Part 13

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Koch--when Mr. Koch spoke, he raised his voice, and assumed a declamatory style, as though in fancy he were addressing a public meeting--“Yes, sir, when I saw that other houses were having trouble, I made up my mind to take the bull by the horns. So I called all our men together, and I talked to them up and down. I gave it to them straight. 'Look at here, boys,' said I, 'I want you to understand that the firm of Blum & Koch are not merely your employers; they're your friends. They're the best friends you've got, and don't you forget it. They mean to deal fairly and squarely with you in every thing, and they want to be dealt with the same way by you. You have rights, and we mean to recognize and protect your rights. You have interests, and we mean to make your interests our interests. And unless I'm hugely mistaken, we've always done it. Well, now, look at here. If you men ain't contented; if you think you've got any grievances; or if there's any demands you want to make, I'll tell you what you do. Don't you come to us as enemies, or strikers; but you just come right up like one friend to another, and you tell us in a friendly way what you want; and I promise you that every thing you ask will be considered, and every thing that's even fair-to-middling reasonable, will be done for you?' That's what I said to the men; and it worked like magic. They gave three cheers for Blum & Koch; and two or three days later they sent a committee with a statement of their claims. Well, sir, the granting of those claims involved a net loss of two per cent, annually on our profits; but we talked it over, and we made up our minds that the harm it would do us, wouldn't equal the good it would do the men; and so we gave in gracefully. There was one point, though, on which we held off. But we told them our reasons for holding off on that; and after they thought it over, they came and confessed that we were in the right.”

“Would it be indiscreet to ask what that point was?” the rabbi ventured.

“Not at all. It was this. We got a man in our employ--one of our best hands--an Irishman of the name of O'Day--who's been with us ever since we started manufacturing. You know, when we first went into business, we simply jobbed. We didn't begin to manufacture till '76. Well, that man, O'Day, a year or two ago, he contracted a kind of a nervous disease, which makes it impossible for him to do his work when the other workmen are around. He can work perfectly well alone; but in the room with the others, he gets excited, and loses his head, and can't take a stitch. At the same time, he's got a family to support. So we've given him a machine, and we allow him to do his work in his own home. Well, sir, the men, they're dead set against tenement-house labor; and they wanted us to discharge O'Day. We wouldn't. It struck us as such a dirty mean thing to do, that we made up our minds the Lord would punish us, if we did it. We made up our minds that if we did that, we'd deserve to have bad luck right along. So we told the men we wouldn't. We told them that we'd rather shut down and go out of the trade, than discharge O'Day--which was the fact. We said we'd always been a prosperous house; and that we believed we owed our prosperity chiefly to the fact that we'd never done any thing to offend the Lord. We said that right out. And we said also that if any other man in our employ should get in the same box, we'd treat him the same way. Well, as I say, the men, they thought it over, and they concluded that we were in the right.”

“Yes, sir,” added Mr. Blum, “we believe in treating our hands like feller-beings. I was a hand myself, already. Dot's a great advaintage. We don't go on the American plan, and treat them like machines.”

“Now, don't you get started on that subject,” cried Mr. Koch. “There's nothing he's so prejudiced about, as every thing American. I'm an Americain We're all Americans. The Americans are the grandest people on the face of the earth.”

“I don't see how you make dot out,” retorted Mr. Blum.

“Well, I'll tell you how I make it out. I make it out this way. But first, you just hold on. Let's see how _you_ make it out. What do _you_ judge the Americans from? What do you know about them, anyhow? Why, you meet a few of them downtown; and you're prejudiced against them, to begin with, because they're Christians; and they're prejudiced against you, because you're a Jew; and you and they don't understand each other, and don't get on together; and the consequence is, your mutual prejudices are simply intensified. Well, now, that ain't a fair way to judge a people. I'll leave it to Dr. Gedaza if it is. The right way is, not to take individuals, but to take public sentiment. Public sentiment, that is to say, the feeling of the people in general on questions of importance--that's the real index of a people's character, And there ain't another country in the world, where public sentiment is so high as it is right here in the United States of America.”

“In what respects?” questioned the rabbi.

Mrs. Koch put in: “You needn't scream so, Washington. We ain't none of us daif.” But her husband didn't hear her.

