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HUNGRY HEARTS

BY
ANZIA YEZIERSKA

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY ANZIA YEZIERSKA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

To Mrs. Henry Ollesheimer

CONTENTS

HUNGRY HEARTS

WINGS

“My heart chokes in me like in a prison! I’m dying for a little love and I got nobody—nobody!” wailed Shenah Pessah, as she looked out of the dismal basement window.

It was a bright Sunday afternoon in May, and into the gray, cheerless, janitor’s basement a timid ray of sunlight announced the dawn of spring.

“Oi weh! Light!” breathed Shenah Pessah, excitedly, throwing open the sash. “A little light in the room for the first time!” And she stretched out her hands hungrily for the warming bit of sun.

The happy laughter of the shopgirls standing on the stoop with their beaux and the sight of the young mothers with their husbands and babies fanned anew the consuming fire in her breast.

“I’m not jealous!” she gasped, chokingly. “My heart hurts too deep to want to tear from them their luck to happiness. But why should they live and enjoy life and why must I only look on how they are happy?”

She clutched at her throat like one stifled for want of air. “What is the matter with you? Are you going out of your head? For what is your crying? Who will listen to you? Who gives a care what’s going to become from you?”

Crushed by her loneliness, she sank into a chair. For a long time she sat motionless, finding drear fascination in the mocking faces traced in the patches of the torn plaster. Gradually, she became aware of a tingling warmth playing upon her cheeks. And with a revived breath, she drank in the miracle of the sunlit wall.

“Ach!” she sighed. “Once a year the sun comes to light up even this dark cellar, so why shouldn’t the High One send on me too a little brightness?”

This new wave of hope swept aside the fact that she was the “greenhorn” janitress, that she was twenty-two and dowryless, and, according to the traditions of her people, condemned to be shelved aside as an unmated thing—a creature of pity and ridicule.

“I can’t help it how old I am or how poor I am!” she burst out to the deaf and dumb air. “I want a little life! I want a little joy!”

The bell rang sharply, and as she turned to answer the call, she saw a young man at the doorway—a framed picture of her innermost dreams.

The stranger spoke.

Shenah Pessah did not hear the words, she heard only the music of his voice. She gazed fascinated at his clothes—the loose Scotch tweeds, the pongee shirt, a bit open at the neck, but she did not see him or the things he wore. She only felt an irresistible presence seize her soul. It was as though the god of her innermost longings had suddenly taken shape in human form and lifted her in mid-air.

“Does the janitor live here?” the stranger repeated.

Shenah Pessah nodded.

“Can you show me the room to let?”

“Yes, right away, but wait only a minute,” stammered Shenah Pessah, fumbling for the key on the shelf.

“Don’t fly into the air!” She tried to reason with her wild, throbbing heart, as she walked upstairs with him. In an effort to down the chaos of emotion that shook her she began to talk nervously: “Mrs. Stein who rents out the room ain’t going to be back till the evening, but I can tell you the price and anything you want to know. She’s a grand cook and you can eat by her your breakfast and dinner—” She did not have the slightest notion of what she was saying, but talked on in a breathless stream lest he should hear the loud beating of her heart.

“Could I have a drop-light put in here?” the man asked, as he looked about the room.

Shenah Pessah stole a quick, shy glance at him. “Are you maybe a teacher or a writing man?”

“Yes, sometimes I teach,” he said, studying her, drawn by the struggling soul of her that cried aloud to him out of her eyes.

“I could tell right away that you must be some kind of a somebody,” she said, looking up with wistful worship in her eyes. “Ach, how grand it must be to live only for learning and thinking.”

“Is this your home?”

“I never had a home since I was eight years old. I was living by strangers even in Russia.”

“Russia?” he repeated with quickened attention. So he was in their midst, the people he had come to study. The girl with her hungry eyes and intense eagerness now held a new interest for him.

John Barnes, the youngest instructor of sociology in his university, congratulated himself at his good fortune in encountering such a splendid type for his research. He was preparing his thesis on the “Educational Problems of the Russian Jews,” and in order to get into closer touch with his subject, he had determined to live on the East Side during his spring and summer vacation.

He went on questioning her, unconsciously using all the compelling power that made people open their hearts to him. “And how long have you been here?”

“Two years already.”

“You seem to be fond of study. I suppose you go to night-school?”

“I never yet stepped into a night-school since I came to America. From where could I get the time? My uncle is such an old man he can’t do much and he got already used to leave the whole house on me.”

“You stay with your uncle, then?”

“Yes, my uncle sent for me the ticket for America when my aunt was yet living. She got herself sick. And what could an old man like him do with only two hands?”

“Was that sufficient reason for you to leave your homeland?”

“What did I have out there in Savel that I should be afraid to lose? The cows that I used to milk had it better than me. They got at least enough to eat and me slaving from morning till night went around hungry.”

“You poor child!” broke from the heart of the man, the scientific inquisition of the sociologist momentarily swept away by his human sympathy.

Who had ever said “poor child” to her—and in such a voice? Tears gathered in Shenah Pessah’s eyes. For the first time she mustered the courage to look straight at him. The man’s face, his voice, his bearing, so different from any one she had ever known, and yet what was there about him that made her so strangely at ease with him? She went on talking, led irresistibly by the friendly glow in his eyes.

“I got yet a lot of luck. I learned myself English from a Jewish English reader, and one of the boarders left me a grand book. When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.” Her whole face and figure lit up with animation as she poured herself out to him.

“So even in the midst of these sordid surroundings were ‘wings’ and ‘high thoughts,’” he mused. Again the gleam of the visionary—the eternal desire to reach out and up, which was the predominant racial trait of the Russian immigrant.

“What is the name of your book?” he continued, taking advantage of this providential encounter.

“The book is ‘Dreams,’ by Olive Schreiner.”

