Yekl | Page 3

followed was relieved by one of the playgoers who wanted to know whether it was true that to pitch a ball required more skill than to catch one.
"Sure! You must know how to peetch," Jake rejoined with the cloud lingering on his brow, as he lukewarmly delivered an imaginary ball.
"And I, for my part, don't see what wisdom there is to it," said the presser with a shrug. "I think I could throw, too."
"He can do everything!" laughingly remarked a girl named Pess.
"How hard can you hit?" Jake demanded sarcastically, somewhat warming up to the subject.
"As hard as you at any time."
"I betch you a dullar to you' ten shent you can not," Jake answered, and at the same moment he fished out a handful of coin from his trousers pocket and challengingly presented it close to his interlocutor's nose.
"There he goes!--betting!" the presser exclaimed, drawing slightly back. "For my part, your pitzers and catzers may all lie in the earth. A nice entertainment, indeed! Just like little children--playing ball! And yet people say America is a smart country. I don't see it."
"'F caush you don't, becaush you are a bedraggled greenhorn, afraid to budge out of Heshter Shtreet." As Jake thus vented his bad humor on his adversary, he cast a glance at Bernstein, as if anxious to attract his attention and to re-engage him in the discussion.
"Look at the Yankee!" the presser shot back.
"More of a one than you, anyhoy."
"He thinks that shaving one's mustache makes a Yankee!"
Jake turned white with rage.
"'Pon my vord, I'll ride into his mug and give such a shaving and planing to his pig's snout that he will have to pick up his teeth."
"That's all you are good for."
"Better don't answer him, Jake," said Fanny, intimately.
"Oh, I came near forgetting that he has somebody to take his part!" snapped the presser.
The girl's milky face became a fiery red, and she retorted in vituperative Yiddish from that vocabulary which is the undivided possession of her sex. The presser jerked out an innuendo still more far-reaching than his first. Jake, with bloodshot eyes, leaped at the offender, and catching him by the front of his waistcoat, was aiming one of those bearlike blows which but a short while ago he had decried in the moujik, when Bernstein sprang to his side and tore him away, Pess placing herself between the two enemies.
"Don't get excited," Bernstein coaxed him
"Better don't soil your hands," Fanny added.
After a slight pause Bernstein could not forbear a remark which he had stubbornly repressed while Jake was challenging him to a debate on the education of baseball players: "Look here, Jake; since fighters and baseball men are all educated, then why don't you try to become so? Instead of spending your money on fights, dancing, and things like that, would it not be better if you paid it to a teacher?"
Jake flew into a fresh passion. "Never min' what I do with my money," he said; "I don't steal it from you, do I? Rejoice that you keep tormenting your books. Much does he know! Learning, learning, and learning, and still he can not speak English. I don't learn and yet I speak quicker than you!"
A deep blush of wounded vanity mounted to Bernstein's sallow cheek. "Ull right, ull right!" he cut the conversation short, and took up the newspaper.
Another nervous silence fell upon the group. Jake felt wretched. He uttered an English oath, which in his heart he directed against himself as much as against his sedate companion, and fell to frowning upon the leg of a machine.
"Vill you go by Joe tonight?" asked Fanny in English, speaking in an undertone. Joe was a dancing master. She was sure Jake intended to call at his "academy" that evening, and she put the question only in order to help him out of his sour mood.
"No," said Jake, morosely.
"Vy, today is Vensday."
"And without you I don't know it!" he snarled in Yiddish.
The finisher girl blushed deeply and refrained from any response.
"He does look like a regely Yankee, doesn't he?" Pess whispered to her after a little.
"Go and ask him!"
"Go and hang yourself together with him! Such a nasty preacher! Did you ever hear--one dares not say a word to the noblewoman!"
At this juncture the boss, a dwarfish little Jew, with a vivid pair of eyes and a shaggy black beard, darted into the chamber.
"It is no used!" he said with a gesture of despair. "There is not a stitch of work, if only for a cure. Look, look how they have lowered their noses!" he then added with a triumphant grin. "Vell, I shall not be teasing you. 'Pity living things!' The expressman is darn stess. I would not go till I saw him start, and then I caught a car. No other