Atlantic Narratives Part 4

Mrs. Rudinsky often glanced at David's teacher, to see how her husband's stories were impressing her. She was too shy with her English to say more than was required of her as hostess, but her face, aglow with motherly pride, showed how she partic.i.p.ated in her husband's enthusiasm.

'You see yourself, ma'am, what he is,' said David's father, 'but what could I make of him in Russia? I was happy when he got here, only it was a little late. I wished he started in school younger.'

'He has time enough,' said Miss Ralston. 'He'll get through grammar school before he's fourteen. He's twelve now, isn't he?'

'Yes, ma'am--no, ma'am! He's really fourteen now, but I made him out younger on purpose.'

Miss Ralston looked puzzled. Mr. Rudinsky explained.

'You see, ma'am, he was twelve years when he came, and I wanted he should go to school as long as possible, so when I made his school certificate, I said he was only ten. I have seven children, and David is the oldest one, and I was afraid he'd have to go to work, if business was bad, or if I was sick. The state is a good father to the children in America, if the real fathers don't mix in. Why should my David lose his chance to get educated and be somebody, because I am a poor business man, and have too many children? So I made out that he had to go to school two years more.'

He narrated this anecdote in the same simple manner in which he had told a dozen others. He seemed pleased to rehea.r.s.e the little plot whereby he had insured his boy's education. As Miss Ralston did not make any comment immediately, he went on, as if sure of her sympathy.

'I told you I got my citizen papers right away when I came to America. I worked hard before I could bring my family--it took me four years to save the money--and they found a very poor home when they got here, but they were citizens right away. But it wouldn't do them much good, if they didn't get educated. I found out all about the compulsory education, and I said to myself that's the policeman that will keep me from robbing my David if I fail in business.'

He did not overestimate his visitor's sympathy. Miss Ralston followed his story with quick appreciation of his ideals and motives, but in her ingenuous American mind one fact separated itself from the others: namely, that Mr. Rudinsky had falsified his boy's age, and had recorded the falsehood in a public doc.u.ment. Her recognition of the fact carried with it no criticism. She realized that Mr. Rudinsky's conscience was the product of an environment vastly different from hers. It was merely that to her mind the element of deceit was something to be accounted for, be it ever so charitably, whereas in Mr. Rudinsky's mind it evidently had no existence at all.

'So David is really fourteen years old?' she repeated incredulously.

'Why, he seems too little even for twelve! Does he know?--Of course he would know! I wonder that he consented--'

She broke off, struck by a sudden thought. 'Consented to tell a lie' she had meant to say, but the unspoken words diverted her mind from the conversation. It came upon her in a flash that she had found the key to David's mystery. His note was in her pocketbook, but she knew every word of it, and now everything was plain to her. The lie was this lie about his age, and the person he wanted to s.h.i.+eld was his father. And for that he was suffering so!

She began to ask questions eagerly.

'Has David said anything about--about a little trouble he had in school the day he became ill?'

Both parents showed concern.

'Trouble? what trouble?'

'Oh, it was hardly trouble--at least, I couldn't tell myself.'

'David is so hard to understand sometimes,' his father said.

'Oh, I don't think so!' the teacher cried. 'Not when you make friends with him. He doesn't say much, it's true, but his heart is like a crystal.'

'He's too still,' the mother insisted, shaking her head. 'All the time he's sick, he don't say anything, only when we ask him something. The doctor thinks he's worrying about something, but he don't tell.'

The mother sighed, but Miss Ralston cut short her reflections.

'Mrs. Rudinsky--Mr. Rudinsky,' she began eagerly, '_I_ can tell you what David's troubled about.'

And she told them the story of her last talk with David, and finally read them his note.

'And this lie,' she ended, 'you know what it is, don't you? You've just told me yourself, Mr. Rudinsky.'

She looked pleadingly at him, longing to have him understand David's mind as she understood it. But Mr. Rudinsky was very slow to grasp the point.

'You mean--about the certificate? Because I made out that he was younger?'

Miss Ralston nodded.

'You know David has such a sense of honor,' she explained, speaking slowly, embarra.s.sed by the effort of following Mr. Rudinsky's train of thought and her own at the same time. 'You know how he questions everything--sooner or later he makes everything clear to himself--and something must have started him thinking of this old matter lately--Why, of course! I remember I asked him his age that day, when he tried on the costume, and he answered as usual, and then, I suppose, he suddenly _realized_ what he was saying. I don't believe he ever _thought_ about it since--since you arranged it so, and now, all of a sudden--'

She did not finish, because she saw that her listeners did not follow her. Both their faces expressed pain and perplexity. After a long silence, David's father spoke.