“H—m,” he reflected. “So these are the ‘wings’ and ‘high thoughts.’ No wonder the blushes—the tremulousness. What an opportunity for a psychological test-case, and at the same time I could help her by pointing the way out of her nebulous emotionalism and place her feet firmly on earth.” He made a quick, mental note of certain books that he would place in her hands and wondered how she would respond to them.

“Do you belong to a library?”

“Library? How? Where?”

Her lack of contact with Americanizing agencies appalled him.

“I’ll have to introduce you to the library when I come to live here,” he said.

“Oi-i! You really like it, the room?” Shenah Pessah clapped her hands in a burst of uncontrollable delight.

“I like the room very much, and I shall be glad to take it if you can get it ready for me by next week.”

Shenah Pessah looked up at the man. “Do you mean it? You really want to come and live here, in this place? The sky is falling to the earth!”

“Live here?” Most decidedly he would live here. He became suddenly enthusiastic. But it was the enthusiasm of the scientist for the specimen of his experimentation—of the sculptor for the clay that would take form under his touch.

“I’m coming here to live—” He was surprised at the eager note in his voice, the sudden leaven of joy that surged through his veins. “And I’m going to teach you to read sensible books, the kind that will help you more than your dream book.”

Shenah Pessah drank in his words with a joy that struck back as fear lest this man—the visible sign of her answered prayer—would any moment be snatched up and disappear in the heavens where he belonged. With a quick leap toward him she seized his hand in both her own. “Oi, mister! Would you like to learn me English lessons too? I’ll wash for you your shirts for it. If you would even only talk to me, it would be more to me than all the books in the world.”

He instinctively recoiled at this outburst of demonstrativeness. His eyes narrowed and his answer was deliberate. “Yes, you ought to learn English,” he said, resuming his professional tone, but the girl was too overwrought to notice the change in his manner.

“There it is,” he thought to himself on his way out. “The whole gamut of the Russian Jew—the pendulum swinging from abject servility to boldest aggressiveness.”

Shenah Pessah remained standing and smiling to herself after Mr. Barnes left. She did not remember a thing she had said. She only felt herself whirling in space, millions of miles beyond the earth. The god of dreams had arrived and nothing on earth could any longer hold her down.

Then she hurried back to the basement and took up the broken piece of mirror that stood on the shelf over the sink and gazed at her face trying to see herself through his eyes. “Was it only pity that made him stop to talk to me? Or can it be that he saw what’s inside me?”

Her eyes looked inward as she continued to talk to herself in the mirror.

“God from the world!” she prayed. “I’m nothing and nobody now, but ach! How beautiful I would become if only the light from his eyes would fall on me!”

Covering her flushed face with her hands as if to push back the tumult of desire that surged within her, she leaned against the wall. “Who are you to want such a man?” she sobbed.

“But no one is too low to love God, the Highest One. There is no high in love and there is no low in love. Then why am I too low to love him?”

“Shenah Pessah!” called her uncle angrily. “What are you standing there like a yok, dreaming in the air? Don’t you hear the tenants knocking on the pipes? They are hollering for the hot water. You let the fire go out.”

At the sound of her uncle’s voice all her “high thoughts” fled. The mere reminder of the furnace with its ashes and cinders smothered her buoyant spirits and again she was weighed down by the strangling yoke of her hateful, daily round.

It was evening when she got through with her work. To her surprise she did not feel any of the old weariness. It was as if her feet danced under her. Then from the open doorway of their kitchen she overheard Mrs. Melker, the matchmaker, talking to her uncle.

“Motkeh, the fish-peddler, is looking for a wife to cook him his eating and take care on his children,” she was saying in her shrill, grating voice. “So I thought to myself this is a golden chance for Shenah Pessah to grab. You know a girl in her years and without money, a single man wouldn’t give a look on her.”

Shenah Pessah shuddered. She wanted to run away from the branding torture of their low talk, but an unreasoning curiosity drew her to listen.

“Living is so high,” went on Mrs. Melker, “that single men don’t want to marry themselves even to young girls, except if they can get themselves into a family with money to start them up in business. It is Shenah Pessah’s luck yet that Motkeh likes good eating and he can’t stand it any more the meals in a restaurant. He heard from people what a good cook and housekeeper Shenah Pessah is, so he sent me around to tell you he would take her as she stands without a cent.”

Mrs. Melker dramatically beat her breast. “I swear I shouldn’t live to go away from here alive, I shouldn’t live to see my own children married if I’m talking this match for the few dollars that Motkeh will pay me for it, but because I want to do something good for a poor orphan. I’m a mother, and it weeps in me my heart to see a girl in her years and not married.”

“And who’ll cook for me my eating, if I’ll let her go?” broke out her uncle angrily. “And who’ll do me my work? Didn’t I spend out fifty dollars to send for her the ticket to America? Oughtn’t I have a little use from her for so many dollars I laid out on her?”

“Think on God!” remonstrated Mrs. Melker. “The girl is an orphan and time is pushing itself on her. Do you want her to sit till her braids grow gray, before you’ll let her get herself a man? It stands in the Talmud that a man should take the last bite away from his mouth to help an orphan get married. You’d beg yourself out a place in heaven in the next world—”

“In America a person can’t live on hopes for the next world. In America everybody got to look out for himself. I’d have to give up the janitor’s work to let her go, and then where would I be?”

“You lived already your life. Give her also a chance to lift up her head in the world. Couldn’t you get yourself in an old man’s home?”

“These times you got to have money even in an old man’s home. You know how they say, if you oil the wheels you can ride. With dry hands you can’t get nothing in America.”

“So you got no pity on an orphan and your own relation? All her young years she choked herself in darkness and now comes already a little light for her, a man that can make a good living wants her—”

“And who’ll have pity on me if I’ll let her out from my hands? Who is this Motkeh, anyway? Is he good off? Would I also have a place where to lay my old head? Where stands he out with his pushcart?”

