UNIVERSITY 
 LOS 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 ANGELES
 
 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED 
 CANDLESTICK 
 
 THE SCHOOLDAYS OF YOUNG 
 AMERICAN JEW 
 
 BY 
 
 GILBERT W. GABRIEL 
 
 A 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 BLOCH PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 "The Jewish Book Concern" 
 
 1917
 
 Copyright. 1917 
 BLOCH PUBLISHING COMPANY
 
 E/ff 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. BY WAY OF PROLOGUE . . 5 
 
 II. IN THE BEGINNING . . , 16 
 
 III. FRIDAY NIGHT . . . .25 
 
 IV. THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL . . 34 
 V. THE MILITARY ACADEMY . . 42 
 
 VI. MY STEERFORTH . .51 
 
 VII. FRESHMAN YEAR .... 61 
 
 VIII. WITHIN THE GATES ... 70 
 
 IX. MY AUNT AND I . . . . 79 
 
 X. THE RULES OF THE GAME . . 88 
 
 XI. A MAN'S WORK .... 98 
 
 Xll. THE HEART OF JUDEA . . .107 
 
 XIII. CHILD AND PARENT ... 116 
 
 XIV. AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW . . 125 
 XV. COLLEGE LIFE .... 135 
 
 XVI. THE HUN'S INVASION . . .144 
 
 XVII. MANY IMPULSES .... 154 
 
 XVIII. I STAND BUT NOT ASIDE . . 163 
 
 XIX. "BATTLE ROYAL" ... 172 
 
 XX. THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED . . 181 
 
 3 
 
 .. 
 HRO-SOC.
 
 The Seven- Branched Candlestick 
 
 i 
 
 BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 
 
 "YEARS of Plenty" was the name an English- 
 man recently gave to a book of his school days. 
 My own years of secondary school and college 
 were different from his, by far, but no less full. 
 
 I shall only say by way of preface that they 
 numbered seven. There were two of them at 
 high school, one at a military school on the Hud- 
 son, and four at our city's university. 
 
 Seven in all. Because they were not altogether 
 happy, I have no right to think of them as lean 
 years. For each one of them meant much to me 
 means as much now as I look back and am chas- 
 tened and strengthened by their memory. Each 
 is as a lighted candle in the dark of the past that 
 I look back upon. And I like to imagine that, 
 since there are seven of them, they are in the 
 seven-branched candlestick which is so stately 
 and so reverent a symbol of my Faith.
 
 6 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 For it was my school days which gave me 
 that Faith. 
 
 Born a Jew, I was not one. And this I can 
 blame on no person excepting myself. Before my 
 parents 7 death, they had urged me, pleaded 
 with me to go to Sunday school at our 
 reformed synagogue, to attend the Saturday 
 morning services, to study the lore, that I 
 might be confirmed into the religion of my 
 fathers. That they did not absolutely insist upon 
 it was because they wanted me to come to my 
 God gratefully, voluntarily, considering his wor- 
 ship an exercise of love, of gladness, and not a 
 task of impatient duty. I know that it must 
 have grieved them I know it now, even if I 
 only half-guessed it then in that distorted but 
 instinctive way that boys do guess things and 
 yet they said little to me of it. 
 
 Once or twice a year they took me with them 
 to a Friday night service. I was too young, 
 perhaps. I am willing to use my youth as an 
 excuse for my falling asleep, or for my sitting 
 uneasily, squirming, yawning, heavy-eyed, unin- 
 terested, unmoved . . . hungry only to be out 
 into the streets again, and back in my own room 
 at home, with my copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," 
 or "The Talisman," between my knees. 
 
 At best, I can excuse myself only because I 
 lived in a neighborhood distinctly Christian. It
 
 BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 7 
 
 was on one of those old, quiet streets of the 
 Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn that our 
 house stood. There was a priggish sedateness to 
 it. . There was much talk on either hand of "fam- 
 ily" : the Brooklyn people of that neighborhood, 
 anyhow seem to set much stock by their early 
 settling ancestors. Near our house was a pre- 
 paratory school for girls and another for boys; 
 they were hotbeds of snobbery and prejudice, 
 these schools. The students who attended them 
 had to pass down our block on their way home 
 from school. Often, when they saw me playing 
 there, some of them would stop and make fun 
 of me and tease me with remarks about the 
 Jews. I was a boy without much spirit. I 
 always resented the taunts but I always lacked 
 the courage to call back . . . and if my eyes 
 did blaze involuntarily with anger, I usually 
 turned away so that these bigger boys should 
 not be able to see them. 
 
 My fear was behind it all. I was afraid to 
 fight back. And, being ashamed of my cowardice, 
 I grew quickly ashamed of that which had proved 
 it. I grew ashamed of being a Jew. 
 
 Terribly, bitterly ashamed. So mortified, in- 
 deed, that it was more than I could do to speak 
 of it to my father. And, usually, I could talk 
 of anything to him. Once he himself mentioned 
 it to me: asked me whether I was not proud of
 
 8 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 my race, whether I could not look with true 
 contempt and easy forgiveness upon those row- 
 dies who had taunted me. I tried to take that 
 attitude . . . but I was not big and strong 
 enough for it. I tried it only once and then 
 one of the big bullies of that fashionable pre- 
 paratory school, on his way down the block, 
 grew angry at my lordly unconcern towards his 
 teasing, and hit me with his fist, and cut my 
 lip open. I kicked him in the shins, I remember, 
 and ran swiftly away. 
 
 That didn't help matters. I was as much a 
 weakling as ever. When I went to public school, 
 1 used to cry with a snivelling vexation because 
 the toughs of my class made fun of me. One 
 of them had a little sister in the class below 
 us, and I was very fond of her. I remember how, 
 on St. Valentine's day, I stole into her class 
 room at lunch time and, while she was absent, 
 stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her 
 desk. I didn't understand, then, why the teacher 
 tittered so nervously when I asked her permission 
 to do it. But, when my own lunch was dono, and 
 I was back at my desk, I lifted the lid of it only to 
 find that same valentine rammed into one corner, 
 crushed and torn almost in half, and scrawled 
 with the word, "Sheeny !" 
 
 Nor did the little romantic flight end there. 
 For the next day, after sister and brother had
 
 BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 8 
 
 been comparing notes, the former marched 
 straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned 
 me to keep away, once and for all, from the true 
 American daughter of a true American family, 
 and to confine my sentiments to "some little 
 Jew girl!" 
 
 I knew none of that sort. What few boys and 
 girls of my own race I had met at playtime or 
 at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I 
 thought, if I went in their company, I should 
 be inviting persecution. I thought my only way 
 to escape this was to escape all Jewish com- 
 rades ... to deny my religion, if possible. 
 I was so utterly ashamed of it! 
 
 Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and 
 a child's cowardice, into those days which were 
 to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, 
 the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish 
 heritage, those days would have meant less. Less 
 in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and in- 
 finitely more in the building up of my character. 
 
 There are those who go stolidly, brusquely 
 through life without ever needing the comfort 
 of religion. And there are those, like me, who 
 lack the self-reliance . . . who cannot be 
 content with a confessed agnosticism, but who 
 must take faith and strength from those rites and 
 codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically 
 sublime. Now that I am grown to man's estate
 
 10 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 I can know these things of myself but how 
 could I know it then? How could a romping, 
 light-hearted boy who cared more for baseball 
 and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the 
 world recognize, then, his own needs and crav- 
 ings? 
 
 It was only after those few black, frightful 
 days were over that I realized that something 
 was lacking in my life. But even then I did 
 not know what it was. I only felt the sharply 
 personal loss, the inevitable loneliness and help- 
 lessness . . . and had not learned in what 
 direction to lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to 
 ask for spiritual succor. 
 
 Those days were the ones in which my parents 
 left me. My father was killed in a railroad ac- 
 cident My mother, about to give birth to another 
 child, was in bed at the time when the news was 
 brought to her. She never rose again. The 
 shock killed her. 
 
 I remember that the funeral services were con- 
 ducted by the rabbi of our synagogue. They were 
 according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought 
 them dull and unmeaning. They expressed for 
 me none of the sorrow that I felt. The Hebrew 
 that was in them was mockery and gibberish to 
 me. I am afraid I was glad when it was over, 
 and I was alone with my aunt with whom I was 
 to live.
 
 BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 11 
 
 This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. 
 Her husband had been a devout Jew of the most 
 orthodox type. She used to tell me with great 
 amusement how he would say his prayers 
 each morning with his shawl and phylacteries 
 upon him, with his head bowed and a look of 
 joyous devotion on his face. She said she never 
 could understand how a man, as educated and 
 broadminded as he was, could have had so sim- 
 ple and unquestioning a loyalty to these worn 
 old costumes of the past. But she said wist- 
 fully that she thought he had died a much hap- 
 pier man because of his religion . * * and 
 that was what was hardest of all for her to 
 understand. 
 
 Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She 
 put as little stock in Christian Science, though, 
 as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an 
 escape from the hindrances which connection 
 with the Jewish faith would have entailed. I 
 think she had an idea that people would forget 
 she had ever been a Jewess and would accept 
 her for a Christian without her having to go 
 through the extremer forms of proselytism. 
 Like me, she lacked spirit for either one thing 
 or the other. Like me, she dreaded to be classed 
 among her own people. But in this we were 
 unlike : that her dread amounted to a vindictive 
 and brutal antagonism towards whatever and
 
 12 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 whoever smacked of Jewry. I think she even 
 objected to adopting me for a while, because my 
 name was a distinctly Jewish one, and because 
 it would leave no doubt in her neighbor's eyes 
 as to my race and hence, no doubt as to hers. 
 
 Aunt Selina lived on Central Park West in 
 the City. She was full of social ambitions. She 
 had a good many friends from among the in- 
 tellectuals of Washington square: Christians, 
 of course, most of them. Her closest companion 
 was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be 
 a Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, 
 she had married a Mr. Fleming who had made 
 necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My 
 aunt, Mrs. Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen 
 lunched together very often, and I suspect they 
 had a tacit but inviolable agreement never to 
 mention to each other that bond of race and re- 
 ligion which, stronger than their professed tastes, 
 drew them instinctively together. 
 
 My life in Aunt Selina's apartment was a 
 lonely one. She was hardly the sort of woman to 
 whom young folks would go for sympathy. She 
 did not mistreat me, of course, but left me en- 
 tirely to my own devious ways. For the ways 
 of a boy of fourteen especially of an orphan 
 of somewhat shy and melancholic disposition 
 are bound to be devious. 
 
 I had much to fight out with myself. I lacked
 
 BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 13 
 
 any help from the outside and though I won 
 over my impulses, my doubts and inner con- 
 flicts, the struggle left me a weak, shy, shunning 
 boy. 
 
 For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina 
 I went to a nearby public school. There were 
 a good many Jewish boys in my class many 
 more than there had been in the whole Brooklyn 
 school but I kept away from them as a matter 
 of course. I made a few friends among the Gen- 
 tiles not many, because they were hard to make, 
 and I could always feel, in my supersensitive 
 fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor 
 out of conferring their friendhsip upon me. 
 
 "It will be different when I am in high school," 
 I told myself. "It will be different because I 
 myself shall be different. The boys will be older 
 there, will be more sensible and broad-minded, 
 and I shall be less nervous about the difference 
 between us!" 
 
 The difference . . . I did not know 
 what it was, but I felt it all the time. I tried 
 to hide it, to disregard it but I knew that it 
 was there, in my blood, in my face, in my name 
 . - . . and it held me apart from my class as 
 if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace. 
 
 So it was that I looked forward more and 
 more eagerly for the change and liberation which 
 I thought high school would bring me. Half a
 
 14 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 year, two months, a month . . . then only 
 a few days . . . and then it was over. My 
 public schools days were past. I had graduated 
 into high school with high honors and with an 
 equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish. 
 
 If Aunt Selina had been different . . . 
 but no, I am not going to blame it on anyone 
 excepting myself. 
 
 The summer after I graduated from public 
 school I went with Aunt Selina and her friend, 
 Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White 
 Mountains. It was one of those hotels where 
 Jews are not welcome. The management, if I am 
 not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt 
 Selina with that fact. They were constantly 
 raising the price of our rooms, but the two 
 ladies seemed content to keep on paying what 
 was asked for the rare privilege of dwelling in 
 forbidden places. 
 
 It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The 
 other guests snubbed us continually, left us to 
 our own devices. I used to have to go walking 
 every morning and sit on the porch every after- 
 noon in the company of the two ladies . . . 
 because there was no one else for me to go with. 
 For even among the children there was a rigor- 
 ous boycotting and I was the sufferer for it. 
 It made me very melancholy; not indignant, 
 of course, because at that time I lacked entirely
 
 BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 15 
 
 the spirit to be indignant just melancholy, and 
 hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed 
 of the things I should have gloried in, hating 
 the things I should have worshiped. 
 
 Well, I told myself, it would all be different 
 in the fall: it would all be different when I 
 was at high school. For then I was to begin 
 those seven years which were to be my real edu- 
 cation. So far it had been naught but child- 
 hood's prologue. And what a shabby little part I 
 had played in it! 
 
 But I did not know that, then!
 
 n 
 
 IN THE BEGINNING 
 
 IMMEDIATELY upon our return from the moun- 
 tains I entered high school. My aunt did her 
 duty by accompanying me to the office of the 
 principal and assuring him that I was an honest 
 and upright boy, aged fourteen. 
 
 It had been her ambition to have me attend 
 one of the fashionable boarding schools in Con- 
 necticut. I do not think she had me much in 
 mind when she made the attempt to enroll me at 
 the St. Gregory Episcopalian Institute. She told 
 so many of her friends of this intention and 
 told them it with such an evident pride that I 
 fear she was more concerned with her own social 
 prestige than with my education. And when 
 St. Gregory, through a personal visit from its 
 headmaster, discovered that Mrs. Haberman had 
 no right to aspire to the exquisite preference 
 which God accords Episcopalians, and later 
 sent us a polite but cursory letter of regret that 
 its roster's capacity was full for the year, she 
 bore it as a direct insult upon her ancestors. 
 (Though, of course, even so sharp a hurt to her 
 
 16
 
 IN THE BEGINNING 17 
 
 pride would not let her admit openly that all of 
 those ancestors were Jews.) 
 
 At any rate, I went to the high school as a sort 
 of a last resort. My aunt dreaded the company 
 I might have to keep there all the public riff- 
 raff, she called it. That was really why she ac- 
 companied me, that first day, to assure herself 
 that I was going to be placed among a "perfectly 
 horrid set of rude ruffians ghetto boys, and the 
 like!" and to have something tangible and def- 
 inite to worry about during the next few years. 
 
 The principal, busy with the hundred details 
 of school's opening, gave us as much time and 
 courtesy as he could afford. As I look back upon 
 it, I think he was remarkably patient with my 
 aunt. 
 
 She told him her fears in a fretful, supercilious 
 way; it was in exactly the same tone that she 
 ordered things from the butcher and grocer each 
 morning over the telephone. The principal 
 heard her through in fact, prompted her when- 
 ever she faltered, nodded appreciatively when 
 something she said was most flagrantly out of 
 place. When she was finished, he turned to 
 look very steadily at me. 
 
 "If you have such objections to the class of 
 boys in a public high school, why do you send 
 your nephew here?" he asked. 
 
 "Because it it is convenient," she stammered.
 
 18 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "I must confess, I wanted him to go to a board- 
 ing-school." 
 
 "Which one?" 
 
 "St. Gregory Episcopalian Institute." 
 
 The principal's mouth quivered with the smile 
 he could hardly suppress : 
 
 "Episcopalian? The boy is a Jew, is he not?" 
 
 Mrs. Haberman sat up very straight. "His 
 parents had Jewish affiliations, I believe. They 
 are both dead." 
 
 "I see." And I am sure he really did see ! For 
 a moment later he put a deft end to the inter- 
 view. 
 
 "Madam," he said, "this boy must take his 
 chances like any other boy in the school. He 
 must make his own friends from among his own 
 sort. He must fight his own adversaries among 
 those who are unlike him. That is the law of life 
 as well as of every school. If he is attracted to 
 the undesirable element, he would find it and 
 mingle with it at St. Gregory's as quickly as he 
 would here. I have a fine lot of youths here. I am 
 proud of them even of those who fail to come 
 up to the standards. I won't try to talk to you 
 about the splendid spirit of democracy because 
 you evidently don't want the boy to be demo- 
 cratic. You don't want him to stand on his own 
 merits as a Jew. If he did that, he would be 
 putting up an honest, spirited battle. I only
 
 IN THE BEGINNING 19 
 
 know that all men and all boys like an honest 
 stand and a fair fight for the things worth pro- 
 tecting. I know that if I were a Jew, I should 
 never well, that's your business, not mine." He 
 took out of his desk a little leather-covered book. 
 "It may interest you to know that this high 
 school is ranked very high scholastically." He 
 turned the pages. "Also that the St. Gregory 
 Institution is ranked among the most unsuccess- 
 ful schools in the country in the matter of 
 scholarship." He showed her a table of figures, 
 then closed the book and put it away, smiling. 
 "Also," he finished, "that I am an Episcopalian, 
 and that I should rather send a son or a nephew 
 of mine to prison than to so harmful a place as 
 St. Gregory." 
 
 His remarks did not altogether convince my 
 aunt, of course; and he said no more, except to 
 assure her that he would follow my course in 
 his school with much interest, and would do all 
 in his power to make me manly. To Mrs. Haber- 
 man, the promise to make a man of me meant 
 little. 
 
 She left me at the school door, stepping gin- 
 gerly across the pavement into her limousine in 
 order to escape the contamination of a group of 
 young Italians who were coming up the steps. 
 As she slammed the machine door and was driven 
 away, I felt somewhat bewildered very much
 
 20 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 alone in a hallway of hundreds of boys whom I 
 did not know, but who jostled me, went by me, up 
 and down the stairs with a great hollow stamping 
 of feet, an echoing laughter, a loud excitement of 
 regathering after the summer's recess. None of 
 them paid the slightest attention to me. 
 
 A deep-voiced gong sounded through the hall 
 and up the wide stair-well. It was the signal 
 to disperse to our classrooms. 
 
 I had a card in my hand, assigning me to room 
 7 on the third floor. I climbed the stairs fear- 
 fully, my heart . beating faster than usual, my 
 knees trembling a little. I was entering a strange 
 and mystic land that I had dreamed of, yet had 
 never seen. 
 
 Koom 7, third floor. It was a big, bare room, 
 void of almost everything excepting sunshine. 
 There were desks, low and set decently apart 
 Along the wall, behind gleaming glass, were cases 
 of seashells and' botanical specimens. The 
 teacher's desk, at the further end, was on a 
 small, shabby dais. Only a few of the boys had 
 arrived, and the big room rang with the echo 
 of unfilled space. 
 
 I heard them telling each other what they had 
 been doing over the summer. One of them, 
 brown and sturdy, was telling of Maine and the 
 camp he had attended there. Another, in ragged 
 clothes, and of a thin, pale face, spoke of the
 
 IN THE BEGINNING 21 
 
 heated city during July and August, and of how 
 he had been swimming when he could get away 
 from his summer job swimming in the East 
 Jiivcr. It shocked me to hear that. I had a 
 picture of the East Eiver as I had seen it from 
 the Brooklyn Bridge, a brown, littered flood, 
 choked with scurrying tugboats and the float- 
 ing trnils of refuse. I hated that boy for a long 
 while after I heard his story. But he had a 
 sharp, kindly face, and I wondered to see how 
 popular he was with those who knew him. 
 
 Coning, as I did, from a distant grammar 
 school, it chanced that there were no boys of my 
 acquaintance in the classroom. I was absolutely 
 alone a stranger to them all. 
 
 The teacher, on his dais, tapped with thin, 
 vhite knuckles against the side of his desk. He 
 was a little, timid man with one of the saddest 
 faces I have ever seen. Mr. Levi, he said his 
 name was. 
 
 The boy next to me stirred in his seat. "A 
 Jew for a teacher ! What do you think of that !" 
 he said to me. "A Jew for " Then he stopped 
 short and looked at me. "Oh, gee! You're one 
 yourself, ain't you?" 
 
 I felt my face grow very hot. I thought of 
 the words which the principal had only just 
 spoken. . . . Could I stand up and fight 
 like a man?
 
 22 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 I wanted to I really do believe that I wanted 
 to. But somehow the impulse that came to me 
 to face this seatmate squarely and to tell him 
 that yes, I was a Jew, too and proud of it 
 dwindled away into a gulp and a whimper and a 
 Bickly smile. 
 
 This other boy was red-headed, freckled. He 
 was very tall, but I saw a crutch at his side. 
 Later on, when he rose, I could see that he was 
 very lame; also that around his neck (for he 
 wore no collar) was a little leather thong and 
 tab. I did not know then and I did not learn 
 for many months that it was the scapular of 
 a Roman Catholic. 
 
 He looked at me surlily, but laughing. 
 
 "You are a Jew, aint you?" he demanded. 
 
 I hung my head, wondering how to evade the 
 directness of the question. The lame boy seemed 
 to be waiting for my reply. 
 
 "Well, no not exactly." I stuttered. But 
 I could feel my face flushing again. 
 
 "What d'yer mean, not exactly? What's yer 
 mom and pop?" 
 
 "My mother and father? They are dead." 
 
 That did not seem to check him. "Well, if you 
 ain't a Jew, you look like one. You look more 
 like one than the teacher does." Whereupon, 
 much to my relief, he branched off the subject. 
 "He don't seem to be such a bad fellow, even
 
 
 IN THE BEGINNING 23 
 
 with a name like Levi. Oi, oi, oi, Levi!" And 
 he chuckled with delight at the thought of how 
 he would annoy and tease this teacher at some 
 future date. 
 
 There are some boys of whom we can know 
 at a glance that they are bullies and mischief 
 makers. This boy, whose name was Geoghen, 
 was one of them. He used his very lameness 
 as an excuse to boss and bully his classmates. 
 He was very strong, though as I was to learn 
 only too soon and his size made him an undis- 
 puted leader. 
 
 There w^ere no lessons this first day. There 
 were only a speech of welcome from the teacher, 
 and an assignment of home work for the next 
 morning. 
 
 But when we were dismissed and had started 
 for the door, Geoghen limped up to me. 
 
 "So you ain't a Jew, eh?" he chuckled, look- 
 ing hard into my face. 
 
 So as to avoid the retort^ I fled from him, 
 down the stairs into the main hall. I was just 
 about to gain the street when the principal, 
 coming out of his office, saw me, 
 
 "What's this?" he said in his deep likable 
 voice. "Kunning away so soon?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. We're dismissed for today." 
 
 "Oh, I see. Well, I suppose you've already 
 begun to fight like a man, haven't you? I hope 
 so."
 
 24 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "Oh, yes, sir!" 
 
 But, as I went^ I knew in my heart that it 
 was not true. The whole first day had been 
 false.
 
 Ill 
 
 FRIDAY NIGHT 
 
 THOSE first days at high school seemed terri- 
 ble in the intensity of new experiences. Had 
 T but had my parents to encourage me, perhaps 
 I should not have felt so bitterly the loneliness 
 of this new turn in the road. 
 
 I do not care how manly and resolute he is, 
 a boy will always need the kind words, the clasp 
 and kiss which only his parents can give him. 
 And I was not half so resolute then, nor half 
 so hardened to battle as I am now. 
 
 I worried a good deal about my standing in 
 the class room. It seemed to me that I could 
 not possibly pass each day's recitations credit- 
 ably. And yet I did, as I remember. It was 
 only that I so sorely lacked self-confidence. 
 
 My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, did her duty in 
 taking me to a nerve specialist. He charged 
 her a pretty price to examine me and to assure 
 her that, physically, there was nothing wrong 
 with me. 
 
 "Mentally, he is a little too active," was his 
 sentence upon me. "And that is what makes 
 
 25
 
 26 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 him melancholy. Let him study, let him get out 
 and meet boys of his own age. . . . Let him 
 find something to be proud of, to be interested 
 in." 
 
 My aunt gave this last a few pettish, impatient 
 moments of thought. After the doctor was 
 gone, and she and I sat opposite each other at 
 the table, where the glass and silver made so 
 ostentatious a showing, she did her best to be 
 practical about it. 
 
 "Now, dear, let's see," she pondered, her long 
 white fingers stroking the table cloth, "I'm sure 
 we can find something to interest and amuse 
 you, dear. How about basket weaving? or color- 
 ing photographs or something artistic like 
 that?" 
 
 I wasn't very polite in my refusals. I de- 
 clined basket weaving and coloring photographs 
 and even balked at the idea of installing a bil- 
 liard table in our apartment which seemed to 
 relieve Mrs. Haberman immensely, since she 
 considered billiards a brutal and vulgar game. 
 
 All her suggestions came to naught. Once she 
 spoke of religion, but her eyes fluttered and she 
 changed the subject quickly, as if she had ac- 
 cidently hit upon the truth and found it un- 
 pleasant. It was enough to put an idea into 
 my head. 
 
 I did not know then, but I do now, that the
 
 FRIDAY NIGHT 27 
 
 thing I needed was Faith. A boy needs it 
 needs it as much as he needs his parents and 
 I had neither one nor the other. 
 
 The days retreating into a gloomy background 
 of autumn chills and fogs, left me thoroughly 
 weakened in spirit. Oftentimes I could not 
 guess why I came home from high school so 
 exhausted that I could only throw myself upon 
 my bed, behind a locked door, and sob and 
 sigh and shiver as if with the ague. Everything 
 that had happened during the day would come 
 pouring back into my memory with a distorted 
 clarity, tinctured with despair, hopelessly som- 
 bred with a boy's sense of wrong and perse- 
 cution. 
 
 I did actually have enough to contend with 
 at high school. I had begun to feel the racial 
 distinctions, the thoughtless slurs and boycot- 
 tings which Jewish lads must everywhere en- 
 counter. I tried to tell myself that it didn't 
 matter that these were only rough, ill-bred boys 
 to whom I ought not lower myself to pay at- 
 tention. But a boy of fourteen finds it hard 
 to argue himself into bravery, and I failed mis- 
 erably, ridiculously at the task. Years later, 
 T was to learn that it was all natural that T 
 was passing, as every boy must pass, through the 
 difficult period of adolescence. It was mostly 
 that I was lonely, balked by the unappreciative
 
 28 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 attitude of my aunt, without guidance or curb. 
 
 If in all this personal recital I am harsh to 
 the memory of my aunt, you will perhaps see 
 that I have the right. I am grateful, truly 
 grateful, for all that she attempted to do for 
 me, but I know that all her care was misdirected. 
 It was, besides, cruelly lacking in all of the 
 finer things which should have been mine ; things 
 which my parents would have given me, things 
 that, in my aggravated state, I needed. 
 