“In what respects?” he shouted, swelling with emotion. “Why, in--in every respect--on every question of honor and decency and morality. Here's a simple example. You go to Europe--you go to London, Berlin, Paris--I don't care which--and you notice the way the drivers beat their horses in the public streets; and nobody thinks any thing of it, nor dreams of interfering. If they tried to do it here, in New York, they'd be mobbed in no time. Well, that may seem a trifle; but it _ain't_ a trifle. No, sir. For it points to a radical defect in the European character, and to a positive virtue in the American. It's the sense of fair play--that's what it is. Don't abuse a creature, simply because he's defenseless and you've got the upper hand. Do you see? Then take the American way of treating women. You let a respectable young girl, provided she's good-looking--you let Tillie, there--go out alone in Paris or Berlin, and when she gets back, you ask her whether she's been stared at, or insulted. But you let her go out here. Why, she could travel alone from New York to San Francisco, and not run a risk. Then take morality and decency. And take the American way of doing business--the big, generous scale on which every thing is done, and the sense of honor among business men. They're sharp and close, I admit, but they mean what they say every time. I tell you, it's grand, it's beautiful; it does me good every time I think of it. I go to Europe every two or three years on business; and I get a chance of comparing. It makes me sick, the depravity, the corruption, and the stinginess, you meet everywhere over there.”

The orator sank back in his chair, panting, and absent-mindedly mopped his brow with his napkin.

“Vail, dot's pretty good,” cried Mr. Blum, with cutting irony, “and what you say of them big American bank swindlers, hey? They do things on a generous scale, don't they?”

“That's no argument,” replied his son-in-law. “That don't signify any thing. If you want to argue, you just answer me this. If you think America's such a poor sort of a place, what did you come here for, any way?”

“Oh, I came because I didn't have no money; and I got an idea the streets here was paved with gold.”

“Well, now that you've got money, and now that you know the streets here ain't paved with gold, why don't you go back?”

“Oh, dot--dot is another question.”

“Well, I'll tell you why. Because you like it here, Because, down deep, you think it's the finest country in the world. You talk against it, for the love of talking. If you went to Europe, you'd be as homesick as anybody.”

“Ain't my uncle a splendid conversationalist?'' Tillie whispered to Elias.

“Washington,” said his father-in-law, solemnly, “you got a head on you like Daniel Webster's.”

“Oh, papa!” cried Mrs. Koch. “You make me die with laifing.”

Mrs. Blum was rocking from side to side in her chair, and murmuring, “Gott! Gott! Gott!”

For a while, again, there was silence; which, again, by and by, Mr. Blum was the first to break.

“Sarah,” he declared, addressing his daughter, “them pickles is simply graind.”

“I opened a new jar to-day, papa,” Mrs. Koch returned.

“Elias Bacharach,” the old gentleman continued, “what _you_ think of them pickles?”

“They're delicious,” Elias said.

“Vail, sir, my daughter, she make them herself. I think she make the best pickles going.”

“Oh, papa,” protested Mrs. Koch, blushing. “How can you say dot, when Aintoinette Morgenthau is seated right next to you? Her pickles beat mine all hollow.”

“No,” cried Mrs. Morgenthau, magnanimously; “he's right. You're the boss.”

“Vail,” pursued Mr. Blum, judicially, “there is a difference. Aintoinette's pickles is splendid--dot's a faict. Maybe their flavor is just exactly as good as yours. But yours is crisper. My Gott! when I put one of your pickles in my mouth, dot makes me feel said. I never taste no pickles so crisp as them, since I was a little boy in Chairmany, and ate my mamma's. Her pickles--oh, they was loafly, they was maiknificent.”

“Ach, papa! You got so much zendimend!” his daughter exclaimed, with deep sympathy.

“You ought to taste my mamma's pickles,” Tillie whispered to Elias. “Of course, Mr. Blum is prejudiced in favor of his daughter's.”

“Been to the theater lately, Mr. Bacharach?” Mr. Koch called out.

“No,” said Elias, little foreseeing the effect of his announcement; “I don't go to the theater much. I'm not very fond of it.”

Immediately, from all directions, there was an outburst of astonishment and indignation; for in New York the theater has no patrons more ardent or devoted than the-German Jews.

“Oh, Mr. Bacharach!”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Gott in Himmel!”

