THE WORLD IS A WEDDING
without offending him. He said hurriedly: "You will pardon me
if
I point out-" and then told his listener facts about the subject
which the listener for the most part did not know existed, or were
known to anyone.
Thus on this day when Israel Brown stopped at Edmund Kish's
house to get the compendium he had lent Edmund, one of his most
devoted students, he was introduced to Edmund's mother and he
spoke to her immediately with customary pace and passion, telling
her all about her generation, the generation which had come to
America from Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1914. He spoke
of the causes of the departure of this generation from the old world,
the problems and tricks of the oceanliner agencies, the prospects of
the immigrants, the images of the new world which had inhabited
their minds, the shortage of labor which had drawn them, and the
effect of their coming upon social and economic tensions in America.
Mrs. Kish listened to Israel Brown, amazed as everyone was
who heard him for the first time, amazed and overwhelmed by his
eloquence, his learning, and his ravenous desire to tell all that he
knew. Edmund as he listened was amused by the dumbfounded look
upon his mother's face. She was an intelligent woman who had been
a radical in her youth and she was not wholly bound in mind by her
middle-class existence.
As
soon as Israel Brown departed, Mrs. Kish breathed deeply
as if in relief.
"You have just seen a genius," said Edmund to his mother.
"How much money does he make?" asked Mrs. Kish.
This was the story with which Edmund, excited, came to the
Saturday evening at the Bell apartment.
He was not disappointed. The circle responded with enormous
joy, and immediately Rudyard started the analysis and augmentation
of any news which was a loved practice.
"Your mother's question," said Rudyard, in a tone in which
gaiety and a pedagogic attitude were present, "is not only brilliant
in itself, but it suggests an inexhaustible number of new versions. Your
mother has virtually invented a new genre for the epigram. Thus,
whenever anyone is praised and whenever anything favorable is said
abQut anyone, let us reply:
'Never mind that: how much money
does he make?'"
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