§ 6
For weeks Berel Pinsky worked, dull and inanimate as the machines he had learned to drive. Work, eat, sleep—eat, sleep, work. Day after day he went to and from his hall bedroom, day after day to and from the shop.
He had ceased to struggle. He had ceased to be an individual, a soul apart. He was a piece of a mass, a cog of a machine, an ant of an ant hill. Individually he was nothing—they were nothing. Together they made up the shop.
So he went on. Inert, dumb as a beast in a yoke, he brushed against his neighbours. He never talked. As if in a dream, he heard the shrill babble of the other shop hands rise above the roaring noises of the machines.
One day, while eating his scanty lunch, lost in a dull, wandering daydream, he felt a movement at his elbow. Looking up, he saw Sosheh, the finisher, furtively reaching for a crust that had dropped from his thick slice of bread.
“You don’t want it yet?” she questioned, her face colouring with confusion.
“No,” he answered, surprised out of his silence. “But didn’t you have any lunch?”
“I’m saving myself from my lunches to buy me a red feather on my new spring hat.”
He looked at Sosheh curiously, and noticed for the first time the pinched look of the pale young face.
“Red over that olive paleness!” he mused. “How bright and singing that colour would be!”
Moved by an impulse of friendliness, he pushed an apple towards her.
“Take it,” he said. “I had one for my lunch already.”
He watched her with smiling interest as she bit hungrily into the juicy fruit.
“Will your feather be as red as this apple?” he asked.
“Ach!” she said, with her mouth full. “If you could only give a look how that feather is to me becoming! The redness waves over my black hair like waves from red wine!”
“Why, that girl is a poet!” he thought, thrilled by the way her mind leaped in her dumb yearning for beauty.
The next noon she appeared with a paper bag in her hand. Reverently she drew forth a bright red cock’s feather.
“Nu, ain’t it grand? For two weeks my lunch money it is.”
“How they want to shine, the driven things, even in the shop!” he mused. “Starving for a bit of bright colour—denying themselves food for the shimmering touch of a little beauty!”
One morning, when he had risen to go to work in the grey dawn, he found his landlady bending over an ironing board in the dim gaslight, pressing a child’s white dress. She put down the iron to give Berel his breakfast.
“My little Gittel is going to speak a piece to-day.” Her face glowed as she showed him the frock. “Give a look only on those flowers I stitched out myself on the sash. Don’t they smell almost the fields to you?”
He gazed in wonder at the mother’s face beaming down at him. How could Tzipeh Yenteh still sense the perfume of the fields in this dead grind of work? How could his care-crushed landlady, with seven hungry mouths to feed—how could she still reach out for the beautiful? His path to work was lit up by Tzipeh Yenteh’s face as she showed him her Gittel’s dress in all its freshness.
Little by little he found himself becoming interested in the people about him. Each had his own hidden craving. Each one longed for something beautiful that was his and no one else’s.
Beauty—beauty! Ach, the lure of it, the tender hope of it! How it filled every heart with its quickening breath! It made no difference what form it took—whether it was the craving for a bright feather, a passion for an ideal, or the love of man for woman. Behind it all was the same flaming hope, the same deathless outreaching for the higher life!
God, what a song to sing! The imperishable glamour of beauty, painting the darkest sweatshop in rainbow colours of heaven, splashing the gloom of the human ant-hill with the golden pigments of sunrise and sunset!
Lifted to winged heights by the onrush of this new vision, Berel swept home with the other toilers pouring from shops and factories.
How thankful he was for the joy of his bleak little room! He shut the door, secure in his solitude. Voices began to speak to him. Faces began to shine for him—the dumb, the oppressed, the toil-driven multitudes who lived and breathed unconscious of the cryings-out in them. All the thwarted longings of their lives, all the baffled feelings of their hearts, all the aching dumbness of their lips, rose to his sympathetic lips, singing the song of the imperishable soul in them.
Berel thought how Beethoven lay prone on the ground, his deaf ears hearing the beat of insects’ wings, the rustle of grass, the bloom of buds, all the myriad voices of the pregnant earth. For the first time since the loss of his gift in the jazz pit of Tin Pan Alley, the young poet heard the rhythm of divine creation.
He drew a sheet of white paper before his eyes. From his trembling fingers flowed a poem that wrote its own music—every line a song—the whole a symphony of his regeneration.
“To think that I once despised them—my own people!” he mused. “Ach, I was too dense with young pride to see them then!”
His thoughts digging down into the soil of his awakened spirit, he cried aloud:
“Beauty is everywhere, but I can sing it only of my own people. Some one will find it even in Tin Pan Alley—among Maizie’s life-loving crowd; but I, in this life, must be the poet of the factories—of my own East Side!”