“No,” said Fanny, low-voiced.
“Sometime, when you can snatch a moment from the fascinations of the mail order catalogue, read it. Fishberg says—I wish I could remember his exact words—`It isn't the body that marks the Jew. It's his Soul. The type is not anthropological, or physical; it's social or psychic. It isn't the complexion, the nose, the lips, the head. It's his Soul which betrays his faith. Centuries of Ghetto confinement, ostracism, ceaseless suffering, have produced a psychic type. The thing that is stamped on the Soul seeps through the veins and works its way magically to the face——'”
“But I don't want to talk about souls! Please! You're spoiling a wonderful day.”
“And you're spoiling a wonderful life. I don't object to this driving ambition in you. I don't say that you're wrong in wanting to make a place for yourself in the world. But don't expect me to stand by and let you trample over your own immortal soul to get there. Your head is busy enough on this infants' wear job, but how about the rest of you—how about You? What do you suppose all those years of work, and suppression, and self-denial, and beauty-hunger there in Winnebago were meant for! Not to develop the mail order business. They were given you so that you might recognize hunger, and suppression, and self-denial in others. The light in the face of that girl in the crowd pouring out of the plant. What's that but the reflection of the light in you! I tell you, Fanny, we Jews have got a money-grubbing, loud-talking, diamond-studded, get-there-at-any-price reputation, and perhaps we deserve it. But every now and then, out of the mass of us, one lifts his head and stands erect, and the great white light is in his face. And that person has suffered, for suffering breeds genius. It expands the soul just as over-prosperity shrivels it. You see it all the way from Lew Fields to Sarah Bernhardt; from Mendelssohn to Irving Berlin; from Mischa Elman to Charlie Chaplin. You were a person set apart in Winnebago. Instead of thanking your God for that, you set out to be something you aren't. No, it's worse than that. You're trying not to be what you are. And it's going to do for you.”
“Stop!” cried Fanny. “My head's whirling. It sounds like something out of `Alice in Wonderland.'”
“And you,” retorted Heyl, “sound like some one who's afraid to talk or think about herself. You're suppressing the thing that is you. You're cutting yourself off from your own people—a dramatic, impulsive, emotional people. By doing those things you're killing the goose that lays the golden egg. What's that old copy-book line? `To thine own self be true,' and the rest of it.”
“Yes; like Theodore, for example,” sneered Fanny.
At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a diversion. Across the black sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Heyl watched it in silence until the last pale glimmer faded and was gone, and only the brazen lights of Gary, far, far down the beach, cast a fiery glow against the sky.
They sighed, simultaneously. Then they laughed, each at the other.
“Curtain,” said Fanny. They raced for the station, despite the sand. Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp in parental arms; with lunch baskets exuding the sickly scent of bananas; with disheveled vandals whose moist palms grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers. Past the belching chimneys of Gary, through South Chicago, the back yard of a metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon them, and so to the city again. They looked at it with the shock that comes to eyes that have rested for hours on long stretches of sand and sky and water. Monday, that had seemed so far away, became an actuality of to-morrow.