§ 3
“A black year on the landlord!” screamed Hanneh Breineh through the partition. “The rent he raised, so what does he need to worry yet if the gas freezes? Gottuniu! freeze should only the marrow from his bones!”
Sophie turned back to the little stove in an attempt to light the gas under the pan of oatmeal. The feeble flame flickered and with a faint protest went out. Hanneh Breineh poked in her tousled head for sympathy.
“Woe is me! Woe on the poor what ain’t yet sick enough for the hospital!”
As the chill of the gathering dusk intensified, Sophie seemed to see herself carried out on a stretcher to the hospital, numb, frozen.
“God from the world! better a quick death than this slow freezing!” With the perpetual gnawing of hunger sapping her strength, Sophie had not the courage to face another night of torment. Drawing her shabby shawl more tightly around her, she hurried out. “Where now?” she asked as a wave of stinging snow blinded her. Hanneh Breineh’s words came back to her: “the hospital!” Why not? Surely they couldn’t refuse to shelter her just overnight in a storm like this.
But when she reached the Beth Israel her heart sank. She looked in timidly at the warm, beckoning lights.
“Ach! how can I have the gall to ask them to take me in? They’ll think I’m only a beggar from the street.”
She paced the driveway of the building, back and forth and up and down, in envy of the sick who enjoyed the luxury of warmth.
“To the earth with my healthy body!” she cursed. “Why can’t I only break a bone or something?”
With a sudden courage of despair she mounted the steps to the superintendent’s office; but one glance of the man’s well-fed face robbed her of her nerve.
She sank down on the bench of the waiting applicants, glancing stealthily at the others, feeling all the guilt of a condemned criminal.
When her turn came, the blood in her ears pounded from terror and humiliation. She could not lift her eyes from the floor to face this feelingless judge of the sick and the suffering.
“I’m so killed with the cold,” she stammered, twisting the fringes of her shawl. “If I could only warm myself up in a bed for the night——”
The man looked at her suspiciously.
“If we fill up our place with people like you, we’ll have no room left for the sick. We have a ’flu epidemic.”
“So much you’re doing for the ’flu people, why can’t you help me before I get it?” She spoke with that suppressed energy which was the keynote of her whole personality.
“Have you a fever?” he asked, his professional eye arrested by the unnatural flush on her face.
“Fever?” she mumbled. “A person has got to be already dead in his coffin before you’d lift a finger to help.” She sped from the office into the dreary reception-hall.
On her way out her eye was caught by the black-faced type on the cover of a magazine that lay on the centre-table.
SHORT-STORY COMPETITION
A Five-Hundred-Dollar Prize for the Best Love-Story of a Working-Girl
As she read the magical words, the colour rushed to her cheeks. Forgotten was the humiliation of the superintendent’s refusal to take her in, forgotten were the cold, the hunger. Her whole being leaped at the words:
“Write your own love-story, but if you have never lived love, let it be your dream of love.”
“Your dream of love.” The words were as wine in her blood. Was there ever a girl who hungered and dreamed of love as she? It was as though in the depths of her poverty and want the fates had challenged her to give substance to her dreams. She stumbled out of the huge building, her feet in the snow, her mind in the clouds.
“God from the world! the gas is burning again!” cried Hanneh Breineh as she groped her way back into her cellar-room. “The children are dancing over the fire like for a holiday. All day they had nothing to warm in their bellies, and the coffee tastes like wine from heaven.”
“Wine from heaven!” repeated the girl. “What wine but love from heaven?” and she clutched the magazine more tightly to her shrunken chest.
In the flicker of the gas-jet the photograph on the wall greeted her like a living thing. With the feel of the steady gaze upon her, she re-read the message that was to her an invitation and a challenge; and as she read, the dingy little room became alive with light. The understanding eyes seemed to pour vision into her soul. What was the purpose of all the harsh experiences that had been hers till now but to make her see just this, that love, and love only, was the one vital force of life? What was the purpose of all the privation and want she had endured but to make her see more poignantly this ethereal essence of love? The walls of her little room dissolved. The longing for love that lay dumb within her all her years took shape in human form. More real than life, closer than the beat within her heart, was this radiant, all-consuming vision that possessed her.
She groped for pencil and paper and wrote, unaware that she was writing. It was as though a hand stronger than her own was laid upon hers. Her power seemed to come from some vast, fathomless source. The starved passions of all the starved ages poured through her in rhythmic torrent of words—words that flashed and leaped with the resistless fire of youth burning through generations of suppression.
Not until daylight filtered through the grating of her window did the writing cease, nor was she aware of any fatigue. An ethereal lightness, a sense of having escaped from the trammels of her body, lifted her as on wings. Her radiant face met the responsive glow of understanding that shone down on her from the wall. “It’s your light shining through me,” she exulted. “It’s your kind eyes looking into mine that made my dumbness speak.”
For the moment the contest was forgotten. She was seized by an irresistible impulse to take her outpourings to the man who had inspired her. “Let him only see what music he made of me.” Gathering tightly to her heart the scribbled sheets of paper, she hurried to the university.
A whole hour she waited at his office door. As she saw him coming, she could wait no longer, but ran towards him.
“Read it only,” she said, thrusting the manuscript at the bewildered man. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“What exotic creature was this, with her scattered pages of scrawling script and eager eyes?” President Irvine wondered. He concluded she was one of the immigrant group before which he had lectured.