“Oh, you don't mean it!”

“Vail, if I aifer!”

And so forth, till the poor fellow was blushing to the roots of his hair, and would have liked to bite his tongue out. Mr. Koch took up the cudgels in his behalf.

“Oh, come,” he shouted, “don't make Mr. Bacharach feel as though he'd brought the Tower of Babel crashing around his ears. He's got a right to his opinion, hasn't he? I understand the way he feels. In fact, I feel about the same way, myself. I _go_ to the theater a good deal, I don't deny; but that's because there's nothing else to do. When I get home at night I'm fagged out, and I want a little amusement, and I take my wife and go to the theater. But all the same, I'm free to say that the theaters here in this town are about as poor as they can make them, and no mistake. Melodrama and burlesque--that's what they give you. Good, honest pictures of life--where'll you find them, I'd like to know? Now and then you get a big star--Salvini or Booth; now and then you get an old English comedy; but it's the average that I'm talking about, and I defy any man to say any thing in defense of that. You folks, you go to the theater, the same as I do, because you haven't got any thing else to do. But an intellectual young fellow like Mr. Bacharach, he don't need any outside amusements of that sort. He'd rather stay home, and think; wouldn't you, Mr. Bacharach?”

“Washington,” said Mr. Blum, “you're talking about American theayters. But what you got against the Chairman theayter--the Thalia--hey?”

“Oh, you go 'way. You want to get back to our old quarrel,” Mr. Koch retorted. “No, thanks.”

“Sarah,” said her father, abruptly, “there's one of your adopted children--my grainchild, consequently,” he added, winking humorously at Elias.

He pointed toward the open window, at which appeared the red and weather-beaten visage of an elderly tramp. The tramp was peering in through the iron bars, and muttering an inarticulate, plaintive prayer--presumably for “cold victuals.” Mrs. Koch glanced over her shoulders at him, and then, addressing a hasty “Excuse me,” to the company, got up and left the room.

“She's got about twenty of them fellers,” Mr. Blum informed Elias, “who she tries to be a mudder for. She feeds them, and clothes them, and gives them free lectures. They're coming all the time. We don't never sit down to a meal, but one of them sticks his head in the winder. Now, you just listen.”

Out in the area, Mrs. Koch's high-pitched voice could be heard earnestly speaking as follows:

“Oh, you baid man! You told me you wouldn't touch another drop of liquor this week! And now I see you been indoxicated! You smell perfectly outracheous; and dot loafly coat I give you, all spoiled! I got a great mind to send you away, and naifer do nothing for you any more.”

A dull reverberation, like the far-distant roll of muffled drums, testified that the tramp was pleading in his defense. After which, Mrs. Koch went on: “Vail, you promise you don't drink another glaiss of liquor till next Sunday, hey? You cross your heart, and promise? All right. Then, you take this. And bright and early, to-morrow morning, you come around here, and I give you a job. I want my cellar to be cleaned out.”

“She makes them fellers say they'll come around to-morrow morning, every time she sees them; but they don't never come,” Mr. Blum announced. “She's keeping dot cellar dirty just on purpose, so dot some time she can give the chop to one of them good-for-nodings. I guess I clean it out myself, if dot goes on much longer.--Hey! Hold on, there!” he cried, with sudden excitement. He ran to the window; stopped the tramp, who was in process of departure; and deposited a twenty-five-cent silver piece in his grimy palm. Returning to his seat, he appeared quite oblivious to the laughter at his expense, in which the others were indulging.

“You want to kill that old fellow, don't you?” Mr. Koch demanded. “Giving him a quarter! Why, it will bring on an attack of delirium tremens.”

“Dot's all right,” Mr. Blum replied. “I know how it is myself. I was pretty near to being a traimp myself, one time, already. Hey, Rebecca?”

“Du bist ein Engel--ja wohl!--ein himmlischer, wunderschoener Engel!” cried his wife, her broad face beaming like a harvest moon. Then she whispered to Elias, “Ach! He is so loafly, dot Meester Blum!” and kept swaying her head, and smiling to herself, for the next ten minutes.

