Yekl | Page 3

college boys and tony peoplesh
play it," he concluded triumphantly. Bernstein remained silent, his eyes
riveted to his newspaper. "Ah, you don't answer, shee?" said Jake,
feeling put out.
The awkward pause which 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