but the obsession persisted. in his miserable attic off hester street—that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was many stories nearer the sky—he warmed himself with gittel's image, smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. night and sleep surrendered [298]him to grotesque combinations—gittel goldstein smoking cigarettes in a bath-room, yvonne rupert playing yiddish heroines in a little chapel.
in the clear morning these absurdities were forgotten in the realized absurdity of the initial identification. but a forenoon at the pasting-desk brought back the haunting thought. at noon he morbidly expended his lunch-dime on an 'yvonne rupert' cigar, and smoked it with a semi-insane feeling that he was repossessing his gittel. certainly it was delicious.
he wandered into the box-making room, where the man who tended the witty nail-driving machine was seated on a stack of mexican cedar-wood, eating from a package of sausage and scrapple that sent sobering whiffs to the reckless smoker.
'you ever seen this yvonne rupert?' he asked wistfully.
'might as well ask if i'd smoked her cigar!' grumbled the nailer through his mouthfuls.
'but there's a gallery at webster and dixie's.'
'su-er!'
'i guess i'll go some day, just for curiosity.'
but the great yvonne, he found, was flaming in her provincial orbit. so he must needs wait.
meantime, on a saturday night, with a dirty two-dollar bill in his pocket, and jingling some odd cents, he lounged into the restaurant where the young russian bloods assembled who wrote for the yiddish labour papers, and 'knew it all.' he would draw them out about yvonne rupert. he established himself near a table at which long-haired, long-fingered freethinkers were drinking chocolate and discussing lassalle.
'ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only a [299]schoolboy to protest against the master's injustice to one of his schoolfellows! how the divine fire flamed in him!'
they talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the lassalle legend, broidering it with messianic myths, with the same fantastic oriental invention that had illuminated the plain pentateuch with imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of socialism with the same passionate personalization. he listened impatiently. he had never been caught by socialism, even at his hungriest. he had once been an employer himself, and his point of view survived.
they talked of the woman through whom lassalle had met his death. one of them had seen her on the american stage—a bouncing burlesque actress.
'like yvonne rupert?' he ventured to interpose.
'yvonne rupert?' they laughed. 'ah, if yvonne had only had such a snap!' cried melchitsedek pinchas. 'to have jilted lassalle and been died for! what an advertisement!'
'it would have been on the bill,' agreed the table.
he asked if they thought yvonne rupert clever.
'off the stage! there's nothing to her on,' said pinchas.
the table roared as if this were a good joke. 'i dare say she would play my ophelia as well as mrs. goldwater,' pinchas added zestfully.
'they say she has a yiddish accent,' elkan ventured again.
the table roared louder. 'i have heard of yiddish-deutsch,' cried pinchas, 'never of yiddish-fran?ais!'
elkan mandle was frozen. by his disappointment he knew that he had been hoping to meet gittel again—that his resentment was dead.