 Once I was asked by some other Jewish boys 
 at high school to join a little club which they 
 were forming. I hesitated about it. They were 
 jolly, healthy boys most of them from the 
 poorer sections of the city who went up to Van 
 Cortlandt Park on Saturday afternoons and Sun- 
 days to play ball or to skate. It would have done 
 me good to be one of them, to join their spo>rts 
 and laughter and yet. . . . 
 
 Well, my aunt did not approve. I knew she 
 wouldn't, long before I asked her. If I was the 
 least bit undecided before, she gave me clearly 
 to understand that companionship with Jewish 
 boys would not be right for me; that I must 
 avoid this stigma of Judaism as I would avoid 
 a crime. She said it was for my own good but 
 I cannot believe it very heartily. She was try- 
 ing at that time to make me join a dancing class 
 of Gentile boys and girls. She told me she
 
 FRIDAY NIGHT 29 
 
 thought their company would counteract the 
 effect of having to endure a high school's rab- 
 ble. 
 
 There came a night, after a day of niggardly 
 discouragements, when the strange moroseness 
 seemed too heavy to bear. I told my aunt that 
 I did not want any supper a fact which did 
 not worry her too much, since she was in a 
 hurry to dress and go off to a studio party of 
 some silly sort. And when she was gone and 
 I was alone in the apartment, I could not read 
 or rest or do anything. I tried to study my 
 next day's lessons, but had to give them up. 
 
 And at last I put on my hat and coat and 
 went down to the street. The air was bracing, 
 but I was not used to the streets at night and 
 a white, wraith-like fog was beginning to seep 
 up from the pavements and cluster in misty, 
 yellow patches around the lamp-lights. 
 
 Shivering, I went on. I did not know where 
 I was bound. The old, savage loneliness here 
 in the open, where the dampness brought the 
 scent of withered grass and lean, bare trees 
 was sharper, more embittering than ever. 
 
 I went across the street and into the nearest 
 entrance of Central Park. The quietness of every- 
 thing thi?re frightened me, called up every fool- 
 ish, childhood fear and superstition. I went 
 through dark lanes that were branched over
 
 30 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 with creaking branches. I saw the lake, black, 
 cold, with the stippled reflections of shore lights 
 shining up from its edges. I felt the moist, 
 chilly wind that came across the big lawns and 
 struck my face and chest and shoulders. I felt 
 I could not help but feel that I must go on, go 
 on and on in search of I know not what. 
 
 I came at length to the Fifth Avenue side of 
 the park. The huge white stone and marble 
 houses that flanked the street beyond were half 
 lost in the mist. The automobiles that went up 
 and down the pavements, which were wet and 
 shining like the backs of seals, made no noise 
 went silently, mystically, sweeping blurred 
 trails of light upon the sidewalks as they passed. 
 
 Against that white, low horizon of houses I 
 saw one thing that loomed dark and gropingly 
 conspicuous. 
 
 I did not know what it was. Not then. But 
 it held my attention: the darkness, the gray 
 curve of it against the sky. There was some- 
 thing about it that was forbidding, deep, sombre. 
 The lower front of it seemed to be arched and 
 pillared and under each arch the shadows were 
 impenetrably black. 
 
 There were automobiles waiting in front of 
 it, at the sidewalk's edge. A long string of 
 them, too, as if many persons were within up- 
 on some mysterious business.
 
 FRIDAY NIGHT 31 
 
 Then, softly, as if from far distant recesses, 
 there came from within the soft, resonant voice 
 of an organ playing. 
 
 Was it a church? 
 
 Then I remembered that is was Friday night 
 and I knew that this was a synagogue a 
 temple of the Jewish Faith. 
 
 At first realization, I moved a little away from 
 it, down the street. A synagogue and all 
 that it brought to my mind was the memory of 
 my parents. In former years they had been 
 wont to take me with them when they went on 
 Friday nights. And those had been dull, weari- 
 some nights for me but I had spent them at 
 my parent's side. So that now, in the shadow 
 of God's house, my loneliness for them came 
 back to me in wild deluge, breaking the dam 
 of reserve and doubts and petty limitations. 
 
 The music of the organ swelled louder, richer, 
 blending all the majesty of its bass notes with 
 the triumph and fancy of its treble. Louder, 
 richer, louder and I, who stood outside in the 
 choking fog, felt my heart give way to its pain 
 and my eyes to the solace of their tears. 
 
 Until the service was ended, and the organ 
 had ceased to play I stayed there. Once or twice 
 1 heard the voice of the cantor at his solemn 
 chantings and this too brought me a distinct 
 memory of the cantor in our Brooklyn syna-
 
 32 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 gogue, and of how I had listened to him with 
 my hands locked in my mother's. 
 
 Outside it was all so dark, so clammy with 
 nrist and in there they my own sort of peo- 
 ple were worshipping God my God. And 
 when, soon thereafter, the doors swung open in 
 the black of the arches and bathed the steps 
 below with a great, glad, golden light, I ran 
 forward, almost involuntarily, to gaze within. 
 
 I caught a glimpse of rich things, bright and 
 gleaming of carpets glowing, walls resplend- 
 ent of golden tracery and colors. And then 
 people began coming through the doors down 
 the steps, blackening and obscuring my view of 
 the interior. 
 
 I saw some of their faces. They were Jewish 
 people, of course and I heard a man among 
 them talking rather loudly and laughingly. He 
 talked with an accent. 
 
 For me the spell was broken. All the old, 
 petty prejudice which circumstance had nurtured 
 in me sprang up anew. A sense of anti-climax, 
 of disgust came over me: yes, these such as 
 these were my people and I hated them. 
 
 And I turned and ran away, back through 
 the park, and home. 
 
 I did not ever tell my aunt where I had been, 
 nor anything else of the adventure. I knew 
 she would not have understood it.
 
 FRIDAY NIGHT 83 
 
 But I did. And, boy as I was, I knew now 
 that I needed some Faith, some link to the com- 
 pany and comfort of God and that, sooner or 
 later, as Jew or Christian, I must seek and find 
 that link. 
 
 But I knew, too, that my antipathy to my 
 own people had become deep-seated had grown 
 to be part of my whole life's code.
 
 IV 
 THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 
 
 HIGH school's terrors developed for me into 
 a more personal terror of that young tough, 
 Jim Geoghen. A thorough bully, he made 
 me feel always that he was aware of my 
 religion, that he could at any moment disclose 
 it to the rest of my classmates and make me the 
 subject of their taunts. No doubt, they all knew 
 as well as he that I was a Jew but, for the 
 most part, they paid little attention to that fact. 
 A large number of them were Jews themselves : 
 bright-eyed, poorly-dressed little fellows who led 
 the class in studies, but wLo mingled little with 
 any other element. 
 
 Something stronger than myself made me take 
 np a half-hearted companionship with these Jew- 
 ish boys. I did not want to: I dreaded being 
 one of them and yet, for all my aunt's sneers 
 and warnings, and my own perverted pride, I 
 always felt more comfortable with them more 
 as if, in walking home with one of them after 
 school, instead of with some Christian boy, T 
 was where I belonged. I know it was only 
 
 34
 
 THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 35 
 
 self-consciousness that gave me this feeling 
 but after all, comfort must play a big part in 
 our companionships. 
 
 Geoghen, with his towering, menacing form, 
 his dull, animars face, his swinging crutch, his 
 mysterious scapular, haunted me continuously. 
 I remember distinctly dreaming of him once or 
 twice at night and that he stood over my 
 bedside, in those dreams, with his crutch up- 
 raised to strike, and his little leather scapular 
 writhing and hissing like a coiled snake. 
 
 One day he did strike me. It was during 
 the noon recess when a group of us were in 
 the asphalted yard, eating our lunches. Mine was 
 always an elaborate package of dainties, wrap- 
 ped in much tissue paper and doilies. Geoghen, 
 on the other hand, had just a chunk of rye 
 bread, covered over with a slice of ham. His 
 glance, long and greedy, betrayed how envious 
 of me he was. 
 
 "Eat ham?" he asked with a snicker. 
 
 He did not wait for an answer, but crammed 
 a few shreds of it towards my mouth, his dirty 
 fingers striking my teeth. I jumped away from 
 him and he followed after me, hobbling with 
 amazing swiftness. 
 
 "Tried to bite me, eh?" he cried. 
 
 I denied it but he did not listen and, raising 
 his crutch, dealt me a stinging blow with the
 
 36 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 smaller end of it though, at that, I was let off 
 easy. 
 
 Towards our teacher, Mr. Levi, Geoghen and 
 some of the other boys acted with all the pent-up 
 meanness and savagery of mischievous youth. 
 Mr. Levi's manner invited the twitting, perhaps : 
 his pale, thin face bore always a nettled look, his 
 eyes seemed ever hungry with some dark sorrow, 
 and his mouth was always twitching. There was 
 a fine timidity about his way of handling us. He 
 did not seem to be able to scold or be authorita- 
 tive. 
 
 But when he would be teaching us our Roman 
 History, for instance, and would tell us of the 
 beauties of Italian scenery or of Caesar's cen- 
 turions lost in the dark, tangled German forests 
 or of how Cleopatra came with purple sails 
 or of how Cleopatra came to meet Mark Antony 
 in a golden barge with purple sails then his 
 face would light up with a look that was 
 glorious, and even the rattiest, coarsest of us 
 would thrill and be hushed with the thrill 
 and know, no matter how dimly, that he was 
 in the presence of a great and beautiful spirit. 
 
 But those times were rare; and, as a rule, we 
 made life miserable for Mr. Levi. He seemed 
 to feel, I am sure, the handicap of his religion 
 to know that the Irish boys of the class, and 
 dark, sullen-faced Italians, were thinking it an
 
 THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 37 
 
 insult to be taught by a Jew and that they 
 were only waiting for the opportunity for an 
 outburst. 
 
 It came at the end of my year in high school. 
 That last month is always a rebellious one. The 
 spring weather, the sense of approaching vaca- 
 tion make gamins of the quietest of us. 
 
 Mr. Levi had been absent from the room for 
 a little while. Geoghen in that time had left 
 his seat, hobbled up to the dais and opened the 
 teacher's desk. This bit of boldness drew a 
 crowd of laughing boys to the front of the room. 
 They rummaged the desk, overturning and scat- 
 tering its papers, tumbling books to the floor. 
 
 Suddenly one of them stooped and picked up 
 a book which lay sprawled with its pages open. 
 There was an immediate shouting, coarse and 
 repellent to hear. 
 
 The book of Mr. Levi's which they had found, 
 was a Hebrew prayer book. 
 
 Geoghen took it from the other boy. He held 
 it open and up close to his leering face. Then 
 slowly, with the others in his trail, he began to 
 march around the room, making believe to sing 
 a heathenish jargon which he must have thought 
 to resemble Hebrew, twisting his face gro- 
 tesquely to seem like a Jew's, making lewd ges- 
 tures breaking off now and again to shriek 
 with laughter at the comicality of it all.
 
 38 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 Then suddenly Mr. Levi returned. 
 
 He charged into the line, spun Geoghen about 
 and tore the book from his hands. Geoghen 
 reached for it, as if loath to let go of so much 
 fun his face impudent, grossly humorous and 
 Mr. Levi knocked him down. 
 
 I shall never forget how the teacher looked. 
 His pale face, paler than ever, gleamed as if it 
 were cut smooth out of marble. The eyes flashed 
 with a noble fury. The mouth had stopped its 
 twitching and was drawn taut, and his teeth 
 showed at the corners of it. And when he struck 
 at Geoghen his whole slender tenseness seemed 
 to be thrown into the blow. 
 
 The crippled lad lay there for a moment, stun- 
 ned. Then he got unsteadily to his feet and 
 picked up his crutch. A stream of profanity be- 
 gan to come from his mouth. I don't think any of 
 us had ever heard such talk before. All the 
 obscene things which the lowest scum of human- 
 ity can pick up in the course of living years in 
 the gutter, he spat out at Mr. Levi. 
 
 But the teacher had gone back to his dais and 
 desk and stood facing him silently, calmly, a 
 look of mild reproach taking the place of the 
 anger in his eyes. He let Geoghen have his mis- 
 erable say. and then silently pointed to/ the door 
 and motioned to him to get out. And Geoghen 
 went.
 
 THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 89 
 
 That wasn't the end of it, though. For, with- 
 in a week the newspapers had taken up the in- 
 cident and enlarged it, exaggerated it and 
 Geoghen's father who, it seems, was a political 
 vassal of the alderman of this district, had man- 
 aged to have Mr. Levi brought before the Board 
 of Education for an investigation. 
 
 Mr. Levi had no show in that trial. He told 
 his story truthfully. I remember that, according 
 to the newspapers, he made scarcely any effort 
 to defend himself. He merely explained that 
 he had caught this boy defiling the traditions of 
 the Jewish faith, mocking what was most sacred 
 to him, and that he was indeed sorry that, 
 in order to wrest the book away from his im- 
 pure hands, he had had to strike and knock 
 down a crippled pupil. 
 
 The newspapers called Mr. Levi a dangerous 
 and cruel fanatic, the Board of Education de* 
 cided that he was incompetent, and Mr. Levi 
 his face paler than ever, his manner more mild 
 and saddened announced to us on the last 
 day of school that he would not be with us in 
 the next year. 
 
 I felt somehow that I would have liked to say 
 goodby to him, but I was afraid that he would 
 ask me why I, in his absence on that terrible 
 day, had not prevented Geoghen from doing what 
 he did and my conscience made a coward of
 
 40 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 me. I had a foolish idea, besides, that he did 
 ii ot like me. Any man who cared so much for 
 his religion would not be able to respect a boy 
 in my position. It was all very unfortunate 
 I was sorry for him, to be sure but I must 
 not sympathize too much with him. 
 
 I told my aunt of the affair, of course, and 
 ehe shuddered with distaste. 
 
 "What a fearful lot of ruffians they must 
 be!" she sighed. "And worst of all, a Kussian 
 Jew for a teacher!" 
 
 I spent the summer at a Y. M. O. A. camp 
 on the Maine coast. There were no other Jew- 
 ish boys there, but my aunt had managed to 
 have me placed on the roll-call somehow. I was 
 glad enough of it. I did not want another sum- 
 mer at a fashionable hotel in her and other ladies' 
 company. 
 
 Of course, I was "Ike" to the boys of the 
 camp. They were a good, rough-and-ready sort 
 who swam well, ran, tramped, sang rollicking 
 songs on weekdays and hymns on Sundays, grew 
 brown and muscle-bound and manly. Such teas- 
 ing as I had from them was good-natured, 
 and I suppose I should have taken it in the 
 eame spirit. But I had none of their assurance, 
 was like a stranger in a strange land and came 
 out of the summer with a still deeper shrinking 
 from contact with other boys.
 
 THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 41 
 
 High school began again, went on and on from 
 lagging month to month, and soon enough was 
 over for a second year. But this time my aunt 
 had been as much aroused as she could be to 
 the baffling condition of my mind and spirits. 
 I had by no means lost the old loneliness. I 
 had learned to bear it with greater patience, 
 but it still galled and depressed me. 
 
 Only, after that evening when I stood outside 
 the synagogue, I had some dim conception of 
 what the inevitable cure would have to be. 
 
 At any rate, my aunt called in the nerve 
 specialist a second time. He insisted that I 
 must be sent away. Perhaps he saw into the 
 unsympathetic quality of our home life. 
 
 This sent my aunt into tremors of delight. 
 She had now a legitimate excuse for shipping 
 me off to a fashionable boarding school of some 
 sort. For days she made a feverish study of 
 monogrammed and photogravured catalogues 
 from various schools in the East. It was upon 
 a military school on the upper Hudson that her 
 choice finally fell. And I am sure that this 
 was due to the expensive appearance, the coat 
 of arms and Latin motto of the catalogue's cover. 
 
 What ever it was, her choice was made. She 
 talked a good deal of splendid uniforms, of flags 
 unfurled to the sunset and fired me with a 
 lust for the new chapter in my life.
 
 MY introduction to military school was hardly 
 auspicious. I was now sixteen years old nearly 
 seventeen. I did not look that old, however; 
 the commandant of the school, in examining me, 
 took me for much less and assigned me to a 
 room with a boy of twelve. 
 
 At seventeen, our age is a most important 
 item. We think so, anyhow. And this incident 
 dampened my spirits most disproportionately. 
 Especially when I discovered that this room- 
 mate was to be the only other Jew in the school. 
 It seemed to me a very pointed and personal 
 insult. 
 
 He was a meek little boy, though meeker 
 even than I. And all through that first night 
 he wept aloud, smothering his tears upon his 
 pillow and crying for his mama and for kar- 
 toffel salat. It was a Friday night, I remember, 
 and it must have been a Sabbath custom in his 
 house to have potato salad for supper. 
 At any rate he kept me awake long into the 
 night. 
 
 42
 
 THE MILITARY ACADEMY 43 
 
 And once, taking savage pity on him, I got 
 .up and went over to him in my bare feet and 
 nightgown, and told him brusquely how satis- 
 fied he ought to be to have a mother at all ; that 
 both my father and mother were dead, and I 
 should never see them again, no matter how 
 homesick I grew or how long I waited for their 
 coming. This silenced him on that score, but 
 he went on whimpering for the kartoffel salat. 
 
 The next day I screwed up my courage to 
 complain to the commandant. He was a very 
 tall, majestic figure of a soldier who had fought 
 through the Spanish and Boer wars and now, 
 in times of peace, was reduced to teaching the 
 manual of arms and simple drill formations to 
 young sons of the rich. He was the most pom- 
 pous, mean and utterly selfish man I ever met. 
 One could see it on his handsome face. 
 
 He heard my complaint through. Then, be- 
 cause, being an ignorant "plebe," I had forgot- 
 ten to salute him, he made me perform that act 
 and retell the whole story word for word. But 
 he could not change my room until I had agreed 
 to take a cot in the general dormitory this be- 
 ing reserved for students who paid less tuition. 
 
 "You may write your aunt," he said stifly, 
 twirling his long mustaches, "that we did all 
 we could to make you comfortable. We pur- 
 posely put you in a room with young Piivate
 
 44 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 Ornstein because we thought it would be more 
 er, more congenial." 
 
 I saw what he was driving at, and went away 
 miserable. So they knew it up here, too: I was 
 a Jew, and must be separated from the others 
 as if I had the plague ! I felt sorry for myself. 
 
 I was not particularly homesick, though I 
 had never been able to develop much love for my 
 Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. 
 But the unaccustomed severing from all that 
 was mine: my room at home, the street that I 
 saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who 
 stood on the corner and passed me an occasional 
 lofty jest and a thousand other things, inti- 
 mate and absurdly unimportant I missed with 
 dull emptiness. 
 
 The school was comfortable enough. It was 
 a huge, barn-like affair, built in the previous 
 generation and hardly ever repainted since then, 
 to look at it The towers at either end of it 
 had tin and battered battlements, and the flanks 
 of steps which went up the hill on which it 
 stood were worn with the tread of the hundreds 
 of boys who had marched upon them, each suc- 
 ceeding year. It was so with the stairs all 
 through the building: each step had a shallow, 
 smooth cup which years of treading had ground 
 cut. It gave me a creepy sense of the place's 
 antiquity.
 
 THE MILITARY ACADEMY 45 
 
 There was a large parade ground at the back 
 of the building. Its grass was brown and mealy, 
 and a flag pole, sagging slightly to one side, 
 jutted up from the center of it like a long, 
 lone fin. 
 
 In the quadrangle where we formed in line 
 to march to the mess-hall, stood a huge oak tree, 
 century-old, with twisted limbs and browning 
 leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an 
 American spy was hanged by the British in Rev- 
 olutionary days but it may have been only a 
 fable. I have since learned that almost every 
 military school along the Hudson has its Rev- 
 olutionary oak but, at the time, it made a 
 deep impression on me, so that I could not bear 
 to hear the creaking of the branches against 
 my do-rmitO'ry window. 
 
 This dormitory, to which I and my belongings 
 repaired, was a long, narrow, whitewashed room, 
 crowded with iron cots and intruding ward- 
 robes. At night, when the bugle had blown taps 
 and the lights were dimmed, there was a ghostly 
 quality to the rows of white and huddled figures 
 that lay the length of the room. There was 
 never absolute quiet. Sometimes some little boy 
 would be sobbinsr, sometimes two of the older 
 ones would be telling each other the sort of 
 jokes that davligfht forbids and sometimps it 
 would be the heaw, asthmatic breathing of the 
 proctor who was there to keep charge,
 
 46 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 Of the boys themselves I could not judge at 
 first. I was too young to judge, at that: but 
 I was not too young that I could not realize 
 they were not of the same sort as I had known 
 in the city. There I had known the pupils of 
 a public school, poor, rough, almost always hard 
 workers, eager for whatever seemed fair and 
 quick and democratic. But these boys were of 
 wealthy parents, most of them. There were only 
 a few of them who held scholarships, and these 
 did jobs so menial and embarrassing that, even 
 under the most ideal conditions, they must have 
 suffered in the opinions of the rest of the school. 
 As a matter of fact, we were a brutal little 
 crowd of snobs, and made life miserable for 
 these poorer scholars who must sweep the halls 
 and wash dishes. 
 
 I do not think all military schools are like 
 the one I attended. I hope not. I gained from 
 my year there much in the way of physical de- 
 velopment but that is all. For every inch of 
 muscle that I put on I lost something worth 
 incalculably more: honesty and cleanliness of 
 mind and what little shred of self-reliance I 
 possessed. Somehow or other, it seemed to me 
 that I had reached the lowest rung of boyhood 
 here and, as I look back upon it, I know that 
 I was not much mistaken. 
 
 I wrote to ask my aunt to take me away. She
 
 THE MILITARY ACADEMY 47 
 
 refused to come to see me but scribbled a few 
 empty lines to accuse me of homesickness, and 
 to assure me I should soon be rid of it. 
 
 We did much more drilling than studying. 
 Though nearly all of us intended to go to col- 
 lege, our school day was confined to about three 
 Lours at the most and under teachers who were 
 always surly, sneering and uncouth. The stand- 
 ard of work in the classroom was very low. At 
 first I did not have any trouble at all in leading 
 the entire school in scholarship; but gradually, 
 under the careless and relaxed conditions, I grew 
 unambitious, lazy and found myself failing 
 among a class of boys who, I secretly knew, were 
 my mental inferiors. It is so much a matter 
 of competition, of environment. 
 
 Of friends I made few: even of those school- 
 boy friends who are your "pals" one day, your 
 sworn enemies the next. I had one or two> senti- 
 mental encounters with a brewer's son a great, 
 beefy ox of a boy who lorded it over all of us 
 because he kept his own private horse in the 
 town livery stable and had his room furnished 
 with real mission furniture. But he had no 
 use for me when he realized that I was a Jew, 
 and took particular pains to transfer me from 
 the company of which he was first sergeant into 
 the band. 
 
 The band, so-called in spite of the fact that
 
 48 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 it was composed of only fifes, drums and bugles, 
 was a sadly amateurish thing. The little knowl- 
 edge of music that I had was just so much more 
 than that possessed by any other member of 
 the organization. As a result I soon rose to the 
 magnificence of cadet drum-major, an office 
 which involved a tall, silvered stick and a shako 
 of sweltering bear-skin. Thus, my military 
 training consisted mostly of learning to twirl the 
 baton; and when semi-annual examinations re- 
 sulted in disaster for me, I was reduced to the 
 humility of a private without having gained 
 more than the knack of sending a silvered rod 
 in rapid circles about my stiff and sorely-tried 
 thumb. 
 
 At that, I was glad to return to the ranks. 
 There had been plenty of criticism of the fact 
 that a "plebe" should have risen so quickly to 
 an officership. And, of course, as Jewish boys 
 always do, I imagined that the demonstration 
 was just another evidence of race prejudice. 
 Undoubtedly it was, to some extent but I know 
 that I have always been too suspicious in that 
 direction. Had I been braver about it, I should 
 have been less suspicious. 
 
 One friend I did make: a lieutenant-adjutant 
 whose first name was Sydney and who was in 
 charge of the punishment marks that were al- 
 lotted us for our various misdemeanors. Many
 
 THE MILITARY ACADEMY 49 
 
 a time did Sydney, for my sake, forget to re- 
 cord the two or four marks which some crabbed 
 teacher had charged against me for inattention 
 or disorderly conduct. 
 
 He was a big, handsome chap, with the most 
 attractive manners I have ever met. He was a 
 scholarship boy so that he had begun his school 
 year with a hundred and one unpleasant tasks 
 to perform. But somehow or other he had man- 
 aged to be rid of them all excepting this digni- 
 fied one of "keeping the books" and I am sure 
 it must have been a lucrative one, in a small 
 way, for Sydney's room was full of pictures 
 which had been given him from other boys' 
 rooms, of canes and banners even of a half 
 dozen pair of patent leather shoes which may 
 or may not have come to him in return for his 
 apt juggling of those hated punishment marks. 
 
 I am not attempting to judge him and I will 
 tell you much more of him later on but I must 
 remember him as one of the most wonderful of 
 friends: always smiling, always ready to join 
 in upon whatever lark was planning a bit of 
 a daredevil, very much of a protector when the 
 bullies of the school were pressing too close for 
 comfort. 
 
 During the year, of course, I saw or heard 
 nothing that could remind me of my Faith. We 
 had to go to church on Sunday mornings. I was
 
 50 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 given my choice, and tried accompanying one 
 squad after another. I went to the Epis- 
 copal, the Methodist^ the Presbyterian and 
 it was the last that I finally selected for 
 good. There was a splendid old pastor there; 
 his white hair and trumpeting voice gave him 
 venerableness, even when he spoke of things that 
 seemed to me very childish and obvious. 
 
 Once the commandant, twirling his mustaches, 
 asked me whether I should not like to go to the 
 synagogue on Friday nights (there was a small 
 one at the edge of the town). I did not care 
 much about the religious inspiration to be gained 
 from the Hebrew service, but I did think it 
 would be jolly fun to be allowed to go down into 
 the town at night. And yet I knew that some 
 of my schoolmates would come to know why I 
 went, and what sort of services I attended, and 
 reluctantly I declined the opportunity. 
 
 I do not know what the bumptious command- 
 ant thought of it, but he pulled his mustaches 
 very, very hard.
 
 VI 
 
 MY STEEEFOETH 
 
 I WISH I could write this episode in quite 
 a different tone from all the others. I wish 
 I could summon all the tenderness of which 
 boyhood has and which it loses and put it 
 into the lines of the recital that is now due. Be- 
 cause, then, perhaps, you would have some 
 knowledge and appreciation of what the last 
 few months of my stay at the military school 
 meant for me. 
 