With the coffee, the gentlemen lighted their cigars, and, leaving their respective places, gathered in a knot at one end of the table, where they began vociferously to exchange their views upon the state of trade. The ladies assembled at the other end, and discoursed of topics maternal and domestic. Lester was produced, and trotted upon his grandmother's lap, while his “points” were mooted and admired for the thousandth time. Finally, the men again covered their heads; and the rabbi chanted his grace _after_ meat. Then Mr. Koch proposed that the company should ascend to the parlor, and listen to some music. In the parlor the gentlemen lighted fresh cigars; and Miss Tillie seated herself at the piano.

She played the second Hungarian Rhapsody, and the Allegro Appassionato from the Moonlight Sonata, and Chopin's Funeral March, and she played them all marvelously well. Her technic was exact and brilliant; her feeling was ardent, intelligent and refined. For an hour she flooded the room with bewitching harmonies, and held every heart there spellbound. Elias, whose chief sentiment for her, a short while ago, had been one of half contemptuous amusement, felt an emotion very like genuine respect begin to stir within his bosom. It astonished him, it awed him a little, to find that a young lady who, in the commoner relations of life, appeared so crude and so prosaic, was possessed of such superb and consummate genius for a noble art. “There must be something _in_ her, after all,” he thought. She, perhaps, divined what was going on in his mind; for, when he had finished complimenting her upon her performance, she said, in a subdued voice, and with a gentler air than her usual one, “I know, Mr. Bacharach, that I'm not very much in conversation; but when I sit down at the piano, it seems as though somehow I was another girl, and a great deal nicer one; and I feel things that I don't ever feel anywhere else. I guess maybe music's my natural method of expression.”

“Now, Mr. Bacharach,” Mr. Koch said, when Elias and the rabbi were taking their leave, “don't treat us like strangers. Drop in on us any evening, or to dinner any Sunday afternoon. We'll always be glad to see you.”

“Yes; come over often,” added Mrs. Koch. “Come just exactly as if you was to home.”

XVII.

ELIAS had enjoyed his dinner at the Kochs' very much. He had been greatly amused by it; but he had derived from it, besides, a pleasure that was deeper than mere amusement--the pleasure, namely, which comes of contact with people whom we feel to be thoroughly good and wholesome.

“They, with their strident voices, and vulgar manners, and untutored ways of thinking, are the sort of Jews that Gentiles judge the race by,” he reflected. “It is a comfort to know that underneath all their superficial roughness and unrefinement, the core is sound and sweet.”

It was with a sense of agreeable anticipation that, on the following Thursday evening, he started out to pay his digestion visit.

The maid-servant showed him into the parlor, and went off to announce him. Returning a moment later, she asked him to step down-stairs to the basement. There he was very cordially welcomed; and Mr. Koch explained, “I thought you'd rather join us down here, than have us come up to the show-room. (That's my nick-name for the parlor; pretty good, hey?) Down here it's more comfortable and homey.”

Mr. and Mrs. Blum smiled and swayed their heads at him; and Mrs. Koch, clasping Lester to her bosom with one hand, offered him the other.

“We don't want to make company of you, Mr. Bacharach,” Mr. Koch went on; “and so, after my wife has put Lester to bed, you must come around with us to Winkum's. We're going to meet my brother-in-law and my sisters around there.”

“I shall be very happy,” Elias responded. “But Winkum's--what is it? and where?”

“Oh, Winkum's is Terrace Garden. I always call it Winkum's, because a man named Winkum kept it when I first began to go there, years ago; and I've never got used to calling it by its new name. Force of habit.”

Mrs. Koch passed Lester around, and everybody kissed him good-night. Then she carried him from the room.

“Have a cigar?” asked Mr. Koch. “They're genuine--_Hoyo de Montereys_.”

Elias took a cigar.

Mr. and Mrs. Blum were whispering together, on the sofa, over in the corner. He appeared to be urging her to do something, which she, with blushes and modest smiles, was protesting against.

“Come,” cried Mr. Koch; “it ain't polite to whisper in company. What you people conspiring about?”

“I want her,” Mr. Blum answered, “to offer Elias Bacharach some of her cheese-cake; and she's too baishful. Elias Bacharach, my wife every now and then, she make us a cheese-cake. You never taste any thing like it. It's simply elegant. Vail, she make us one to-day; and I want her to give you a bite of it, just to show what she can do. But she--she's just exactly as baishful as she was the day we got married; and that's forty years ago, already.”

