§ 3
Out in the street she struggled to get hold of herself again. Despite the tumult and upheaval that racked her soul, an intoxicating lure still held her up—the hope of seeing Frank Baker that evening. She was indeed a storm-racked ship, but within sight of shore. She need but throw out the signal, and help was nigh. She need but confide to Frank Baker of her break with her people, and all the dormant sympathy between them would surge up. His understanding would widen and deepen because of her great need for his understanding. He would love her the more because of her great need for his love.
Forcing back her tears, stepping over her heartbreak, she hurried to the hotel where she was to meet him. Her father’s impassioned rapture when he chanted the psalms of David lit up the visionary face of the young Jewess.
“After all, love is the beginning of the real life,” she thought as Frank Baker’s dark, handsome face flashed before her. “With him to hold on to, I’ll begin my new world.”
Borne higher and higher by the intoxicating illusion of her great destiny, she cried:
“A person all alone is but a futile cry in an unheeding wilderness. One alone is but a shadow, an echo of reality. It takes two together to create reality. Two together can pioneer a new world.”
With a vision of herself and Frank Baker marching side by side to the conquest of her heart’s desire, she added:
“No wonder a man’s love means so little to the American woman. They belong to the world in which they are born. They belong to their fathers and mothers; they belong to their relatives and friends. They are human even without a man’s love. I don’t belong; I’m not human. Only a man’s love can save me and make me human again.”
It was the busy dinner-hour at the fashionable restaurant. Pausing at the doorway with searching eyes and lips eagerly parted, Rachel’s swift glance circled the lobby. Those seated in the dining-room beyond who were not too absorbed in one another, noticed a slim, vivid figure of ardent youth, but with dark, age-old eyes that told of the restless seeking of her homeless race.
With nervous little movements of anxiety, Rachel sat down, got up, then started across the lobby. Half-way, she stopped, and her breath caught.
“Mr. Baker,” she murmured, her hands fluttering toward him with famished eagerness. His smooth, athletic figure had a cocksureness that to the girl’s worshipping gaze seemed the perfection of male strength.
“You must be doing wonderful things,” came from her admiringly, “you look so happy, so shining with life.”
“Yes”—he shook her hand vigorously—“I’ve been living for the first time since I was a kid. I’m full of such interesting experiences. I’m actually working in an East Side settlement.”
Dazed by his glamorous success, Rachel stammered soft phrases of congratulation as he led her to a table. But seated opposite him, the face of this untried youth, flushed with the health and happiness of another world than that of the poverty-crushed Ghetto, struck her almost as an insincerity.
“You in an East Side settlement?” she interrupted sharply. “What reality can there be in that work for you?”
“Oh,” he cried, his shoulders squaring with the assurance of his master’s degree in sociology, “it’s great to get under the surface and see how the other half live. It’s so picturesque! My conception of these people has greatly changed since I’ve been visiting their homes.” He launched into a glowing account of the East Side as seen by a twenty-five-year-old college graduate.
“I thought them mostly immersed in hard labour, digging subways or slaving in sweatshops,” he went on. “But think of the poetry which the immigrant is daily living!”
“But they’re so sunk in the dirt of poverty, what poetry do you see there?”
“It’s their beautiful home life, the poetic devotion between parents and children, the sacrifices they make for one another——”
“Beautiful home life? Sacrifices? Why, all I know of is the battle to the knife between parents and children. It’s black tragedy that boils there, not the pretty sentiments that you imagine.”
“My dear child”—he waved aside her objection—“you’re too close to judge dispassionately. This very afternoon, on one of my friendly visits, I came upon a dear old man who peered up at me through horn-rimmed glasses behind his pile of Hebrew books. He was hardly able to speak English, but I found him a great scholar.”
“Yes, a lazy old do-nothing, a bloodsucker on his wife and children.”
Too shocked for remonstrance, Frank Baker stared at her.
“How else could he have time in the middle of the afternoon to pore over his books?” Rachel’s voice was hard with bitterness. “Did you see his wife? I’ll bet she was slaving for him in the kitchen. And his children slaving for him in the sweatshop.”
“Even so, think of the fine devotion that the women and children show in making the lives of your Hebrew scholars possible. It’s a fine contribution to America, where our tendency is to forget idealism.”
“Give me better a plain American man who supports his wife and children, and I’ll give you all those dreamers of the Talmud.”
He smiled tolerantly at her vehemence.
“Nevertheless,” he insisted, “I’ve found wonderful material for my new book in all this. I think I’ve got a new angle on the social types of your East Side.”
An icy band tightened about her heart. “Social types,” her lips formed. How could she possibly confide to this man of the terrible tragedy that she had been through that very day? Instead of the understanding and sympathy that she had hoped to find, there were only smooth platitudes, the sight-seer’s surface interest in curious “social types.”
Frank Baker talked on. Rachel seemed to be listening, but her eyes had a far-off, abstracted look. She was quiet as a spinning-top is quiet, her thoughts and emotions revolving within her at high speed.
“That man in love with me? Why, he doesn’t see me or feel me. I don’t exist to him. He’s only stuck on himself, blowing his own horn. Will he never stop with his ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I’? Why, I was a crazy lunatic to think that just because we took the same courses in college he would understand me out in the real world.”
All the fire suddenly went out of her eyes. She looked a thousand years old as she sank back wearily in her chair.
“Oh, but I’m boring you with all my heavy talk on sociology.” Frank Baker’s words seemed to come to her from afar. “I have tickets for a fine musical comedy that will cheer you up, Miss Ravinsky——”
“Thanks, thanks,” she cut in hurriedly. Spend a whole evening sitting beside him in a theatre when her heart was breaking? No. All she wanted was to get away—away where she could be alone. “I have work to do,” she heard herself say. “I’ve got to get home.”
Frank Baker murmured words of polite disappointment and escorted her back to her door. She watched the sure swing of his athletic figure as he strode away down the street, then she rushed upstairs.
Back in her little room, stunned, bewildered, blinded with her disillusion, she sat staring at her four empty walls.
Hours passed, but she made no move, she uttered no sound. Doubled fists thrust between her knees, she sat there, staring blindly at her empty walls.
“I can’t live with the old world, and I’m yet too green for the new. I don’t belong to those who gave me birth or to those with whom I was educated.”
Was this to be the end of all her struggles to rise in America, she asked herself, this crushing daze of loneliness? Her driving thirst for an education, her desperate battle for a little cleanliness, for a breath of beauty, the tearing away from her own flesh and blood to free herself from the yoke of her parents—what was it all worth now? Where did it lead to? Was loneliness to be the fruit of it all?
Night was melting away like a fog; through the open window the first lights of dawn were appearing. Rachel felt the sudden touch of the sun upon her face, which was bathed in tears. Overcome by her sorrow, she shuddered and put her hand over her eyes as though to shut out the unwelcome contact. But the light shone through her fingers.
Despite her weariness, the renewing breath of the fresh morning entered her heart like a sunbeam. A mad longing for life filled her veins.
“I want to live,” her youth cried. “I want to live, even at the worst.”
Live how? Live for what? She did not know. She only felt she must struggle against her loneliness and weariness as she had once struggled against dirt, against the squalor and ugliness of her Ghetto home.
Turning from the window, she concentrated her mind, her poor tired mind, on one idea.
“I have broken away from the old world; I’m through with it. It’s already behind me. I must face this loneliness till I get to the new world. Frank Baker can’t help me; I must hope for no help from the outside. I’m alone; I’m alone till I get there.
“But am I really alone in my seeking? I’m one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.”