 David Copperfield had his Steerforth. Every 
 boy must have one. Certainly, / did. And I 
 worshipped him with all the ardor and unques- 
 tioning devotion that could come fresh from a 
 boy-heart which had never yet given itself to 
 friendship. Steerforth was a villain; but in 
 David's eye he was always, unalterably, a 
 glorious hero. This is how it was, perhaps, with 
 Sydney though he was no villain, I am sure. 
 
 I spoke of him in my last chapter: told you 
 that he was a poor student, much in favor with 
 the commandant for his good services. I have 
 told you, he was tall, fair-haired, with locks that
 
 52 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 waved back from his white forehead (as Steer- 
 forth's did, as I remember) and merry, blue 
 eyes. 
 
 He befriended me because it was of his gen- 
 erous nature to befriend all the lonelier boys. He 
 used to pal with all the school "freaks," to coun- 
 sel them, to drill them privately, so that 
 they should be more proficient on parade. He 
 used to make me very jealous of his large circle 
 of small worshippers. I thought that privilege 
 ought to be kept for me alone. 
 
 He used to read with me, on spring nights, in 
 the school's dingy library. We read "David 
 Copperfield" together ; and would glance up from 
 the page to watch, from the windows, the pale 
 but glowing battle of sunset colors over the hills 
 and mirrored in the darkling stretch of the 
 Hudson. And sometimes, when the story would 
 not give us respite, he would smuggle the book 
 up into the dormitory and when all was dark 
 there, and the proctor slept, we would creep into 
 the hall and read by its dusky light until long 
 into the night. I have read "David Copper- 
 field" again since then but not with so ex- 
 quisite a thrill. 
 
 And reading of Steerforth, I used to look up 
 at Sydney and imagine that he was that fine, 
 attractive fellow and that I, dumb but ecstatic 
 in my pride of friendship, was little David.
 
 MY STEERFORTH 53 
 
 It seemed so wonderful to me, especially, 
 that he was a Christian and I a Jew, and yet 
 there had never been any question of difference 
 between us. Other boys who had given me some- 
 thing of their friendship had made such a brave 
 point of telling me that they didn't mind my 
 being a Jew that there were just as many good 
 Jews as there were bad ones and all those other 
 stupid and inevitable remarks that we must 
 swallow and forget. But with Sydney it was 
 not like that. He had never mentioned it, and 
 it seemed as if he knew that I dreaded the sub- 
 ject and so kept silent on it out of kindness. 
 
 Sometimes, when the days were warm and the 
 trees were budding, we went off together on 
 long walks through the country. Sidney taught 
 me to smoke cigarettes, and we would stop on 
 our way at a little village store that lay at the 
 end of a hilly road. 
 
 An old man, who was an invalid, owned the 
 store. But he sat all day at his little card table 
 in the dark, untidy rear, playing solitaire; and 
 it was his young daughter who would wait on us 
 behind the counter. 
 
 She was a thin, dull-looking girl, scarcely 
 pretty, yet with large, sombre eyes that her lonely 
 task explained. She was ignorant, I am sure, 
 and knew little of what went on in the town at 
 the river's edge or in the big city, fifty-odd miles
 
 64 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 away. But there was something pathetic about 
 her position and when Sydney made it more 
 and more a custom to talk to her, to make 
 friendly advances, I thought it only the big gen- 
 erosity of his heart pouring out to succor an- 
 other such shy soul as mine. 
 
 Once or twice it was not until evening that 
 we could steal "off bounds," and then we would 
 make straight for the little store, as if we knew 
 that, if we did not hurry, it would be closed 
 for the night. And we would have only a few 
 hurried words, but laughing, with the girl and 
 she would look up at Sidney with a light in those 
 big eyes of hers that I had never seen before in 
 any woman's. She left her counter, once, and 
 walked all the way home with us; and I saw, 
 in the blue of the gloaming, that her hand was 
 tightly clasped in Sydney's, and that he whis- 
 pered things to her under his breath, as soon 
 as I was gone a little way ahead of them, and 
 that they both laughed and she looked up at 
 him as a dumb animal to its master. She came 
 as far as the school gate ; and after I had gotten 
 within, they stood for a moment together and 
 I thought I could hear the sound of kissing. It 
 was only then that I began to be troubled. 
 
 Sydney, who was a lieutenant in the cadet 
 battalion, had more privileges than I. He could 
 leave the premises when he pleased. He never
 
 MY STEERFORTH 65 
 
 had to sign the big book in the hall when leaving 
 and arriving back. He needed never to give ac- 
 count of what he did "off bounds." It was an 
 easy matter for him and there were many 
 times, now, that he went off alone. No one 
 knew why he used to take that little country 
 road that led up the hill towards a stupid old 
 country store. No one, that is, but me. 
 
 At first I did not think much of the girl's side 
 of it. I was bitterly disappointed that some one 
 else had come between my friend and me. I was 
 jealous of all the time he spent with her, of the 
 hours of reading and walking and jesting that 
 once were mine and of which the lure of her 
 had robbed me. 
 
 But once, when we were at the store, and I 
 stood aside from them, watching the humped 
 back of her old father, bent over his card table, 
 and saw the feeble shaking of his hand, I began to 
 comprehend what it might mean to him if any- 
 thing should happen. Not that I knew what 
 might happen. I was still very young but I 
 felt the chill foreboding of tragedy lurking some- 
 where in the background of it all. The dingy 
 little shop, with its flyspecked glass cases and its 
 dusty rows of untouched stock; the lights dim- 
 med and blackened by clusters of whirling in- 
 sects ; the old father with his bent back and the 
 two of them standing there and laughing, gazing
 
 66 TEE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 into each other's faces with the look of youth 
 and the Springtime. 
 
 And I went out quickly and stumbled my way 
 home alone, leaving Sydney to follow after. 
 
 When Sidney came in, after taps, I stole from 
 my bed to his to speak to him of it. But the 
 words would not form themselves suitably, and 
 he laughed at my poor stammerings, and sent 
 me off to bed again. 
 
 But one night, just before "tattoo," when the 
 fruit trees were frothing with light blossoms and 
 the scent of lilacs was heavy in the air, Sydney 
 gent for me. He was officer-of-the-day, to-day, 
 and could not leave the premises. He wanted 
 me to go in his place, to meet the girl and to 
 explain why he could not keep his appointment. 
 
 I looked at him in amazement. "Do you mean 
 to say, you've been meeting her every night. As 
 late as this? Alone?" 
 
 He was playing with the tassel at the end of 
 the red sash which the officer-of-the-day wears 
 about his waist. He let it drop and gave me a 
 quick glance. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "and mind you don't tell 
 anybody, either. You'll have to sneak off 
 bounds but I'll see you don't run much of a 
 risk. You can leave that part to me." 
 
 Then, when he saw me hesitate, he began to 
 plead. "Oh, say, you won't go back on me, will
 
 MY STEERFORTH 57 
 
 you? I've been a good friend to you and done 
 you lots of favors and now when I ask you to 
 take a little risk for me. . . ." 
 
 I smiled. "You don't understand, Sydney," 
 said. "It isn't the risk." 
 
 "Then what is it?" 
 
 "It's it's the girl." 
 
 He stepped back from me, and his face took 
 on a coldness I had never seen before. "Don't 
 worry about that," he exclaimed. "That's my 
 business." 
 
 Then, as I hesitated, he burst out: "Hurry 
 up, now, you little Jew !" 
 
 I stood very still for a minute. Then I felt 
 my face flush hot and I flung away from him. 
 
 It had come at last. He, my best friend my 
 only friend he had called me a Jew ! 
 
 I wanted to scream back at him, to beat him 
 with my fist, to denounce him and curse him. 
 I felt betrayed, degraded as I had never been 
 before. Then I gulped hard and controlled my- 
 self. 
 
 I said nothing. I merely saluted and set off 
 upon his errand. 
 
 But I did not find the girl at the street cor- 
 ner he had mentioned. I went on, only a few 
 hundred yards, to the store. There was a dim 
 blue light in one of its windows, and I crept up 
 and pressed my face against the glass, knowing
 
 68 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 that she was probably sitting up and waiting. 
 
 Yes, she was there behind the counter, with 
 her shawl still over her head and her eyes fixed 
 on the cheap wall clock. She could not see me in 
 the darkness outside not even when she turned 
 her head and gave me a full view of her face, 
 so that I could see how strangely pale and set it 
 was, and how deeply lurking in her eyes was the 
 fear of the moment. 
 
 I did not go in and tell her anything. I could 
 not. The sight of her and the appeal of her 
 thin, tragic little body sent me hurrying back 
 with my errand uncompleted and glad, madly 
 glad that it was so. 
 
 I crept up to bed as soon as I was "in bounds." 
 again. I wanted to avoid Sydney. Nor would I 
 give him a chance to speak to me the next morn- 
 ing. I felt that I knew now, almost in its entirety, 
 the scheme he was laying and the climax which 
 was fast approaching. And, after having seen 
 her, as I did last night, I knew that I could 
 never go walking with him again or have more 
 to do with him, and that I must go back to her, 
 some day soon, traitor- wise, and warn her against 
 him who had been my best friend. 
 
 In the afternoon, after school was done, a 
 crowd of us obtained permission to go swimming 
 in a nearby lake. Sydney was among us: the 
 leader of us, in fact. He tried to speak to me
 
 MY STEERFORTH 69 
 
 perhaps he was going to apologize ix> me for hav- 
 ing called me a Jew I do not know. But, 
 though I did not give him the chance, I remem- 
 ber well how tall and brave he looked, and how 
 his hair waved back from his forehead like Steer- 
 forth's. 
 
 And like Steerforth, too, he was drowned. 
 
 Schoolboys are careless of their swimming. 
 We did not notice until it was long too late that 
 Sydney had disappeared. When his body was 
 recovered, the doctors worked over it for fully 
 two hours. But it was no use. 
 
 His funeral was held in the school parlor the 
 next morning. But it had been a night of ter- 
 rors, of whispering groups, of Death's shadow 
 over us all and we were but children. His 
 empty bed, his dress uniform tossed carelessly 
 over the back of a chair, the knowledge of his in- 
 sensible presence in the undertaker's shop at the 
 other end of town . . . brought fear and 
 wakefulness to us all. 
 
 And as for me, I sat all night at the dormitory 
 window and listening to the creak and groan of 
 the old Revolutionary oak in the quadrangle, 
 thought of many things: of the walks we had 
 taken, of the hundred smiling adventures we had 
 shared, of all the glad things he had taught me
 
 60 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 and then, of the girl and of the tragic face of 
 her as I had seen it last. 
 
 And I wished that he had lived only a few 
 minutes longer so that I might have pleaded with 
 him and shown him where he was wrong. And, 
 perhaps, in those few minutes he would 
 have reached out his hand to me, and 
 begged forgiveness for having called me 
 what he did perhaps he might have done 
 so and oh, I wanted with all my heart to for- 
 give him and tell him it did not matter and to 
 wish him God-speed. 
 
 But in a few days, when I summoned 
 enough courage to go up the hilly road in search 
 of the little old store, I found it closed. The 
 cracked shades were down before the windows, 
 and a "For Sale" sign was on the door. The 
 father and daughter had moved away, I heard 
 in the town; but no one knew where or why. 
 
 But when I was back in the dormitory, I took 
 the book of "David Copperfield" from under my 
 pillow, and put it back in the library, and did 
 not attempt to read further in it, then.
 
 VII 
 FRESHMAN YEAR 
 
 NEW adventures must be prefaced by new 
 hopes. My entering college meant the starting 
 of a thousand new dreams, ambitions and 
 seemed to me an opening gate to a land stronger 
 than any I had yet heard of : a land of real men, 
 virile, courteous and kind, whose thoughts were 
 never petty, whose breadth of mind unfailing. 
 
 It was only a few weeks after Sydney's death 
 that I took my college entrance examinations. I 
 had taken the "preliminaries" the year before, 
 and I entered upon these "finals" low in spirit, 
 disinterested, very much aware of how poor a 
 training for them this last year at military school 
 had given me. 
 
 Nevertheless, I managed to pass them. Not 
 brilliantly, to be sure, but by a small margin 
 which left no doubt but that I should be accepted 
 in the freshman class of the city's university. 
 
 I have not called my alma mater by any other 
 name than this : I do not wish, out of a sense of 
 loyalty, to define it more closely. You will say, 
 before I am through, that I am perverse in that 
 
 61
 
 62 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 loyalty ; perhaps so but I do not wish to trans- 
 gress upon it. Suffice it then, that my college 
 days were spent at one of the two universities 
 which New York has within its borders. 
 
 I shall never forget how my heart bounded 
 when I received, through the mail, that little 
 leather covered book which college men know as 
 the "Freshman Bible." It is the directory of 
 undergraduate activities issued by the univer- 
 sity Y. M. C. A., and is sent to all members 
 of the incoming class. I read each little page 
 and its small, fine print as if my life depended 
 upon its reading. When I came to understand 
 that freshman must wear a black, green-buttoned 
 cap upon the campus, a deep awe of collegiate 
 law and order came over me. When I saw the 
 little half-tone prints of the chapel, the gym- 
 nasium, the baseball field, I felt that I was 
 glimpsing, before my proper time, the sacred 
 precincts of a land which would be magical, splen- 
 did with an eternal sunlight, peopled only with a 
 chivalrous and knightly manhood. I suppose 
 that college was to me, as to most subfreshman, 
 a place of green swards and track meets and 
 those musical harmonies which glee clubs can so 
 throatily accomplish. 
 
 I was at the hotel in New Hampshire when 
 this book arrived. The very same mail brought 
 me the definite results of my college entrance ex- 
 aminations. I remember that I was just start-
 
 FRESHMAN YEAR 63 
 
 ing to walk down to the lake with my aunt when 
 they arrived. I knew what was in the big 
 ominous envelope and I was afraid to open it. 
 I crammed it into my coat pocket, careful not to 
 let my Aunt Selina see it, and went on to the 
 boat house, hired a boat and rowed her dutifully 
 around the lake for a full two hours. She re- 
 marked upon my silence but I did not tell her 
 that my fate was in my pocket and that I dared 
 not look upon it. 
 
 But when I was back at the hotel, I went 
 straightway to my room and opened the en- 
 velope, stripped out the blue, bank-note sheet 
 and read yes, I had passed every examination. 
 And I was a regularly enrolled student at the 
 university. 
 
 I told my aunt of it at lunch, as if it were 
 a casual thing and she treated it as such, too. 
 If I had had any doubts of her lack of genuine 
 interest in me, I knew it now for certain. It 
 was just a matter of course to her this en- 
 trance into college and to me, in turn, it meant 
 so much : a new work, a new land, a life entirely 
 new and shot through with hopes. I did not 
 tell her that, but let her change the topic quickly. 
 She was intent upon talking fashions with Mrs. 
 Fleming-Cohen. 
 
 I had hated to come to this hotel for another 
 year. The people persisted in making things
 
 64 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 graciously unpleasant for us. I was beginning to 
 be old enough to feel it keenly and not old 
 enough to overlook. I wonder, for that matter, 
 if Jews are ever old enough to overlook it? 
 
 But Aunt Selina was dictatress of my des- 
 tinies. She had declared I must either come 
 along to the hotel or else I would not be allowed 
 to enter college. In the face of such an alter- 
 native I had yielded quickly. But there had 
 already begun between my aunt and me a chasm 
 that grew daily wider, deeper, more hopelessly 
 incapable of bridging. When one has been away 
 for a year, one returns to find grim truths. I 
 had met other people, seen other lives and other 
 souls since I had been in boarding school: 1 
 was not clouded now by my blood relationship 
 to Mrs. Haberman or by day after day of close 
 but unintimate companionship. I saw her as 
 she was: a shallow, flighty woman whose 
 thoughts were always upon that sort of society 
 which spells itself with a capital S, whose petu- 
 lance found no ease always restless, always 
 ambitious for petty things, wanting only what 
 she could not have an idle woman, foolish in 
 her idleness. 
 
 In spite of her taking it as a matter of course, 
 she spent the whole day, after she had learned 
 my news, in spreading it about the porch and 
 parlors of the hotel. She seemed to imagine
 
 FRESHMAN YEAR 5 
 
 that it would interest every one even Mrs. Van 
 Brunt, the arbiter of elegance of the hiountain 
 clique, who, on hearing it, sniffed, patted her 
 lorgnette with a lace handkerchief, and inquired 
 if a great many Jews did not attend this par- 
 ticular university. 
 
 "Really, I should not think of sending any 
 relative of mine there," she sniffed. "Not that 
 I have a prejudice against Jews, of course in 
 fact, I consider myself very democratic. I have 
 many Jewish acquaintances. Many of my best 
 friends are Jews." 
 
 My aunt, who had undoubtedly had to listen 
 to these catchwords as often as any other Jew 
 or Jewess must, attempted not to understand 
 why Mrs. Van Brunt had spoken them. A few 
 minutes later she made a few unblinking and 
 pointed remarks about having to attend a con- 
 vention of Christian Science workers in the fall 
 as if to protest that Mrs. Van Brunt had made 
 a grievous and embarrassing error. 
 
 I asked my aunt, a few days later, if I was 
 not to be allowed to live in one of the university 
 dormitories. Whether or not his college is in 
 his home town, every boy wants the full flavor 
 of undergraduate life wants to live on the 
 campus, to throw himself heart and soul into the 
 college games and customs. I could not see 
 how college would mean anything to me if I
 
 66 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 were to go on living at home in that dull, com- 
 fortless apartment of Aunt Selina's. 
 
 Youth is always eager for emancipation al- 
 ways a little too thoughtless in its eagerness. 
 
 Perhaps I was wrong in forgetting what I 
 owed Aunt Selina. She took great offense at my 
 wish. She spoke, her voice choked with tears, of 
 the many years that she had cared for me, fost- 
 ered me, guarded me from a world of foreign 
 things "ruffians and kikes and niggers," was 
 the way she described it. 
 
 At any rate, I remember that I spent a whole 
 day in thinking it out for myself upon a lonely 
 walk, and that, at the end of it, I came to tell 
 her that she was right and that I was ashamed 
 of wanting to leave her that I would live home 
 with her, and try to gain the best of college in 
 that way. Privately, I knew that I could never 
 gain as much but I had made up my mind not 
 to pain her, confident that it would be worth 
 the sacrifice. 
 
 The days lagged slowly to the end of that 
 summer. I was preparing in a hundred little 
 ways for the great adventure: sending for all 
 sorts of stereotyped books on the moral conduct 
 of college men, on the art of making friends, 
 on the history and traditions of my university. 
 I was prepared to be its most loyal son. I could 
 hardly wait for the stupid weeks at this moun-
 
 FRESHMAN YEAR 67 
 
 tain hotel to pass by, for the opening day to 
 arrive. 
 
 And then, when the trees were beginning to 
 fleck with scarlet and the summer heather 
 streaked with goldenrod, we did depart for the 
 city. It was only a week before college would 
 begin. 
 
 Then five days, four days, three, two, one. 
 And on the night before registration day, which 
 would commence the college year, I sat for a 
 long while at my table-desk, dreaming high 
 things hope and fear mingling with my dreams, 
 charging them with an exquisite uncertainty, 
 making them pulse with the things that were 
 innermost in me. 
 
 I was old enough, I thought, to review all the 
 past to see myself with youth's over-harsh 
 criticism of itself to realize that, so far, I had 
 made a miserable, cringing, cowardly botch of 
 my conduct and convictions. Some day, soon, 
 I seemed to feel, there would come a moment of 
 crisis a moment when all the shy, stammering 
 manhood that I knew to be in my heart would 
 fling itself suddenly into the open and make me 
 strong and confident, helpful to myself and many 
 others. I had always longed to be a leader as 
 every boy does and so far I had been a slave 
 slave, most abjectly of all, to my own fears and 
 prejudices. But it would be different at col-
 
 8 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 lege : there would be something I did not know 
 what which would fling courage into me, fill 
 my veins with flame and it troubled me to won- 
 der what that thing would be. Had any one 
 told me, then, that it would be Judaism, I should 
 have either laughed or been insulted. 
 
 For I was just as much afraid as ever of what 
 hardships my religion might work for me at 
 college. I had as much fear, as much abhorrence 
 of the truth, in that regard. I wanted so much to 
 forget it to be one of the other sort, little car- 
 ing for creed in any form, but wishing I were 
 safe in the comfort of having been born into 
 the faith of the majority. As I looked at it 
 then, I was going into these new four years with 
 a tremendous handicap scored against me. It 
 seemed so unfair: I cared so little for Jewish 
 things, yet I would have to be identified with 
 them throughout my entire course. I had 
 learned, by now, that I could not escape them. 
 
 I went into college with a deeper sense of the 
 injustice of it all than I had ever had. I was 
 going with the feeling that, come what may, 
 I should have to bow before the inevitable stigma 
 of my race And yet, I hoped so yearningly that 
 it would be otherwise. I hoped and dreamed 
 and laughed at my dreams, and told my- 
 self that college men were only boys, after all: 
 boys as bigoted, as cruel in their prejudices as
 
 FRESHMAN YEAR 69 
 
 any that I had met at high school or military 
 academy. 
 
 And perhaps I was justified in this last opin- 
 ion. For, when I appeared on the campus the 
 next morning, headed for the dean's office to 
 file my registration, I was met by a ratty, little 
 sophomore who made me buy a second-hand 
 freshman cap from him at four times its original 
 value. 
 
 And when he had my money in his pocket, and 
 was a safe distance across the green from me, 
 be began to laugh and shout : 
 
 "Oi, oi ! oi, oi !" 
 
 So that this was my introduction into col- 
 lege life.
 
 vm 
 
 WITHIN THE GATES 
 
 THIS initial experience did not frighten me. 
 I came up to the first day of college in the firm 
 and joyous belief that here, if anywhere, that 
 old bugbear of my past school days would be 
 absent. I came into sight of buildings that 
 were new to me, and oh, how stately to my fresh- 
 man eyes! I came across a campus that was 
 golden with the autumn grass, where red leaves 
 filtered down from old elms, and where, from 
 heights, I caught glimpses of the university's 
 private parks, still green and soft, and of the 
 river beyond and of the clean flanks of white 
 stone buildings and marble colonnades, half 
 hidden in the trees. It was all so beautiful. It 
 was the promised land and I was within its 
 gates. 
 
 The giddy knowledge of it buoyed me up and 
 sent me across the campus humming to myself 
 one of the alma mater songs which I had so 
 religiously learned from that "Freshman Bible." 
 I was on my way to my first class. Directly 
 ahead of me was the broad, lofty door of the 
 
 70
 
 WITHIN THE GATES 71 
 
 recitation building and, a little to the left, a 
 fountain's water spilled itself singingly over in- 
 to a shallow marble basin. 
 
 Suddenly a trio of sophomores bounded out 
 from behind a clump of bushes. They came about 
 me in a whooping circle, took me by the head 
 and feet and tossed me into the fountain. 
 
 I clambered out, dripping, spluttering, but 
 be it said to my credit still smiling. I had 
 heard that this was the customary hazing which 
 all freshmen must endure and I knew enough 
 to take it with as good a grace as they gave it. 
 
 I started on my way to the recitation hall 
 again, my clothes leaving a trickling line behind 
 me on the walk. But they pulled me back and 
 thumped me into the water again. It happened 
 a third time before they let me go. And then 
 one of them a big, stocky fellow who wore a 
 thick, rolling sweater on which the college letter 
 was emblazoned laughed heartily and thwacked 
 me on the back and roared that I was a good 
 kid, even for a Jew! 
 
 The kindness of his remark was perhaps deeply 
 meant. I've no doubt, he thought to be pay- 
 ing me a compliment but I went away, wetter 
 than ever, fast contracting a cold and with a 
 lump in my throat for which the cold was not at 
 all responsible. 
 
 In the class room I found a number of my
 
 72 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 new classmates in quite as damp a condition 
 as L I was glad to be among them, to know 
 that I had not been singled out and, being 
 miserable, enjoyed their company. The instruc- 
 tor seemed to be making a point of paying no 
 attention to our wetness. It made me wonder 
 how the faculty felt about hazing. Evidently they 
 shut their eyes to it. 
 
 The class was soon over, since we were only 
 kept for a preliminary explanation of the course 
 and a few words of supercilious greeting on 
 behalf of the young instructor. We came out 
 upon the campus again, locked arm in wet arm, 
 paradoxically proud of what we had suffered. 
 
 But some more sophomores were waiting for 
 us. We had to go into the fountain over and 
 over again. My own personal score was nine 
 times. Nor did my good nature kept at what 
 a cost! serve to bring me any leniency. 
 
 In fact it was only when I showed a trace of 
 anger that the sophomores finally released me 
 and took me over to the gymnasium to give 
 me a sweater and a pair of old pants, much too 
 big for me, to wear until my other suit was dry. 
 
 I went home from that first day jubilant, ex- 
 cited, sure of my coming four years. I had 
 proven to myself and to all these others that 
 I was ready to take a joke, to share it and enjoy 
 it even when it was "on me." I had come out
 
 WITHIN THE GATES 73 
 
 of it all with a tame but conclusive triumph of 
 patience and good nature. 
 
 I told my aunt of what had happened, when 
 we sat down to dinner. She was shocked at 
 the recital. She wanted to know what sort of 
 boys these sophomores were were they of good 
 family and all that? Otherwise, if they were 
 ruffians, common street boys she was going to 
 write a letter of complaint to the Dean of the uni- 
 versity. I had a hard time restraining her from 
 it: I only did succeed by maintaining stoutly 
 that hazing was part of the social scheme, and 
 was indulged in only by ''boys of the best fam- 
 ilies!" 
 
 The next morning, when I had traveled up- 
 town to the college site, I was met by more than 
 one sophomore and upper classman who gave 
 me a broad smile or a humorous wink. The 
 story of my dousings had probably gone the 
 rounds of the campus. 
 
 That night there was to be a reception given 
 to the freshman class by the college Y. M. C. A. 
 I had arranged with Aunt Selina that I would 
 not be home until late. 
 
 There was a baseball game between the two 
 classes in the afternoon. The sophomores won, 
 of course as I believe they almost always do in 
 that first game. But after that there was a class 
 rush around the flag pole. I was light enough
 
 74 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 to climb up, stockinged-feet, upon the shoulders 
 of some of the taller classmates. I managed, 
 somehow or other, to reach that silly little flag 
 and to tear it down, and then to dive down into 
 the twisting, jammed crowd below me, hugging 
 the rag to my breast in bulwarked hiding. And 
 when the whistle blew I was still in possession 
 of it. 
 
