§ 5
“Last lot cheap! Apples sweet like honey!”
“Fish, live, fresh fish!”
“Shoe laces, matches, pins!”
The raucous orchestra of voices rose and fell in whining, blatant discord. Into the myriad sounds the rumbling Elevated bored its roaring thunder. Dirty, multi-coloured rags—the pinions of poverty—fluttered from the crowded windows. Streams of human atoms surged up and down the side-walk littered with filth. Horses and humans pounded and scuttled through the middle of the street.
Berel’s face shone exultant out of the crowd. In the quickening warmth of this old, familiar poverty his being expanded and breathed in huge drafts of air. The jostling mass of humanity that pressed about him was like the close embrace of countless friends.
Ach, here in this elemental struggle for existence was the reality he was seeking! It cried to him out of the dirty, driven faces. Here was the life that has never yet been fully lived. Here were the songs that have not yet been adequately sung.
“A black year on you, robber, swindler! If I go to buy rotten apples, should you charge me for fruit from heaven?”
The familiar voice shot like a bolt to his awakening heart. He looked up to see Hanneh Breineh’s ragged figure wedged in between two pushcarts, her face ecstatic with the zest of bargaining.
“Hanneh Breineh!” he cried, seizing her market basket, and almost throwing himself on her neck in a rush of exuberant affection. “I’ve come back to you and Moisheh!”
“God from the world! What’s this—you in rags?” A quick look of suspicion crept into her face. “Did you lose your money? Did you maybe play cards?”
“I left it all to her—you know—every cent of the ill-gotten money.”
“Left your money to that doll’s face?”
Hanneh clutched her head and peered at him out of her red-lidded eyes.
“Where’s Moisheh?” Berel asked.
He came closer to her, his whole face expressing the most childlike faith in her acceptance of his helplessness, in the assurance of her welcome.
“Don’t you yet know the pants pressers was on a strike, and he owed me the rent for so long he went away from shame?”
“But where is he—my brother?” cried Berel in despair.
“The devil knows, not me. I only know he owes me the rent!”
“Moisheh gone?” He felt the earth slipping from under him. He seized Hanneh Breineh’s hand imploringly. “You can squeeze me in with the other boarders—put me up on chairs—over the washtub—anywhere. I got no one but you!”
“No one but me?” Thrusting him down to his knees, she towered above him like some serpent-headed fury. “What did you ever done for me when you had it good that I should take pity on you now? Why was you such a stingy to me when you were rolling yourself in riches?”
Her voice came in thick gusts of passion, as the smouldering feeling of past neglect burst from her in volcanic wrath. “You black-hearted schnorrer, you!”
A crowd of neighbours and passers-by, who had gathered at her first cursing screams, now surged closer. With her passion for harangue, she was lifted to sublime heights of vituperative eloquence by her sensation-hungry audience.
“People! Give a look only! This soft idiot throws away all his money on a doll’s face, and then wants me to take the bread from the mouths of my own children to feed him!” She shook her fist in Berel’s face. “Loafer—liar! I was always telling you your bad end!”
A hoarse voice rose from the crowd.
“Pfui! the rotten rich one!”
“He used to blow from himself like a Vanderbilt!”
“Came riding around in automobiles!”
All the pent-up envy that they never dared express while he was in power suddenly found voice.
“He’s crazy—meshugeh!”
The mob took up the abuse and began to press closer. A thick piece of mud from an unknown hand flattened itself on the ashen cheek of the shaken poet. Instantly the lust for persecution swept the crowd. Mud rained on the crouching figure in their midst. Hoarse invectives, shrieks, infamous laughter rose from the mob, now losing all control.
With the look of a hunted beast, Berel drove his way through the merciless crowd. His clothing swirled in streaming rags behind him as he fled on, driven by the one instinct to escape alive.
When he had outdistanced those who pursued, he dropped in a dark hallway of an alley. Utter exhaustion drained him of all thought, all feeling.
Dawn came. Still Berel slept. From the near-by street the clattering of a morning milk wagon roused him slightly. He stirred painfully, then sank back into a dream which grew as vivid as life.
He saw himself a tiny, black ant in an ant-hill. While plodding toilfully with the teeming hive, he suddenly ventured on a path of his own. Then a huge, destroying force overwhelmed and crushed him, to the applause of the other ants, slaves of their traditional routine.
The pounding of a hammer rang above his head. He opened his eyes. A man was nailing a sign to the doorway into which he had sunk the night before. Berel rubbed his heavy-lidded eyes and, blinking, read the words:
MACHINE HANDS WANTED
“Food! Oi weh, a bite to eat! A job should I take?”
The disjointed thoughts of his tired brain urged him to move. He tried to rise, but he ached in every limb. The pain in his stiff body brought back to him the terror through which he had lived the day before. More than starvation, he feared the abyss of madness that yawned before him.
“Machine hand—anything,” he told himself. “Only to be sane—only to be like the rest—only to have peace!”
This new humility gave him strength. He mounted the stairs of the factory and took his place in the waiting line of applicants for work.