“On Essex Street near Delancey.”

“Oi-i! You mean Motkeh Pelz? Why, I know him yet from years ago. They say his wife died him from hunger. She had to chew the earth before she could beg herself out a cent from him. By me Shenah Pessah has at least enough to eat and shoes on her feet. I ask you only is it worth already to grab a man if you got to die from hunger for it?”

Shenah Pessah could listen no longer.

“Don’t you worry yourself for me,” she commanded, charging into the room. “Don’t take pity on my years. I’m living in America, not in Russia. I’m not hanging on anybody’s neck to support me. In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be fifty years old and without a man, and nobody pities her.”

Seizing her shawl, she ran out into the street. She did not know where her feet carried her. She had only one desire—to get away. A fierce rebellion against everything and everybody raged within her and goaded her on until she felt herself choked with hate.

All at once she visioned a face and heard a voice. The blacker, the more stifling the ugliness of her prison, the more luminous became the light of the miraculous stranger who had stopped for a moment to talk to her. It was as though inside a pit of darkness the heavens opened and hidden hopes began to sing.

Her uncle was asleep when she returned. In the dim gaslight she looked at his yellow, care-crushed face with new compassion in her heart. “Poor old man!” she thought, as she turned to her room. “Nothing beautiful never happened to him. What did he have in life outside the worry for bread and rent? Who knows, maybe if such a god of men would have shined on him—” She fell asleep and she awoke with visions opening upon visions of new, gleaming worlds of joy and hope. She leaped out of bed singing a song she had not heard since she was a little child in her mother’s home.

Several times during the day, she found herself, at the broken mirror, arranging and rearranging her dark mass of unkempt hair with fumbling fingers. She was all a-tremble with breathless excitement to imitate the fluffy style of the much-courted landlady’s daughter.

For the first time she realized how shabby and impossible her clothes were. “Oi weh!” she wrung her hands. “I’d give away everything in the world only to have something pretty to wear for him. My whole life hangs on how I’ll look in his eyes. I got to have a hat and a new dress. I can’t no more wear my ‘greenhorn’ shawl going out with an American.

“But from where can I get the money for new clothes? Oi weh! How bitter it is not to have the dollar! Woe is me! No mother, no friend, nobody to help me lift myself out of my greenhorn rags.”

“Why not pawn the feather bed your mother left you?” She jumped at the thought.

“What? Have you no heart? No feelings? Pawn the only one thing left from your dead mother?

“Why not? Nothing is too dear for him. If your mother could stand up from her grave, she’d cut herself in pieces, she’d tear the sun and stars out from the sky to make you beautiful for him.”

Late one evening Zaretsky sat in his pawnshop, absorbed in counting the money of his day’s sales, when Shenah Pessah, with a shawl over her head and a huge bundle over her shoulder, edged her way hesitantly into the store. Laying her sacrifice down on the counter, she stood dumbly and nervously fingered the fringes of her shawl.

The pawnbroker lifted his miserly face from the cash-box and shot a quick glance at the girl’s trembling figure.

“Nu?” said Zaretsky, in his cracked voice, cutting the twine from the bundle and unfolding a feather bed. His appraising hand felt that it was of the finest down. “How much ask you for it?”

The fiendish gleam of his shrewd eyes paralyzed her with terror. A lump came in her throat and she wavered speechless.

“I’ll give you five dollars,” said Zaretsky.

“Five dollars?” gasped Shenah Pessah. Her hands rushed back anxiously to the feather bed and her fingers clung to it as if it were a living thing. She gazed panic-stricken at the gloomy interior of the pawnshop with its tawdry jewels in the cases; the stacks of second-hand clothing hanging overhead, back to the grisly face of the pawnbroker. The weird tickings that came from the cheap clocks on the shelves behind Zaretsky, seemed to her like the smothered heart-beats of people who like herself had been driven to barter their last precious belongings for a few dollars.

“Is it for yourself that you come?” he asked, strangely stirred by the mute anguish in the girl’s eyes. This morgue of dead belongings had taken its toll of many a pitiful victim of want. But never before had Zaretsky been so affected. People bargained and rebelled and struggled with him on his own plane. But the dumb helplessness of this girl and her coming to him at such a late hour touched the man’s heart.

“Is it for yourself?” he repeated, in a softened tone.

The new note of feeling in his voice made her look up. The hard, crafty expression on his face had given place to a look of sympathy.

“Yes, it’s mine, from my mother,” she stammered, brokenly. “The last memory from Russia. How many winters it took my mother to pick together the feathers. She began it when I was yet a little baby in the cradle—and—” She covered her face with her shawl and sobbed.

“Any one sick? Why do you got to pawn it?”

She raised her tear-stained face and mutely looked at him. How could she explain and how could he possibly understand her sudden savage desire for clothes?

Zaretsky, feeling that he had been clumsy and tactless, hastened to add, “Nu—I’ll give you—a—a—a—ten dollars,” he finished with a motion of his hand, as if driving from him the onrush of generosity that seized him.

“Oi, mister!” cried Shenah Pessah, as the man handed her the bill. “You’re saving me my life! God will pay you for this goodness.” And crumpling the money in her hand, she hurried back home elated.

The following evening, as soon as her work was over, Shenah Pessah scurried through the ghetto streets, seeking in the myriad-colored shop windows the one hat and the one dress that would voice the desire of her innermost self. At last she espied a shining straw with cherries so red, so luscious, that they cried out to her, “Bite me!” That was the hat she bought.

The magic of those cherries on her hat brought back to her the green fields and orchards of her native Russia. Yes, a green dress was what she craved. And she picked out the greenest, crispest organdie.