 Popularity is a heady wine and I had my 
 fill of it that day and evening. I little I 
 had won the class rush for the freshmen. Every- 
 body seemed to know my name, to recognize me, 
 to want to speak to me. At the reception, later 
 on, I was surrounded by a great group of fresh- 
 men too shy to stand by themselves. Under 
 ordinary circumstances, of course, I should have 
 been more shy than any of them but these were 
 not ordinary circumstances. I was a suddenly 
 awakened hero, a wolf who had thrown off his 
 meek lamb's outfit. 
 
 As I was leaving for home, full of ice cream, 
 punch and much self-conceit, a junior came to- 
 ward me hesitatingly. He seemed to be near- 
 sighted, for he groped rather pitifully for my 
 sleeve, and thrust his face close to mine. 
 
 "Aren't you the freshman that won the rush?" 
 he asked me. 
 
 I told Mm promptly that I was. 
 
 "Well, won't you come around for lunch to-
 
 WITHIN THE GATES 76 
 
 morrow at our fraternity house? We'll be 
 mighty glad to have you." 
 
 I had learned a little of fraternities at school. 
 They had not amounted to anything there; but 
 I knew that college fraternities were different 
 were big, powerful organizations which could 
 make or break a man's college career. My aunt 
 had spoken to me of fraternities, too ; she wanted 
 me to join one which should give me and her 
 a deal of social prestige. And I, hungering 
 for new experiences and as every boy does 
 for things that are mysterious and secretive, 
 wanted, too, the distinction and glory of mak- 
 ing a fraternity. It seemed to my freshman 
 mind the most important thing upon the hori- 
 zon. 
 
 And so, when this upper classman invited me 
 to luncheon, my heart bounded high with expec- 
 tation. I knew from other college men that an 
 invitation to lunch was but the beginning of 
 the usual system of "rushing" a prospective 
 member: the preliminary skirmish of festivities 
 which would prelude the final invitation to join 
 the fraternity. And I was going to lunch at one 
 of the most influential and exclusive of the uni- 
 versity's fraternities. 
 
 It is needless to say, I was dressed in my Sun- 
 day-best the next morning. And, after my 11 
 o'clock recitation, I hurried out to find the upper
 
 76 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 classman waiting for me by the side of the foun- 
 tain which had been the scene of my yesterday's 
 wetting. I smiled indulgently at the thought 
 of it. How changed everything was since then! 
 The upper classman waited for me to come up 
 to him. I saw that he did not recognize me at 
 once, and a tremor of suspicion came over me. 
 What if it were all a hoax another bit of haz- 
 ing? 
 
 He was immensely cordial; took me by the 
 arm and marched me across the campus, down 
 a side street and into the palatial, pillared house 
 of his fraternity. On the way, his genial face 
 full of a stupid, expansive smile, and his near- 
 sighted eyes twinkling vacantly, he told me of 
 the men I should meet. 
 
 Inside, in the magnificent hall, with its 
 weathered oak beams and mission furniture and 
 bronze plaques upon the tapestried walls, I met a 
 host of good-looking, well-dressed men. There 
 was evidently a "rushing committee" of upper 
 classmen, who took me about and introduced me 
 to all the others. There were one or two fresh- 
 men, too, whom I recognized; and these were 
 wearing in their lapels a strange, gleaming little 
 button. I was to learn later than this was the 
 "pledge button" which announced that these men 
 had been offered membership to the fraternity 
 and had accepted it.
 
 WITHIN THE GATES 77 
 
 When we went into luncheon the near-sighted 
 junior sat me next to him. He seemed tremend- 
 ously embarrassed. Once or twice he leaned over 
 to whisper to other men; then he would steal 
 a glance at me and blush a brick red, his inef- 
 ficient eyes puckering to squint closely. 
 
 The other men, for the most part, disregarded 
 me. A classmate one of the pledged freshmen 
 spoke to me now and then, but loftily and as 
 if it were an effort of hospitality. 
 
 As I felt the coldness increase, I grew glum 
 and silent. My new-found confidence oozed out 
 into bewilderment. What had I done? What 
 had I said to insult them all, to hurt my chances 
 of election to their midst? I could not figure 
 it out. 
 
 They were courteous enough. They were what 
 they claimed to be: a crowd of young gentlemen. 
 But I could sense, electric in the air, the dis- 
 approval and amusement which they felt. 
 
 And after lunch was over, I did not join the 
 others in the big, leather-walled smoking room. 
 I made a mumbled apology and went. They 
 accepted it blandly, smiling, smirking a little, 
 and let me go. 
 
 I had just gone down the steps and towards 
 the campus when the near-sighted junior came 
 after me, redder than ever of face, his eyes, 
 blinking very hard. He hurried up behind ine 
 
 and put his hand on my shoulder.
 
 78 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "See here, 'fresh,' " he said thickly, "I owe 
 you an explanation. I don't want the other 
 fellows to see me giving it to you. Come on, 
 walk along with me." 
 
 At the corner, out of range of the windows 
 of his fraternity house, he began his hurried, 
 jumbling speech. 
 
 "I could see," he said, "how uncomfortable 
 they made you. They tried to be decent, honest- 
 ly they did. But they they've never had never 
 had to entertain a one of your sort before, 
 don't you see? We we don't ever take well, 
 it's all my fault I'm so darn near-sighted that 
 I didn't realize. I couldn't see I didn't 
 know " 
 
 He could not go on, for his dull, honest face 
 was fearfully distressed. 
 
 "What didn't you know?" I demanded. 
 
 "That you were now, don't get sore, because 
 I like Jews as much as any folks and I can't 
 see why we don't take them in our fraternity. 
 Only" 
 
 "Only you didn't realize I was a Jew," I said 
 hotly. 
 
 "That's ii^-I'm so near-sighted that I" 
 
 I did not wait for his stammered finish. I 
 went swiftly away and home, my heart well- 
 nigh bursting.
 
 IX 
 MY AUNT AND I 
 
 "IT isn't true," snapped my aunt, when I told 
 her of what had happened at .the fraternity 
 house. "I can't imagine that young gentlemen 
 of such an aristocratic set could act so meanly. 
 You must have done something wrong. You 
 must have insulted them personally, yourself. 
 I'll wager, you're to blame not they." 
 
 I was too sickened by it all to protest. I 
 repeated to her slowly the words of apology 
 which the near-sighted junior had spoken to 
 me at our parting, and, when they did not con- 
 vince her, gave up the task and went to bed 
 without any supper. I was old enough to have 
 cured myself of the habit of tears though, as 
 a matter of fact, no men ever do quite want 
 to cure themselves of it but I remember that 
 my pillow was damp the next morning, and the 
 grey, foggy sky, through the window, seemed 
 in sad tune with my spirits. 
 
 I dressed and went up to college, fearful to 
 meet any of that fraternity crowd again, wonder- 
 ing how they would act towards me, trying to 
 
 79
 
 80 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 be indignant, but succeeding only in a shriveled 
 self-debasement. Because I was a Jew that 
 was their one and only reason for showing me 
 the door in so polite and gentlemanly a fashion. 
 
 But when, at the chapel entrance, I bumped 
 into one of the pledged freshmen, he simply did 
 not pay any attention to me at all. He appeared 
 not to know me, murmured an unhurried and 
 general, "Excuse me," and went on. A few 
 yards further on, I met with one of the seniors 
 at whose fraternity table I had been sitting the 
 noon before. He bowed hastily and walked 
 past. 
 
 Neither one nor the other of them seemed to 
 be much perturbed by the meeting, nor to notice 
 my own discomfiture. I could not imagine that 
 such incidents as mine of yesterday were com- 
 mon occurences and yet they seemed to take 
 it so much as a matter of course. 
 
 I fought with my pride in the matter for a 
 long while. Then, at the end of a noon-time 
 recitation, I spoke of it to a freshman with 
 whom I had struck up a friendship two days 
 old. The friendship ended there. He seemed 
 (Scandalized at my mentioning fraternities at all : 
 it was a subject far too sacred for discussion, 
 evidently. He merely snapped back stiffly that 
 he expected to be pledged to another fraternity 
 sometime during the day, and that he did not
 
 MY AUNT AND I 81 
 
 care to hurt his chances by talking too freely. 
 It made me see the secretiveness of the system 
 from another angle. 
 
 I received no more invitations to lunch. I 
 contented myself henceforth with a humble 
 sandwich and glass of milk at the "Commons" 
 eating hall. It was galling to see classmates 
 being escorted across the campus to the fra- 
 ternity houses, to 'overhear them accepting in- 
 vitations to theater in the evening, to watch the 
 process of their conversion to this fraternity 
 or that one. It was like being in a bustling 
 crowd with hands tied and mouth gagged and 
 the sullen rage of a disappointed boyhood 
 in my heart. 
 
 Aunt Selina did not know how to comfort 
 me. I think she tried to, in her superfluous 
 way. At first she wanted to make light of 
 the fraternities, gibing at them whenever op- 
 portunity arose at the dinner table. But she 
 did not feel lightly about it and her disap- 
 pointment was too great to be laughed away. 
 She still had a dim suspicion that I had made 
 some fearful misstep had brought the failure 
 on myself. And so, after a. while, she kept 
 silent on the subject, and would not speak of it 
 at all. But her silence was more harshly elo- 
 quent than all her foolish talk had been. 
 
 It seems that Paul Fleming, a nephew of Mrs.
 
 82 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 Fleming-Cohen, had belonged to a fraternity at 
 college; and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen was always 
 alluding to it, as if it gave her a social security 
 which my own aunt could never attain. Aunt 
 Selina wanted me to make a fraternity to prove 
 to Mrs. Fleming-Cohen how easy a matter it 
 was. She had implied as much, when we had 
 first come back from the country. 
 
 Our life together as days went by, seemed 
 to be going peacefully and smoothly in- 
 to some sort of a makeshift groove. I knew well 
 enough that she and I would never grow to be 
 genuinely fond of each other. Our aims were 
 different ; and the beginning of college had given 
 me some inkling of what my aims were going 
 to be. I was only eighteen, to be sure; but I 
 was older, more settled than most youths of 
 twenty or more. I blamed myself a little for 
 my impatience with her, for my hasty conclu- 
 sions concerning those friends of hers who came 
 up from Washington square to eat her meals 
 and to fill her with senseless chatter of art and 
 literature. And yet I could not help loathing 
 them. Whenever they came to dinner, I made 
 an excuse of studying at the house of another 
 freshman for the evening, and thus escaped 
 them. 
 
 The first month of college was not yet over 
 when I went, on one of those evenings, to hear
 
 MY AUNT AND I 83 
 
 an extra-curriculum lecture on the social duties 
 of a college man. I had expected to hear a fop 
 of some sort deliver dicta on the proper angle 
 of holding a fork or inside information as to 
 the most aristocratic set in college. It was that 
 word social that misled me. 
 
 Instead, the speaker was a rough, business- 
 like man, rather shabbily dressed, who heaped 
 fiery anathema upon the idle rich. And he spoke 
 of the true social duties. He spoke mainly be- 
 cause he knew most about it concerning the 
 opportunities for college men in settlement work. 
 
 I had never heard of settlement work before. 
 It was a new thing to me and perhaps it was 
 its newness that at first attracted me so strongly. 
 I waited until the end of the lecture, and joined 
 a little group of listeners who gathered around 
 the man with eager questions. I had a few of 
 my own to ask, too and he answered mine as he 
 answered all of them, simply, kindly, directly. 
 
 The speaker was Lawrence Richards, director 
 of one of the largest settlement societies in New 
 York. There was something powerful, magnet- 
 ically enthusiastic about him and his face was 
 tremendously keen and happy. 
 
 He was gathering up his papers to depart 
 when he chanced to remark to me: 
 
 "See here, will you come over to my fraternity 
 house with me and talk things over? We can sit
 
 84 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 in the library, and I'll tell you lots more that 
 I know will interest you. We'll be comfortable 
 and fairly alone." 
 
 Mr. Kichards, it seems, had gone to my uni- 
 versity ten years ago. I asked him the name of 
 the fraternity. When he told me it, I shook my 
 head, No. 
 
 It was the house at which I had had that 
 memorable luncheon and whither I was not to 
 be invited any more. 
 
 "Why not?" he persisted. "I want you down 
 in my settlement. I want to show you how you 
 can be of help to us. Won't you come over to 
 the fraternity house?" And when I again de- 
 clined, he insisted on knowing why. 
 
 But I did not tell him. "Perhaps some of the 
 members of your active chapter will tell you," 
 I replied, "but I will not." 
 
 He looked at me sharply, and his face grew 
 grim. "I see," he said warmly. "The nasty little 
 cads. Well, it's harder for me to excuse them 
 than it is for you and I'm their sworn brother !" 
 
 So I made an appointment to come down to 
 the settlement, instead, and to take supper with 
 him there some evening. He wanted to show 
 me the splendid organization of things there: 
 the club rooms, the dance hall, the gymnasium 
 and reading room. He wanted to introduce me 
 to the resident leaders. He wanted to persuade
 
 MY AUNT AND I 85 
 
 me to become a leader, myself: to attend one 
 of the clubs of young boys, to join with, them in 
 their meetings, their debates, their entertain- 
 ments and studies, to help them by friendliness 
 and example. 
 
 "I suppose," he said, when he left me at a 
 subway kiosk, "that you feel mighty sorry that 
 you didn't make a fraternity, don't you? Well, 
 I'm offering you a membership in a bigger and 
 better one than ever had a chapter in a college 
 the brotherhood of humanity. You'll be proud 
 of it, little fellow, if you'll join. So come along 
 down and let us 'rush' you!" 
 
 It was so good-natured a joke that I could 
 not resent it. I had had my eyes opened, to- 
 night, by some of the things that Mr. Eichards 
 had told me. I had learned that the city has 
 its poor, its sick and wicked, its boys and girls 
 embroiled in wrong environments, its lonely and 
 unambitious, who must be comraded and wak- 
 ened. And I had learned that I, young as I 
 was, was able to help, to foster, to do good for 
 such as these. 
 
 On the way home, I passed a street corner 
 where boys a few years younger than myself were 
 loitering in obscene play. A little further on 
 I came to a girl, not more than fifteen or sixteen, 
 who was being followed by some toughs. She 
 was a Jewish girl, too, I noticed and she was
 
 86 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 crying with, fright. I put her on a street car 
 to get her out of harm's way. 
 
 It was of just such as these, both boys and girls, 
 that Mr. Richards had spoken this evening. Per- 
 haps he was right and what a noble thing to 
 be able to join in the help and companionship 
 which the settlement could give them. I resolved 
 to go down to him the very next evening. 
 
 When I reached home, Aunt Selina was just 
 getting ready for bed. She came out into the 
 hall in a pink silk dressing-gown, all frills and 
 ruffles, and asked me complainingly where I had 
 been so long. She was angry at my abrupt de- 
 parture when her evening's guests arrived. 
 
 "I have been to hear a lecture delivered by 
 a Mr. Lawrence Richards," I told her. 
 
 "Oh ! That settlement man?" she asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 She almost snorted. "I met him once at a 
 meeting of our Ladies' Auxiliary. He is such 
 a plain, undistinguished fellow!" 
 
 I hesitated a moment. "Aunt Selina," I said, 
 "I am going down tomorrow night to have sup- 
 per with him. He wants me to become a leader 
 in one of the settlement clubs. It would take 
 only one night a week, he says " 
 
 My aunt was so affected by the announcement 
 that I had to run and fetch her smelling salts. 
 "Oh, oh, down into that awful tenement house
 
 MY AUNT AND I 87 
 
 district? Down among those dreadful people? 
 Indeed, you shan't go. If you do, I shall never 
 allow you to come back! Think, of the diseases 
 you might spread!" 
 
 And she carried on so hysterically that, after 
 a while, I gave in and promised I would not go 
 not for a while, anyhow. 
 
 "Why aren't you like other boys of your 
 class?" she demanded. "Why aren't you con- 
 tent to make the best of things and be satisfied 
 with the splendid opportunities you have?" 
 
 "That's just what I'm trying to do, Aunt 
 Selina," I told her. "Trying to make the best 
 the really best of everything that comes into 
 my life!" 
 
 But she was unimpressed, and went off sob- 
 bing to bed.
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 I BECAME rather friendly with that near-sighted 
 junior. He was so genial, good-hearted, apolo- 
 getic a chap that I could not harbor any resent- 
 ment against him for the events which took place 
 at his fraternity house. They were not Ms fault, 
 anyhow. 
 
 His name was Trevelyan, and he came from 
 one of the oldest families in New York; one 
 of the wealthiest, too. At college he was con- 
 sidered somewhat of a fool, his never-failing good 
 nature giving justification for the opinion. I 
 f don't think that, since that first embarrassing 
 / luncheon, I have^fever seen him unhappy and 
 even then it was on my account he was dis- 
 contented, not on his own. And outside of col- 
 lege he must have been respected with all the 
 awe which New Yorkers accord to the Sons of 
 the American Revolution and five or six million 
 dollars. But he was the least lofty, least snob- 
 bish man that I have ever known. Most of his 
 college friends thought he was too much of a 
 fool to play the snob ; I thought he was too much 
 
 of a gentleman. 
 
 88
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 89 
 
 He came to dinner at my aunt's apartment 
 after he had known me for about a month. I 
 do not know who of us was the more proud, 
 my aunt or I for to me the idea of having a 
 junior and a member of one of the most powerful 
 fraternities visiting at my home was quite as 
 much of a marvel as my aunt seemed to feel 
 it, that a member of the Trevelyan family the 
 Trevelyan's of Fifth avenue and Sixty-fourth 
 street, don't you know should be seated at her 
 table and giving gracious attention to her gos- 
 sipy conversation. For a whole week after his 
 visit Aunt Selina made a great point of it 
 and of telling her friends of it. The distinction 
 of having a Trevelyan to dinner was a great 
 triumph over Mrs. Fleming- Cohen, who had once 
 entertained a Jewish mining magnate from the 
 Far West but who had never attained anything 
 like a Trevelyan. 
 
 I think Trevelyan began at first feeling very 
 much ashamed and sorry; he was just trying to 
 square up matters with his own conscience. He 
 had a room in one of the college dormitories. 
 He seldom used it, but when he did he would in- 
 vite me to stay up there with him and to sit 
 until the wee, quiet hours, talking over our briar 
 pipes, interspacing the layers of blue smoke with 
 argument and stirring plans. Trevelyan had 
 great hopes for me. He had discovered that 
 I was a runner.
 
 90 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 As a matter of fact, I had done a little practic- 
 ing with, the track team at military school. I 
 had never amounted to much, had never stood 
 out tremendously in meets. I liked to run, I 
 liked the healthy trim that the exercise gave me, 
 but I'm afraid I never took it very seriously. 
 
 But Trevelyan saw things differently. Here 
 was my great chance. Never mind the college 
 papers, the literary societies and all that tame 
 coterie of lesser institutions. If I made the track 
 team I would be a college hero and, after see- 
 ing me capture the flag in the class rush, he 
 had no doubt of my vim and nerve. I must 
 make the track team. (Trevelyan, by the way, 
 was assistant manager of the track organiza- 
 tion. ) 
 
 So, soon enough, I was out on the windy field 
 in my old school track-clothes, racing around 
 and around with a sturdy intention of proving 
 myself worthy of Trevelyan's friendship. That 
 was my chief reason for "coming out for track," 
 after all. 
 
 The coach, a taciturn, gray old fellow, whose 
 muscles were running too fat and whose temper 
 had frayed out in the years of snarling at pros- 
 pective champions, paid little attention to me 
 until the week before the freshman-sophomore 
 track meet. Then he tried me out at a 44-yard 
 run. That was what I had been used to doing
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 91 
 
 at school. There was only one man in the fresh- 
 man class who could beat me in this run for cer- 
 tain. There was no reason, said Trevelyan, why I 
 should not be absolutely sure of my place on 
 the class team. 
 
 Three days before the meet the other "44" 
 man sprained his knee. He was out of the 
 race for the time being. There was no doubt 
 now that I would be put in. So said Trevelyan, 
 and so, in surly, semi-official fashion, said the 
 coach. 
 
 But we had not counted on the captain of the 
 freshman track team. This was one of my class- 
 mates, chosen from among the many candidates 
 by the captain of the Varsity team. This fresh- 
 man leader I did not know personally. I had 
 met him almost every day on the field, but he 
 had never recognized me. His track shirt bore 
 the monogram of a noted preparatory school; 
 and it was echoed that he was the handsomest 
 man in the class. He was most certainly the 
 most snobbish. He was thrown into contact 
 with me in various organizations during our 
 four years. I do not remember his ever having 
 bowed to me. In his college world I, and such 
 as I, did not exist. 
 
 At any rate, the college newspaper came out 
 one noon to announce the members of the fresh- 
 man track team, as chosen by its captain. My 
 name was not among them.
 
 92 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 In vain did Trevelyan protest to the 'varsity 
 /'captain, to the coach I even think he took the 
 ' \ matter as high as a meeting of the faculty ath- 
 letic advisory committee. Nothing could be 
 done. The 'varsity captain shrugged his shoul- 
 ders, the old coach growled but said nothing, 
 the faculty advisers kept away from the topic 
 as if it were beneath their tutelary notice. And 
 the freshman-sophomore track meet was held 
 with me on the side-lines, among the spectators. 
 I have no reason to gloat over it, but it is a 
 rather amusing point that we lost the entire 
 meet through losing the four-forty yard run. 
 
 "It's a dirty shame," said Trevelyan, his 
 squinting eyes full of rue and anger. "I knew 
 that sort of thing went on in the 'varsity circle 
 but I didn't think they'd carry it down into 
 the class teams. It's all college politics and 
 college politics- are the meanest, most vindictive 
 intrigue on earth." 
 
 I didn't ask him for a further explanation, 
 and I suppose- he felt it would be kinder not 
 to make one. But I knew well enough to what 
 he referred and why there had been this sud- 
 den, underhanded discrimination. I made up 
 my mind to forget the whole episode. I had not 
 been so tremendously anxious to make the track 
 team that I would let the disappointment of 
 it rankle and grow and ruin my year's fun. I
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 93 
 
 put it all behind me, resolving to take my en- 
 thusiasm into some other of the college activities 
 where it would be more sincerely appreciated. 
 
 I consulted Trevelyan about it. He suggested 
 the college newspaper. But after he had made 
 the suggestion, he began to stammer and make 
 strange protests. I asked him to tell me plainly 
 what was wrong. 
 
 "Why, it's the same with that as with the track 
 team. The editor-in-chief of the paper is in 
 my 'crowd.' I'll speak to him and save you 
 any trouble. If he says yes, then you go out and 
 win a place on the board of editors. But if he 
 says no, I want you to promise me that you won't 
 subject yourself to any more of this puppy-dog 
 prejudice." 
 
 I did promise. And two days later I received 
 a postcard from Trevelyan, telling me that it 
 would hardly be worth my while to try for the 
 college paper. He added, in the large, unruly 
 handwriting which his near-sightedness made 
 necessary : 
 
 "You may go on breathing, however, if you 
 don't make a noise at it." 
 
 He supplemented this, a few nights later, when 
 he and I were at our old places in his room. 
 He threw down his pipe in the midst of talking 
 about something carefully unimportant, and sat 
 up with a laughably angry face.
 
 94 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "See here, 'fresh,' " lie bawled out, "you're 
 getting the rottenest deal I ever saw. You know 
 why so do I. And we're going to show them 
 a thing or two. We're going to buck up against 
 the strongest thing in the world and that thing 
 is prejudice. We're going to beat it, too. Do 
 you understand? Were going to beat it out! 
 Smash it to pieces !" 
 
 Yes, I understood, I said. I understood it 
 all only too well. So well, indeed, that I knew 
 there was no use trying to fight. I knew that 
 prejudice of race and religion was the strongest 
 shield of the ignorant and mean, that neither he 
 nor I could fight it fairly and that, if he came 
 into the fight by my side, he would ruin his 
 own chances of being one of the biggest men 
 in the college world when his senior year ar- 
 rived. 
 
 "A lot I care for being a big man in a place 
 of little thoughts," he snapped back at me. "I'm 
 ready to take the consequences, now and forever 
 after." 
 
 "Have you thought of what your fraternity 
 brothers might say about it?" I asked him. 
 
 "I don't care I don't well, if they ." His 
 voice died away in perplexity. I had hit upon 
 his weak spot. He was an easy-going, likeable 
 chap ; he hated a rumpus. If he made any sort 
 of fight against the anti-Jewish prejudice, he
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 95 
 
 would have his whole fraternity against him, 
 he would perhaps be shunned by all his sworn 
 brothers, by his best college friends. His en- 
 thusiasm became a little dulled, then died down 
 into a great good-natured sigh. 
 
 "I suppose you're right, 'fresh,' " he ^admitted 
 slowly. "I'm not of the fighting sort, And T 
 have my fraternity to consider. That's the worst 
 of belonging to a fraternity." He took up his 
 pipe again and smoked in silence for a while. 
 "I suppose you think you'll never be happy, now 
 that you know you aren't going to be in a fra- 
 ternity. Take my word for it, you're ten times 
 luckier in having your freedom. Wait until 
 you're an upper-classman and you'll agree with 
 me." 
 
 It seemed a dreadful sacrilege for him to be 
 saying it. Besides, I thought he was blaming 
 his own lack of fighting power on his fraternity 
 in too heavy and unjust a degree. I wasn't any 
 more of a fighter than he but I was disap- 
 pointed, somehow, that his pugnacity had died 
 out so readily. 
 
 "I can't do it, 'fresh,' " he confessed, with a 
 grin. "I'm not the scrapper I thought I could 
 be. I just want to go through college lazily, 
 happily, respectably and all that. I wouldn't 
 know how to make a rumpus if I wanted to. 
 But listen here." He pointed his finger at me
 
 96 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 sternly. "If I were you, I wouldn't rest until 
 I had made the fight and won it. Fight it not 
 only for yourself but for the hundred other 
 Jewish fellows in college. See that they get 
 a square deal. See that they don't lose out on 
 all the things that make college worth while. A 
 Jew is just as good as anyone else, isn't he?" 
 
 "Yes," I answered him only faintly. 
 
 'Well, then, go ahead and prove that fact to 
 the whole college world." 
 
 But, though I did not answer him, I knew 
 that I was not any more able to make the fight 
 than he. Less able, perhaps, because I was more 
 handicapped. I made myself a thousand ex- 
 cuses as I sat there thinking it over I was not 
 brave enough, that was all. 
 
