Part 7

After Angelo, Silvio Romano's son, was drafted into the army, the father felt the loss threefold--the son, the helper, and the flutist. Angelo was all these to him. As a son, there was none more dutiful than the boy. As a barber, people came from uptown to have their hair cut by Angelo Romano; he was a real artist in his line. But as a flutist he surpassed himself in all other qualities. All musical disputes were quickly settled by Romano's calling upon his son to illustrate the particular passages in dispute, of "Lucia de Lammermoor" or "Il Barbiere de Sevilla." And Angelo would leave the half-shaved customer in the chair to do his filial duty--to uphold the older Romano's authority.

The duos father and son played together were the joy of the neighborhood, ten blocks around. The select ones--Luigi the banker, Marino the olive oil dealer, and other "notabiles"--sat inside the shop smoking their cigars, while ordinary folk stood outside near the window. Young couples sat on the door sill, holding hands and humming softly the tunes played inside. The duo finished, Mulberry Street applauded generously. And when Mulberry Street applauds, even the Manhattan Bridge shakes from the concussion.

Angelo gone, Romano suffered tremendously. But he had to engage help. There was none to be found, so he inserted the following advertisement in an Italian daily newspaper:

"Artist barber wanted in a first-class tonsorial parlor. One with musical talents preferred."

A week later, Salvatore Gonfarone, disliking to return to his former shop because he was exempted from military service on account of an infirmity of which he had not previously been aware, applied for the job.

The place made no impression on him. It was not like the one he had abandoned. He would not have accepted it; but while he was talking with his prospective employer, Rosita, Silvio's daughter, entered the shop. Salvatore's heart was struck. Thumb and forefinger of the left hand rose to curl his little black mustache, while the right palm met the open hand of Romano. "Sta bene, signore!" And there and then he donned the newly laundered white jacket which Angelo used to wear.

Rosita only came to see whether any mail had arrived. She disappeared as quickly as she came. Romano sat in the chair to give Salvatore a trial. It was a dream! or, as Romano himself said to his wife about the new helper's razor hand, "as light as a gentle breeze." Indeed, he was so pleased with the young man's work that he forgot to inquire about his musical abilities.

Silvio Romano was due for a surprise; that same evening Salvatore sang in a most beautiful mellow baritone voice an aria from "Rigoletto." Romano's fingers struck the tense strings of his guitar with vigor. The old Italian was happy.

Banker and grocer and the other "notabili" came again, and the sidewalk was so crowded with people the policeman on the beat thought Mulberry Street feuds were aflame.

But the greatest triumph of Salvatore was yet to come. Rosita in her best blue silk dress, and Madame Romano herself, entered the shop. The young girl stood timidly in a corner, the Latin impulsiveness checked by her American training. The introduction was not slow to come, and in a few well-chosen words Salvatore paid his compliments to both mother and daughter.

In a few days the news of Romano's great find spread all over town. The two men got to be so busy there was no time to sing and play during the day. Rosita, red flower in her thick raven hair, visited the shop quite frequently. Her black eyes spoke quite distinctly, and once Salvatore even thought she mimicked a kiss to him. But there was no chance to say a word. Silvio Romano began to make plans for a third chair.

The evenings were gorgeous. Salvatore sang "like a god."

Springtime in Mulberry Street is like nowhere else. It finds there a most receptive mood, and there is no sweeter perfume in any flower than the odor wafted by human happiness--as though every inhabitant carried in his bosom the gardens of Tuscany. It is primavera--the primavera of the Italy of Parma violets and lush red roses.

Salvatore Gonfarone pined away in his desire to speak to Rosita. But youth, love and luck are on very friendly terms.

Silvio Romano took sick one day--nothing very serious, a toothache. Salvatore was not going to lose his chance. When Rosita came to the shop he kissed her.

"Oh, Salvatore!"

"Oh, Rosita mio!"

It was just two weeks after they had first seen each other. Rosita made it her business to come ten times that day. A few cuts on the faces of customers bore witness to the young man's distraction.