That night, as she put on her beloved colors, she vainly tried to see herself from head to foot, but the broken bit of a mirror that she owned could only show her glorious parts of her. Her clothes seemed to enfold her in flames of desire leaping upon desire. “Only to be beautiful! Only to be beautiful!” she murmured breathlessly. “Not for myself, but only for him.”

Time stood still for Shenah Pessah as she counted the days, the hours, and the minutes for the arrival of John Barnes. At last, through her basement window, she saw him walk up the front steps. She longed to go over to him and fling herself at his feet and cry out to him with what hunger of heart she awaited his coming. But the very intensity of her longing left her faint and dumb.

He passed to his room. Later, she saw him walk out without even stopping to look at her. The next day and the day after, she watched him from her hidden corner pass in and out of the house, but still he did not come to her.

Oh, how sweet it was to suffer the very hurt of his oblivion of her! She gloried in his great height that made him so utterly unaware of her existence. It was enough for her worshiping eyes just to glimpse him from afar. What was she to him? Could she expect him to greet the stairs on which he stepped? Or take notice of the door that swung open for him? After all, she was nothing but part of the house. So why should he take notice of her? She was the steps on which he walked. She was the door that swung open for him. And he did not know it.

For four evenings in succession, ever since John Barnes had come to live in the house, Shenah Pessah arrayed herself in her new things and waited. Was it not a miracle that he came the first time when she did not even dream that he was on earth? So why shouldn’t the miracle happen again? This evening, however, she was so spent with the hopelessness of her longing that she had no energy left to put on her adornments.

All at once she was startled out of her apathy by a quick tap on her window-pane. “How about going to the library, to-morrow evening?” asked John Barnes.

“Oi-i-i! Yes! Thanks—” she stammered in confusion.

“Well, to-morrow night, then, at seven. Thank you.” He hurried out embarrassed by the grateful look that shone to him out of her eyes. The gaze haunted him and hurt him. It was the beseeching look of a homeless dog, begging to be noticed. “Poor little immigrant,” he thought, “how lonely she must be!”

“So he didn’t forget,” rejoiced Shenah Pessah. “How only the sound from his voice opens the sky in my heart! How the deadness and emptiness in me flames up into life! Ach! The sun is again beginning to shine!”

An hour before the appointed time, Shenah Pessah dressed herself in all her finery for John Barnes. She swung open the door and stood in readiness watching the little clock on the mantel-shelf. The ticking thing seemed to throb with the unutterable hopes compressed in her heart, all the mute years of her stifled life. Each little thud of time sang a wild song of released joy—the joy of his coming nearer.

For the tenth time Shenah Pessah went over in her mind what she would say to him when he’d come.

“It was so kind from you to take from your dear time—to—”

“No—that sounds not good. I’ll begin like this—Mr. Barnes! I can’t give it out in words your kindness, to stop from your high thoughts to—to—”

“No—no! Oi weh! God from the world! Why should it be so hard for me to say to him what I mean? Why shouldn’t I be able to say to him plain out—Mr. Barnes! You are an angel from the sky! You are saving me my life to let me only give a look on you! I’m happier than a bird in the air when I think only that such goodness like you—”

The sudden ring of the bell shattered all her carefully rehearsed phrases and she met his greeting in a flutter of confusion.

“My! Haven’t you blossomed out since last night!” exclaimed Mr. Barnes, startled by Shenah Pessah’s sudden display of color.

“Yes,” she flushed, raising to him her radiant face. “I’m through for always with old women’s shawls. This is my first American dress-up.”

“Splendid! So you want to be an American! The next step will be to take up some work that will bring you in touch with American people.”

“Yes. You’ll help me? Yes?” Her eyes sought his with an appeal of unquestioning reliance.

“Have you ever thought what kind of work you would like to take up?” he asked, when they got out into the street.

“No—I want only to get away from the basement. I’m crazy for people.”

“Would you like to learn a trade in a factory?”

“Anything—anything! I’m burning to learn. Give me only an advice. What?”

“What can you do best with your hands?”

“With the hands the best? It’s all the same what I do with the hands. Think you not maybe now, I could begin already something with the head? Yes?”

“We’ll soon talk this over together, after you have read a book that will tell you how to find out what you are best fitted for.”

When they entered the library, Shenah Pessah halted in awe. “What a stillness full from thinking! So beautiful, it comes on me like music!”

“Yes. This is quite a place,” he acquiesced, seeing again the public library in a new light through her eyes. “Some of the best minds have worked to give us just this.”

“How the book-ladies look so quiet like the things.”

“Yes,” he replied, with a tell-tale glance at her. “I too like to see a woman’s face above her clothes.”

The approach of the librarian cut off further comment. As Mr. Barnes filled out the application card, Shenah Pessah noted the librarian’s simple attire. “What means he a woman’s face above her clothes?” she wondered. And the first shadow of a doubt crossed her mind as to whether her dearly bought apparel was pleasing to his eyes. In the few brief words that passed between Mr. Barnes and the librarian, Shenah Pessah sensed that these two were of the same world and that she was different. Her first contact with him in a well-lighted room made her aware that “there were other things to the person besides the dress-up.” She had noticed their well-kept hands on the desk and she became aware that her own were calloused and rough. That is why she felt her dirty finger-nails curl in awkwardly to hide themselves as she held the pen to sign her name.

When they were out in the street again, he turned to her and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to walk back. The night is so fine and I’ve been in the stuffy office all day.”

“I don’t mind”—the words echoed within her. If he only knew how above all else she wanted this walk.

“It was grand in there, but the electric lights are like so many eyes looking you over. In the street it is easier for me. The dark covers you up so good.”

He laughed, refreshed by her unconscious self-revelation.

“As long as you feel in your element let’s walk on to the pier.”

“Like for a holiday, it feels itself in me,” she bubbled, as he took her arm in crossing the street. “Now see I America for the first time!”