 But one thing my acquaintanceship with 
 Trevelyan did bring me. He was a dabbler in 
 light verse, and had been elected to the college 
 funny paper. He also contributed to the under- 
 graduate literary magazine at times though he 
 was a bit ashamed of being taken seriously. At 
 any rate, he encouraged me to go into these two 
 activities. 
 
 Whether or not it was due entirely to his in- 
 fluence, or whether these two college publications 
 were broader and less exacting as to the ancestry 
 of contributors, my work for them was wel- 
 comed. Before the year was over I had been
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 97 
 
 elected an associate editor of the funny paper, 
 and had four articles accepted by the literary 
 magazine enough to put me among the list of 
 "probables" for election, next winter. 
 
 At the same time I went through a successful 
 trial for membership in the college dramatic 
 association. I was not given a part in the an- 
 nual play, however. I made up my mind to 
 consider this a just decision, and that I had no 
 right to impute it to anything other than my 
 lack of talent. The president of the association, 
 however, met me at lunch hour one day and 
 made some rather lame remarks about the em- 
 barrassment to which the "dramatics" would be 
 put if I were in the cast. 
 
 "Yer see," he said, "we go on an annual tour. 
 And we get entertained a lot, yer see. And it's 
 big social stunts in every city. And it's the 
 cream of society wherever we go so, it'd be 
 funny if well don'tcher see?" 
 
 "Yes," I admitted, "I do see. I see further 
 than you do." 
 
 I was beginning to wonder if that fight that 
 Trevelyan planned wouldn't be worth while, 
 after all.
 
 XI 
 
 A MAN'S WORK 
 
 I TALKED to Trevelyan, too, of my interest in 
 the work of Lawrence Richards. Trevelyan had 
 heard of him and of his settlement, and was 
 rather at sea to give an opinion about it. He 
 was only mildly enthusiastic. 
 
 "What's the use of bothering with things so 
 far away from your college life?" he protested 
 lazily. "Of course, the idea of being useful to 
 people in need is splendid and all that. But 
 somehow, it doesn't fit in with college life." 
 
 "Why not? Why shouldn't it?" I argued. 
 
 He waved his hand as if to begin some gen- 
 eralization, but made no real reply. 
 
 "Wait until you're through with college be- 
 fore you settle down to manhood," he said a 
 little later. "College is just the sport of kids, 
 after all." 
 
 It came to me though I did not tell him so 
 of how, in the beginning, I had thought of 
 college as a place of full manhood and of the 
 misgivings I had had, that perhaps, after all, col- 
 lege would be only another stepping stone to 
 
 08
 
 A MAN'S WORK 99 
 
 that manhood. And so it was: just a stepping 
 stone, through brambles of prickly prejudice and 
 childish pranks. When would it come, that man- 
 hood? 
 
 "You know, Trev," I said to him hesitatingly, 
 "I sometimes feel I am much older than most 
 fellows. Almost old enough to do a man's work." 
 
 He looked at me and laughed, refusing to take 
 me too soberly. "You are older," he admitted. 
 "Only what do you call a man's work?" 
 
 I didn't know, and told him so. He seemed 
 to consider it a triumph for his own argument. 
 
 "See here," he said, "what's the use of all this 
 stewing about the slums and the wretched poor 
 and that sort of thing, if you're just aching to 
 make trouble for yourself? If you want man- 
 hood, you'll reach it ten times sooner if you'll 
 slip into it comfortably, gracefully, lying quiet- 
 ly on your back and floating and not splash- 
 ing too hard. You'll never get anywhere if you 
 insist on getting there with a rumpus." 
 
 I admired the studied grace of his similes, 
 but had to confess that they did not impress me 
 as true. But, at the same time, I did not try to 
 explain any further to him how I felt. 
 
 That did not end the questioning for me, how- 
 ever. I even broached it to Aunt Selina once, 
 and she threw up her hands in despair. I think 
 I did it somewhat with the idea of seeing her
 
 100 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 do just that. It was beginning to amuse me, 
 how hopeless she thought I was. 
 
 So that was why I did not tell her of my 
 intention to go, one evening, to see Mr. Lawrence 
 Richards at his East Side Settlement. But im- 
 mediately after supper, I bade my aunt good 
 night, and answered her suspicious query with 
 the information that I was "bound for a social 
 affair." The answer seemed to reassure her and 
 she_gave me gracious permission to go. 
 
 I took the subway to Spring street, walked 
 across to the Bowery, and a few blocks on the 
 other side of it, came to the Settlement. It was 
 in the heart of a noisy crowded section, tower- 
 ing high above the shabby buildings like a great, 
 clean, shining bulwark. 
 
 Mr. Richards was at supper, I was told. A 
 bright-eyed little Jewish boy, neatly dressed and 
 careful of speech, offered to show me the way 
 to the dining room on the fifth floor. 
 
 I had a hearty welcome from the Head Worker 
 when he recognized me. He was disappointed 
 that I had already had my supper ; made me sit 
 down beside him and introduced me to all his as- 
 sociates. They were mostly young men, I was 
 surprised to find; one of them told me that ho 
 had graduated from one of the New England 
 colleges only the year before. 
 
 Mr. Richards showed me all about the place,
 
 A MAN'S WORK 101 
 
 as he had promised he would. Then he took me 
 with him into his "den" as he called it a little 
 room just off the gymnasium, where he had his 
 desk and filing cabinets and books. He sat me 
 down opposite him on a canvas-covered chair, 
 and, when he had gone over some reports which 
 needed his signature, looked up at me and 
 smiled. 
 
 "Well," he said, "what's the trouble?" 
 
 "Oh, I didn't well, how did you know there 
 was any trouble?" 
 
 The smile broadened. "None of you ever come 
 down here unless you are in trouble. Trouble's 
 a sort of bait that lands ambitious youths into 
 doing settlement work and into coming to me 
 for advice. They say I'm pretty good at giving 
 it. Why don't you try me?" 
 
 I did. I told him exactly how I felt: that 
 I was growing impatient of all the tomfoolery 
 of college; that I wanted work more sure of 
 manly results, more broadening, more full of 
 character. Then, too, I told him of what Tre- 
 velyan had said, and he laughed at it merrily. 
 
 "Trevelyan?" he said. "Oh, yes, I know him. 
 He belongs to my fraternity, doesn't he? I've 
 met him at one or another of our affairs. A 
 good enough fellow a little too much money, 
 and a little too easy with himself in conse- 
 quence. But he's a thorough gentleman at heart, 
 isn't he?"
 
 102 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 I almost gasped. He had summed up Trevel- 
 yan marvelously well in those few words. He 
 saw my wonderment and smiled. 
 
 "I've only met him once or twice," he said, 
 "but I have the faculty of knowing men. It's 
 a faculty I have to have in. this sort of work. 
 It depends so much on the human equation. I 
 meet thousands of young men and women every 
 year meet them, talk with them a little while, 
 give them the best I have to give in that short 
 space and like to think that, even if I never 
 see them again, I've helped them along a bit. 
 That's all that a settlement can do, after all." 
 
 Outside the door, in the gymnasium, we could 
 hear the joyful shrieks of a crowd of young boys 
 playing basketball. From the upper floors came 
 a scraping of feet to tell that the clubs were 
 beginning to meet for the evening. From across 
 the hall came the sound of young girls singing 
 the parts of a cantata and this was all planned, 
 all created by Lawrence Kichards who sat there 
 at his desk and had a smile for each and every- 
 one who came before him. 
 
 "Don't think you're different from all the 
 other fellows at the university," he said to me. 
 "You're not. You're all as much alike as a row 
 of pins. Your problems are youth's problems 
 and you needn't be ashamed to have them, as 
 long as you work them out to suit the best that
 
 A MAN'S WORK 103 
 
 is in you. You've nothing definite in mind, have 
 you?" 
 
 I said, "No." I only had an idea that he 
 migl>t be able to use me here at the settlement 
 in some capacity. 
 
 "There's a good deal in what Trevelyan said," 
 he told me. "While you're at college you might 
 as well give college all that it needs of your time 
 and energy. College will surely pay you back. 
 All the work that you do on a team, for a col- 
 lege paper, for any of the undergraduate organ- 
 izations, will be just so much of a pledge on the 
 part of your college that she will honor you, 
 give you power and position and the opportunity 
 to do bigger things. Don't you want those 
 honors? Doesn't that power mean anything to 
 you?" 
 
 I could not answer him; I did not want to 
 tell him that I thought myself above these little 
 things. He understood me, however, even in my 
 silence. 
 
 "They are things worth while," he said. "There 
 is a senior society worth 'making,' if you can. 
 It would be something to be proud of to be the 
 only Jew ever to have 'made* it. But it's more 
 than an honor. That senior society practically 
 governs the student body molds its thought, 
 holds sway over all campus opinion. Think what 
 you could do if you were a member of it. You
 
 104 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 could fight far the other Jewish boys, make 
 things easier and fairer for them could spare 
 them the unpleasant things you had to bear. 
 You could master all snobbery, could make the 
 university a place of real American democracy 
 and gentlemanliness. Don't you think that 
 that's worth while?" 
 
 I admitted it was. I had not thought of it in 
 that way. 
 
 "Now, this is what I suggest," he said. "It's 
 getting near the end of the term, and there's no 
 use in your beginning any work down here at 
 the settlement while college is still in session. 
 But when vacation begins, I want you to come 
 down here to live for a couple of months. I'll 
 make you a resident club-leader, and you'll have 
 your full share of the best sort of work." He 
 paused a moment. "Will you come?" 
 
 "Will I? You bet I will !" 
 
 "Good! And in the meanwhile, take Trev- 
 elyan's advice it's mine, to. Stick to your col- 
 lege work and your college play, and don't bother 
 about the outside world for a while. That is 
 your world the college. Fight hard in it. The 
 whole world likes a stiff upper lip, and the col- 
 lege world likes it best of all. And, sooner or 
 later, Jew or Gentile, the college world will re- 
 pay you for all that you give it. If you go 
 through college shunning everyone, afraid of
 
 A MAN'S WORK 105 
 
 your own shadow, surly to the approach of all 
 who would be friendly to you, you will reap 
 nothing but loneliness and a bitter 'grouch/ If 
 you loaf and play cards and hang about the bil- 
 liard parlors all day long, you won't make a 
 friend worth having, you won't gain anything 
 worth remembering. If you work at your stud- 
 ies only, you'll gain nothing but Phi Beta Kappa 
 and, for all its worth, that'll mean nothing to 
 you unless it brings along with it the respect and 
 good will of all the men from whom you wrested 
 it. At college as much as in any business office 
 a smile will beget a smile, willingness to work 
 will reap willingness to reward and Alma Ma- 
 ter, if only you prove your love for her by work- 
 ing for her, will return your love tenfold." 
 
 He reached over the desk and touched my arm. 
 
 "I don't mean to be just rhetorical," he con- 
 tinued. "I have been through the same inner 
 struggle and wonder and repugnance that you 
 have and I know how deeply you feel it. Well, 
 I worked blindly ahead at the things that col- 
 lege gave me to work at the football team 
 and the newspaper and all that and soon 
 enough I knew that I had been working into 
 manhood by the only right road. Manhood is 
 a matter of disposition, not of work. There's 
 a place for manhood in your little college world. 
 Go and find that place and give it all that is 
 manly and courageous in you."
 
 106 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 I left him, I confess, doubting his words a 
 little to find that place of which he spoke so 
 feelingly. 
 
 Well, perhaps I would find it. Perhaps an 
 opportunity would spring up from out of the 
 sing-song ordinariness of my daily life and what 
 would I do then?
 
 xn. 
 
 THE HEART OF JUDEA 
 
 MY promise to Mr. Kichards brought more 
 than one result. The first of them was a serious 
 quarrel with my Aunt Selina. Her horror at 
 the idea of my spending the summer at a slum- 
 settlement was beyond curbing. She had planned 
 that I should accompany her and Mrs. Flem- 
 ing-Cohen upon a trip to Europe. They did not 
 need me; they would be in no way dependent 
 on my company . . . and I flatly declined. 
 Aunt Selina, outraged at my actual intentions, 
 left for France a week earlier than she had ex- 
 pected and, in high indignation, gave me leave 
 to do "whatever I pleased by way of disgracing 
 her reputation." 
 
 Her letter from the steamer warned me to bathe 
 every day in very hot water, lest I should be con- 
 taminated by the filth of that section of the city 
 which I had chosen for my summer home . . . 
 and to be sure and give her warmest regards to 
 that delightful Mr. Trevelyan! 
 
 I lost no time in moving into Mr. Richards' 
 company at the East Side settlement I was 
 
 107
 
 108 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 given a room there which was small, dark, but 
 neat and comfortable enough. College had no 
 sooner closed than I was settled in it, ready for 
 the two months of work which had been allotted 
 me. 
 
 In return for my board and lodgings, the settle- 
 ment demanded all my time. There was hardly 
 an hour which was not given to some sort of club 
 or class, rehearsal or supervision or gymnastic 
 training. Almost immediately after breakfast 
 the play-ground work began ; by noon I was help- 
 ing a crowd of little ragamuffins to forget the 
 heat in the splashing fun of the swimming pool, 
 in the basement. In the afternoon there were 
 classes for young boys who needed tutoring 
 hungry-eyed, eager little fellows who reminded 
 me of what I must have been when I was their 
 age. 
 
 I would not have you believe that I was readily 
 sympathetic with every case I met. These boys 
 and girls though. I rarely had to do with the 
 latter were all Jewish. The appearance of 
 some of them would perhaps have justified my 
 aunt's antipathy to the East Side. Those that 
 were new to the settlement, I noticed, were 
 shabby, dull, rough of speech, surly of manners. 
 It would need a few weeks before I could see 
 how subtle, yet how fundamental, were the 
 changes which the settlement would have 
 wrought in them.
 
 THE HEART OF JITDEA 109 
 
 I was shy, too, in the presence of so many 
 boys: shy of their hastily-offered friendship, 
 their rushing eagerness to bring me into all 
 their schemes and boyish dreams. But I was 
 still young enough to know those dreams upon 
 my own account: young enough to feel with 
 little Mosche, a cripple, who wanted so much 
 to become an expert at the swinging of Indian 
 clubs, and who was forever dropping the heavy 
 things in clumsy weakness; young enough to 
 realize how much his mother's love meant to 
 thirteen-year-old Frank Cohen, who had been 
 caught stealing fruit from a corner grocery 
 and was "on parole." 
 
 But the feeling in itself was not enough, 
 evidently. I must try and try to make that 
 feeling eloquent to make these boys feel, in 
 turn, the sureness and helpfulness of my un- 
 derstanding. Sometimes it was torture. It is 
 harder to conquer shyness than to slap a 
 dragon. 
 
 Mr. Richards saw this in me watched the 
 struggle, appreciated it. He spoke of it to 
 me, once, and I did not hesitate to tell him 
 how I felt. How inadequate, how chagrined 
 and humbled in the face of all the poverty 
 and suffering which life down here disclosed. 
 
 "It was the same when I first came down 
 here," he said to me in turn. "But I gained 
 courage. Thank God for that!"
 
 110 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 He said it quietly, but there was a good deal 
 of fervor in the tones. It surprised me, some- 
 how, because, I had never before heard him 
 mention the name of the Deity. It gave me 
 a new question to ask. 
 
 "Why is it that you don't lay more stress 
 on religion down here? Don't the boys and 
 girls need it?" 
 
 "Need it? Who doesn't?" A shadow crossed 
 his face. His vivacity gave way for a moment 
 before deep thoughtfulness. "But they get all 
 they need, these kids. They are mostly all 
 of them members of strictly orthodox Jewish 
 families. Keligion is given them at all hours 
 in their own homes. Many of them get more 
 of it than they can ever need. They get so 
 much of it that they flee from it, just anxious 
 for the freedom of the streets and the novelty 
 of the bar room and the brothel and the 
 gambling den. I have made investigations. 
 I know that half of the East Side boys who 
 land in the police court have been driven there 
 by the religious strictness of their parents." 
 
 "Mr. Kichards," I began . . . but stopped 
 in dismay. What I had been about to say 
 was no more nor less than a hot, strong denial 
 of his opinion. I felt sure he was wrong 
 and yet it seemed humorous to me that I, who 
 a year ago, had hated all things Jewish, was
 
 THE HEART OF JUDEA 111 
 
 now defending all the worth and venerability 
 of its ritual. 
 
 "I do not agree with you altogether," I said 
 lamely. "But ... but still, don't think 
 I am a very enthusiastic Jew. Because I'm 
 not." 
 
 "Aren't you? Why not?" 
 
 I did not answer had no answer to make, 
 in fact. I did not want to tell him of my 
 aunt, of her influence, of my own cowardice. 
 But, looking at me, I think he did guess some- 
 thing of the longing I had had . . . some- 
 thing of that strange night when I had stood 
 outside the synagogue and heard the music com- 
 ing from within the depths of its golden haze. 
 For he put his hand on my shoulder and 
 bade me think for a moment why I was not 
 a Jew in spirit as well as in name. 
 
 "You're not a snob," he said, trying to help 
 me. "You're not thinking that, because your 
 religion is in the minority in the midst of a 
 Christian land, it is necessarily an ignominy 
 to be a Jew and to act as one." 
 
 My silence held. I let him go on talking. 
 "Anyhow, you need religion. Every man does 
 to a variable extent. I should feel sorry for 
 the man who didn't. And do you mind my 
 telling you " he paused only for a second 
 "that you are one of those who need it most?"
 
 112 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 I hung my head. He had hit so truly up- 
 on what was right, what was most secret in 
 me. ... I could not ask him how he had 
 guessed it, I remembered his assertion that 
 he knew men all men and saw now that 
 he had not been boasting. 
 
 He went on, presently, to explain that re- 
 ligion was a thing for the fathers and mothers 
 and rabbis to teach to the children not for 
 the settlement to teach them. He knew that 
 boys needed the guidance of religion . . . 
 but he felt that it was supplied in even too 
 large doses already. 
 
 "The pity of it is," he said in closing, "that 
 wherever Jewish children turn away from the 
 faith of their fathers, they have nothing to 
 turn towards next. They are at sea . . ." 
 he gave me another of his quick, deep set 
 glances . . . "and that applies to rich and 
 poor alike. Christians forget their religion 
 when they feel they have outgrown it ... 
 because they have lost interest in it. Jews 
 forsake theirs but never forget it. Under cer- 
 tain circumstances they grow impatient with it, 
 slink from the inconveniences which it en- 
 tails . , i. but their hearts are always des- 
 perate for the Faith. It is a hidden loneliness, 
 a stifled longing to them." 
 
 I thought of Aunt Selina and wondered if
 
 THE HEART OF JUDEA 113 
 
 she had ever felt that loneliness, that longing, 
 as I had. I could hardly imagine her happy 
 in devoutness to Judaism. It was so comical, 
 I laughed aloud . . . and got up and left 
 Mr. Richards, lest he should ask me at what 
 I was laughing. 
 
 It was his remark about Jewish children 
 getting all the religion they need which nettled 
 me the most. I felt that I would like to go 
 out upon the streets and see for myself. The 
 streets are the East Side's parliament, its court 
 of law and high opinion. 
 
 They were hot and glaring with the noonday 
 sun when first I appealed to them. Their pave- 
 ments, white and littered with unspeakable con- 
 fusion, gave off a dancing wave of heat. Old 
 women, squatting on their doorsteps, their 
 coarse wigs low upon perspiring foreheads, 
 dozed and woke and gabbled to each other and 
 dozed again. Old men, with long grey beards, 
 long, tousled hair and melancholy eyes shuffled 
 listlessly up and down, stopping only to make 
 way for playing children or to pat them on 
 the head. The gutters had their Jewish peddlers, 
 each window its fat Jewish matron who leaned 
 upon a cushioned window-sill and gazed apath- 
 etically at nothing. There was a Babel of Yid- 
 dish and Russian and guttural English. At one 
 corner there was a crap-game going on in full
 
 114 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 sight of the policeman across the street. Young 
 men of my age were in it; youths with mean, 
 furtive faces and laughs that were cruel and 
 raucous. 
 
 So this was Judea? This was where religion 
 played too strong a part . . . where parents 
 and rabbis taught so fully to their charges the 
 word and the comfort of God? It did not seem 
 so to me. It eeemed all hateful, smeared, re- 
 pellant. And, with the question unanswered. 
 I fled from it. 
 
 But the next morning, in the settlement play- 
 ground, something happened which began the 
 solution for me. It was an accident and I 
 regretted it for a long while, feeling that it 
 was my fault. 
 
 I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some 
 tricks on the horizontal bar. Frank, the boy 
 on parole for petty theft, was daring in this 
 gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned 
 on him than he tried one of the tricks without 
 my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily 
 from the bar to the ground. When we picked 
 him up, his arm was found to be broken. 
 
 We got him home in Mr. Kichards' little run- 
 about, and put the boy to bed. The doctor set 
 his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's 
 mother here, and, later on, his father who, hav- 
 ing heard of the accident, came rushing upstairs
 
 THE HEART OF JUDEA 115 
 
 from his bakery shop. They were a nervous, 
 frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my 
 lungs were capable of to assure them that their 
 son would soon recover the use of his arm and 
 be out of his bandage. 
 
 As I left their stuffy little flat, they were 
 reciting some Hebrew prayers of gratitude. 
 Tears were on the checks of both of them, and 
 their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not 
 know. I went downstairs bitterly conscious of 
 that. 
 
 And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, 
 his arm in a sling, but the hero of his com- 
 rades, came again to the settlement, I sought 
 him out and made an especial friend of him. 
 Of what that friendship should become I had 
 then no plan.
 
 XIII 
 CHILD AND PARENT 
 
 ONE hot evening, when the fire-escapes were 
 crowded with hundreds of sleeping children, and 
 the streets were shrieking canyons of heated 
 Btone and iron, and men and women lay in the 
 grass of little parks, breathing heavily as if in 
 prayer for coolness, I learned the secret in the 
 heart of young Frank Cohen. 
 
 He was sitting beside me in the amateur roof- 
 garden which Mr. Richards had contrived atop 
 the settlement. We had wicker chairs there, a 
 few potted palms and a solitary, tiny goldfish 
 in a small glass bowl. That was the extent of its 
 furnishings; but in the later afternoons the old 
 .Jewish mothers would come and sit here and 
 doze in the sun, grateful for the breeze, city-fed 
 and redolent, which might carry relief towards 
 them. 
 
 This afternoon Frank's mother had been 
 among them. I had seen her there, a pale, little 
 woman who sat with her sewing in her lap, 
 staring dully out over the roofs below her. I 
 had been detailed to go around among these 
 
 116
 
 CHILD AND PARENT 117 
 
 women and to make them as comfortable as I 
 could. Hardly a one, however, could understand 
 English; and Frank's mother, when I came to 
 her, took no notice of anything that I said or 
 mentioned. She looked at me from under 
 lowered eyebrows. Later on Mr. Richards, who 
 had had her under his attention for some 
 months, told me how frightened she had been by 
 her son's misdemeanor it had been no more 
 than that, according to the police report and 
 it was easy to imagine that she looked with 
 suspicion upon every comrade whom Frank fol- 
 lowed, now. The fact that I was so much older 
 and was a member of the staff of the settle- 
 ment workers was not enough to overcome the 
 whole of her distrust. 
 
 And when the evening came, and Frank and 
 I had emerged from one of the club meetings 
 for he was president of his particular club of 
 boys of his own age hot and tired from wrang- 
 ling over Robert's Rules of Order and the word- 
 ing of a baseball challenge to be sent to a rival 
 organization, he told me the entire story of that 
 misdemeanor. He would not speak of it readily. 
 He too felt the shame of it, differently of course, 
 but no less heavily. He had been in bad com- 
 pany. He had been going for months with some 
 sons of one of the East Side's notorious gamb- 
 lers boys who were wise beyond their years and
 
 118 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 brutal beyond their strength. Cowardly, sneaky, 
 they had prompted him to steal things at the 
 counters of all the shops on their street. He had 
 never realized, under their whispered urgings, 
 how wrong it was and he had never had a 
 chance to profit by his thefts himself. The petty 
 business had gone on for a couple of weeks, the 
 other boys praising him, bullying him by turn, 
 and dividing the loot between them. And when 
 the inevitable happened and Frank found him- 
 self locked for the night in a police court, frantic 
 at the disgrace which the loathsome night ex- 
 aggerated, these boys informed against him. 
 
 When he told me of this, and how they had 
 come snivelling before the police lieutenant, and 
 had lied to make that fat, gruff, old master be- 
 lieve that Frank had stolen even more than he 
 actually had, and all for the sake of becoming 
 the chief of their "gang" then his narrow face 
 darkened and writhed with a hate that was too 
 great for him to bear and presently tears came 
 into his black eyes. 
 
 "Were they Jewish boys?" I asked him. "No," 
 he answered passionately. "I think I should 
 have gone crazy if they had been." 
 
 I glanced at him quickly. He did not smile 
 as he said it, nor was there anything too melo- 
 dramatic about his manner. 
 
 "Why do you say that? That you would have 
 gone crazy?"
 
 CHILD AND PARENT 119 
 
 "Don't you see? You're a Jew, ain't you?" 
 
 I said, "Yes." 
 
 'Well, I couldn't talk about it to you at all 
 if you wasn't. And if they had been Jews my 
 own people and had gone back on ine like that, 
 it would 've been just a little too much. They 
 were just tough kids and so they didn't know 
 any better. If they had been Jews they wouldn't 
 have taught me to steal, they wouldn't have done 
 what they God, my father and mother were 
 right about it, for sure !" 
 
 "Your father and mother? Why, what had 
 they to do with it?" 
 
 "Oh, you know how parents are. They used 
 to warn me against going with those tough kids. 
 They seemed to know from the beginning that 
 something 'd happen out of it. They said you 
 know, it's like old folks that Christian boys 
 would never want to go with me unless to gain 
 their own ends and then to desert me, see? 
 They wanted me to go with the Jewish boys I'd 
 been going with all my life, before then. But 
 I laughed and didn't listen. And and when I 
 had to pay back for all the things I stole, it 
 was well, it was the Jewish boys I knew who 
 clubbed together and earned money by odd jobs 
 after school and if it wasn't for them, I'd be in 
 the workhouse." 
 
 "But all Christian boys aren't like the ones 
 you went with," I argued.
 
 120 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "No, I suppose not. But I like to think that 
 all Jewish boys are like the ones on this street. 
 They made a good Jew of me!" 
 
 I turned on him quickly. "Did they? How?" 
 
 "They made me proud of being one of them. 
 They made me feel the close something-or-other 
 well, I ain't much when it comes to speeches 
 but you know what I mean." 
 
