She even wanted me I should got 'em engraved, so grossartig she becomes all of a sudden. Printing is good enough, Sternsilver. Just lookyhere at this now, how elegant it is."
He handed Philip an invitation which read as follows:
"What's the use you are inviting a corporation to a wedding, Mr. Seiden?" Philip said as he returned the invitation with a heavy sigh. "A corporation couldn't eat nothing, Mr. Seiden."
"Sure, I know," Seiden replied. "I ain't asking 'em they should eat anything, Sternsilver. All I am wanting of 'em is this: Here it is in black and white. Me and Beckie and that old Schnorrer, Mrs. Saphir, requests the honour of the Intercolonial Company's presents at the marriage of their daughter. You should know a corporation's presents is just as good as anybody else's presents, Sternsilver. Ain't it?"
Sternsilver nodded gloomily.
"Also I am sending invitations to a dozen of my best customers and to a couple of high-price sales-men. Them fellers should loosen up also oncet in a while. Ain't I right?"
Again Sternsilver nodded and returned to the factory where, at hourly intervals during the following week, Seiden accosted him and issued bulletins of the arrival of wedding presents and the acceptance of invitations to the ceremony.
"What do you think for a couple of small potatoes like Kugel & Mishkin?" he said. "If I bought a cent from them people during the last five years I must of bought three hundred dollars' worth of buttons; and they got the nerve to send a half a dozen coffee spoons, which they are so light, y'understand, you could pretty near see through 'em."
Sternsilver received this news with a manner suggesting a cramped swimmer coming up for the second time.
"Never mind, Sternsilver," Seiden continued reassuringly, "we got a whole lot of people to hear from yet. I bet yer the Binder & Baum Manufacturing Company, the least you get from 'em is a piece of cut glass which it costs, at wholesale yet, ten dollars."
Sternsilver's distress proceeded from another cause, however; for that very morning he had made a desperate resolve, which was no less than to leave the Borough of Manhattan and to begin life anew in Philadelphia. From the immediate execution of the plan he was deterred only by one circumstance – lack of funds; and this he proposed to overcome by borrowing from Fatkin. Indeed, when he pondered the situation, he became convinced that Fatkin, as the cause of his dilemma, ought to be the means of his extrication. He therefore broached the matter of a loan more in the manner of a lender than a borrower.
"Say, lookyhere, Fatkin," he said on the day before the wedding, "I got to have some money right away."
Fatkin shrugged philosophically.
"A whole lot of fellers feels the same way," he said.
"Only till Saturday week," Sternsilver continued, "and I want you should give me twenty-five dollars."
"Me?" Fatkin exclaimed.
"Sure, you," Sternsilver said; "and I want it now."
"Don't make me no jokes, Sternsilver," Fatkin replied.
"I ain't joking, Fatkin; far from it," Sternsilver declared. "To-morrow it is all fixed for the wedding and I got to have twenty-five dollars."
"What d'ye mean, to-morrow is fixed for the wedding?" Fatkin retorted indignantly. "Do you want to get married on my money yet?"
"I don't want the money to get married on," Sternsilver protested. "I want it for something else again."
"My worries! What you want it for?" Fatkin concluded, with a note of finality in his tone. "I would oser give you twenty-five cents."
"'S enough, Fatkin!" Sternsilver declared. "I heard enough from you already. You was the one which got me into this Schlemazel and now you should get me out again."
"What do you mean, getting you into a Schlemazel?"
"You know very well what I mean," Philip replied; "and, furthermore, Fatkin, you are trying to make too free with me. Who are you, anyhow, you should turn me down when I ask you for a few days twenty-five dollars? You act so independent, like you would be the foreman."
Hillel nodded slowly, not without dignity.
"Never mind, Sternsilver," he said; "if my family would got a relation, y'understand, which he is working in Poliakoff's Bank and he is got to run away on account he is missing in five thousand rubles, which it is the same name Sternsilver, and everybody in Kovno – the children even – knows about it, understand me, I wouldn't got to be so stuck up at all."
Sternsilver flushed indignantly.
"Do you mean to told me," he demanded, "that I got in my family such a man which he is stealing five thousand rubles, Fatkin?"
"That's what I said," Hillel retorted.
"Well, it only goes to show what a liar you are," Sternsilver rejoined. "Not only was it he stole ten thousand rubles, y'understand, but the bank was run by a feller by the name Louis Moser."
"All right," Fatkin said as he started up his sewing-machine by way of signifying that the interview was at an end. "All right, Sternsilver; if you got such a relation which he ganvered ten thousand rubles, y'understand, borrow from him the twenty-five dollars."
Thus Sternsilver was obliged to amend his resolution by substituting Jersey City for Philadelphia as the seat of his new start in life; and at half-past eleven that evening, when the good ferryboat Cincinnati drew out of her slip at the foot of Desbrosses Street, a short, thick-set figure leaned over her bow and gazed sadly, perhaps for the last time, at the irregular sky-line of Manhattan. It was Sternsilver.
When Mr. Seiden arrived at his factory the following morning he found his entire force of operators gathered on the stairway and overflowing on to the sidewalk.
"What is the matter you are striking on me?" he cried.
"Striking!" Hillel Fatkin said. "What do you mean, striking on you, Mr. Seiden? We ain't striking. Sternsilver ain't come down this morning and nobody was here he should open up the shop."
"Do you mean to told me Sternsilver ain't here?" Seiden exclaimed.
"All right; then I'm a liar, Mr. Seiden," Hillel replied. "You asked me a simple question, Mr. Seiden, and I give you a plain, straightforward answer. My Grossvater, olav hasholam, which he was a very learned man – for years a rabbi in Telshi – used to say: 'If some one tells you you are lying, understand me, and – "
At this juncture Seiden opened the factory door and the entire mob of workmen plunged forward, sweeping Hillel along, with his quotation from the ethical maxims of his grandfather only half finished. For the next quarter of an hour Seiden busied himself in starting up his factory and then he repaired to the office to open the