It was all so wonderful to Barnes that in the dirt and noise of the overcrowded ghetto, this erstwhile drudge could be transfigured into such a vibrant creature of joy. Even her clothes that had seemed so bold and garish awhile ago, were now inexplicably in keeping with the carnival spirit that he felt steal over him.

As they neared the pier, he reflected strangely upon the fact that out of the thousands of needy, immigrant girls whom he might have befriended, this eager young being at his side was ordained by some peculiar providence to come under his personal protection.

“How long did you say you have been in this country, Shenah Pessah?”

“How long?” She echoed his words as though waking from a dream. “It’s two years already. But that didn’t count life. From now on I live.”

“And you mean to tell me that in all this time, no one has taken you by the hand and shown you the ways of our country? The pity of it!”

“I never had nothing, nor nobody. But now—it dances under me the whole earth! It feels in me grander than dreams!”

He drank in the pure joy out of her eyes. For the moment, the girl beside him was the living flame of incarnate Spring.

“He feels for me,” she rejoiced, as they walked on in silence. The tenderness of his sympathy enfolded her like some blessed warmth.

When they reached the end of the pier, they paused and watched the moonlight playing on the water. In the shelter of a truck they felt benignly screened from any stray glances of the loiterers near by.

How big seemed his strength as he stood silhouetted against the blue night! For the first time Shenah Pessah noticed the splendid straightness of his shoulders. The clean glowing youth of him drew her like a spell.

“Ach! Only to keep always inside my heart the kindness, the gentlemanness that shines from his face,” thought Shenah Pessah, instinctively nestling closer.

“Poor little immigrant!” murmured John Barnes. “How lonely, how barren your life must have been till—” In an impulse of compassion, his arms opened and Shenah Pessah felt her soul swoon in ecstasy as he drew her toward him.

It was three days since the eventful evening on the pier and Shenah Pessah had not seen John Barnes since. He had vanished like a dream, and yet he was not a dream. He was the only thing real in the unreal emptiness of her unlived life. She closed her eyes and she saw again his face with its joy-giving smile. She heard again his voice and felt again his arms around her as he kissed her lips. Then in the midst of her sweetest visioning a gnawing emptiness seized her and the cruel ache of withheld love sucked dry all those beautiful feelings his presence inspired. Sometimes there flashed across her fevered senses the memory of his compassionate endearments: “Poor lonely little immigrant!” And she felt his sweet words smite her flesh with their cruel mockery.

She went about her work with restlessness. At each step, at each sound, she started, “Maybe it’s him! Maybe!” She could not fall asleep at night, but sat up in bed writing and tearing up letters to him. The only lull to the storm that uprooted her being was in trying to tell him how every throb within her clamored for him, but the most heart-piercing cry that she could utter only stabbed her heart with the futility of words.

In the course of the week it was Shenah Pessah’s duty to clean Mrs. Stein’s floor. This brought her to Mr. Barnes’s den in his absence. She gazed about her, calling up his presence at the sight of his belongings.

“How fine to the touch is the feel from everything his,” she sighed, tenderly resting her cheek on his dressing-gown. With a timid hand she picked up a slipper that stood beside his bed and she pressed it to her heart reverently. “I wish I was this leather thing only to hold his feet!” Then she turned to his dresser and passed her hands caressingly over the ivory things on it. “Ach! You lucky brush—smoothing his hair every day!”

All at once she heard footsteps, and before she could collect her thoughts, he entered. Her whole being lit up with the joy of his coming. But one glance at him revealed to her the changed expression that darkened his face. His arms hung limply at his side—the arms she expected to stretch out to her and enfold her. As if struck in the face by his heartless rebuff, she rushed out blindly.

“Just a minute, please,” he managed to detain her. “As a gentleman, I owe you an apology. That night—it was a passing moment of forgetfulness. It’s not to happen again—”

Before he had finished, she had run out scorched with shame by his words.

“Good Lord!” he ejaculated, when he found he was alone. “Who’d ever think that she would take it so? I suppose there is no use trying to explain to her.”

For some time he sat on his bed, staring ruefully. Then, springing to his feet, he threw his things together in a valise. “You’d be a cad if you did not clear out of here at once,” he muttered to himself. “No matter how valuable the scientific inquiry might prove to be, you can’t let the girl run away with herself.”

Shenah Pessah was at the window when she saw John Barnes go out with his suitcases.

“In God’s name, don’t leave me!” she longed to cry out. “You are the only bit of light that I ever had, and now it will be darker and emptier for my eyes than ever before!” But no voice could rise out of her parched lips. She felt a faintness stunning her senses as though some one had cut open the arteries of her wrists and all the blood rushed out of her body.

“Oi weh!” she moaned. “Then it was all nothing to him. Why did he make bitter to me the little sweetness that was dearer to me than my life? What means he a gentleman?

“Why did he make me to shame telling me he didn’t mean nothing? Is it because I’m not a lady alike to him? Is a gentleman only a make-believe man?”

With a defiant resolve she seized hold of herself and rose to her feet. “Show him what’s in you. If it takes a year, or a million years, you got to show him you’re a person. From now on, you got why to live. You got to work not with the strength of one body and one brain, but with the strength of a million bodies and a million brains. By day and by night, you got to push, push yourself up till you get to him and can look him in his face eye to eye.”

Spent by the fervor of this new exaltation, she sat with her head in her hands in a dull stupor. Little by little the darkness cleared from her soul and a wistful serenity crept over her. She raised her face toward the solitary ray of sunlight that stole into her basement room.

“After all, he done for you more than you could do for him. You owe it to him the deepest, the highest he waked up in you. He opened the wings of your soul.”

HUNGER

Shenah Pessah paused in the midst of scrubbing the stairs of the tenement. “Ach!” she sighed. “How can his face still burn so in me when he is so long gone? How the deadness in me flames up with life at the thought of him!”

