she became an obsession, this franco-american singer and dancer, as he sat pasting and pasting, caressing her pictured face with sticky fingers. there were brief intervals of freedom from her image when he was 'edging' and 'backing,' or when he was lining the boxes with the plain paper; but yvonne came twice on every box—once in large on the inside, once in small on the outside, with a gummed projection to be stuck down after the cigars were in. he fell to recalling what he had read of her—the convent education that had kept her chaste and distinguished beneath all her stage deviltry, the long lenten fasts she endured (as brought to light by the fishmonger's bill she disputed in open court), the crucifix concealed [296]upon her otherwise not too reticent person, the adorable french accent with which she enraptured the dudes, the palatial private car in which she traversed the states, with its little chapel giving on the bathroom; the swashbuckling marquis de st. roquière, who had crossed the channel after her, and the maid he had once kidnapped in mistake for the mistress; the diamond necklace presented by the rajah of singapuri, stolen at a soirée in san francisco, and found afterwards as single stones in a low 'hock-shop' in new orleans.
and despite all this glitter of imposing images a subconscious thought was forcing itself more and more clearly to the surface of his mind. that aureole of golden hair, those piquant dark eyes! the yvonne the cheap illustrated papers had made him familiar with had lacked this revelation of colour! but no, the idea was insane!
this scintillating celebrity his lost gittel!
bah! misery had made him childish. goldwater had, indeed, blossomed out since the days of his hired hall in spitalfields, but his fame remained exclusively yiddish and east-side. but gittel!
how could that obscure rush-light of the london ghetto theatre have blazed into the star of paris and new york?
this lent-keeping demoiselle the little polish jewess who had munched passover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! this gilded idol the impecunious gittel he had caressed!
'you ever seen this yvonne rupert?' he inquired of his neighbour, a pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the establishment, [297]had refused to join the strike of the mere hundred-and-fifty a day.
the young woman swiftly drew a knife from the wooden pail beside her, and deftly scraped at a rough hinge as she replied: 'no, but i guess she's the actress who gets all the flowers, and won't pay for 'em.'
he saw she had mixed up the two lawsuits, but the description seemed to hit off his gittel to the life. yes, gittel had always got all the flowers of life, and dodged paying. ah, she had always been diabolically clever, unscrupulously ambitious! who could put bounds to her achievement? she had used him and thrown him away—without a word, without a regret. she had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day's paste. what other 'pious philanthropist' had she found to replace him? whither had she fled? why not to paris that her theatric gifts might receive training?
this chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her—had not gittel possessed it all? had not her heroines enchanted the ghetto?
oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths of the yvonne rupert cigar!
