§ 4
A night of carousing had just ended. Berel Pinsky looked about his studio. Wineglasses were strewn about. Hairpins and cigarette ashes littered the floor. A woman’s rainbow-coloured scarf, reeking with tobacco smoke and perfume, lay wantonly across the piano keys.
He strode to the window and raised the shade, but quickly pulled it down again. The sunlight hurt him. The innocent freshness of the morning blew accusingly against his hot brow.
He threw himself on the couch, but he could not rest. Like a distorted mirror, his mind reflected the happenings of the night before.
A table decked with flowers and glittering with silver and glass swam in vinous streaks of purple and amber. Berel saw white shoulders and sinuous arms—women’s soft flesh against the black background of men’s dress coats.
One mocking moment rose out of the reeling picture. A bright head pressed against his breast. His arms encircled a slender silken body. Pinnacled high above the devouring faces of his guests, hectic verses sputtered from his lips with automatic fluency.
It was this scene, spurting out of his blurred vision, that stabbed him like a hidden enemy within his soul. He had prostituted the divine in him for the swinish applause of the mob!
“God help me! God help me!” His body swayed back and forth in dumb, driven helplessness. “My sin!” he moaned, and sank to his knees.
Unconsciously he recalled the ritual chant of the Hebrews on the Day of Atonement—a chant he had not heard since he was a little child in Russia.
“‘My sin—the sin I committed wilfully and the sin without will. Behold, I am like a vessel filled with shame and confusion!’”
As he repeated the chant, beating his breast, his heart began to swell and heave with the old racial hunger for purging, for cleanness.
“My sin!” he cried. “I took my virgin gift of song and dragged it through the mud of Broadway!”
His turbulent penance burst into sobs—broke through the parched waste within him. From afar off a phrase fragrant as dew, but vague and formless, trembled before him. With a surge of joy, he seized pencil and paper. Only to catch and voice the first gush of his returning spirit!
“Wake up, you nut!”
Shapiro had come in unobserved, and stood before him like a grinning Mephistopheles. Berel looked up, startled. The air boiled before him.
“See here—we got the chance of our life!” Shapiro, in his enthusiasm, did not notice Berel’s grim mood. He shook the poet by the shoulder. “Ten thousand bucks, and not a worry in your bean! Just sign your name to this.”
With a shudder of shame, Berel glanced at the manuscript and flung it from him.
“Sign my name to this trash?”
“Huh! You’re mighty squeamish all of a sudden!”
“I can’t choke no more my conscience.”
“Conscience, rot! If we can’t get the dope from you, I tell you, we got to get it from somebody else till you get back on the job!”
A cloud seemed to thicken Berel’s glance.
“Here,” he said, taking from his desk his last typewritten songs, “I’ve done my level best to grind this out.”
Shapiro grasped the sheets with quickening interest. He read, and then shook his head with grieved finality.
“It’s no use. It’s not in you any more. You’ve lost the punch.”
“You mean to tell me that my verses wouldn’t go?”
Berel’s eyes shone like hot coals out of his blanched face.
“Look here, old pal,” replied Shapiro, with patronizing pity. “You’ve just gone dry.”
“You ghoul!” Berel lifted his fist threateningly. “It’s you who worked me dry—made of my name nothing but a trade-mark!”
“So that’s what I get for all I done for you!” Revulsion at the boy’s ingratitude swept through Shapiro like a fury. “What do you think I am? Business is business. If you ain’t got the dope no more, why, you ain’t better than the bunch of plumbers that I chucked!”
With a guttural cry, Berel hurled himself forward like a tiger.
“You bloodsucker, you!”
A shriek from Maizie standing in the doorway. A whirling figure in chiffon and furs thrust itself between them, the impact pushing Shapiro back.
“Baby darling, you’re killing me!” Soft arms clung about Berel’s neck. “You don’t want to hurt nobody—you know you don’t—and you make me cry!”
Savagely Berel thrust the girl’s head back and looked into her eyes. His face flashed with the shame of the betrayed manhood in him.
“I was a poet before you smothered my fire with your jazz!”
For an instant Maizie’s features froze, terrified by an anger that she could not comprehend. Then she threw herself on his shoulder again.
“But it’s in rehearsal—booked to the coast. It’s all up with me unless you sign!”
He felt her sobs pounding away his anger. A hated tenderness slowly displaced his fury. Unwillingly, his arms clasped her closer.
“This once, but never again,” he breathed in her ear as he crushed her to him.
Gently Maizie extricated herself, with a smile shining through her tear-daubed face.
“You darling old pet! I’ll be grateful till I die,” she said, thrusting the pen into Berel’s hand.
With tragic acceptance of his weakness, Berel scrawled his well-known signature on one sheet after another. With a beaten look of hatred he handed them to Shapiro, now pacified and smiling.
Long after they had gone, Berel still sat in the same chair. He made no move. He uttered no sound. With doubled fists thrust between his knees, he sat there, his head sunk on his breast.
In the depths of his anguish a sudden light flashed. He picked up the rejected songs and read them with regained understanding. All the cheap triteness, the jazz vulgarity of the lines, leaped at him and hit him in the face.
“Pfui!” he laughed with bitter loathing, as he flung the tawdry verses from him.
Like a prisoner unbound, he sprang to his feet. He would shake himself free from the shackles of his riches! All this clutter of things about him—this huge, stuffy house with its useless rooms—the servants—his limousine—each added luxury was only another bar shutting him out from the light.
For an instant he pondered how to get rid of his stifling wealth. Should he leave it to Moisheh or Hanneh Breineh? No—they should not be choked under this mantle of treasure that had nearly choked the life in him.
A flash of inspiration—Maizie! God help her, poor life-loving Maizie! He would give it to her outright—everything, down to the last kitchen pot—only to be a free man again!
As quick as thought Berel scribbled a note to his lawyer, directing him to carry out this reckless whim. Then he went to the closet where, out of some strange, whimsical sentiment, he still kept his shabby old coat and hat. In a moment he was the old Berel again. Still in his frenzy, he strode towards the door.
“Back—back to Hanneh Breineh—to Moisheh—back to my own people! Free—free!”
He waved his hands exultantly. The walls resounded with his triumphant laughter. Grasping his shabby old cap in his hand, he raised it high over his head and slammed the gold-panelled door behind him with a thundering crash.