The dark hallway seemed flooded with white radiance. She closed her eyes that she might see more vividly the beloved features. The glowing smile that healed all ills of life and changed her from the weary drudge into the vibrant creature of joy.

It was all a miracle—his coming, this young professor from one of the big colleges. He had rented a room in the very house where she was janitress so as to be near the people he was writing about. But more wonderful than all was the way he stopped to talk to her, to question her about herself as though she were his equal. What warm friendliness had prompted him to take her out of her dark basement to the library where there were books to read!

And then—that unforgettable night on the way home, when the air was poignant with spring! Only a moment—a kiss—a pressure of hands! And the world shone with light—the empty, unlived years filled with love!

She was lost in dreams of her one hour of romance when a woman elbowed her way through the dim passage, leaving behind her the smell of herring and onions.

Shenah Pessah gripped the scrubbing-brush with suppressed fury. “Meshugeneh! Did you not swear to yourself that you would tear his memory out from your heart? If he would have been only a man I could have forgotten him. But he was not a man! He was God Himself! On whatever I look shines his face!”

The white radiance again suffused her. The brush dropped from her hand. “He—he is the beating in my heart! He is the life in me—the hope in me—the breath of prayer in me! If not for him in me, then what am I? Deadness—emptiness—nothingness! You are going out of your head. You are living only on rainbows. He is no more real—

“What is real? These rags I wear? This pail? This black hole? Or him and the dreams of him?” She flung her challenge to the murky darkness.

“Shenah Pessah! A black year on you!” came the answer from the cellar below. It was the voice of her uncle, Moisheh Rifkin.

“Oi weh!” she shrugged young shoulders, wearied by joyless toil. “He’s beginning with his hollering already.” And she hurried down.

“You piece of earth! Worms should eat you! How long does it take you to wash up the stairs?” he stormed. “Yesterday, the eating was burned to coal; and to-day you forget the salt.”

“What a fuss over a little less salt!”

“In the Talmud it stands a man has a right to divorce his wife for only forgetting him the salt in his soup.”

“Maybe that’s why Aunt Gittel went to the grave before her time—worrying how to please your taste in the mouth.”

The old man’s yellow, shriveled face stared up at her out of the gloom. “What has he from life? Only his pleasure in eating and going to the synagogue. How long will he live yet?” And moved by a surge of pity, “Why can’t I be a little kind to him?”

“Did you chop me some herring and onions?” he interrupted harshly.

She flushed with conscious guilt. Again she wondered why ugly things and ugly smells so sickened her.

“What don’t you forget?” His voice hammered upon her ears. “No care lays in your head. You’re only dreaming in the air.”

Her compassion was swept away in a wave of revolt that left her trembling. “I can’t no more stand it from you! Get yourself somebody else!” She was surprised at her sudden spirit.

“You big mouth, you! That’s your thanks for saving you from hunger.”

“Two years already I’m working the nails off my fingers and you didn’t give me a cent.”

“Beggerin! Money yet, you want? The minute you get enough to eat you turn up your head with freshness. Are you used to anything from home? What were you out there in Savel? The dirt under people’s feet. You’re already forgetting how you came off from the ship—a bundle of rags full of holes. If you lived in Russia a hundred years would you have lived to wear a pair of new shoes on your feet?”

“Other girls come naked and with nothing to America and they work themselves up. Everybody gets wages in America—”

“Americanerin! Didn’t I spend out enough money on your ship-ticket to have a little use from you? A thunder should strike you!”

Shenah Pessah’s eyes flamed. Her broken finger-nails pierced the callous flesh of her hands. So this was the end—the awakening of her dreams of America! Her memory went back to the time her ship-ticket came. In her simple faith she had really believed that they wanted her—her father’s brother and his wife who had come to the new world before ever she was born. She thought they wanted to give her a chance for happiness, for life and love. And then she came—to find the paralytic aunt—housework—janitor’s drudgery. Even after her aunt’s death, she had gone on uncomplainingly, till her uncle’s nagging had worn down her last shred of self-control.

“It’s the last time you’ll holler on me!” she cried. “You’ll never see my face again if I got to go begging in the street.” Seizing her shawl, she rushed out. “Woe is me! Bitter is me! For what is my life? Why didn’t the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?”

Through the streets, like a maddened thing, she raced, not knowing where she was going, not caring. “For what should I keep on suffering? Who needs me? Who wants me? I got nobody—nobody!”

And then the vision of the face she worshiped flashed before her. His beautiful kindness that had once warmed her into new life breathed over her again. “Why did he ever come but to lift me out of my darkness into his light?”

Instinctively her eyes sought the rift of blue above the tenement roofs and were caught by a boldly printed placard: “Hands Wanted.” It was as though the sign swung open on its hinges like a door and arms stretched out inviting her to enter. From the sign she looked to her own hands—vigorous, young hands—made strong through toil.

Hope leaped within her. “Maybe I got yet luck to have it good in this world. Ach! God from the sky! I’m so burning to live—to work myself up for a somebody! And why not?” With clenched fist she smote her bosom. “Ain’t everything possible in the new world? Why is America but to give me the chance to lift up my head with everybody alike?”

Her feet scarcely touched the steps as she ran up. But when she reached the huge, iron door of Cohen Brothers, a terror seized her. “Oi weh! They’ll give a look on my greenhorn rags, and down I go—For what are you afraid, you fool?” she commanded herself. “You come not to beg. They need hands. Don’t the sign say so? And you got good, strong hands that can turn over the earth with their strength. America is before you. You’ll begin to earn money. You’ll dress yourself up like a person and men will fall on their knees to make love to you—even him—himself!”

