“Oi-i-i-i! Mrs. Preston! You always make me feel so grand!” said Hanneh Hayyeh, a mist of tears in her wistful eyes. “When I go away from you I could just sit down and cry. I can’t give it out in words what it is. It chokes me so—how good you are to me—You ain’t at all like a rich lady. You’re so plain from the heart. You make the lowest nobody feel he’s somebody.”
“You are not a ‘nobody,’ Hanneh Hayyeh. You are an artist—an artist laundress.”
“What mean you an artist?”
“An artist is so filled with love for the beautiful that he has to express it in some way. You express it in your washing just as a painter paints it in a picture.”
“Paint?” exclaimed Hanneh Hayyeh. “If you could only give a look how I painted up my kitchen! It lights up the whole tenement house for blocks around. The grocer and the butcher and all the neighbors were jumping in the air from wonder and joy when they seen how I shined up my house.”
“And all in honor of Aby’s home-coming?” Mrs. Preston smiled, her thoughts for a moment on her own son, the youngest captain in his regiment whose home-coming had been delayed from week to week.
“Everything I do is done for my Aby,” breathed Hanneh Hayyeh, her hands clasping her bosom as if feeling again the throb of his babyhood at her heart. “But this painting was already dreaming itself in my head for years. You remember the time the hot iron fell on my foot and you came to see me and brought me a red flower-pot wrapped around with green crêpe paper? That flower-pot opened up the sky in my kitchen.” The words surged from the seething soul of her. “Right away I saw before my eyes how I could shine up my kitchen like a parlor by painting the walls and sewing up new curtains for the window. It was like seeing before me your face every time I looked on your flowers. I used to talk to it like it could hear and feel and see. And I said to it: ‘I’ll show you what’s in me. I’ll show you that I know what beautiful is.’”
Her face was aglow with an enthusiasm that made it seem young, like a young girl’s face.
“I begged myself by the landlord to paint up my kitchen, but he wouldn’t listen to me. So I seen that if I ever hoped to fix up my house, I’d have to spend out my own money. And I began to save a penny to a penny to have for the paint. And when I seen the painters, I always stopped them to ask where and how to buy it so that it should come out the cheapest. By day and by night it burned in me the picture—my kitchen shining all white like yours, till I couldn’t rest till I done it.”
With all her breeding, with all the restraint of her Anglo-Saxon forbears, Mrs. Preston was strangely shaken by Hanneh Hayyeh’s consuming passion for beauty. She looked deep into the eyes of the Russian Jewess as if drinking in the secret of their hidden glow.