'And what do _you_ think, ma'am?'

Miss Ralston was touched by the undertone of submission in his voice.

Her swift sympathy had taken her far into his thoughts. She recognized in his story one of those ethical paradoxes which the helpless Jews of the Pale, in their search for a weapon that their oppressors could not confiscate, have evolved for their self-defence. She knew that to many honest Jewish minds a lie was not a lie when told to an official; and she divined that no ghost of a scruple had disturbed Mr. Rudinsky in his sense of triumph over circ.u.mstances, when he invented the lie that was to insure the education of his gifted child. With David, of course, the same philosophy had been valid. His father's plan for the protection of his future, hingeing on a too familiar sophistry, had dropped innocuous into his consciousness, until, in a moment of spiritual sensitiveness, it took on the visage of sin.

'And what do _you_ think, ma'am?'

David's father did not have to wait a moment for her answer, so readily did her insight come to his defense. In a few eager sentences she made him feel that she understood perfectly, and understood David perfectly.

'I respect you the more for that lie, Mr. Rudinsky. It was--a _n.o.ble_ lie!' There was the least tremor in her voice. 'And I love David for the way _he_ sees it.'

Mr. Rudinsky got up and paced slowly across the room. Then he stopped before Miss Ralston.

'You are very kind to talk like that, Miss Ralston,' he said, with peculiar dignity. 'You see the whole thing. In the old country we had to do such things so many times that we--got used to them. Here--here we don't have to.' His voice took on a musing quality. 'But we don't see it right away when we get here. I meant nothing, only just to keep my boy in school. It was not to cheat anybody. The state is willing to educate the children. I said to myself I will tie my own hands, so that I can't pull my child after me if I drown. I did want my David should have the best chance in America.'

Miss Ralston was thrilled by the suppressed pa.s.sion in his voice. She held out her hand to him, saying again, in the low tones that come from the heart, 'I am glad I know you, Mr. Rudinsky.'

There was unconscious chivalry in Mr. Rudinsky's next words. Stepping to his wife's side, he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and said quietly, 'My wife has been my helper in everything.'

Miss Ralston, as we know, was given to seeing things. She saw now, not a poor immigrant couple in the first stage of American respectability, which was all there was in the room to see, but a phantom procession of men with the faces of prophets, m.u.f.fled in striped praying-shawls, and women radiant in the light of many candles, and youths and maidens with smouldering depths in their eyes, and silent children who pushed away joyous things for--for--

Dreams don't use up much time. Mr. Rudinsky was not aware that there had been a pause before he spoke again.

'You understand so well, Miss Ralston. But David'--he hesitated a moment, then finished quickly. 'How can he respect me if he feels like that?'

His wife spoke tremulously from her corner.

'That's what I think.'

'Oh, don't think that!' Miss Ralston cried. 'He does respect you--he understands. Don't you see what he says: _I can't tell you--because you would blame somebody who didn't do wrong._ He doesn't blame you. He only blames himself. He's afraid to tell me because he thinks _I_ can't understand.'

The teacher laughed a happy little laugh. In her eagerness to comfort David's parents, she said just the right things, and every word summed up an instantaneous discovery. One of her useful gifts was the ability to find out truths just when she desperately needed them. There are people like that, and some of them are school-teachers hired by the year. When David's father cried, 'How can he respect me?' Miss Ralston's heart was frightened while it beat one beat. Only one. Then she knew all David's thoughts between the terrible, 'I have lied,' and the generous, 'But my father did no wrong.' She guessed what the struggle had cost to reconcile the contradictions; she imagined his bewilderment as he tried to rule himself by his new-found standards, while seeking excuses for his father in the one he cast away from him as unworthy of an American.

Problems like David's are not very common, but then Miss Ralston was good at guessing.

'Don't worry, Mr. Rudinsky,' she said, looking out of her glad eyes.

'And you, Mrs. Rudinsky, don't think for a moment that David doesn't understand. He's had a bad time, the poor boy, but I know--Oh, I must speak to him! Will he wake soon, do you think?'

Mr. Rudinsky left the room without a word.

'It's all right,' said David's mother, in reply to an anxious look from Miss Ralston. 'He sleeps already the whole afternoon.'

It had grown almost dark while they talked. Mrs. Rudinsky now lighted the lamps, apologizing to her guest for not having done so sooner, and then she released Bennie from his prolonged attendance in the store.