All fear had left her. She flung open the door and beheld the wonder of a factory—people—people—seas of bent heads and busy hands of people—the whirr of machinery—flying belts—the clicking clatter of whirling wheels—all seemed to blend and fuse into one surging song of hope—of new life—a new world—America!

A man, his arms heaped with a bundle of shirts, paused at sight of the radiant face. Her ruddy cheeks, the film of innocence shining out of eyes that knew no guile, carried him back to the green fields and open plains of his native Russia.

“Her mother’s milk is still fresh on her lips,” he murmured, as his gaze enveloped her.

The bundle slipped and fell to her feet. Their eyes met in spontaneous recognition of common race. With an embarrassed laugh they stooped to gather up the shirts.

“I seen downstairs hands wanted,” came in a faltering voice.

“Then you’re looking for work?” he questioned with keen interest. She was so different from the others he had known in his five years in this country. He was seized with curiosity to know more.

“You ain’t been long in America?” His tone was an unconscious caress.

“Two years already,” she confessed. “But I ain’t so green like I look,” she added quickly, overcome by the old anxiety.

“Trust yourself on me,” Sam Arkin assured her. “I’m a feller that knows himself on a person first off. I’ll take you to the office myself. Wait only till I put away these things.”

Grinning with eagerness, he returned and together they sought the foreman.

“Good luck to you! I hope you’ll be pushed up soon to my floor,” Sam Arkin encouraged, as he hurried back to his machine.

Because of the rush of work and the scarcity of help, Shenah Pessah was hired without delay. Atremble with excitement, she tiptoed after the foreman as he led the way into the workroom.

“Here, Sadie Kranz, is another learner for you.” He addressed a big-bosomed girl, the most skillful worker in the place.

“Another greenhorn with a wooden head!” she whispered to her neighbor as Shenah Pessah removed her shawl. “Gevalt! All these greenhorn hands tear the bread from our mouths by begging to work so cheap.”

But the dumb appeal of the immigrant stirred vague memories in Sadie Kranz. As she watched her run her first seam, she marveled at her speed. “I got to give it to you, you have a quick head.” There was conscious condescension in her praise.

Shenah Pessah lifted a beaming face. “How kind it was from you to learn me! You good heart!”

No one had ever before called Sadie Kranz “good heart.” The words lingered pleasantly.

“Ut! I like to help anybody, so long it don’t cost me nothing. I get paid by the week anyhow,” she half apologized.

Shenah Pessah was so thrilled with the novelty of the work, the excitement of mastering the intricacies of her machine, that she did not realize that the day was passed until the bell rang, the machines came to a halt, and the “hands” made a wild rush for the cloak-room.

“Oi weh! Is it a fire?” Shenah Pessah blanched with dread.

Loud laughter quelled her fears. “Greenie! It’s six o’clock. Time to go home,” chorused the voices.

“Home?” The cry broke from her. “Where will I go? I got no home.” She stood bewildered, in the fast-dwindling crowd of workers. Each jostling by her had a place to go. Of them all, she alone was friendless, shelterless!

“Help me find a place to sleep!” she implored, seizing Sadie Kranz by the sleeve of her velvet coat. “I got no people. I ran away.”

Sadie Kranz narrowed her eyes at the girl. A feeling of pity crept over her at sight of the outstretched, hungry hands.

“I’ll fix you by me for the while.” And taking the shawl off the shelf, she tossed it to the forlorn bundle of rags. “Come along. You must be starved for some eating.”

As Shenah Pessah entered the dingy hall-room which Sadie Kranz called home, its chill and squalor carried her back to the janitor’s basement she had left that morning. In silence she watched her companion prepare the hot dogs and potatoes on the oil-stove atop the trunk. Such pressing sadness weighed upon her that she turned from even the smell of food.

“My heart pulls me so to go back to my uncle.” She swallowed hard her crust of black bread. “He’s so used to have me help him. What’ll he do—alone?”

“You got to look out for yourself in this world.” Sadie Kranz gesticulated with a hot potato. “With your quickness, you got a chance to make money and buy clothes. You can go to shows—dances. And who knows—maybe meet a man to get married.”

“Married? You know how it burns in every girl to get herself married—that’s how it burns in me to work myself up for a person.”

“Ut! For what need you to work yourself up. Better marry yourself up to a rich feller and you’re fixed for life.”

“But him I want—he ain’t just a man. He is—” She paused seeking for words and a mist of longing softened the heavy peasant features. “He is the golden hills on the sky. I’m as far from him as the earth is from the stars.”

“Yok! Why wills itself in you the stars?” her companion ridiculed between swallows.

Shenah Pessah flung out her hands with Jewish fervor. “Can I help it what’s in my heart? It always longs in me for the higher. Maybe he has long ago forgotten me, but only one hope drives in me like madness—to make myself alike to him.”

“I’ll tell you the truth,” laughed Sadie Kranz, fishing in the pot for the last frankfurter. “You are a little out of your head—plain mehsugeh.”

“Mehsugeh?” Shenah Pessah rose to her feet vibrant with new resolve. “Mehsugeh?” she challenged, her peasant youth afire with ambition. “I’ll yet show the world what’s in me. I’ll not go back to my uncle—till it rings with my name in America.”

She entered the factory, the next day, with a light in her face, a sureness in her step that made all pause in wonder. “Look only! How high she holds herself her head! Has the matchmaker promised her a man?”

Then came her first real triumph. Shenah Pessah was raised above old hands who had been in the shop for years and made assistant to Sam Arkin, the man who had welcomed her that first day in the factory. As she was shown to the bench beside him, she waited expectantly for a word of welcome. None came. Instead, he bent the closer to his machine and the hand that held the shirt trembled as though he were cold, though the hot color flooded his face.

Resolutely, she turned to her work. She would show him how skillful she had become in those few weeks. The seams sped under her lightning touch when a sudden clatter startled her. She jumped up terror-stricken.

