The Imported Bridegroom | Page 2

let you sing again. You are weak and you got enough."
"Hush! It is not potato soup; you can never have enough of it." He fell to tugging nervously at his white beard, which grew in a pair of tiny imperials. "Tamara! It's time to break the fast, isn t it?"
"You can wash your hands. Supper is ready," came the housekeeper's pleasant voice.
He took off his brown derby, and covered his steel-gray hair with a velvet skullcap; and as he carried his robust, middle-sized body into the kitchen, to perform his ablutions, his ruddy, gnarled face took on an air of piety.
When supper was over and Asriel and Tamara were about to say grace, Flora resumed the reading of her novel.
"Off with that lump of Gentile nastiness while holy words are being said!" the old man growled.
Flora obeyed, in amazement. Only a few months before she had seldom seen him intone grace at all. She was getting used to his new habits, but such rigor as he now displayed was unintelligible to her, and she thought it unbearable.
"You can read your book a little after. The wisdom of it will not run away," chimed in Tamara, with good-natured irony. She was a poor widow of forty. Asriel had engaged her for her piety and for the rabbinical learning of her late husband, as much as for her culinary fame in the Ghetto.
Asriel intoned grace in indistinct droning accents. By degrees, however, as he warmed up to the Hebrew prayer, whose words were a conglomeration of incomprehensible sounds to him, he fell to swaying to and fro, and his voice broke into an exalted, heart-rending singsong, Tamara accompanying him in whispers, and dolefully nodding her bewigged head all the while.
Flora was moved. The scene was novel to her, and she looked on with the sympathetic reverence of a Christian visiting a Jewish synagogue on the Day of Atonement.
At last the fervent tones died away in a solemn murmur. Silence fell over the cozy little room. Asriel sat tugging at his scanty beard as if in an effort to draw it into a more venerable growth.
"Flora!" he presently growled. "I am going to Europe."
When Asriel Stroon thought he spoke, and when he spoke he acted.
"Goin' to Europe! Are you crazy, papa? What are you talkin' about?"
"Just what you hear. After Passover I am going to Europe. I must take a look at Pravly."
"But you ain't been there over thirty-five years. You don't remember not'in' at all."
"I don't remember Pravly? Better than Mott Street; better than my nose. I was born there, my daughter," he added, as he drew closer to her and began to stroke her glossless black hair. This he did so seldom that the girl felt her heart swelling in her throat. She was yearning after him in advance.
Tamara stared in beaming amazement at the grandeur of the enterprise. "Are you really going?" she queried, with a touch of envy.
"What will you do there?--It's so far away!" Flora resumed, for want of a weightier argument at hand.
"Never mind, my child; I won't have to walk all the way."
"But the Russian police will arrest you for stayin' away so long. Didn't you say they would?"
"The kernel of a hollow nut!" he replied, extemporizing an equivalent of "fiddlesticks!" Flora was used to his metaphors, although they were at times rather vague, and set one wondering how they came into his head at all. "The kernel of a hollow nut! Show a treif [impure] gendarme a kosher [pure] coin, and he will be shivering with ague. Long live the American dollar!"
She gave him a prolonged, far-away look, and said, peremptorily: "Mister, you am' goin' nowheres."
"Tamara, hand me my Psalter, will you?" the old man grumbled.
When the girl was gone, the housekeeper inquired: "And Flora--will you take her along?"
"What for? That she might make fun of our ways there, or that the pious people should point their fingers at her and call her Gentile girl, hey? She will stay with you and collect rent. I did not have her in Pravly, and I want to be there as I used to. I feel like taking a peep at the graves of my folks. It is pulling me by the heart, Tamara," he added, in a grave undertone, as he fell to turning over the leaves of his Psalter.

II
When Asriel Stroon had retired from business, he suddenly grew fearful of death. Previously he had had no time for that. What with his flour store, two bakeries, and some real estate, he had been too busy to live, much less to think of death. He had never been seen at the synagogue on weekdays; and on the Sabbath, when, enveloped in his praying-shawl, he occupied a seat at the East Wall, he would pass the time drowsing