 Perhaps I did, but I would not admit it to 
 myself. Perhaps I did see the faith reborn in 
 him through the faith that other boys had given 
 him. Perhaps, too, I could picture something 
 of the welling joy that had come to his parents 
 when he returned to the only right path that 
 their simple, unquestioning eyes could see. And 
 how jealously they must be guarding him now, 
 to keep him in that code which was their life's 
 law and had become his daily lesson ! 
 
 "Don't you see?" he begged. "Can't you? 
 Why, a fellow's just got to have a side to fight 
 on and to fight for. And he's got to believe 
 that his side is the only one, the right one. 
 Life wouldn't be worth living without it. You 
 don't know what it means to be fighting -for the 
 right!" 
 
 From below came the droning of the unquiet 
 streets. A little higher up a hot wind went al- 
 most noiselessly among the chimneys, so that 
 we heard but faint sighs. The roof garden was
 
 CHILD AND PARENT 121 
 
 in darkness, naught gleaming but the little glass 
 bowl of gold fish. There was a sense of utter 
 darkness and loneliness and yet into it had 
 come, like the glad, brave blast of New Year's 
 trumpet, a battle cry of the One God. A battle 
 cry which made throb the heart of a young, rough 
 boy ; a battle cry which would be his whole life's 
 secret well of gratitude and bravery. 
 
 "You don't know what it means to be fighting 
 for the right!" 
 
 He was so slight, so meagre in appearance, 
 that I could not help finding something gently 
 humorous about his utterance. But when I 
 looked at him and saw how his eyes glowed 
 through the dark, and how he stood straight 
 and at full height, his narrow shoulders thrown 
 back, in spite of his bandaged arm, and his 
 face upraised to the summer stars, my smile 
 passed quickly. 
 
 There came over me that same queer panging 
 sense of being only on the outside of things 
 only on Life's outermost border. I was looking 
 straight into the heart of a boy and seeing the 
 gladness which blazed there and yet I could 
 not have it, as he had it. Here was this sudden, 
 all-forgetting boldness of belief which he had 
 won and I could only watch it covetously 
 through the bars of my exiled doubts. 
 
 No, no, he was right a thousand times more
 
 122 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 right than I. If faith in the One God did all 
 of this for him, then that faith was surely jus- 
 tified. 
 
 And if I could only bring myself to believe 
 as deeply, as powerfully as he did then my 
 whole life would be remade as his had been 
 and I, too, would fight for what I must believe: 
 would fight for the right! 
 
 I did not let him talk any further, but sent 
 him home. I did not want his parents to be 
 worrying as to where he was, this time of night. 
 I stayed on a little while, looking over the roofs 
 and the white-faced huddlings of the fire-escapes, 
 and then I went to bed, to toss with heat and 
 battle with my thoughts throughout the night. 
 
 When the morning came, I went early to 
 Frank's house. The pavements were fresh and 
 damp with the water of a sprinkling cart, and 
 the shops, just beginning to open, had a Sabbath 
 air of cleanliness. It was cooler than yesterday, 
 too, and the street corners were still cleared and 
 quiet. 
 
 I had been granted permission to take Frank 
 and two other boys on a picnic to Westchester. 
 He was ready for me when I knocked at his 
 door, and let me into the darkened kitchen. 
 
 His mother was there, too, cutting bread for 
 sandwiches which we would take along. Her old 
 morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled head
 
 CHILD AND PARENT 128 
 
 gave her an even more forbidding appearance 
 than ever. But when her sandwiches were 
 packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she 
 wiped her hands on a towel and looked at me 
 steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a minute. 
 
 I could not understand what she said. It was 
 in Yiddish, and I have never learned that tongue. 
 But here and there I caught a word which gave 
 me enough of her meaning. 
 
 She was telling me that Frank had spoken to 
 her of me last night when he returned from the 
 blessed settlement. He always came to her bed- 
 side, nowadays, knowing that she would be awake 
 and waiting to hear where he had been. And so 
 he had whispered, while his father slept, of the 
 strange young man who was so kind a Jew, 
 like them and yet who had no faith in God. 
 
 Then suddenly she began to beg something. 
 "Mutter, mutter," was all I could make of it 
 and I guesed that she was asking me of my 
 mother, and wondering why I did not listen at 
 her knee as Frank had done at his own mother's. 
 And when I told her that my mother was dead, 
 tears came into her eyes, and this was the finest 
 sympathy I had ever known. 
 
 For she put her big, buttery hand on mine and 
 shook her head. "You must learn to know God," 
 I think she said. "He alone can take your 
 mother's place. He made my son what I longed
 
 124 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 he should be. He will make you what you most 
 desire. In God alone is there happiness." 
 
 And so Frank and I went out and down the 
 dirty, narrow stairs, and came into a street of 
 Heaven itself a street of early sunlight, and a 
 clear sky above and morning smiles upon the 
 faces of all passersby. Or so it seemed to me, 
 at any rate. 
 
 Because, for once in my life, I had seen the 
 happiness of mother and child swept up into 
 glory that is God's. 
 
 And I laughed to think of Mr. Eichard's re- 
 mark that religion works harm among these 
 East Side people.
 
 XIV 
 
 AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 
 
 THE summer came to an end only too quickly. 
 I had enjoyed every moment of it, every op- 
 portunity. I had built up three clubs of which 
 I was personal leader; I had given service in 
 the gymnasium and playground; I had helped 
 in the development of a roof-garden cordiality 
 between the settlement workers and the mothers 
 of children on the street. Mr. Richards, the last 
 night I was there, presented me with a loving- 
 cup on behalf of the other workers. 
 
 It was at supper that he did this, in front of 
 them all. He called upon me, then, to describe 
 to them the most interesting experience I had 
 had in the course of the summer. So I told 
 them the incident of Frank Cohen and his 
 mother but I do not think they saw much that 
 was interesting about it. Mr. Richards may have, 
 perhaps, because he must have remembered that 
 dictum of his which the incident disproved ; but 
 even he could guess little of the impression it 
 had made upon my thought and character. 
 
 I had had a letter from my Aunt Selina, to tell 
 
 125
 
 126 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 me curtly that she was back in New York, bat 
 intended starting out immediately upon an auto- 
 mobile tour through New England into Canada, 
 in company with Mrs. Fleming-Cohen and some 
 ship-board acquaintances "personages," she 
 called them in her much underlined letter, which 
 probably meant that she had succeeded in cap- 
 turing some stray society folk. She bade me 
 go back to our apartment and to have it ready 
 for her on her return. The servants, she said, 
 were already there, engaged in cleaning away 
 the summer's dust. She hoped "I would be able 
 to start the college year without her, and that 
 I would comport myself on the campus in a man- 
 ner creditable and befitting, etc., etc." 
 
 But in spite of the servants' efforts to make 
 things bright and comfortable, the apartment 
 was a dismal and lonely place. College kept 
 me uptown all day long, of course, but when 
 the evening came and I must return to the big, 
 empty rooms that were our substitute for home, 
 I did not like it. I began to linger more and 
 more about the campus at night: it was truly 
 the most beautiful time to be there, when the 
 autumn moon silvered its lawns and gave the 
 buildings a marble whiteness. There was sing- 
 ing on the fences, then, and all sorts of meetings 
 of all kinds of college organizations. The cam- 
 pus hummed with a hundred undergraduate ac-
 
 AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 127 
 
 tivities so that I saw, as never before, how 
 much I missed through having to go downtown 
 each night to live. But so long as my aunt 
 wanted it, I felt I owed it to her to obey, and 
 would not even consider the renting of Tre- 
 velyan's suite of rooms in the principal dormi- 
 tory. Trevelyan had given up these rooms to 
 move into his fraternity house. 
 
 "It's a dreadful bore," he said to me in his 
 lazy, rueful way. "I'd be ten times more com- 
 fortable here but I don't want to insult the 
 brothers. However, you'll come up to the house 
 and see me just as often, won't you?" 
 
 I promised him I would, but he seemed to 
 know as well as I that I would not. A sopho- 
 more paying nightly visits to a senior in the 
 fraternity house where that sophomore had only 
 a year ago been smiled politely out no, it didn't 
 seem even probable. And so, when I had helped 
 Trevelyan put his last bit of furniture upon a 
 truck and had tucked among the rungs of many 
 Morris chairs the bundle of flags and college 
 shields which he had overlooked I could hardly 
 bear to shake hands with him. We both knew 
 that it was something in the nature of a definite 
 goodbye; at any rate, so far as college was con- 
 cerned. 
 
 "A damned nuisance, this," he said thickly, 
 his short-sighted eyes screwing up oddly. "And
 
 128 THE SEVEN-BKANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 if it wasn't for the brothers " But the brothers 
 did win him, and I lost a friend thereby. 
 
 The home to which I must go seemed lonelier 
 than ever now. I was not expecting Aunt Selina 
 for two more weeks, and so I hit upon the idea 
 of inviting some one to stay with me until then. 
 
 Frank Cohen! Yes, I would ask Frank 
 Cohen. He was going to high school now, and 
 the branch which he attended was not so far 
 from where I lived. It would be convenient for 
 him, and perhaps a happy change from the East 
 Side crowdedness which he had had to encounter 
 all his life. 
 
 He was as glad to come as I to have him. 
 I gave him Aunt Selina's room to sleep in, and 
 we sat there, when our homework was done, 
 many evenings until past midnight, talking 
 gently and thoughtfully of many things. He was 
 a boy much as I had been and perhaps, still 
 was. He was shy to an uncomfortable degree, 
 low of voice, dreamy in manner. But when 
 he was aroused to something especial, he be- 
 came uncontrollably intense, his eyes flashing 
 and his knees trembling, so that his whole small 
 body seemed but the sheer vibration of his 
 thoughts. 
 
 He was hoping to go to college, when his 
 high school days were over. He had not dared 
 mention it at home, though, because he knew
 
 AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 129 
 
 how poor his father was, and how much of a 
 help he would be when he could go to work and 
 begin to carry home his weekly earnings. He 
 hated to go into a shoddy little business; he 
 wanted to study further, to take up some pro- 
 fession perhaps the law. Or if he did go into 
 business, he wanted to have had a few years 
 of college first, so that he might see things broad- 
 ly and with a mind trained for bigness. But 
 he had only dreamed all this, only longed for 
 it in secret. He would rather forego all of 
 it than urge his father to make the big sacrifice. 
 
 I had come to be so fond of him, it was not 
 long before I decided upon what seemed to be 
 a proper solution. Without a word to Frank, 
 I escaped from college early one afternoon and 
 went downtown to that East Side street where 
 he lived. I found his father in the cellar of the 
 bakery shop which he owned, his beard all 
 whitened with flour dust, his thin, bare arms 
 thick with the paste of dough. 
 
 With rehearsed gesticulations I made him un- 
 derstand what I offered. My own father had left 
 me fairly well off ; I wanted to lay out the money 
 which would be necessary to afford Frank a 
 college education. They could pay it back when 
 they pleased not for many years would I need 
 it. 
 
 I had a distinct surprise, then. My generosity
 
 130 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 was taken somewhat aback by the man's ap- 
 parent anger. He seemed to be resenting any 
 suggestion of charity. I tried to assure him that 
 this was not what I intended, but he did not 
 understand. At length we had to call in one 
 of the bakery's oven-tenders to act as inter- 
 preter. And through this third party Mr. Cohen 
 thanked me kindly. He appreciated all I offered, 
 but he had long ago made arrangements for 
 Frank. 
 
 "And what are those arrangements?" I asked 
 anxiously, picturing the boy at work in this 
 dark, mouldy cellar. 
 
 "It is a secret," said Mr. Cohen. "But it is 
 time now for me to disclose what his mother and 
 I have planned for him. For ten years we have 
 saved. And we have saved enough to send him 
 to college. He shall go there and we ourselves 
 shall send him." He drew himself up as he 
 said it, so that I had a glimpse of that pride 
 which all Jewish fathers seem to take in hard- 
 ships which they undergo for their children. 
 "It is so with the son of the president of my 
 synagogue," he said. "It shall be no less so 
 with my son, either. He shall have what his 
 father could not have, though his father starve 
 and slave to give it to him !" 
 
 The dull interpreter gave me this in flat, spirit- 
 less tones; but I could see the clenched hands
 
 AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 131 
 
 and the earnest face of Mr. Cohen, and I nodded 
 quickly. 
 
 "I am very glad," I told him. "And I know 
 it will mean ten times more in happiness to you 
 because you are giving him all this with your 
 own hands. Frank said to me he dared not 
 ask it of you he thought the sacrifice) too 
 great and that is why I came to you with my 
 offer. Do not think me rude, therefore." 
 
 He answered gravely. I was not rude, he as- 
 sured me, and he owed me deep thanks. He 
 had only one favor to ask; that I should not 
 tell Frank the secret, but would leave it and 
 the joy that it would bring, for him, his father. 
 He would tell him immediately after Frank had 
 returned home from his stay at my apartment. 
 
 I hurried home, for it was now nearly supper- 
 time. To my amazement I found Frank sitting 
 in the lobby of the apartment, his old suitcase 
 beside him, his look one of fevered disconsole- 
 ment. 
 
 "What's the trouble?" I asked him. 
 
 "Oh, I just wanted to say goodby to you," he 
 said hurriedly. "I did not want to go without 
 doing that. I've I've had a pleasant time." 
 
 "But why are you going?" 
 
 "Oh, I want to be home . . . you know, 
 I get a little homesick." But he said it so 
 stumblingly that I was sure he was not telling 
 me all.
 
 132 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "Frank," I demanded, "tell me the truth. Has 
 anything gone wrong? I had hoped you would 
 stay until my aunt returned." 
 
 He laughed at that, and mystified me the more. 
 "Have any of the servants offended you in any 
 way?" I asked, searching my brain for some rea- 
 son for his change of attitude. 
 
 "The servants? Oh, no, of course, not!" He 
 picked up his suitcase and started for the street. 
 "Well, goodby," he said. He stopped as if he 
 wanted to explain, then thought better or worse 
 of it, and went on. I was a little nettled by 
 this time, and let him go. 
 
 As I went up in the elevator, it seemed to me 
 a mighty mystery. But no sooner had I let my- 
 self into tlie apartment than I was due for a 
 bigger surprise. 
 
 For there, blocking the hallway, a figure of 
 offended pride, stood Aunt Selina. 
 
 I went to her to kiss her, but she stepped 
 back and glared into my face. 
 
 "It's a lucky thing I came back unexpected- 
 ly," she said. "The idea of finding a little Jew 
 boy like that in my room sitting in my own 
 bedroom with his copy books spread all over 
 my directoire desk! A common little boy with 
 an accent!" 
 
 I saw it all, now. 
 
 "That boy was one of my best friends," I
 
 AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 133 
 
 told her as calmly as I could. "Had I thought 
 you would have objected to his presence here, 
 I would never have invited him to stay with 
 me for these weeks." 
 
 "Weeks? What, you have had that little East 
 Side creature here for weeks?" She began to 
 walk up and down the hall in feline fury. 
 "Haven't you any idea of what is proper? Here 
 I go away with some of the most cultured and 
 well-known society people in New York an ab- 
 solute triumph and you use my home as a 
 refuge for nasty little scum of the slums. It 
 isn't bad enough for you to spend your summer 
 in such disgusting company. You have to cap 
 it all by bringing them up into my own home. 
 Think of the disgrace it would mean if any of 
 these new friends of mine were to discover it!" 
 
 "I have my own friends to consider," I told 
 her patiently. "And this boy is one of them. 
 What did you tell him?" 
 
 "Tell him? What should I tell him?" She 
 made a great show of shuddering. "I told him 
 to get out. To to get out as fast as he could." 
 
 I looked at her evenly for as long a while as 
 she could stand it. Then her miserable pose 
 gave way to pettishness, and she cried: 
 
 "And what's more, you'll have to get out your- 
 self, if you insist on trying any more of these 
 outrageous things. I can't bear it, that's all.
 
 134 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 You'll have to get out before you disgrace me!" 
 
 "I shall," I agreed, and, passing her, went into 
 my own room and began to pack. 
 
 We had a silent, sullen supper. At the end 
 of it I told her that my clothes were packed and 
 that I intended moving on the morrow to 
 Trevelyan's empty suite, up at college. I would 
 take none of the furniture from my room, how- 
 ever, since I did not wish to inconvenience her. 
 I would not trouble her at all after to-night. 
 
 She may have thought this was pure bragging, 
 she may have been reconciled to it. At any 
 rate she made no answer, and let me go to my 
 room without a word of comment. 
 
 And it was only two weeks later, when I was 
 comfortably settled in my room on the campus, 
 that I received a stormy letter from her, calling 
 me a "most ungrateful monster of a nephew."
 
 XV 
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 
 
 ACROSS the hall from Trevelyan's rooms lived 
 one of the college "grinds." Now that I had 
 moved there and came and went at all hours of 
 the day, I saw this man often. 
 
 Fallen that was his name stood fully six- 
 feet four, and had about a thirty-two-inch waist. 
 He stooped until his thin shoulder blades were at 
 directly right angles to each other. He would 
 never talk to any one he met on his way; his 
 nose was always deep in the book which he held 
 outspread. He was the most ferocious grind I 
 have ever known. 
 
 Next to Fallen lived Waters, a cheery, well- 
 dressed little person, who had pink cheeks and 
 no disturbing thoughts. Waters was a member 
 of one of the minor fraternities ; he spoke long- 
 ingly of the day when he would be living in 
 his "chapter lodge." Waters was easy company. 
 He had four hundred "friends" around the cam- 
 pus, and when I met him was engaged in capital- 
 izing on those friendships by canvassing votes for 
 his election to a team managership. 
 
 135
 
 136 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 That perhaps is why he came into my room 
 so often to sit and chat pleasantly, lightly, about 
 almost every topic known to the college man. 
 He was very much of a type. There were at 
 least thirty other men in that class who were 
 like him, no better nor worse, nor more nor less 
 attractive than he was. Popularity was an end 
 and a means with him. It was all he wanted 
 of college. 
 
 <r Well, how are you, old top?" was the greet- 
 ing that came singing from his room, each time 
 I passed its open door. It was a door perennially 
 open, lest some passerby might escape without 
 the greeting. 
 
 "D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping 
 into my room in the midst of a study-hour and 
 slumping down upon the divan with a great 
 show of silk socks and shirtings, "it's high time 
 you and I did something for that 'grind' across 
 the hall." 
 
 He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it 
 would appear. Not personally, he explained to 
 me but just because Fallon might become a 
 valuable friend in time. A college man needed 
 friends and he, Waters, had only four hundred 
 of them! 
 
 Fallon, however, had something of his own 
 opinion about it. He went about the building 
 with his book before him, bowing neither to me
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 137 
 
 nor Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful 
 to have to speak to him. He could scarcely an- 
 swer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling 
 painfully up and down, and finally he would 
 succeed in emitting a barely audible whisper. 
 He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, 
 then hurry away. 
 
 That was Fallen, worst of "grinds." He was 
 beginning to be the butt of all sorts of miserable 
 jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line 
 to make fun of him. For, like Waters and my- 
 self, he was a sophomore. 
 
 In the guise of helping a classmate, Waters 
 took charge of him. He gave him nightly lec- 
 tures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bet- 
 tering of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced 
 to go by, I heard him delivering glib advice upon 
 what "Fallen, old top" ought to eat, in order 
 that he might grow stouter and more favorable 
 to look upon. And Fallon sat through it all and 
 clutched his bony knees and grinned the grin 
 of the helpless. 
 
 But one day, the story goes, he surprised 
 Waters by finding his voice and a very full- 
 toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at 
 all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters 
 to keep out of his room in study hour; 
 he told him that he did not care to have his 
 chances of becoming class valedictorian spoiled
 
 138 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 through, having to divert his attention and listen 
 to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him 
 to keep himself away, now and forever more, 
 from his room and its owner. 
 
 "Oh, very well !" I heard the injured Waters 
 say. A second later he had come across into 
 my room and was pouring into my ear a com- 
 plaint concerning the beggarly rudeness of that 
 "grind, Fallon, who never would amount to any- 
 thing in the college world, anyhow!" 
 
 He had just returned from a very important 
 meeting, he told me, for the express purpose of 
 having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon and 
 the big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at 
 all. No wonder some fellows never did get along 
 in college and here he was, absent from this 
 most important meeting, with no results at all. 
 
 He didn't mind telling me (here his voice 
 died down into an impressive whisper) that 
 it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. 
 They were great things, these fraternity meetings. 
 It was really too bad that I had never been able 
 to join a fraternity but then, of course, I must 
 realize that fraternities had to draw the line 
 somewhere! Now, I mustn't take that as a re- 
 flection on me personally because it wasn't. I 
 was all right, I was and some day, he was sure, 
 I was going to be a big man in the college 
 world bigger than he himself ever hoped to be.
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 139 
 
 But Jews were a funny people and I must ad- 
 mit, if I wanted to be fair, that some of them 
 weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak 
 of joining fraternities. 
 
 And so he went on, until, thoroughly nau- 
 seated by the bland niceness of his speech, I 
 followed Fallon's example and threw him out, 
 though he refused to be insulted at this move, 
 and promised to come around the next night 
 and discuss the question of who should be 
 elected our next football manager. 
 
 A little while after he was gone, Fallen came 
 across the hall and knocked at my door. It was 
 a timid, scared sort of a knock, and it needed a 
 loud and repeated, "Come in," before he finally 
 obeyed my summons. 
 
 He was pitifully wrought up over the incident. 
 He had wanted to be polite to Waters, but he 
 had had to study. He hadn't wanted to insult 
 him, but somehow Waters never did understand 
 how valuable time was, and what it would mean 
 to Fallon's mother if he could come out a vale- 
 dictorian at the end of our four years. 
 
 "Which would you rather have," I asked him, 
 "a valedictory or a friend?" 
 
 He stammered a good deal over it. He knew 
 that Waters was right about that: he did not 
 have a single friend in the whole college didn't 
 know how to go about it but he didn't want
 
 140 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 such men as Waters trying to teach him the way 
 either. 
 
 That began my friendship for Fallen. I had 
 acquaintances enough on the campus, but I was 
 almost as friendless as he for friendlessness, I 
 think, is not so much a matter of other people's 
 as of one's own habit of mind. And there was 
 something so grotesquely miserable about his 
 loneliness something so like a grinning gar- 
 goyle, solitary in its elevation that I was drawn 
 to him without much conscious effort. 
 
 I began by taking him for long walks. It was 
 the first exercise of any sort, outside of the re- 
 quired freshman gymnasium course, which he had 
 had in college. At first he would not talk at 
 all ; would just walk beside me through the city's 
 fringes into the half-suburban roads, his eyes 
 drinking in the green vistas as if they were 
 astounding novelties, his breath coming fast with 
 exertion, his cheeks glowing with new color. 
 Gradually I urged him into talking and, like all 
 beginners, he talked of himself entirely. It was 
 good for him. The more he spoke of himself, the 
 more highly he thought of himself. He needed 
 pride. 
 
 I had already been elected an editor of the col- 
 lege joke paper. I was qualified, therefore, to 
 persuade Fallen to contribute what he could to 
 that periodical. But he had not a jot of humor,
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 141 
 
 and his contributions turned out to be very long 
 and serious bits of verse in studied French 
 rhyme schemes. I did not even risk reading them 
 at a meeting of the board, but always turned them 
 over to Trevelyan who could have them used in 
 the coming issue of the other magazine, the lite- 
 rary monthly. This set Fallen writing entirely 
 for the "lit," as we called it and, as a result, 
 when the elections to that paper were announced 
 in the middle of the sophomore year, Fallon's 
 name and mine stood together. 
 
 But the happiest inspiration came to me one 
 Sunday when at noon Fallen and I were resting 
 atop the Palisades, whither we had gone upon an 
 all-day tramp. I watched him pick up a flat rock 
 and sent it sailing out and down through space. 
 His long thin arm gave the toss a surprising 
 power. 
 
 I asked him, had he ever seen a discus. He 
 said, "No." 
 
 The next day I had overcome all his scruples 
 as to the immodesty of a track costume and had 
 led him out upon the field to practice with the 
 discus. It was hard work, because he was by far 
 the clumsiest man I have ever known. Later on 
 I interested the old coach on his behalf. Be- 
 fore Thanksgiving Fallen gave promise of be- 
 coming one of the college's best discus throwers. 
 
 When winter began, I took him down to the
 
 i*2 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 gymnasium. At first I had in mind only to 
 keep him in good condition; but his handling 
 of the heavy medicine ball gave me another idea. 
 I put him to work with a basketball and here 
 the training I had given the young boys at the 
 settlement served me in good stead. He was so 
 tall, he need only swing up his arms to drop the 
 ball into the basket. He was the ideal build for 
 a "center," and our 'varsity team needed a 
 center. 
 
 He did not make the Varsity not that year, 
 anyhow. But he did make our class team, and 
 won his numerals. 
 
 Also when spring came in, he was chosen as 
 one of the track team's discus throwers. Add 
 to this the fact that he had lately been elected to 
 the board of the literary monthly, and it will be 
 seen that Fallen had had a skyrocket rise. No 
 wonder that Waters, the genial, now forgot that 
 autumn affront and paid nightly visits upon his 
 particular friend Fallen. And Fallen, of course, 
 having had his attention diverted into so many 
 foreign channels, no longer cared so singularly 
 for his studies, but was willing to receive Waters 
 and such as Waters with an ever-increasing 
 cordiality. 
 
 The inevitable happened. Fallen, exhibiting 
 his latest development a full-sized, roistering 
 swagger came into my room one evening and
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 143 
 
 told me jubilantly that lie was pledged to join 
 Waters' fraternity. 
 
 "It's not the best in college," he admitted 
 loftily, "but it'll tone up a bit when I get the 
 track captaincy and Waters gets elected to a 
 managership." 
 
 "And how about that senior year valedictory?" 
 I asked him. 
 
 "Oh, I was a fool in those days, wasn't I?" 
 
 He mistook my silence. "Say, old chap," he 
 went on, "this is no time for you to be jealous 
 of me. I know well enough, you ought to be in 
 a fraternity in the very best one. I wish I 
 could get you into ours but, say, you know how 
 it is about Jews." 
 
 Yes, I knew, I assured him, and gave him the 
 heartiest hand-clasp I could manage. 
 
 "You know, my mother's going to be awfully 
 proud of this," he exclaimed huskily. 
 
 But though Waters did succeed in winning 
 himself a team managership, Fallen never be- 
 came the captain of the track team. For his 
 election to that fraternity meant his ruin. He 
 lost his grip upon everything. Perhaps ?t was 
 his fellow-members, perhaps he had only himself 
 to blame. He began to drink. At the end of 
 junior year he was expelled from college. 
 
