§ 1
“There are too many writers and too few cooks.” The dean laughed at her outright. His superior glance placed her. “The trouble with you is that you are a Russian Jewess. You want the impossible.”
Sophie Sapinsky’s mouth quivered at the corners, and her teeth bit into the lower lip to still its trembling.
“How can you tell what’s possible in me before I had a chance?” she said.
“My dear child”—Dean Lawrence tried to be kind—“the magazine world is overcrowded with native-born writers who do not earn their salt. What chance is there for you, with your immigrant English? You could never get rid of your foreign idiom. Quite frankly, I think you are too old to begin.”
“I’m not so old like I look.” Sophie heard a voice that seemed to come from somewhere within her speak for her. “I’m only old from the crushed-in things that burn me up. It dies in me, my heart, if I don’t give out what’s in me.”
“My dear young woman”—the dean’s broad tolerance broke forth into another laugh—“you are only one of the many who think that they have something to say that the world is languishing to hear.” His easy facetiousness stung her into further vehemence.
“But I’m telling you I ain’t everybody.” With her fist she struck his desk, oblivious of what she was doing. “I’m smart from myself, not from books. I never had a chance when I was young, so I got to make my chance when I’m ‘too old.’ I feel I could yet be younger than youth if I could only catch on to the work I love.”
“Take my advice. Retain the position that assures you a living. Apply yourself earnestly to it, and you will secure a measure of satisfaction.”
The dean turned to the mahogany clock on his desk. Sophie Sapinsky was quick to take the hint. She had taken up too much of his time, but she could not give up without another effort.
“I can’t make good at work that chokes me.”
“Well, then see the head of the English department,” he said, with a gesture of dismissal.
The professor of English greeted Sophie with a tired, lifeless smile that fell like ashes on her heart. A chill went through her as she looked at his bloodless face. But the courage of despair drove her to speak.
“I wasted all my youth slaving for bread, but now I got to do what I want to do. For me—oh, you can’t understand—but for me, it’s a case of life or death. I got to be a writer, and I want to take every course in English and literature from the beginning to the end.”
The professor did not laugh at Sophie Sapinsky as the dean had done. He had no life left for laughter. But his cold scrutiny condemned her.
“I know,” she pleaded, “I ain’t up to those who had a chance to learn from school, but inside me I’m always thinking from life, just like Emerson. I understand Emerson like he was my own brother. And he says: ‘Trust yourself. Hold on to the thoughts that fly through your head, and the world has got to listen to you even if you’re a nobody.’ Ideas I got plenty. What I want to learn from the college is only the words, the quick language to give out what thinks itself in me—just like Emerson.”
The preposterous assumption of this ignorant immigrant girl in likening herself to the revered sage of Concord staggered the professor. He coughed.
“Well—er”—he paused to get the exact phrase to set her right—“Emerson, in his philosophy, assumed a tolerant attitude that, unfortunately, the world does not emulate. Perhaps you remember the unhappy outcome of your English entrance examination.”
Sophie Sapinsky reddened painfully. The wound of her failure was still fresh.
“In order to be eligible for our regular college courses, you would have to spend two or three years in preparation.”
Blindly, Sophie turned to go. She reached for the door. The professor’s perfunctory good-bye fell on deaf ears.
She swung the door open. The president of the college stood before her. She remembered it was he who had welcomed the extension students on the evening of her first attendance. He moved deferentially aside for her to pass. For one swift instant Sophie looked into kindly eyes. “Could he understand? Should I cry out to him to help me?” flashed through her mind. But before she could say a word he passed and the door had closed.
Sophie stopped in the hall. Had she the courage to wait until he came out? “He’s got feelings,” her instincts urged her. “He’s not an all-rightnik, a stone heart like the rest of them.”
“Ach!” cried her shattered spirit, “what would he, the head of them all, have to do with me? He wouldn’t even want to stop to listen.”
Too crushed to endure another rebuff, she dragged her leaden feet down the stairs and out into the street. All the light went out of her eyes, the strength out of her arms and fingers. She could think or feel nothing but the choked sense of her defeat.
That night she lay awake staring into the darkness. Every nerve within her cried aloud with the gnawing ache of her unlived life. Out of the dim corners the spectre of her stunted girlhood rose to mock her—the wasted, poverty-stricken years smothered in the steaming pots of other people’s kitchens. “Must I always remain buried alive in the black prison of my dumbness? Can’t I never learn to give out what’s in me? Must I choke myself in the smoke of my own fire?”
Centuries of suppression, generations of illiterates, clamoured in her: “Show them what’s in you! If you can’t write in college English, write in ‘immigrant English.’”
She flung from her the college catalogue. About to trample on it, she stopped. The catalogue had fallen open at the photograph of the president. There looked up at her the one kind face in that heartless college world. The president’s eyes gazed once more steadily into hers. Sophie hesitated; but not to be thwarted of her vengeance, she tore out his picture and laid it on the table, then she ripped the catalogue, and stuffed the crumpled pages into the stove. It roared up the chimney like the song of the Valkyrie. She threw back her head with triumph, and once more her eyes met the president’s.
“Let them burn, these dead-heads. Who are they, the bosses of education? What are they that got the say over me if I’m fit to learn or not fit to learn? Dust and ashes, ashes and dust. But you,” she picked up the picture, “you still got some life. But if you got life, don’t their dry dust choke you?”
The wrestlings of her sleepless night only strengthened her resolve to do the impossible, just because it seemed impossible. “I can’t tear the stars out of heaven if it wills itself in me,” her youth cried in her. “Whether I know how to write or don’t know how to write, I’ll be a writer.”