“Oh, Mrs. Blum,” Elias pleaded, “I shall really feel very much offended, if you don't let me taste it. There's nothing in the world I like so well as cheese-cake. Please don't disappoint me.”

Blushing and giggling, the old lady got up, and said, “Ach, Gott! All right,” and waddled from the room. Presently she waddled back, and placed an enormous slice of cheese-cake, together with knife, fork, and napkin, upon the table. Then she sat down, and crossed her hands upon her stomach, and watched Elias as he ate. Between his mouthfuls, he kept uttering ejaculations of delight and wonder: marvelous! delicious! never tasted any thing equal to it in all my life! etc. She kept swaying her head and smiling. At the end, he vowed that the cheese-cake was a triumph of art, and confessed that antecedently he would not have believed such excellence attainable. Her husband demanded, “Didn't I tell you so?” The old lady herself was overcome, and could only gurgle, “Gott! Du lieber, lieber Gott!”

By and by Mrs. Koch reappeared; and her husband called out, “Well, let's start.”

At Terrace Garden they found Mr. and Mrs. Sternberg and Mrs. Morgenthau seated at a round table under an ailanthus tree.

“Why, where's Tillie?” cried Mr. Koch.

“Oh, she had to stay at home to work,” her mother answered. “Preparing for some lessons she has to give to-morrow.”

The electric-lamps flared and sizzled. The band played tunes from comic operas. There were many people present, seated at similar tables, under similar trees, eating, drinking, smoking, chatting, listening to the music. Their countenances were mostly of the Semitic type. Every now and then a new party entered, from the café adjoining: an old gentleman and lady, a middle-aged gentleman and lady, and a troop of young folks of both sexes: three generations. Your Jew loves to take his pleasure with his family to share it. His boon companions are, as a rule, his father and mother, his wife and children. The waiters dashed like meteors hither and thither. One of them stopped before the table of our friends; and Mr. Koch, having determined the sentiment of the meeting, ordered “beers all around.”

“Vail,” observed Mr. Blum, “to drink dot beer, and hear dot music, and breathe dot fresh air, dot's what I call solid comfort--hey?”

“Yes; and to see the people,” added Mr. Koch. “I don't know as there's any thing that I enjoy better than I do to sit around here of a summer night, and watch the people--see them arrive in squads, and then notice their ways of enjoying themselves after they've got settled. It's quite a study; and every now and then you catch a glimpse into a regular romance. Now, Mr. Bacharach, you just take in that table over there. Can't you imagine how that young fellow's heart is thumping, as he whispers to her in that energetic manner? And see how she blushes, and fidgets with her fan, and pretends not to like it. And the old folks, her father and mother, of course--they sit placidly, with their backs turned, and have no attention for any thing but the beer and the music. I got a great mind to go up and nudge them. I have, as I'm alive.”

“Don't you do nothing of the kind!” cried Mrs. Koch, indignantly. “The idea! How you like it if some busy-body come up, and nudge my papa, when you was making loaf to me?”

“Well, now, what I admire about that couple,” pursued Mr. Koch, “is their clever acting. They're trying hard not to give themselves away, and not to let people see how sweet they feel. Unless a fellow watched them mighty close, and had been there himself, he might really be deceived by them, and think they were talking about nothing more interesting than the weather. But you and me, Mr. Bacharach, we're shrewd, and we know better. She's a daisy, and no mistake, ain't she? And the young man--he looks like a respectable sort of a chap, too. Well, I guess I _won't_ interfere. I guess I'll do as you say, Sarah. It may be a desirable match. What's your advice, mother-inlaw?”

Mrs. Blum, quivering like a mass of jelly with suppressed mirth, responded, “Ach, Gott! Go 'vay! You make me die!”

Mr. Blum, his face wreathed in smiles, exclaimed, “Washington, you got more wit about you than any man I know. It's simply wonderful.”

It seemed as though the Kochs knew every body that came. At all events, every body that passed their table stopped, and said how-d'ye-do, shaking hands, and addressing Mr. Koch as Wash. His usual rejoinder was: “First-class. How's yourself?”

“I'm sorry your daughter wasn't able to be here, Mrs. Morgenthau,” Elias said.