 And I wondered if the mother, who had wanted 
 him to be the class valedictorian, was as proud 
 of him as ever.
 
 XVI 
 THE HUN'S INVASION 
 
 So far in my college course I had met with 
 actually little outspoken insult. Once or twice 
 in my freshman year some loutish sophomore had 
 not stopped at making comments upon my re- 
 ligion. There had been that incident at Trevel- 
 yan's fraternity house, too. But, generally speak- 
 ing, the prejudice had been of a negative sort, 
 restricting rather than driving though none the 
 less offensive and chafing on that account. There 
 was nothing on which I could actually lay my fin- 
 ger to complain. I had no actual proof that I had 
 been kept off any college organization because of 
 my religion. I might have had, had I cared at the 
 time to follow up the favoritism shown in the dra- 
 matic society but that was a small affair, by 
 now, and I preferred to let it rest forgotten. 
 
 Otherwise, I was treated with a fair amount 
 of kindness by almost all of the college. The 
 members of my own class, in which I was gradu- 
 ally acquiring such positions as work and merit 
 could win me, had begun to show me a good, 
 clean respect; and those in the class above soon 
 
 144
 
 THE HUN'S INVASION 145 
 
 followed their lead. All that I asked was fair 
 play, and the chance to overcome that handicap 
 which I knew existed. This was easier, now 
 that I lived at college, and I gave to the various 
 activities in which I was interested, all the spare 
 time which 1 could afford from my studies. I 
 was beginning to realize what that preachment 
 meant : "The college will give you back all that 
 you give to it in work." 
 
 Thus, at the end of my sophomore year, when 
 I again went to the settlement for the summer, 
 I was planning big and enthusiastic things for 
 the autumn term. 
 
 Mr. Richards placed me in charge of one of 
 the settlement's fresh-air camps, up the state. 
 I had two other boys to help me in my work, 
 and one of them was Frank Cohen. It had taken 
 me a long time to overcome Frank's sensitive- 
 ness, after his encounter with my aunt; but we 
 were fast friends again now, and it was good to 
 have him with me where I could help him with 
 his daily noon-time studying for his "prelim- 
 inaries." When the fall came, he passed them 
 easily and it was now definitely decided that 
 he would enter my college when I was a senior. 
 
 My own return to the university, however, 
 gave me an unpleasant shock. I had arrived a 
 few days late, because I had wanted to help Mr. 
 Richards with some of his coining year's pro-
 
 146 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 grams. The campus was already alive and 
 crowded, therefore, and the dormitory windows 
 were all thrown open and overflowing with the 
 rugs and chair cushions of autumn cleaning. 
 The campus teemed with a thousand youths who 
 grasped each other cordially by the wrist and 
 went through all sorts of contortions to prove 
 that they "were glad to see you, old man !" 
 
 But there was a difference ! The first glimpse 
 I had of it, I called myself a self-conscious fool. 
 I tried to reassure myself, everybody's greeting 
 had been as cordial as I could expect. Every- 
 body had said he was glad to see me and yet ! 
 
 Then, the second day that I was at college, I 
 had my first proof of the truth of my suspicions. 
 I had it through eavesdropping but I was jus- 
 tified. For I heard little Waters, the genial 
 popularist, talking of it to another classmate in 
 front of the laboratory steps. 
 
 "It's a rotten shame," he was declaiming. 
 "Haven't you noticed? I don't see how it could 
 escape you!. Jews and Jews! The freshman 
 class is just swarming with 'em!" 
 
 "What? Really?" 
 
 "Honestly. If there's one Jew in the freshman 
 class, there are fifty. And such Jewy-looking 
 Jews !" 
 
 "Gee whizz, it's a disgrace. It was bad enough 
 when they used to come in four or five or even
 
 THE HUN'S INVASION 147 
 
 ten in a class. But fifty! Are there really 
 fifty?" 
 
 "Oh, easily ! Maybe a hundred I don't know. 
 They are swarming all over the place! Gosh, 
 we'll have to do something to get rid of them. 
 It just simply ruins the college name to have 
 so many of them around." 
 
 "You bet! A campaign for ours!" 
 
 I watched them going off together, arm in arm, 
 towards "fraternity row" and wondered what 
 that campaign would be. 
 
 It did not take me long to investigate the real 
 state of affairs. There were some thirty mem- 
 bers of the freshman class listed in the dean's 
 office under the designation of "Jew," "Hebrew" 
 or "Ethical Culturist," And the faces that I 
 met under freshman caps were certainly Semitic, 
 to a large percentage. 
 
 At first it annoyed me. Annoyed me more, 
 too, when the first member of the freshman class 
 to be expelled for ungentlemanly conduct was 
 a Jew. There were one or two others, I noticed, 
 who would sooner or later reach the same end 
 if they did not keep away from the city at night 
 and from the things the city teaches. 
 
 These one or two gradually became scape-goats 
 for the rest of the Jewish boys in the class. 
 They were sons of rich fathers; they paraded 
 their automobiles about the campus and thus
 
 148 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 broke the rule number one in the "freshman 
 bible." They had unbridled tongues, and used 
 them ungraciously. One of them, a big, swag- 
 gering chap, "went out" for his class football 
 team and, having been selected to play in a mi- 
 nor game, developed a dying aunt overnight and 
 disappeared for the day. When he came back, 
 on Sunday night, he was caught and hazed. 
 His automobile was dumped on its side in the 
 middle of the campus. His face, when I saw 
 him the next day, was a network of plaster 
 strips. Three days after that he left college 
 and I, for one, was devoutly thankful for his 
 resigning. He did not belong in our college, 
 had done nothing to fit himself into its environ- 
 ment, had talked loudly, acted the cad and the 
 coward and had reaped the reward of such a 
 person, Jew or Gentile, in whatever community. 
 
 The persecution for it had taken on propor- 
 tions worthy of that name went forward, how- 
 ever. There was an annual "freshman parade," 
 for instance, when the entering class was dressed 
 in grotesque costumes and sent marching in and 
 out a lane of laughing spectators to the football 
 field. In my own freshman year this was a 
 goodnatured affair and each class, including 
 the victimized one, took it for the boisterous 
 joke that it was. 
 
 But this year, when tlie parade was starting
 
 THE HUN'S INVASION 149 
 
 at the gymnasium, and the big, card-board pla- 
 cards were being lifted to the marchers' shoul- 
 ders, I noticed that all the Jewish boys were 
 being put conspicuously into one group. They 
 would march together. And those placards! 
 The sickening succession of them was only a 
 repetition of "Oi oi" and the pawnbroker's sym- 
 bol and humor of that high order. And these 
 Jewish freshmen went down the street amid the 
 jeering and I had to stand by and see them, 
 some with heads high and eyes blazing with 
 pride, others stumbling and bowed, one of them 
 with tears running inanely down his cheeks had 
 to stand there and watch it all, and curse my- 
 self for a coward because I would not, could not, 
 go out into the middle of the road and tear down, 
 one by one, the daubed, cheap jests that they 
 had to carry. 
 
 A few weeks later there was another such cel- 
 ebration. There were speeches to be made. The 
 class wits and what class is without them? 
 were to have their turn. 
 
 And their wit what did it consist of? One 
 after another, they made blunt, exaggerated ref- 
 erences to the Invasion of the Huns," to the 
 "Jews coming unto Jordan," to "the lost Ten 
 Tribes . . ." and hoots of applause went up to 
 the night sky like the roar of a Philistine army ! 
 
 One of the men who spoke was a class-mate
 
 150 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 of mine a fellow-member of the joke paper's 
 board. I knew him well, for he had been to see 
 me often. It was only a few nights ago that he 
 had told me he was chosen to speak at this cele- 
 bration, and had promised me he would make no 
 reference to the Jewish influx. 
 
 "I don't agree with you about it," he had 
 said. "You're too sensitive, all you Jews and 
 anyhow, you know perfectly well we're not aim- 
 ing this campaign at you personally. It's against 
 this big bunch of them in the freshman class." 
 
 "So it's a regular campaign, is it?" I de- 
 manded. 
 
 He evaded the question but satisfied me with 
 his promise. 
 
 But when I heard him break it heard him, 
 more than any other speaker, launch one smil- 
 ing epithet after another against the "sons of 
 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," I lost all the gnaw- 
 ing consciousness that I had had as to the justice 
 of this remark about Jewish sensitiveness and 
 I went forward to the cart-end from which he 
 was speaking. I meant to pull him down and 
 get up there in his place, and to speak hotly, 
 straight from the shoulder I didn't care what 
 I said so long as I put them all to disgrace! 
 
 But when I was within a few feet of him in 
 the jostling, laughing crowd, I could go no fur- 
 ther. I tried to cry out, but that was denied ma
 
 THE HUN'S INVASION 151 
 
 My courage gave me only the power to glare and 
 sneer at him and once, as he spoke, he looked 
 down and saw my face, I think. For his own 
 grew paler in the light of the gas lantern which 
 flared windily beside him, and he faltered in his 
 speech. 
 
 Later on he came over to my room and asked 
 to speak to me. I heard him through; listened 
 to his smooth explanation about the committee 
 of arrangements demanding that he put some- 
 thing into his speech about the Jews and he 
 was sorry he had broken his word to me only, 
 of course, I was to consider myself an exception 
 to all this sort of thing. Everybody knew I was 
 a good fellow and was doing bully work for the 
 name of the college and what right had I to class 
 myself with these insignificant little Jews in the 
 Freshman class? and he didn't want it to break 
 up our friendship, because he thought the world 
 of me. 
 
 And so I showed him the door. 
 
 The next day I began to pay for that stroke of 
 arrogance. The classmates who belonged to that 
 man's fraternity snubbed me on the street. 
 
 It didn't matter much, I thought but in real- 
 ity, it did. Because these men, as it happened, 
 had been my closest friends. I was beginning to 
 worry myself into a maudlin state, and no doubt 
 did attribute hostility to altogether too many of
 
 152 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 the undergraduates. But it is hard to choose 
 and distinguish surely in a land that is gener- 
 ally hostile and strange. I began to stay more 
 and more within the shelter of my room, work- 
 ing at my studies and at those activities which 
 had already given me recognition. I wanted to 
 be plucky about it. I wanted to keep on smil- 
 ing but there were times, I must confess, when 
 I wished that I were through with college and 
 all its rough-and-tumble boyishness. 
 
 I did not care so much myself. There were 
 all these freshmen who were probably ten times 
 lonelier than I was, ten times more bewildered 
 and disheartened by the welcome they had had. 
 I tried to visit as many of them as lived in dor- 
 mitories. I wanted to talk things over with 
 them, to help them in some possible way. But 
 it wasn't much of a success I could make no 
 progress out of condonement and asking them 
 to wait patiently until the foolish campaign had 
 dwindled away. 
 
 Then, one day, as I crossed the campus to a 
 first recitation, I saw that the brick walls of 
 the oldest of the dormitories had been adorned 
 with huge painted letters: 
 
 "OUT WITH THE JEWS." 
 
 I went into a telephone booth and called up 
 the house of one of the professors with whom
 
 THE HUN'S INVASION 153 
 
 I had become friendly. He was a kindly, well- 
 meaning man, and an alumnus of the college. 
 
 His telephone line was busy when I called it. 
 I heard him talking with some one. I was about 
 to ring off when suddenly I heard my own name 
 mentioned. 
 
 The professor was an alumnus member of one 
 of the college fraternities. And this other man 
 evidently an undergraduate, though I never 
 tried to identify him was asking the professor 
 what he thought of offering me an election to 
 this fraternity. 
 
 And I heard the professor sigh in his patient 
 way. 
 
 "I like him I like him very much, mind you," 
 I heard him say, "but er, er I do think it would 
 be disastrous nothing short of disastrous to 
 elect a -Yew to any of our fraternities in the 
 present situation." 
 
 I rang off. It was something to know that 
 I was even being considered for membership 
 but it was disastrous, that was all disastrous! 
 
 When I was out upon the campus again I saw 
 that painters were already at work obliterating 
 the sign. They had whitewashed the "Out With 
 the" away, and there was nothing left upon the 
 wall but a huge, red 
 
 "JEWS." 
 
 And thank God, I could laugh at the incident !
 
 XVII 
 
 MANY IMPULSES 
 
 FAIB play comes first and reasoning follows 
 it. For fair play is always an impulse. It comes 
 when least expected. 
 
 That is how it was at the university. The in- 
 cident of the big, painted sign was practically 
 the last demonstration against the influx of Jew- 
 ish boys. Waters, who made capital of every- 
 thing, attempted to found a formal organization 
 dignified by the title of the Anti-Hebrew Col- 
 legiate League, but when, at the first meeting, 
 he was not elected to the presidency, abandoned 
 the project with bitter complaints against the 
 ingratitude of his fellow members. A little later 
 on, when the tide had turned in the opposite 
 direction, he became the head of the Helping 
 Hand League, and was atop the wave of con- 
 trition. 
 
 For the tide did turn. Men are always afraid 
 to carry their propaganda beyond the point of 
 the ridiculous. When tomfoolery turns to fool- 
 ishness its perpetrators are only too anxious 
 for a chance to abandon it. 
 
 154
 
 MANY IMPULSES 155 
 
 It was impossible to keep the thing out of the 
 newspapers. The day after that sign incident, 
 there was a lurid story to be read at each of 
 the city's breakfast tables and in the evening 
 subways. New York took it up and made it a 
 matter of shocked debate for a day and a half. 
 The president of the university, in his quarterly 
 sermon in chapel, spoke fervently of toleration 
 and the gentle spirit. 
 
 The reaction was almost as hysterical as the 
 movement itself. The little Jewish freshmen 
 timid, frightened little mice, who had been going 
 about their class-room work and scurrying home 
 and out of reach for so many months suddenly 
 found themselves lauded as martyrs, as the best 
 of fellows. 
 
 One evening a deputation of them were wait- 
 ing for me when I came in from supper. They 
 had formed a Jewish fraternity, and wished me 
 to join with them. Appeal to a Jewish phil- 
 anthropist had brought them enough money to 
 lease a house near the campus. They were sure 
 that they would have sanction and support from 
 the rest of the college, now that the prejudice 
 had abated. And since they could not join any 
 of the other fraternities, why should they not 
 have one of their own? 
 
 I thought it over carefully. I wanted to be 
 fair to myself as well as to them. That same
 
 156 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 old repugnance of being identified with a dis- 
 tinctly Jewish, propaganda troubled me and made 
 me turn from them. And yet it wasn't only 
 that, either. For when I thought it out, I knew 
 that, according to my point of view, theirs was 
 not the proper solution. Fire can fight fire, 
 perhaps in proverbs, anyhow but discrimina- 
 tion is not to be overpowered by a like amount 
 of secularity. If Jewish college men objected 
 to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they 
 contended that fraternities should be democratic ; 
 if they wanted equal rights in those fraternities 
 . . . how, then, were they justified in stand- 
 ing apart and founding a fraternity of their own 
 a brotherhood which should be open only to 
 Jews? 
 
 That is what I thought. I may have been 
 wrong and the excellent records of the Jewish 
 fraternity chapters in various colleges and uni- 
 versities do perhaps prove me wrong but I 
 could not bring myself to join them. I was 
 heartily glad the whole heated question of race 
 and race prejudice was abated. I asked, for 
 myself, only that I be given something of the 
 fair-play that other men had. I was working 
 hard for the college. I was doing all that my 
 talents enabled me to do and I was sure 
 that, sooner or later, there would be the reward. 
 
 This reward did come, definitely. It came at
 
 MANY IMPULSES 157 
 
 the end of May when, at the height of the re- 
 action against the whole year of prejudice, I 
 was chosen for the college senior society. It 
 was a public election, held on the afternoon of 
 one of the most important baseball games. There 
 were crowds to watch the ceremony students 
 and graduates, young girls and parents . . . 
 so that the memory of the green campus and 
 the banks of pretty gowns and parasols, the 
 sunshine and the cheering will be with me till 
 I die. I remember that there were tears in 
 my eyes as I was chosen . . . and that there 
 came to me, with all the cool freshness of the 
 spring winds, the thought that this was the end, 
 the salvation from out of all the year's mean, 
 squalid troubles. Here was I, a Jew, raised 
 above all the other Jews who had ever entered 
 this college . . . raised among the highest, 
 to be a power in the land, to be the champion 
 of all those who had suffered, the winner through 
 hardship and handicap, a vindicated Dreyfus, 
 an example to all the lower classes. . . . 
 For, at twenty-one, alas, we are our own best 
 heroes, and none can take our place! 
 
 College closed in a blaze of glory for me. 
 There was even a note from Aunt Selina Haber- 
 man, wishing me well of this new honor and 
 informing me that "Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, when 
 she heard it, was green with envy !" Aunt Selina
 
 158 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 wanted to know, was I going to be a wicked 
 boy, however, and stay away from her all next 
 year, too. She was sure that, now I had won 
 out, we could get along much more smoothly 
 than we had. 
 
 I fear I began to think a little too highly of 
 my position in the community. I was now cap- 
 able of going to no less a person than the dean 
 of the college and talking over with him, as if 
 man to man, the possibility of an anti-Jewish 
 agitation, the next year, and demanding in none 
 too deferential tones that, should it come, the 
 college authorities must do their share to stamp 
 it out. 
 
 "Really, Mr.-er-er-, what's your name?" 
 
 I told him very slowly, but it did not mean 
 much to him. I rather pitied the old gentleman 
 for not paying more attention to the under- 
 graduate contests and triumphs. 
 
 But he did hear me out, and gave me inform- 
 ation which I thought worth acting on. The 
 large majority of the Jewish boys in the fresh- 
 man class had prepared for college at one school 
 a large private preparatory school in New 
 York City. Perhaps it would be as well, sug- 
 gested the dean, for me to go to the principal 
 of this school and talk things over with him. 
 
 "Do you mean, I should warn him against 
 sending so many of his boys to our college?" I 
 asked.
 
 MANY IMPULSES 159 
 
 The dean appeared dreadfully shocked. "Oh, 
 no dear me, no. That wouldn't do at all. Only 
 well, it seems that this school caters almost 
 entirely to the sons of wealthy Jewish men 
 and that this principal is very fond of our col- 
 lege . . . and so he grievously sends us all 
 the boys that he can. You know, so many boys 
 don't know where to go to college and the prin- 
 cipal often has a chance to suggest one, don't 
 you see!" 
 
 The dean had a very sober face, but his eyes 
 were twinkling. It relieved me to know, he was 
 not taking this principal's bad judgment too 
 seriously. 
 
 "So you think it would be wiser if there weren't 
 so many Jewish boys in next year's entering 
 class?" 
 
 "Precise oh, no, I shouldn't dare say that, 
 even if I thought so. Remember, I am in an 
 official capacity here. But come around to my 
 house tonight, when I've doffed my scholastic 
 robe and am in my shirt sleeves and perhaps 
 I'll tell you, then, the name of that principal." 
 
 I did not even bother to do this. Without 
 waiting for further advice, I went down to this 
 school to beard the foolish principal in his den. 
 
 It was a hard matter to work my way into his 
 presence. He had an office and inner office, 
 and stenographers to guard them both. I
 
 180 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 wrote on my card, however, that I wished to 
 speak to him regarding affairs at my college, and 
 evidently piqued his curiosity to the extent of 
 his giving me the interview. 
 
 In that inner office I found a youngish man 
 whose face was adorned with a heavy black beard. 
 He seemed strangely familiar, but I could not 
 place him. 
 
 "Come in," he said, looking hard at me. His 
 restless eyes did not leave my face all the while 
 I was talking. 
 
 "What is it you want me to do?" he asked 
 me when I had given him some stumbling hint 
 of my mission. 
 
 "I think you ought to keep Jewish boys out 
 of my college," I told him. "It it isn't alto- 
 gether fair, and it would only provoke a re- 
 newal of the prejudice, if there should be as 
 many freshmen next year as there were this." 
 
 "You are a Jew yourself," he said accusingly. 
 
 "Yes, I am. But don't judge by me. . . . 
 I have always been an exception to all that pre- 
 judice." 
 
 "Oh, have you? I wonder why?" 
 
 I resented his tone, but went on to explain 
 how I had entered college long before the an- 
 tagonism had broken out ; had worked hard, with 
 Christian friends to help me, until I had won 
 honors which assured me immunity from any 
 unpleasantness.
 
 MANY IMPULSES 161 
 
 "I congratulate you," he said dryly. "You 
 no doubt deserve these honors. Your sort al- 
 ways does." 
 
 I stood up angrily and looked him square in 
 the face. Then suddenly I recognized him. . . . 
 Pictures of my public school days came up be- 
 fore me. . . . The class room and the big, 
 crippled bully, Geoghen. . . . That finding 
 of the Hebrew prayer book when the teacher was 
 out of the room, and the hooting and mocking 
 . .. . and then the teacher's return and the 
 fight. 
 
 It was Mr. Levi. 
 
 He smiled when he saw that I knew him, now. 
 "I remembered you more readily," he said. "You 
 have no beard to change your appearance." But 
 it was more than his beard : there was a complete 
 change in him from the dreamy, pale young man 
 who had learned so harsh a lesson in those old 
 days. There was a bitter twist to his mouth. 
 His lips were set sternly, his eyebrows were 
 lowered, his brow crossed by scowling lines. 
 
 "There's one thing about you that I remem- 
 ber," he snapped at me. "You were a Jew and 
 yet you stood aside and let those little cads take 
 the book of God and make nasty fun of it and 
 never raised your hand or even your voice to 
 stop them. That's the sort of boy you were. 
 And, I suppose, you're still the same. It'd seem
 
 162 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 so, anyhow. You probably won all your college 
 honors through standing aside. And now you 
 have the audacity to ask me to do the same, lest 
 you be made uncomfortable by the number of 
 other Jewish boys at your college. You want 
 me to stand aside, do you? Well, I wish I had 
 a thousand Jewish boys to enter into your col- 
 lege's next year's class !" 
 
 He glared at me. "If you want to know the 
 truth, I can't get a single boy in my school to go 
 to your college, now. I wish I could. Because 
 I'm training them to fight like men. They aren't 
 the sort who win honors by allowing themselves 
 to be classed as exceptions. . . ." 
 
 As for myself, I knew that he was half wrong, 
 half right and that there was nothing more for 
 me to say. I had learned what I came to learn. 
 So I got up to go. 
 
 "And if there's another such demonstration, 
 next year," he sneered, "you and your precious 
 honors will have to stand aside again, eh? It 
 must keep you very light on your feet!"
 
 xvin 
 
 I STAND BUT NOT ASIDE 
 
 THUS it happened that only five Jews enrolled 
 in the entering freshman class. One of them, 
 of course, was Frank Cohen. 
 
 Mr. Levi's accusations had stung deeply. My 
 anger at them was all the more intense because 
 my heart admitted half their truth. Neverthe- 
 less, I was glad to see that there could be no 
 possible aggravation this year : surely, with only 
 five Jewish freshmen, the percentage would be 
 small and unnoticed. It was all very well, that 
 venom of Mr. Levi's but it was unreasonable. 
 I would be glad if the Jewish question would 
 never again be mentioned during my college 
 course. 
 
 The opening of the senior year found Frank 
 Cohen and me on the Palisades, talking eagerly 
 of what his college course would mean to him. 
 He made me smile, his dreams were so like my 
 own had been when I, too, was a freshman. 
 Made me wonder, too, how much I had fulfilled 
 those dreams. Something accomplished, yes 
 and as much unfulfilled, disregarded, left un- 
 
 163
 
 164 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 done. Well, perhaps, in this last year, I would 
 have the chance again and would not flinch. 
 
 The chance came just two days after the open- 
 ing of college. It came when Frank Cohen burst 
 into my room about nine o'clock at night, in com- 
 pany with another Jewish freshman. The other 
 one was dogged, frightened, and, when he was 
 behind my closed door, began to cry noiselessly. 
 As for Frank, who was made of stronger stuff, 
 he sat silent in his chair, grasping its arms and 
 trying to control the intensity of some revulsion 
 which had come over him. 
 
 They told me quickly what had happened. 
 They were just from a meeting of freshman can- 
 didates for the college newspaper. The meeting 
 had been called in order to instruct these can- 
 didates in the rules and qualifications of the 
 competition. All men who cared to enter the 
 competition had been invited. Two men had 
 made speeches: the editor-in-chief and the man- 
 aging editor of the paper, Sayer and Braley by 
 name. 
 
 These had been cordial speeches, urging all 
 men present at the meeting to work hard in 
 this competition. There had been speeches of 
 encouragement, in glowing colors and then, at 
 the end of it all, in front of the fifty-odd youths 
 who were assembled there, Braley had closed 
 his speech with this:
 
 I STAND BUT NOT ASIDE 165 
 
 <f We wish to say that any Jew who may have 
 it in mind to enter this competition might as 
 well save himself the pains. We shall not even 
 consider the election of a Jew to the board." 
 
 Immediately a gasp, then a snicker had run 
 through the roomful ; then necks had craned and 
 heads turned to catch looks at Frank and the 
 other freshman who stood, flushed and humili- 
 ated, in their midst. 
 
 Then the meeting had broken up, and the other 
 candidates, taking their cue from Braley's speech, 
 stood aside to let Frank and his companion pass 
 down through whispering, giggling aisles. They 
 had tried to go calmly, unconcernedly, as if the 
 shock of the insult meant nothing to them. But 
 the other Jewish freshman had broken down, 
 and Frank had to put his arm around him to 
 keep him up and straight upon his path through 
 the crowd's midst, out upon the campus and 
 over to my dormitory. 
 
 I sat a little while silent after I heard them 
 tell of it. I was as much stunned as they 
 and sickened too. I had thought all that sort 
 of thing was done with. I had hoped it was all 
 past, even forgotten and here it was, leaping 
 up again to confront, to threaten, to jeer at us. 
 I had only dimly imagined the possibility of it. 
 I had no plan, no hint of how I should go about 
 it.
 
 168 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 Two years ago, if this had happened, I should 
 not have cared one way or the other. I should 
 have crawled away into a corner and buried 
 my face to hide my fear's approach. I should 
 have waited to see how others acted, how others 
 fought and then, at best I should have fought 
 along in a half-hearted, half-dreading fashion. 
 Even now, I had nothing to fight for. I knew 
 what Judaism was and that it was for the God 
 and the people of Judaism that I should be mak- 
 ing my little fight but 
 
 I turned about and saw the eyes of the two 
 freshmen glued upon me. Frank's especially 
 and they were beginning to fill with a troubled 
 distrust which I had never allowed to be there 
 before. I could not fail Frank. I would do 
 what I could. 
 
