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The Uses Of Adversity
by
When waiting milk-cans were thrown into cellars, when the wheels of momentarily deserted wagons were loosened, when pushcarts disappeared, when children bent on shopping were waylaid and robbed, when cats were tortured, horses’ manes clipped, windows broken, shop-keepers enraged, babies frightened, and pit-falls set upon the stairs, the cry was always, “Them Yonowsky devils.” Leah could do nothing with them. Mr. Yonowsky made no effort to control them, and Aaron Kastrinsky was not always there. Not half, not a quarter as often as he wished, for Leah promptly turned away from all his attempts to make her understand how greatly she would gain in peace and comfort if she would but marry him. They would move to a larger flat and he would manage the boys. But Leah’s view of life and marriage was tinged with no glory of romance. She had no illusions, no ignorances, and she was afraid, she told her suitor, afraid.
“But of what?” asked the puzzled Aaron. “Thou canst not be afraid of me. Thou knowest how dear thou art to me. What canst thou fear?”
“I’m afraid of being married,” was her ultimatum. She confessed that she loved no one else–she had never, poor child, known anyone else to love; she admitted the allurements of the larger flat and the strong hand always ready for the twins, was delighted to go with him to lectures at the Educational Alliance when her father could be aroused to responsible charge of the twins, rejoiced when he prospered in the world and exchanged the push-cart for a permanent fruit-stand–she even assisted at its decoration–but to marry him she was afraid. Yes, she liked him; yes, she would walk with him–and the twins–along Grand Street in the early evening. Yes, she would wear her red dress since he admired it; but to marry him–ah, no! Please, no! she was afraid of being married.
Aaron was by birth and in his own country one of the learned class, and he promptly set about supplementing Leah’s neglected education. She had lived so solitary a life that her Russian remained pure and soft and was quite distinct from the mixture of Yiddish, German, English, and slang which her neighbours spoke. English, which she read easily, she spoke rarely and haltingly, and Jewish in a prettily pedantic manner, learned from her mother, whose father had been a Rabbi. Aaron lent her books in these three languages, which straightway carried her into strange and glorious worlds. Occasionally the twins stole and sold the books, but their enlightenment remained. To supplement the reading he took her to lectures and to night schools, and thus one evening they listened to an illustrated “talk” on “Contagion and Its Causes.” There had been an epidemic of smallpox in the quarter and Panic was abroad. Parents who spoke no English fought wildly with ambulance surgeons who spoke no Jewish, and refused to entrust the sufferers to the care of the Board of Health. Many disturbances resulted and the authorities arranged that, in all the missions, night schools, and settlements of the East Side, reassuring lecturers should spread abroad the folly of resistance, the joys of hospital life, the surety of recovery in the arms of the board, with a few remarks upon the sources of contagion.
Leah and Aaron listened to one of the most calming of these orators. The lecturer spoke with such feeling–and such stereopticon slides–that smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, and diphtheria seemed the “open sesame” to bliss unutterable, and the source of these talismans rather to be sought for diligently than shunned. “Didst hear?” Leah asked Aaron as they went home. “For a redness on the skin one may stay in bed for a week and rest.”
“Ay, but one is sick,” said Aaron sagely.
“Not if one goes where the gentleman said. One lies in bed for a week–three weeks–and there be ladies who wait on one, and one rests–all days one rests. And there be no twins. Think of it, Aaron! rest and no twins!”