The next day Romano, feeling much better, was in the shop again.

Toward noon there was an idle hour, and the two men sat down to talk music. It soon developed into a quarrel. Romano was an admirer of the old Italian school of Rossini and Donizetti; Salvatore Gonfarone bowed at the shrine of Verdi and Puccini.

"Pah! Rossini was nothing but a----"

"Basta, Signor! Rossini was the greatest master. Your Puccinis are nothing but noise makers."

"And you love Rossini only because you can play his things on the guitar."

It was a very insolent remark! Silvio Romano checked himself with difficulty. To dispute his musical authority so sneeringly was the height of impudence. But Salvatore was such a good barber! Romano let go a cutting answer:

"And you love Puccini because he gives you the opportunity to shout stupid arias."

Some customers interrupted the dispute.

During the next few hours Salvatore thought how to evade a disaster with the father of Rosita. He loved the girl; yesterday's kisses were still on his lips. Yet he could not, on account of that, change his musical opinions! The idea of the old wire plucker! Let him stick to his Rossini and Donizetti as much as he wants to, but not impose such ideas on him, on Salvatore Gonfarone, who knew more about music than a hundred Romanos!

It was a hard battle between love and artistic ideals.

Silvio Romano was terribly incensed. Several times he made up his mind to tell the youth they had reached the parting point. To dare sneer at Rossini! Rossini, the greatest master of them all--the god of music! let alone Donizetti--it was nothing less than sacrilege.

After those thoughts had had their sway, more practical ones presented themselves. Romano thought of the difficulty to find another man. Salvatore was such a good barber!

A hard battle between business and artistic ideals, indeed!

There was no music that evening, because there was no harmony between the two.

The banker and the other "notabili" came, in vain.

Salvatore took his hat and cane, and saying very politely, "Buona sera," he left the shop.

"What's the trouble with Salvatore?" they all asked.

"He is crazy," Romano answered. They understood something had gone wrong between the two, so the talk was switched on the war.

Rosita came and turned pale when she did not see the young man. The absence of his hat and cane caused the girl despair.

Said the banker to Romano at parting:

"If it's a question of a few dollars more a week, I would advise you----"

"Nothing of the kind, banchiere. Money means nothing to me. I have ideals, high ideals, which this impudent----Think of that! To dare sneer at Rossini! Il grande maestro! The compositore of the 'Barbiere de Sevilla,' and many another capo d'opera. He will have to apologize, or I never want to see him again!"

"Yes, yes," the banker insisted--"youth is impudent, but Salvatore's razor hand and his voice bring business."

"It means nothing to me. He will have to apologize if he wants to work in my shop."

The next day, Saturday, the two artists were too busy to talk music. Fire hung between them. Rosita came in early, all flushed, and sent Salvatore a meaning-full glance. Romano ordered her out very gruffly. Salvatore was mad with anger. How dare this Rossini fanatic speak to Rosita, to his beautiful Rosita, in such a way!

She did not return the whole day.

In the evening Salvatore again made ready to go. He had planned to leave definitely, and find some "sub rosa" way to speak to Rosita. Yet he changed his mind at the last minute. There was danger. He could not lose the girl. He decided to bide his time.

He had hardly started to take off the white jacket when Romano spoke to him.

"Young man, you will have to apologize or leave my shop for good. It is true you are a very good barber, an artist, and I was ready to increase your wages of my own good will. But I have ideals. You have insulted my masters--my great masters----"

Romano's voice quivered with emotion. His eyes were moist. He was deeply grieved. It touched Salvatore as nothing ever did. Throwing both arms around the old man's neck, he kissed him, crying:

"Silvio Romano, soul of an artist! amo d'artiste! I love you, I honor you. But I too have artistic ideals. I love Rosita--but you will not permit that I debase myself, that I lie to you for her sake?"

Both men cried.

They never again talked about the different masters; instead, they played their music nightly. And after a time, they occasionally bowed each at the other's shrine.