 "All right," I said, drawing on my coat. "Go 
 ahead home and get to bed. I will see what 
 I can do." 
 
 I went with them across the campus to the 
 other freshman's room. Frank would sleep there 
 for the night, though he usually went back to 
 his parents. I think he did not have the heart 
 tonight to face them, and when they asked their 
 usual breathless questions of the day's work and 
 play, lie to them and hide from them the galling 
 incident. He did not seem to feel the insult 
 for his own sake; he was thinking, rather, of
 
 I STAND BUT NOT ASIDE 167 
 
 his mother and of how she would feel, should 
 she ever know. 
 
 "Good night," said the other freshman soberly. 
 
 "Good night," said Frank and I felt in his 
 voice all of the cheery obligation of friendship. 
 He was expecting wonders of me. 
 
 Walking on alone, across the open gloominess 
 of deserted paths and night winds in the shrub- 
 bery, a thousand foolish fears tramped by my 
 side and sang into my ears. I had hidden my 
 empty spirit from those two boys but I could 
 not hide it from myself. I wondered what sort 
 of a fight was ahead of me, and how long it 
 would last, and what would be the final result. 
 Those two men, Sayer and Braley, were among 
 the most influential of the class. They were 
 members of my senior society. They could hold 
 me down by sentimental ties of brotherhood, 
 much as Trevelyan had been held down by his 
 fraternity mates; failing that, they could use 
 their popularity, their clinch upon college opin- 
 ion to force me literally into silence. They could 
 run me out of college, if they pleased. I knew 
 this, did not deny it to myself as I went forward 
 to the first skirmish. 
 
 Once I turned around and almost retreated 
 to my rooms. But the remembrance of the sting 
 that was in Frank's reproachful look would not 
 let me do that.
 
 168 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 So I came to the steps of the big Y. M. C. A. 
 building. They were many, these white stone 
 steps, and they shone in the moonlight with 
 a mottling of hazardous shadows. I mounted 
 them and went into the huge assembly hall on 
 the first floor. I heard the awkward, self-con- 
 scious benediction and adjournment of the meet- 
 ing for they were all young fellows, and had 
 not yet learned to be entirely glib towards their 
 meetings and stood aside to let them pass out. 
 As the first of them went through the door and 
 out upon the campus, they burst into the giddy 
 laughs which moonlight conjures and I heard 
 them singing foolish glees snatches of song 
 that were utterly pagan and gleeful, and far 
 from the heated stuffiness of their prayer meet- 
 ing. They seemed to have found their Kindly 
 Light more easily in the open. 
 
 The man for whom I now waited had always 
 been the leader of my class; this year, he was 
 the idol of the entire university. Captain of 
 football, a 'varsity baseball man, he had the 
 finest, sincerest character that I had ever known. 
 He was not merely popular, in our undergrad- 
 uate sense. Underclassmen worshipped him from 
 afar, and upperclassmen, who knew him and the 
 life that he led, loved him and respected him 
 with a love and respect which few men can ever 
 win.
 
 I STAND BUT NOT ASIDE 169 
 
 He and I had become friendly, lately. It was 
 due, perhaps, to the fact that we now belonged 
 to the same senior society. Before, I had wor- 
 shipped from afar; now I knew him well and 
 warmly and, as I look back upon my college 
 life, I am amazed to realize how much of his 
 influence went into the making of it. 
 
 As he came out, I noticed how his broad 
 shoulders filled the doorway and blocked out its 
 light completely. But his face was above the 
 shadows, and I had a sudden sense of comfort 
 from the resolute kindliness that shone upon it. 
 
 "Fred," I said, "I want your help on some- 
 thing." 
 
 As president of the Y. M. C. A. he had a 
 room allotted him in the building where he 
 might sleep. I knew that he had a suite in his 
 fraternity house, too but he preferred to stay 
 here, for some reason, in this smaller, simpler 
 place, where he would be nearer his duties. 
 
 When he had me in the plain little den, sitting 
 before the miniature wood fire which he heaped 
 with broken twigs, he sat me down and gave 
 me a few minutes of tactful silence. I was think- 
 ing it all out. I wanted to tell it to him fairly, 
 concisely, with no imprecations, and yet with no 
 weakening of attitude. Then I did tell it, simply, 
 just as the two boys had told it to me. 
 
 I saw Fred's face grow troubled. Before I
 
 170 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 was through he had begun to walk up and down 
 the little room with a nervousness that made his 
 pace almost such a jog as football players use 
 when they come out upon the field. 
 
 "You're right," he said when I was done. 
 "You're so right that everything else connected 
 with the incident is wrong and that's the 
 hardest part for me to admit. You deserve to 
 fight this out alone it belongs to you. I wish 
 I had a fight like yours to make. But if you'll 
 let me help you ?" 
 
 "Let you? Why, I need your help!" 
 
 "Then you'll have it. I'll be glad mighty glad 
 to chime in with you " 
 
 He stopped short, his tremendous frame red- 
 lined in the fire's glow, his cheeks above his 
 square jaw as bright as the flames themselves. 
 
 I could not answer him sentimentally. My 
 comfort and gratitude were too deep, my sud- 
 denly gained encouragement too surging for the 
 narrow outlet of words. But after a while we 
 began to plan. We would fight it together and 
 immediately. 
 
 When I got up to go, his Bible was lying open 
 at the beginning of the New Testament, with a 
 ribbon and tiny silver cross to mark the place. 
 When Fred saw me looking at it, he must have 
 felt some part of the strange, shivery misgiving 
 which had come over me. For he took the rib-
 
 I STAND BUT NOT ASIDE 171 
 
 bon in his fingers, so that the cross lay gleaming 
 in his palm. 
 
 "It is Christ's symbol," he said. "It is the 
 sign of one who suffered and who was a Jew." 
 
 Then, as if he must leave me no doubt of his 
 meaning in my mind: 
 
 "Don't worry. The cross won't stand between 
 us. Though " His eyes travelled slowly to the 
 shelf above the fireplace. "Look! There's a 
 symbol of your religion, too " 
 
 So I looked. Gleaming brass, its seven up- 
 lifting arms gracefully curved, stood a Me- 
 norah!
 
 XIX 
 
 "BATTLE ROYAL!" 
 
 I AWOKE the next morning to an insistent 
 knocking at my door. I sprang out of bed and 
 opened it. In the hall, their dress showing signs 
 of much haste, stood Saver and Braley. They 
 did not wait my invitation, but strode at once 
 into the room and, throwing the rumpled covers 
 from the bed, plumped down upon it. 
 
 "See here," said Braley, without prelude, 
 "what's this talk about Fred's calling a special 
 meeting of the senior class for tonight? Do 
 you know anything about it?" 
 
 I smiled my way out of a pajama top. "Real- 
 ly?" I exclaimed. "Well, I did hear Fred say 
 something about it last night." 
 
 "Oh, so you talked it over with him? Did you 
 ask for the meeting?" 
 
 I had thrown on a bathrobe. "Yes, I did. 
 Why?" 
 
 "That's what we want to know. Why, why?" 
 
 I looked up from tying the cord about my 
 waist. "That's just what I'm not going to tell. 
 Not until the meeting." 
 
 172
 
 "BATTLE ROYAL!" 173 
 
 "Well, perhaps we know." 
 
 "You probably do. You deserve to." 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" Sayer jumped 
 up and towards me. He was doing his best to 
 fight, I could see but I would not give him the 
 chance not prematurely! 
 
 Braley waved a conciliatory hand. He was 
 a large, stoop-shouldered fellow with long, light 
 hair and an enormous forehead. He had the 
 most important and sumptuous manners I have 
 ever met. 
 
 "See here, now," he said, "you really must 
 tell us all you know about this thing. You 
 really must." He was very earnest about it. 
 They were both uneasy, it was easy to see. 
 
 "I'll tell you nothing," I said. "You will have 
 to wait until tonight, and then " 
 
 "Threatening us, are you?" 
 
 "No. I'm kind enough to warn you, that's 
 all. I don't want you to go to the meeting 
 unprepared." 
 
 "Oh, so it has to do with my remarks to the 
 freshmen candidates, has it?" 
 
 "And mine?" 
 
 "I've given you all the warning that fair play 
 demands," I said. "Look to your consciences for 
 means of defense." And, flinging a towel over 
 my shoulder, I darted away for my morning 
 shower, leaving them in possession of the room.
 
 174 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 When I came back, a few minutes later, it was 
 apparently empty, and I thought them gone. 
 
 I was almost dressed when I went into the 
 clothes closet to select a tie from the rack I 
 had there. There was a sudden rustle and move- 
 ment of the clothes at the back of the dark little 
 place. Two men closed in on me, dragged me 
 into the depths of the closet. I reached out 
 blindly, furiously. My fists hit only against the 
 rows of my own clothes hanging there. A couple 
 of coat-hangers clattered down. I stumbled and 
 fell over my satchel. Then the door slammed 
 shut. As I lay there, stunned, in the darkness, 
 I heard the key turning in the lock, from the 
 outside. They had sealed me in. 
 
 I had no doubts but they had been Sayer and 
 Braley. Though I had never imagined they 
 would go as far as this and the fools! what 
 did they think they could accomplish by lock- 
 ing me up for the day? 
 
 It was easy enough to breathe in the tiny, 
 black square. I was in no danger. I groped 
 my way to the suitcase and sat down on it for 
 a few minutes. My head pained me terrifically. 
 My forehead was hot. I put my hand up to 
 it and felt a fast-swelling bruise. My fingers 
 grew wet with something warm. It wasn't just 
 perspiration. ... I knew that and that, 
 in the struggle, I must have hit my head against
 
 "BATTLE ROYAL!" 175 
 
 one of the hooks. Or had one of them hit me 
 in the dark with some sharp thing that he held in 
 his hands? 
 
 I stood up again unsteadily, found the door 
 handle yes, it was locked. I was in my stock- 
 ing feet; I could not kick through a panel. I 
 reached along the wall, found a hook. I flung 
 the clothes from it, gave it both my hands and 
 all my strength in a sudden pull. It gave way 
 with a spurting of loosened plaster. 
 
 It was a large, heavy hook. It made a good 
 ram. I crashed upon the two upper panels with 
 it. One of them split at length and when I 
 rammed the ugly iron thing against it again, it 
 broke into splinters and my arm went through 
 it. Light came through dimly and, three min- 
 utes later, I had knocked out the whole panel, 
 climbed through and staggered out into the 
 room. 
 
 The mirror showed me a bad cut over my right 
 eye. I staunched the flow of blood as best I 
 could. It was so humorous an incident like 
 one of the famous adventures of Frank Merri- 
 well! 
 
 I played it out, though. I did not go out of 
 my room the whole day. In the afternoon I tele- 
 phoned Fred, the class president, about it. He 
 came over to see me and he didn't treat it as 
 lightly as I did. He wanted me to have a doc-
 
 176 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 tor, for one thing. I promised I would see one, 
 as soon as the meeting was over, that night. 
 
 "You'd better," he said. "That cut is mighty 
 close to some of the most important nerves of 
 the eye." 
 
 It was evening when I ventured out. Over 
 in the big assembly hall the meeting of the 
 senior class had already begun. I stole across 
 the campus with my coat collar turned up and 
 my hat far down to hide my face. I did not 
 want to be recognized until I was ready. I 
 hung about outside the ruddy windows of the 
 hall, watching the crowded groups that sat with- 
 in. They were listening intently to someone on 
 the platform that I could not see but I knew 
 that it was Fred, presiding. Fred and he was 
 explaining it all to them, perhaps, in that deep- 
 voiced way of his. 
 
 Then, as I watched, I saw how the heads of 
 all who sat within the scope of my spying craned 
 suddenly towards the side of the room. I knew 
 what that meant, too. It meant that either 
 Sayer or Braley had risen from his seat to make 
 reply to the president's accusation. 
 
 Then, amazed, I heard applause and laughter. 
 The muffled clapping of hands went on for min- 
 utes. So they approved these things that the 
 two editors had done, did they? So they could 
 laugh and clap to hear how Sayer and Braley
 
 "BATTLE ROYAL!" 177 
 
 had crushed the spirit out of two young Jews 
 in front of fifty other freshmen? 
 
 I grew too angry to wait. I was not going 
 to dawdle idly in the background, waiting for 
 a foolish, theatrical entrance cue I wasn't go- 
 ing to "stand aside" a moment longer ! 
 
 I hurried into the building, up stairs and 
 around corners until I was at the very threshold 
 of the hall. The big mass of men there, the lights, 
 the noise of their clapping, ten times louder from 
 within all of it gave a tightening to my throat. 
 My knees began to tremble violently. 
 
 It was Braley who was speaking. He was 
 waving his hand with his usual sense of the 
 grandiloquence of his remarks. I heard, I sup- 
 pose, only the last of them but that was enough : 
 
 "I regret, of course, that I should have had 
 to give pain to these two poor little kike fresh- 
 men. I regret that I have thereby offended no 
 less a person than the president of the class. 
 But there is the broader way of looking at this 
 thing : that of the interest of the whole commu- 
 nity. And I believe, as every man in this room 
 believes, that it would be ten times better that 
 all Jews be debarred from our college. If not 
 that, then certainly from all our college activ- 
 ities, in order that real Anglo-Saxon fair play 
 may prevail! If any man, including the Jew 
 who has instigated this protest against Sayer
 
 178 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 and myself, wishes to refute this, let him step 
 forward now or be forever silent." 
 
 He sat down grandly, amid huzzas. 
 
 I do not know whether he or Sayer actually 
 meant me to be incarcerated during all that day 
 and night, while the meeting went forward so 
 famously. Probably they had had it in mind 
 when they played the vindictive little prank, and 
 had been ashamed, when in better senses, to come 
 back and release me. Certainly Sayer, who sat 
 close to the door, turned pale when he saw me 
 now. 
 
 I went slowly to the front of the room. My 
 eyes pained me and I was nauseated. But I 
 had ceased to tremble and was calm with a fury 
 that checked all nervousness. 
 
 "The Jew who instigated this protest is here 
 to back it up," I said slowly. "He is here to 
 appeal to the 'real Anglo-Saxon fair play.' " 
 
 I could feel in the air the antagonism which 
 I must down. I knew, as never before, how bitter 
 and insensate was the prejudice which I must 
 conquer by fifteen minutes of quiet words. 
 
 What I said doesn't count : I hardly remember 
 most of it, anyhow. Before me, as I talked, the 
 faces swam away into a dim and meaningless 
 strip. I was not talking to these raw, swanker- 
 ing college boys. I was talking to some- 
 thing beyond to something that was infinitely
 
 "BATTLE ROYAL!" 179 
 
 brighter and more glorious than I had ever 
 known before. I was talking to something be- 
 yond all earth to Someone. . . . 
 
 And I was appealing, was summoning, calling 
 Him down to my aid. I was speaking His words, 
 in the spirit of His ancient fighting prophets. 
 I was fighting His fight. The calm frenzy in 
 my heart was of His instillation. For years I 
 had sought Him. For years I had shunned Him, 
 knowing my need of Him. For all the days of 
 my life I had borne the fierce justice of His words 
 as a lonely burden and now, now. . . . 
 
 "And I shall fight and fight," I cried, "in the 
 name of God the God that is over all of us, 
 of whatever race, creed or color for the things 
 that are fair and right and just. I shall have 
 justice for a little East Side Jewish freshman 
 as you shall have it, too." 
 
 Then suddenly, as if blinded by the refulgence 
 of what I saw, my eyes began to water and grow 
 dim. I stood there, tense, and did not mind 
 the pain that was in them. But I could speak 
 no more. 
 
 And slowly the men rose and went out, quietly, 
 strangely looking back sometimes to where I 
 stood not comprehending everything, I suppose, 
 but moved beyond all common approbation. 
 They had been conquered. 
 
 Braley remained alone with me in the deserted
 
 180 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 hall. I looked at him across a row of seats and 
 began to laugh. 
 
 "You didn't even say a word to them about 
 that rotten trick we played on you," he said, 
 shamefacedly, his glib manners gone. 
 
 "I didn't have to," I replied. "Besides, I for- 
 got." 
 
 "Well er thanks! You could have had us 
 expelled !" 
 
 But the pain and dizziness were beyond stand- 
 ing now. I tore off my hat, so that he had a 
 glimpse of the long, sullen cut over my eye. 
 
 "Look out!" he cried, leaping up on the plat- 
 form, to hold me for I was falling to the floor. 
 
 I remember laughing again, long but weakly. 
 "I didn't have to ! I didn't have to !" 
 
 And after so much light, there came the dark- 
 ness.
 
 XX 
 
 THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED 
 
 WHEN I rose from a hospital bed of fever and 
 darkness, ten days later, it was with a feeling 
 of rebirth as if, in the dripping delirium of 
 threatened blindness, the last doubts had sloughed 
 away. 
 
 And when the bandage was taken from my 
 eyes, and I had, for the first time in so long 
 a while, a short and tempered bit of sunshine 
 that came through the shaded windows and 
 across the clean, white floors, it was as if I 
 saw things, now, as I had never seen them 
 face to face. 
 
 I must not return immediately to college, the 
 doctors said. There must be another fortnight 
 of convalescence, with absolute rest for my eyes. 
 They gave me my choice as to where I wanted 
 to go and I chose the settlement. I should be 
 among friends, down there; I should have the 
 sunny roof-garden to loiter in and Jewish faces 
 everywhere about me. 
 
 It was good old Trevelyan, squinting and 
 
 stuttering and strangely moved, who called for 
 
 181
 
 182 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 me in his car and took me away from the hos- 
 pital. He had wanted me to go to his Adirondack 
 lodge, instead, and resigned me into Mr. Rich- 
 ards' care at the settlement as if he were con- 
 signing me relunctantly to one of the Inferno's 
 inner limbos. 
 
 It was then the second day of the Jewish New 
 Year. The whole teeming neighborhood was in 
 holiday garb and mood. From the roof that 
 night Mr. Richards and I stood watching the 
 streets and their carnival crowds, swarming in- 
 distinctly under the lamps and about the corners. 
 
 "The little people," quoted Mr. Richards, 
 "God and the little people . . ." 
 
 "They are not little when they have God," 
 I answered. 
 
 He nodded. "I was wrong in what I said in 
 that argument of ours. Do you remember? I 
 said they didn't need their religion that it was 
 working more harm than good among the younger 
 generation. I've learned, now . . . There 
 isn't a person on earth that doesn't need it all 
 that he can get of it and these little people 
 of the East Side most of all." 
 
 From below there rose to us the clang and 
 clatter of traffic, the indescribable rustle of the 
 crowd, the shriek of a demon fire engine, many 
 streets away. But, above it all, we heard sing- 
 ing, on the floor below us, of a solemn chant
 
 THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED 183 
 
 in rehearsal. It was the settlement Choral 
 Society, singing the plaintive "Kol Nidre" 
 and when the parts swelled into unison, all other 
 sounds seemed suddenly engulfed in the rich, 
 melancholy texture of the harmony. 
 
 Mr. Kichards smiled. "There it is, you see: 
 the grim, sad faith of the Jewish people. It is 
 all they have had in all their wanderings but 
 
 it is everything." 
 
 * * * 
 
 The cut across my forehead healed quickly. 
 Besting from all tasks, my eyes regained their 
 strength without relapse. 
 
 I had visitors. Several of the men from col- 
 lege came down each day. I had not known there 
 were so many persons who cared. Braley was 
 among them, once and he sat and twisted his 
 hat and said nothing. Whether or not his friend- 
 ship is worth anything to me, I have made a 
 friend of him. Once or twice, since then, he has 
 tried to speak of the trick which he and Sayer 
 attempted, but I have stopped him. There is 
 no need of going over that. 
 
 Only, a few days after I went to the hospital, 
 there was a long and flowery retraction published 
 in the college newspaper, inviting all freshmen 
 "of whatever race or creed to enter the editorial 
 competition, with the assurance that the most 
 democratic principles would prevail."
 
 184 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CAJSJ DLEST1UK 
 
 At any rate, when Frank Cohen ran in to 
 see me, on his way home, a few days later, I 
 advised him to re-enter the contest. Frank, with 
 a freshman's capacity for hero worship, leaped 
 to act on my advice. 
 
 "And hurry up back to college," he said, with 
 a little catch in his voice. "There are twenty 
 other Jewish underclassmen who want the same 
 sort of counsel from you. You see they didn't 
 know they had a leader and they do need one !" 
 
 It is not part of the tale, perhaps, but I can- 
 not help intruding the fact that Frank was the 
 first freshman to be elected to the editorial board 
 of the college paper and that, in his senior year, 
 
 he became its managing editor. 
 * * # 
 
 My aunt came, too. I had been secretly ex- 
 pecting her hoping, perhaps, for no especial 
 reason, that she would come. 
 
 She wept a little at the sight of my healing 
 scar. It was a long while since I had seen her, 
 and it shocked me she looked so worn. She 
 clung to my hand for several minutes before 
 she would speak. 
 
 "I read about it," she sobbed. "It was in the 
 papers and they said the nicest things of you 
 . . . But I didn't come sooner because be- 
 cause I didn't know whether you wanted you 
 wanted "
 
 THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED 185 
 
 "Yes, Aunt Selina, I am very glad to see 
 you." 
 
 She drew a deep sigh. "It has been so long 
 and I am growing old. I'm just a lonely old 
 woman, boy. And there's no comfort in old age." 
 
 I looked at her. She had changed much, I 
 thought. "But you had so many friends," I 
 remonstrated. "All those intellectual society 
 folk!" 
 
 "I don't know they don't seem to interest 
 me any more. I'm growing old. That's all 
 old and lonely. And they are such fools, every 
 one of them almost as foolish as I am and 
 hypocrites, all." 
 
 Her hand went tighter about mine, and her 
 rheumy eyes sought mine and searched them. 
 "You seem so happy, boy so changed. What's 
 the secret of it can't you tell me?" 
 
 I shook my head. It would be of no use, I 
 thought. 
 
 "I want it," she begged. "The comfort of it 
 I did not know I should need it when I was 
 old and when all else fell away." 
 
 So I reached for a book which was on a table 
 nearby, and gave it to her. It was an old Union 
 Prayer Book. 
 
 She took it with the barest flicker of lashes. 
 "It's it's Hebrew," she protested. I don't 
 know how to read it."
 
 186 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 "There is always an English translation on 
 the opposite page," I showed her. "You will 
 be able to read that. Perhaps it will help you." 
 
 "Perhaps," she said after me, her thin voice 
 quavering. 
 
 "Bead it all. You will come at any rate to 
 a better understanding of your fellow Jews." 
 
 Her head went down, as if in shame of some 
 unpleasant reminiscence. "Perhaps I will try, 
 anyhow and perhaps " 
 
 "Aunt Selina," I told her hastily, "I am com- 
 ing home to live with you at the end of this 
 college year. We shall begin all over again." 
 
 Then her tears began afresh. "I did not dare 
 ask it but oh, if you could only know how I 
 have wanted it and for how long! I would 
 have prayed for it yes, really, prayed for it 
 if I had only had someone to pray to!" 
 
 And then, as if suddenly remembering, she 
 hugged the shabby leather book to her breast, 
 and smiled. 
 
 But, before she left, I opened it up to show 
 her why I prized this particular copy. For, 
 on the yellowed flyleaf in old ink, was the name, 
 "Isidore Levi." And below it, newly written, 
 these words : 
 
 "To a Jew who could not stand aside" 
 
 He had sent it to me immediately after he 
 had learned of that last incident at college. And
 
 THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED 187 
 
 he did not need to explain where I had seen 
 
 this prayer book last. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Yom Kippur was my last day at the settle- 
 ment before returning to college. I went with 
 Frank Cohen and his father to the service of 
 their orthodox congregation. The little syna- 
 gogue, just off the Bowery, had had to be aban- 
 doned, for once, in favor of a huge bare hall 
 that usually served political meetings. But, 
 large as it was, it was packed tightly ; and from 
 the gallery, where I stole once to look on, it 
 seemed a vast black sea wave upon wave of 
 derbies and shiny top hats, with the flicker of 
 white prayer shawls for froth. The prayers and 
 the chantings came up to me almost like 
 mystic exhalations. The great, drab, smeared 
 walls had the splendor of the afternoon sun up- 
 on them ; the cheap chairs, the improvised altar, 
 the temporary gilt ark behind it the long gray 
 beards of the patriarchs, the wan faces of the fast- 
 ing children everything, every one had been 
 gradually drenched in the glory that poured 
 through the windows. 
 
 It was the setting sun upon Israel and Israel 
 
 prayed and sang in the gold of it. 
 
 * * 
 
 I went back to college the next day. Mr. 
 Richards and I had breakfast together, so that
 
 188 THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK 
 
 we might say slowly and easily the last things 
 that were to be said. 
 
 "I'm glad you're going to finish it out," he 
 began. "You've proved what I once told you; 
 that college isn't all child's play. Some things 
 about it are, of course." He paused a moment, 
 a little embarrased. "Trevelyan phoned me last 
 night, after you'd gone to bed." 
 
 "Yes? About me?" 
 
 "Well, in a way. He'd just come from one of 
 our fraternity meetings. He wanted to tell me 
 that, when you are back, they will probably of- 
 fer you an election." 
 
 "What? To your fraternity?" 
 
 "Yes." He paused and watched me amusedly. 
 "It doesn't seem to thrill you." 
 
 I smiled back at him. "No, not the way I 
 would have in freshman year." 
 
 "Yes that's how I thought you'd feel. You 
 needn't be afraid of hurting my feelings or 
 Trevelyan's, either by declining. They're a 
 little too late, aren't they?" 
 
 "Oh, it isn't that. I don't want them to think 
 me ungrateful, you see but I've passed that 
 stage. There are so many other things for me to 
 care about, now." I was thinking of Frank 
 Cohen's remark about the number of Jewish un- 
 derclassmen who wanted counsel, leadership 
 and, now more than ever, I was sure of myself.
 
 180 
 
 "I understand," said Mr. Richards, shaking 
 my hand at parting. "Good luck to you or 
 better still, good faith to you ! A man's work and 
 
 a man's God you've found them at last." 
 * * * 
 
 That night, in my room at college, I found on 
 the mantle shelf the big, brass, seven-branched 
 candlestick which I had seen in the room of the 
 class president. It was Fred's gift to me. 
 
 And, thinking of those years, I lit the seven 
 candles, one by one, and watched them struggle 
 feebly, desperately, until all of them were calm 
 and bright, their flicker ended until the Me- 
 norah, with its uplifted arms, and all the little 
 space about it, shone with a radiance that was 
 firm and beautiful.
 
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