§ 2
She was at the steaming stove of the restaurant at the usual hour the next morning. She stewed the same tzimmas, fried the same blintzee, stuffed the same miltz. But she was no longer the same. Her head was in a whirl with golden dreams of her visionary future.
All at once a scream rent the air.
“Koosh! where in goodness’ name is your head?” thundered her employer. “The blintzee burning in front of her nose, and she stands there like a yok with her eyes in the air!”
“Excuse me,” she mumbled in confusion, setting down the pan. “I was only thinking for a minute.”
“Thinking!” His greasy face purpled with rage. “Do I pay you to think or to cook? For what do I give you such wages? What’s the world coming to? Pfui! A cook, a greenhorn, a nothing—also me a thinker!”
Sophie’s eyes flamed.
“Maybe in Smyrna, from where you come, a cook is a nothing. In America everybody is a person.”
“Bolshevik!” he yelled. “Look only what fresh mouths the unions make from them! Y’understand me, in my restaurant one thing on a time: you cook or you think. If you wan’ to think, you’ll think outside.”
“All right, then; give me my wages!” she retorted, flaring up. “The Tsar is dead. In America cooks are also people.”
Sophie tore off her apron, and thrust it at the man.
To the cheapest part of the East Side she went in her search for a room. Through the back alleys and yards she sought for a place that promised to be within her means. And then a smeared square of cardboard held between the iron grating of a basement window caught her eye. “Room to let—a bargain—cheap!”
“Only three dollars a month,” said the woman in answer to Sophie’s inquiry.
The girl opened a grimy window that faced a blank wall.
“Oi, weh! not a bit of air!”
“What do you need yet air for the winter?” cried Hanneh Breineh. “When the cold comes, the less air that blows into your room, the warmer you can keep yourself. And when it gets hot in summer you can take your mattress up on the roof. Everybody sleeps on the roof in summer.”
“But there’s so little light,” said Sophie.
“What more light do you yet need? A room is only for to sleep by night. When you come home from work, it’s dark, anyway. Gottuniu! it’s so dark on my heart with trouble, what difference does it make a little darkness in the room?”
“But I have to work in my room all day. I must have it light.”
“Nu, I’ll let you keep the gas lighted all day long,” Hanneh Breineh promised.
“Three dollars a month,” deliberated Sophie. The cheapness would give her a sense of freedom that would make up for the lack of light and air. She paid down her first month’s rent.
Her house, securely hers. Yet with the flash of triumph came a stab of bitterness. All that was hers was so wretched and so ugly! Had her eager spirit, eager to give, no claim to a bit of beauty, a shred of comfort?
Over the potato-barrel she flung a red shawl, once her mother’s, and looked through her bag for something to cover an ugly break in the plaster. She could find nothing but the page torn from the college catalogue.
“It’s not so sunny and airy here as in your college office,” she said, tacking the photograph on the wall; “but maybe you’d be a realer man if once in your life you had to put up with a hole like this for a room.”
Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. With tense fingers she wrote down the title of her story, then stopped, and stared wildly at the ceiling.
Where was the vision that had haunted her all these days? Where were the thoughts and feelings that surged like torrents through her soul? Merely the act of putting her pencil to paper, her thoughts became a blur, her feelings a dumb ache in her heart.
Ach, why must she kill herself to say what can never be said in words? But how did Emerson and Shakespeare seize hold of their vision? What was the source of their deathless power?
The rusty clock struck six.
“I ought to run out now for the stale bread, or it will be all sold out, and I will have to pay twice as much for the fresh,” flashed through her mind.
“Oi weh!” she wailed, covering her eyes, “it’s a stomach slave I am, not a writer. I forget my story, I forget everything, thinking only of saving a few pennies.”
She dragged herself back to the page in front of her and resumed her task with renewed vigour.
“Sarah Lubin was sixteen years old when she came to America. She came to get an education, but she had to go to a factory for bread,” she wrote laboriously, and then drew back to study her work. The sentences were wooden, dead, inanimate things. The words laughed up at her, mockingly.
Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Writers never started stories in this way. Her eyes wandered over to the bed, a hard, meagre cot. “I must remember to fix the leg, or it will tip to-night,” she mused.
“Here I am,” she cried despairingly, “thinking of my comforts again! And I thought I’d want nothing; I’d live only to write.” Her head sank to the rough edge of the potato-barrel. “Perhaps I was a fool to give up all for this writing.”
“Too many writers and too few cooks”: the dean’s words closed like a noose around her anguished soul.
When she looked up, the kind face of the college president smiled down at her.
“Then what is it in me that’s tearing and gnawing and won’t let me rest?” she pleaded. The calm faith of the eyes levelled steadily at her seemed to rebuke her despair. The sure faith of that lofty face lifted her out of herself. She was humble before such unwavering power. “Ach!” she prayed, “how can I be so sure like you? Help me!”
Sophie became a creature possessed. She lived for one idea, was driven by one resistless passion, to write. As the weeks and months passed and her savings began to dwindle, her cheeks grew paler and thinner, the shadows under her restless eyes were black hollows of fear.
There came a day more deadly than death, when she had to face failure. She took out the thinning wad from her stocking and counted out her remaining cash: one, two, three dollars, and some nickels and dimes. How long before the final surrender? If she kept up her rigorous ration of dry bread and oatmeal, two or three weeks more at most. And then?
An end to dreams. An end to ambition. Back to the cook-stove, back to the stifling smells of tzimmas, hash, and miltz.
No, she would never let herself sink back to the kitchen. But where could she run from the terror of starvation?
The bitterest barb of her agony was her inability to surrender. She was crushed, beaten, but she could not give up the battle. The unvoiced dream in her still clamoured and ached and strained to find voice. A resistless something in her that transcended reason rose up in defiance of defeat.