THE HOLY HEALER FROM OMSK

From Fourth Street to the confines of 14th Street below First Avenue and the East River is one of the Russian districts in New York. It is inhabited to a great extent by Russian laborers. The Russian "Inteligentsia" of New York is so busy talking _about_ the people, the "narod," it has had no time to go and see and talk _with_ the people.

The odor of cooked cabbage and burned fats dissolves into the stronger odors of the oiled high boots and the numerous Russian steam baths of the district. Ah, these steam baths! From the looks of them and the smell one comes to think of them more as sewers than baths. A hundred little "Cuchnias," restaurants with their vapored windows and sawdust floors proclaim the fact that most of the inhabitants of the district are here without their families and therefore thrown upon the ill-smelling and meanly-cooked foodstuffs of those eating places.

The whole week the streets and houses are very quiet; only the occasional quarrel between two restaurateurs and their wives disturbs the peace. The tired workers sleep. But on Saturday night the Russian temperament breaks loose. The windows of every front room are lit and from the street one sees plainly the decorations on the walls; red and blue serpentines cross the ceiling and are wrapped around the chandeliers; a few pictures in color, cut out from some illustrated paper or magazine; a few gayly colored hand embroidered towels are fixed with pins on the wall above the mantelpiece on which are a few pieces of cheap glassware in that milkish green held in so much affection by the Lithuanians. And inside the rooms, to the creaking sound of a concertina, the Russians dance and sing their national songs. Here and there some American song breaks loose, but this only happens early in the evening when things are yet on their surface. Later in the night when drink has sobered and deepened the children of the Volga they sing only dirges, linking one to another until the whole district is permeated in an undulating melancholy for which no God and no man could account.

* * * * *

In this district lived Stephan Ivanoff. Stephan came to New York with a reputation. People said he had escaped from Siberia by flight, and people also said that he was sent to Siberia because of the jealousy of a doctor. Stephan was not a doctor; he was a healer.

Stephan was a big, heavy dark bearded man with two shrewd little eyes in his head and a mouth which always looked as though it just finished eating some savory morsel. He kept to his Russian custom and went every Saturday night to the Russian bath. In the intimacy of the common bathroom he told stories and anecdotes which elicited broad laughter and made many friends to the newcomer from Siberia.

Incidentally Stephan Ivanoff gave some health hints to his friends. "First of all, don't eat eggs; don't eat any eggs," he said, "they are just poisoning your blood. If you have eaten even one egg in the last four, five years, it will come out some day in a swelling of the neck or in some other boil on the legs and arms."

* * * * *

And one day Vasilenko, the owner of one of the restaurants of the district, had such a swelling on the neck. His wife called a doctor, a regular M. D., who prescribed rest, hot water applications and other such truck. It did not help very much and Mrs. Vasilenko complained to a customer.

"A swelling on the neck?" the customer said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, "why, poor Vasilenko is poisoned!"

Several other customers approached Serzei's table and Serzei explained with even greater details all he knew, all he had heard from the mouth of Stephan Ivanoff, that mysterious man who had escaped from Siberia where he had had the great fortune to meet a holy man from Omsk who taught him all about diseases and foods and their poisons.

The upshot of it all was that they went scurrying for Stephan Ivanoff and brought him to the bedside of Vasilenko. Stephan looked the sick man over, held his pulse for quite a while, then declared that Vasilenko was poisoned. He ordered all the bottles of medicine thrown away in his very presence before he would start anything.

"The case is a very serious one," he said, "but I will try to use whatever gifts I have," and he started immediately the old process of dry-cupping the patient. One after the other the little cupping glasses applied to the swollen part filled with the brown blue flesh they sucked in. The patient groaned but Ivanoff assured him it was better than death and tortured him the rest of the night. In the morning Stephan obtained a few particularly active and hungry leeches which he posed to suck out the "bad blood" from Vasilenko's arms and legs. After eight days and eight nights he restored Vasilenko to health and guaranteed that not a drop of poisoned blood had remained in the man's body.

