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.