§ 5
Weeks of tortuous waiting for news of the contest followed—weeks when she dogged the postman’s footsteps and paced the lonely streets in restless suspense. How could she ever have hoped to win the prize? Why was she so starving for the golden hills on the sky? If only for one day she could stop wasting her heart for the impossible!
Exhausted, spent, she lay on her cot when Hanneh Breineh, more than usually disturbed by the girl’s driven look, opened the door softly.
“Here you got it, a letter. I hope it’s such good luck in it as the paper is fine.”
“What’s the matter?” cried Hanneh Breineh in alarm at the girl’s sudden pallor as the empty envelope fluttered from limp fingers.
For answer Sophie held up the cheque.
“Five hundred dollars,” she cried, “and the winner of the first prize!”
Hanneh Breineh felt the cheque. She read it. It was actually true. Five hundred dollars! In a flurry of excitement she called the neighbours in the hall-ways, and then hurried to the butcher, pushing through the babbling women who crowded around the counter. “People listen only! My roomerkeh got a five-hundred-dollar prize!”
“Five hundred dollars?” The words leaped from lips to lips like fire in the air. “Ach! only the little bit of luck! Did she win it on the lotteree?”
“Not from the lottery. Just wrote something from her head. And you ought to see her, only a dried-up bone of a girl, and yet so smart.”
In a few moments Sophie was mobbed in her cellar by the gesticulating crowd of women who hurried in to gaze upon the miracle of good luck. With breathless awe hands felt her, and, reverently, the cheque. Yes, even mouths watered with an envy that was almost worship. They fell on her neck and kissed her.
“May we all live to have such luck to get rich quick!” they chorused.
The following day Sophie’s picture was in the Jewish evening paper. The Ghetto was drunk with pride because one of their number, and “only a dried-up bone of a girl,” had written a story good enough to be printed in a magazine of America. Their dreams of romance had found expression in the overwhelming success of this greenhorn cook.
In one day Sophie was elevated to a position of social importance by her achievement. When she walked in the street, people pointed at her with their fingers. She was deluged with requests “to give a taste” of the neighbours’ cooking.
When she went to the baker for her usual stale bread, the man picked out the finest loaf.
“Fresh bread for you in honour of your good luck. And here’s yet an apple strudel for good measure.” Nor would he take the money she offered. “Only eat it with good health. I’m paid enough with the honour that somebody with such luck steps into my store.”
“Of course,” explained Hanneh Breineh. “People will give you the last bite from their mouth when you’re lucky, because you don’t need their favours. But if you’re poor, they’re afraid to be good to you, so you should not hang on their necks for help.”
But the greatest surprise that awaited Sophie was the letter from the professor congratulating her upon her success.
“The students have unanimously voted you to be their guest of honour at luncheon on Saturday,” it read. “May we hope for the honour of your company on that occasion?”
The sky is falling to the earth—she a guest of honour of a well-fed, well-dressed world! She to break bread with those high up in rules of grammar! Sophie laughed aloud for the first time in months. Lunch at the hotel! A vision of snowy tablecloths, silver forks, delicate china, and sparkling glasses dazzled her. Yes, she would go, and go as she was. The clothes that had been good enough to starve and struggle in must be good enough to be feasted and congratulated in.
She was surprised at the sense of cold detachment with which she entered the hotel lobby.
“Maybe it’s my excuse to myself for going that makes me feel that I’m so above it,” she told herself. The grandeur, the lights, the lustre, and glamour of the magnificent hotel—she took it all in, her nose in the air.
At the entrance of the banquet-hall stood the professor, smiling, smiling. And all these people in silks and furs and broadcloth wanted to shake hands with her. Again, without knowing why, she longed to laugh aloud.
Not until Professor ——, smiling more graciously than ever, reached the close of his speech, not until he referred to her for the third time as having reached “the stars through difficulties,” did she realize that she who had looked on, she who had listened, she who had wanted so to laugh, was a person quite different from the uncouth girl with the shabby sweater and broken shoes whom the higher-ups were toasting and flattering.
“I’ve never made a talk yet in my life,” she said in answer to the calls for “Speech! speech!” “But these are grand words from the professor, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She looked around on these stars of the college world whom, after all her struggles, she had reached. “Yes, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She nodded with a queer little smile, and sat down amidst a shower of applause.