* * * * *

The news spread that Ivanoff had saved Vasilenko's life, and the reputation of the quack grew daily. According to Ivanoff's theory, almost everybody's blood was poisoned. They were all sick people. He took the pulse of every one, listened carefully and then dropped the hand with a little eloquent gesture that set one despairing more than if the death penalty had been pronounced.

"Stephan Ivanoff, what is the matter with me?"

"Alexis Vasilewitch, your pulse tells me that you are a very sick man."

"It's true Stephan Ivanoff that I feel a little tired, but I thought that it was hard work."

Stephan never insisted. It was his trick never to insist. He knew human nature too well to insist. He just made a little gesture and passed on to pleasanter topics, but he was sure that Alexis Vasilewitch, or whoever it was, would come around at the end of the conversation at the dinner table at Vasilenko's and ask: "Stephan Ivanoff, what shall I do?"

And the next day, or on Saturday the man was dry-cupped, blood-sucked, massaged and given to drink strange-tasting mixtures brewed over an alcohol lamp. A few weeks' treatment and the man was healed.

* * * * *

Stephan Ivanoff had saved another life.

Things went on in such a way for years. The several doctors established in the district starved and Stephan Ivanoff became rich. From Vasilenko's restaurant spread tales of marvellous recoveries from all kinds of diseases which the healer discovered as soon as he felt the man's pulse. It was as if the holy man from Omsk had himself sent Stephan Ivanoff to New York to save all the poisoned men. And when a man was very severely ill Stephan spoke mysteriously of occult communications with the man "out there" and gave a brew of special herbs grown on the tombs of holy men and ordered Chinese leeches and dry-cupped in a special way until the man was saved.

Stephen Ivanoff furnished his apartment with all the Russian things he could get in order to impress the increasing number of his visitors.

The priest came to see him one day to admonish him about a little scandal with Vasilenko's wife.

Stephan Ivanoff kissed the hand of the old man and as he held it between the pointer and the thumb he exclaimed "Father, don't move!" Silently, attentive, with the hand of the priest limply between his fingers he said: "Father Anton Fevdoroff, you are a sick man."

"My son, I have come to speak to you about other things." The priest, essaying his unctuous voice, tried to set things right.

Vasilenko had gone to Russia to visit his parents, and his wife, the rumor spread, fell to the healer's spell. Stephan Ivanoff, the healer, listened to the priest's admonition to the end and as he did so his face radiated happiness; as though some wonderfully clear visions were descending from the heavens upon him.

"What have you to say, son?"

"That God's wisdom is seen in the ways of life; that he taketh care of man and worm, and that no action and no thought can come but that He had willed it," answered Stephan Ivanoff, in religious transport.

"But why does my son speak now about godliness, when I come to censure him about his immorality?"

"In Omsk, father, I met a holy man who taught me many things before I came here. In five years I have not met you once. And because you are also a holy man God willed that Vasilenko go to Russia and I be exposed to false accusations so that you should come to me. You are a sick man, Anton Fevdoroff--your pulse tells me you are a very sick man, that you have been poisoned."

Father Anton Fevdoroff maintained that he was not a sick man but the thumb and the forefinger of Stephan Ivanoff on the pulse of the man knew better. A few days later the priest sent word to the healer that he should come to see him. Father Fevdoroff was ill. The doctor had prescribed something which did not seem to help and the priest's wife was despairing. Brought up in a little village in Russia her confidence in leeches and cupping was much stronger than in the official medicine. Stephan's methods suited her and as the priest's health improved under his treatment, Mother Fevdoroff went into ecstasies over the holy man from Omsk:

On the fourth day Ivanoff said to the priest:

"Little father, your pulse is wonderful to-day. There is not a drop of bad blood left in your body."

Father Fevdoroff thereafter dropped the Vasilenko affair. Ivanoff shrewdly refused payment for his cure. Mother Fevdoroff spread the news of the wonderful cure so well that the healer actually overworked himself every day feeling the pulses of his patients.

