The Family Moskat Read Online Free PDF Page B

the day before had been practically a pauper.
    "Who knows where good luck will strike next!" they said in their flat Galician dialect. "It took a miracle from heaven."
    "She did a quick job on him!"
    -
    18-"And she plays the saint, too."
    But directly after the wedding Reb Meshulam began to come to his senses. The masculine ripple that had awakened in him during his courtship soon flickered and died. In their bedchamber his bride revealed herself to be a broken shell. Under the wig of silken threads her hair was gray, cropped close like sheep's wool.
    Around her middle she wore a rupture belt. She lay in bed sighing and talking of her first husband, his learning, his devotion to his daughter, and his manuscripts, which she was so eager to have printed in Warsaw. She wagged on and on about the daughters of the rabbinical dignitaries who were becoming more wanton every day and who, here in Karlsbad, walked around openly with Austrian officers. She sneezed, blew her nose, took valerian drops for her heart. Reb Meshulam got up and climbed out of the bed.
    "Enough babbling," he said in a loud voice. "Is there no end?"
    For a moment it occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to get himself a divorce right here in Karlsbad, pay her off with a few thousand, and put an end to the comedy. But he was ashamed; he was afraid too that such a course might begin a long-drawn-out business of recriminations and lawsuits. He felt, too, a sort of blind resentment toward Koppel, although he knew in his heart that his bailiff was not to blame. For the more than sixty years that Reb Meshulam had been his own master he had never imagined himself capable of committing such a piece of foolishness. Had he not always carefully pondered his actions before he took a step? He had always arranged things so that it would be the other fellow and not himself who would be the fool.
    Let the hotheads do things in a hurry, flounder into impossible dilemmas, reduce themselves to poverty, sickness, disgrace, even death. But now he himself, Meshulam Moskat, had committed an outrageous blunder! What good could this marriage do him? His children would have something to laugh at. Besides, there were the financial commitments; he certainly couldn't break the promises he had made. No, he was not the man to break a promise; his bitterest enemies couldn't say that of him.
    After a good deal of brooding he decided to follow the wis-dom of the sages--the best thing to do is to do nothing. All right, what if there was a wife rattling around the house! So far as her dower rights were concerned, he would sign over to her -19-one of his half—
    toppling houses; he would see to it that she didn't come in for any grand prize in the lottery. As for his new stepdaughter, there was something about her that set him on edge. She was educated, talked German, Polish, and French. But there was something too tense, too arrogant about her. She seemed to be staring past people, always thinking her own thoughts. No, she didn't fit in with his family, or with his business, for that matter. Besides, he was sure that she was secretly an unbeliever. He decided to arrange a match for her as soon as he got back to Warsaw and to give her a small dowry, not more than two thousand rubles.
    "Just wait till she gets to Warsaw," Reb Meshulam said to himself. "Her nose'll come down."
    With these thoughts weaving through his mind Reb Meshulam returned to Warsaw. He was not the one to moon over past mistakes. He was the shrewd Meshulam Moskat, the victor in every encounter, not only against external enemies, but over his own weaknesses as well.

CHAPTER TWO
1
    A FEW weeks after Meshulam Moskat returned to Warsaw another traveler arrived at the station in the northern part of the capital. He climbed down from a third-class car carrying an ob-long metal-bound basket locked with a double lock. He was a young man, about nineteen. His name was Asa Heshel Bannet. On his mother's side he was the