything, Goldie, all the time. She is only five years in the country, and she'll be in college soon. She beats them all in school, Goldie—her father says she beats them all. She studies all the time—all night—and she writes, it is a pleasure to hear. She writes in the paper, Goldie. You ought to hear Mr. Antin read what she writes in the paper. Long pieces—"
"You don't understand what he reads, ma," Goldie interrupts mischievously; and I want to laugh, but I refrain. Mr. Rosenblum does not fill my can; I am forced to stand and hear myself eulogized.
"Not understand? Of course I don't understand. How should I understand? I was not sent to school to learn. Of course I don't understand. But you don't understand, Goldie, and that's a shame. If you would put your mind on it, and study hard, like Mary Antin, you would also stand high, and you would go to high school, and be somebody."
"Would you send me to high school, pa?" Goldie asks, to test her mother's promises. "Would you really?"
"Sure as I am a Jew," Mr. Rosenblum promptly replies, a look of aspiration in his deep eyes. "Only show yourself worthy, Goldie, and I'll keep you in school till you get to something. In America everybody can get to something, if he only wants to. I would even send you farther than high school—to be a teacher, maybe. Why not? In America everything is possible. But you have to work hard, Goldie, like Mary Antin—study hard, put your mind on it."
"Oh, I know it, pa!" Goldie exclaims, her momentary enthusiasm extinguished at the thought of long lessons indefinitely prolonged. Goldie was a restless little thing who could not sit long over her geography book. She wriggled out of her mother's grasp now, and made for the door, throwing a "back-hand" as she went, without losing a single jackstone. "I hate long lessons," she said. "When I graduate grammar school next year I'm going to work in Jordan-Marsh's big store, and get three dollars a week, and have lots of fun with the girls. I can't write pieces in the paper, anyhow.—Beckie! Beckie Hurvich! Where you going? Wait a minute, I'll go along." And she was off, leaving her ambitious parents to shake their heads over her flightiness.
Mr. Rosenblum gave me my oil. If he had had postage stamps in stock, he would have given me all I needed, and felt proud to think that he was assisting in my important correspondences. And he was a poor man, and had a large family, and many customers who paid as irregularly as we. He ran the risk of ruin, of course, but he did not scold—not us, at any rate. For he understood. He was himself an immigrant Jew of the type that values education, and sets a great price on the higher development of the child. He would have done in my father's place just what my father was doing: borrow, beg, go without, run in debt—anything to secure for a promising child the fulfilment of the promise. That is what America was for. The land of opportunity it was, but opportunities must be used, must be grasped, held, squeezed dry. To keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre present for the sake of the opulent future. If there was but one child in a family of twelve who promised to achieve an intellectual career, the other eleven, and father, and mother, and neighbors must devote themselves to that one child's welfare, and feed and clothe and cheer it on, and be rewarded in the end by hearing its name mentioned with the names of the great.