* * * * *

Hard work and heavy eating began to tell on Stephan. After a particularly heavy meal on a Christmas Eve he had an attack of indigestion in the house of a friend.

"Should we call a doctor, Stephan Ivanoff?"

He refused at first. Had he not denounced all the doctors as fakers! But when the cramps almost killed him he made no answer as the suggestion to call a doctor was made again.

The old practitioner of the district was brought to the well known quack's bedside. The doctor hoped that the news "the quack called a doctor when ill" might loosen the healer's hold on the people.

Ivanoff was breathing heavily. The doctor took the sick man's hand to feel the pulse. Suddenly the healer snatched his hand away, and with all the energy at his command exclaimed:

"Stop! You know who I am? _Don't we know that there isn't such a thing as a pulse?_" and he refused to be treated.

That indigestion killed Stephan Ivanoff.

The neighborhood says: Because there was not another man in New York who had met that holy man from Omsk.

HIRSH ROTH'S THEORY

The Bronx, between Claremont Parkway and Bronx Park, has known Hirsh Roth of the firm of Hirsh Roth & Co., wholesale and retail liquor dealers, for the last twenty years. He was there, a believer in the Bronx, when it was yet all rocks and farms, with a few scattered wooden shacks. He was there when the downtown people moved to the Bronx because the doctor said they needed country air and higher ground.

Roth saved up a few dollars sewing pants the whole day and eating herring with bread at night. His wife died of tuberculosis on such a diet after she gave birth to a man child, to Joseph, who is now the anonymous "& Co." of the father's business. Hirsh Roth moved to the "country" to save his own and the child's life. But, as he is a man with proselyting tendencies, he came downtown to the local of his union every Saturday night to persuade people to move to the Bronx.

He was at that time affiliated with a real estate firm, and sold lots and parcels to his former friends and co-workers. Many a fashionable house is now raised on ground he sold. Former pants operators own them. Half of Bathgate Avenue and Brook Avenue was populated by Hirsh Roth's efforts--ere he formulated a new theory: "The Bronx was becoming too populated." He then changed his business from selling real estate to selling liquor.

Many a man changes his business for material interest only. Not so Hirsh Roth. He always requires a theory. He went into the family liquor business to prevent drunkenness. "When a man has a little something at home he does not go to a saloon, that's the idea."

And all those years he boarded with his child in the house of a friend, a house builder. Hirsh Roth did not remarry; he had a theory for that also. "Marriage is a foolish thing a man should commit only once."

The builder, Feldman, had a daughter the same age as Joseph, Roth's son. Before either of the tots could utter an intelligible word, the parents had already affianced them. Dowry and everything else was settled between the two men, and a special glass of wine drunk to the health and happiness of the future couple. Then each went about his business with the feeling of a man who has cleared his mind of earthly cares.

The Bronx grew up in his arms, so to say. Early mornings he went to see how his "baby" developed. Every house was built under his eye. It mattered not whether it was his building or not. If he thought the style or the material was not what it ought to be he gave no peace to the owner or the builder. Many an architect's blue print had to be changed at his insistence. The depth of a foundation or a brick not properly fired had caused him many a sleepless night.

"Mazel Tow, Feldman; Josephson's house is finished"; or "They broke ground to-day on Berger's lot near Washington Avenue," were frequent greetings when he came home.

Fanny Feldman and Joseph Roth grew up together like brother and sister. They fought and quarrelled, and Mrs. Feldman made no distinction between her own and the stranger when she administered a deserved spanking. Then came the period when the high school boy hated even to speak to a girl. Joseph Roth refused to be seen with Fanny on the street, "because I am not a sissy," and thereupon received a beating from his father.

On some such an occasion he learned that Fanny was to be his wife.

"We are not in Russia!" he cried. "I am an American. We are in a free country. What do you mean by choosing for me a girl?"

He got another beating for his defiance. As he lay on his cot one night he made plans how to run away to the West and become a cowboy or something.

Fanny was a beautiful and clever girl. Though Joseph's behavior was very insulting to her, she agreed with the spirit of his revolt.