Abe and Mawruss Part 42

"I am--now--going to got a job out there," Harkavy replied--"a very good job."

Morris drew his former a.s.sistant cutter to the sidewalk. He had temporarily forgotten the object of his visit to the lower East Side in the sudden conception of an idea, which was no less than the rehiring of Harkavy.

"What for a good job?" Morris asked. "Twenty dollars a week?"

Harkavy nodded.

"A little more," he said--"twenty-five."

"_Schon gut_," Morris declared; "then you wouldn't got to go at all, because we ourselves would give you thirty."

"I moost go," Harkavy said, shaking his head; "my fare is paid."

"Pay 'em back the fare," Morris insisted--"we would see you wouldn't lose it."

Again Harkavy shook his head.

"I got a bonus too," he declared--"a thousand rubles."

"What are you talking about, rubles?" Morris said impatiently. "You ain't a greenhorn no longer. Do you mean a thousand dollars?"

"Six hundred dollars--about," Harkavy replied.

Morris whistled.

"Well," he said after a pause of some seconds, "put off going until to-morrow anyhow. Maybe we could fix up to give you the six hundred dollars anyhow."

Harkavy remained silent and Morris clapped him on the shoulder.

"If people is so anxious to get you that they pay you a big lot of money like that, Harkavy, you could keep 'em waiting anyhow one day. Come round and see us to-morrow morning at nine o'clock, wouldn't you?"

Harkavy pondered the question for some minutes.

"If you wish it, Mr. Perlmutter," he said, "I would do so; but I must got to go away by eleven o'clock sure."

"Good!" Morris exclaimed. "Then I'll see you to-morrow morning at nine o'clock."

They shook hands on the appointment and Morris turned away and ascended the high stoop of an old-fas.h.i.+oned tenement. In the vestibule he encountered a boy whose right cheek was apparently distorted by a severe toothache.

"Do a family by the name Levin live here?" Morris asked.

The boy nodded and disgorged a huge lump of toffee, whereat the toothache disappeared.

"Dat's me fader," he said. "Fourt' floor front east. He ain't in, dough."

"Your father!" Morris cried. "Why, the people I am coming to see they are greenhorns."

"Oh, yeh," the youngster replied; "dat's me fader's uncle. He lives wid us."

"All right," Morris said. "Take me up there."

The youngster resumed his swollen cheek and escorted Morris up three flights of slippery bra.s.sbound stairs. Without the formality of knocking, they entered an apartment on the fourth floor where a woman stood was.h.i.+ng dishes.

"Mrs. Levin?" Morris said.

The woman nodded.

"I want to see your man's uncle," Morris continued. Without looking up the woman cried in stentorian tones: "Mees-taire!"

In response a bent figure, clad in an alpaca caftan, appeared from an interior bedroom. He wore a velvet skullcap, and a thin gray beard straggled from his chin; his nose was surmounted by a pair of steel spectacles.

"_Sholom alaicham!_" Morris cried, according the Rabbi that greeting, as ancient as the Hebrew tongue itself--"Peace be with you."

"_Alaicham sholom!_" the Rabbi answered, and then he resorted to the Yiddish jargon: "Do you look for me?"

"I look for the _Rav_ Elkan Levin," Morris said in a tongue to which he had long been unaccustomed. "I am the servant of the philanthropist Steuermann."

"Steuermann?" the _Rav_ Levin repeated. "I do not know him."

"In America," Morris said, "his name is honored over the governor's. He sends me to you to speak for the unfortunate _Tzwee_ Kovalenko."

"_Tzwee_ Kovalenko," the old man cried, and his beard stood out as his invisible lips tightened, while his nose became sharp and hawk-like. "A _mishna meshuna_ to him, the same as he sent to my son."

"No," Morris declared; "he did not send it to your son. It was another that did it."

The old man sank trembling into a nearby chair and clutched the edge of the table.

"You tell this to me who saw with my own eyes his body!" he said in shaking tones. "Yes, _Baron_; I saw my own child like a slaughtered beast, all blood--not a face, but a piece of flesh. I saw him, and you tell me this!"

"None the less," Morris went on, "if your son did die it was a _kapora_ not meant for him. It was intended for the chief of police."

The _Rav_ shook his head.

"It stands in the _Gemera_" he said, in the singsong tone of the Talmudical reader: "If one flings a stone for pleasure and it strikes another so that he dies, the one also shall die."

He rose to his feet and waved one hand with a flapping motion. "An eye for an eye!" he cried in shrill tones. "A tooth for a tooth!"

Morris shrank back and turned to the woman, who had not raised her head from the dishwas.h.i.+ng.

"You tell him," he said, "that the philanthropist Steuermann invites him to come to the address I shall give you--to-morrow at ten o'clock. Tell him you know that when Steuermann commands, governors obey."

"What is it my business?" Mrs. Levin replied. "Tell him yourself."

"Your man should go with him," Morris insisted. "He and you will not lose by it."

Morris wrote the address on the back of one of Potash & Perlmutter's business cards and handed it to her.

"Put on it the table," she said.