“The belt! The belt slipped! But it’s nothing, little bird,” Sam Arkin hastened to assure her. “I’ll fix it.” And then the quick warning, “Sh-h! The foreman is coming!”

Accustomed to her uncle’s harsh bickering, this man’s gentleness overwhelmed her. There was something she longed to say that trembled on her lips, but her voice refused to come.

Sam Arkin, too, was inarticulate. He felt he must talk to her, must know more of her. Timidly he touched her sleeve. “Lunch-time—here—wait for me,” he whispered, as the foreman approached.

A shrill whistle—the switch thrown—the slowing-down of the machines, then the deafening hush proclaiming noon. Followed the scraping of chairs, raucous voices, laughter, and the rush on the line to reach the steaming cauldron. One by one, as their cups of tea were filled, the hungry workers dispersed into groups. Seated on window-sills, table-tops, machines, and bales of shirts, they munched black bread and herring and sipped tea from saucers. And over all rioted the acrid odor of garlic and onions.

Rebecca Feist, the belle of the shop, pulled up the sleeve of her Georgette waist and glanced down at her fifty-nine-cent silk stocking. “A lot it pays for a girl to kill herself to dress stylish. Give only a look on Sam Arkin, how stuck he is on that new hand.”

There followed a chorus of voices. “Such freshness! We been in the shop so long and she just gives a come-in and grabs the cream as if it’s coming to her.”

“It’s her innocent-looking baby eyes that fools him in—”

“Innocent! Pfui! These make-believe innocent girls! Leave it to them! They know how to shine themselves up to a feller!”

Bleemah Levine, a stoop-shouldered, old hand, grown gray with the grayness of unrelieved drudgery, cast a furtive look in the direction of the couple. “Ach! The little bit of luck! Not looks, not smartness, but only luck, and the world falls to your feet.” Her lips tightened with envy. “It’s her greenhorn, red cheeks—”

Rebecca Feist glanced at herself in the mirror of her vanity bag. It was a pretty, young face, but pale and thin from undernourishment. Adroitly applying a lip-stick, she cried indignantly: “I wish I could be such a false thing like her. But only, I’m too natural—the hypocrite!”

Sadie Kranz rose to her friend’s defense. “What are you falling on her like a pack of wild dogs, just because Sam Arkin gives a smile on her? He ain’t marrying her yet, is he?”

“We don’t say nothing against her,” retorted Rebecca Feist, tapping her diamond-buckled foot, “only, she pushes herself too much. Give her a finger and she’ll grab your whole hand. Is there a limit to the pushings of such a green animal? Only a while ago, she was a learner, a nobody, and soon she’ll jump over all our heads and make herself for a forelady.”

Sam Arkin, seated beside Shenah Pessah on the window-sill, had forgotten that it was lunch-hour and that he was savagely hungry. “It shines so from your eyes,” he beamed. “What happy thoughts lay in your head?”

“Ach! When I give myself a look around on all the people laughing and talking, it makes me so happy I’m one of them.”

“Ut! These Americanerins! Their heads is only on ice-cream soda and style.”

“But it makes me feel so grand to be with all these hands alike. It’s as if I just got out from the choking prison into the open air of my own people.”

She paused for breath—a host of memories overpowering her. “I can’t give it out in words,” she went on. “But just as there ain’t no bottom to being poor, there ain’t no bottom to being lonely. Before, everything I done was alone, by myself. My heart hurt so with hunger for people. But here, in the factory, I feel I’m with everybody together. Just the sight of people lifts me on wings in the air.”

Opening her bag of lunch which had lain unheeded in her lap, she turned to him with a queer, little laugh, “I don’t know why I’m so talking myself out to you—”

“Only talk more. I want to know everything about yourself.” An aching tenderness rushed out of his heart to her, and in his grave simplicity he told her how he had overheard one of the girls say that she, Shenah Pessah, looked like a “greeneh yenteh,” just landed from the ship, so that he cried out, “Gottuniu! If only the doves from the sky were as beautiful!”

They looked at each other solemnly—the girl’s lips parted, her eyes wide and serious.

“That first day I came to the shop, the minute I gave a look on you, I felt right away, here’s somebody from home. I used to tremble so to talk to a man, but you—you—I could talk myself out to you like thinking in myself.”

“You’re all soft silk and fine velvet,” he breathed reverently. “In this hard world, how could such fineness be?”

An embarrassed silence fell between them as she knotted and unknotted her colored kerchief.

“I’ll take you home? Yes?” he found voice at last.

Under lowered lashes she smiled her consent.

“I’ll wait for you downstairs, closing time.” And he was gone.

The noon hour was not yet over, but Shenah Pessah returned to her machine. “Shall I tell him?” she mused. “Sam Arkin understands so much, shall I tell him of this man that burns in me? If I could only give out to some one about him in my heart—it would make me a little clear in the head.” She glanced at Sam Arkin furtively. “He’s kind, but could he understand? I only made a fool from myself trying to tell Sadie Kranz.” All at once she began to sob without reason. She ran to the cloak-room and hid from prying eyes, behind the shawls and wraps. The emptiness of all for which she struggled pressed upon her like a dead weight, dragging her down, down—the reaction of her ecstasy.

As the gong sounded, she made a desperate effort to pull herself together and returned to her work.

The six o’clock whistles still reverberated when Sam Arkin hurried down the factory stairs and out to the corner where he was to meet Shenah Pessah. He cleared his throat to greet her as she came, but all he managed was a bashful grin. She was so near, so real, and he had so much to say—if he only knew how to begin.

He cracked his knuckles and bit his finger-tips, but no words came. “Ach! You yok! Why ain’t you saying something?” He wrestled with his shyness in vain. The tense silence remained unbroken till they reached her house.

“I’m sorry”—Shenah Pessah colored apologetically—“But I got no place to invite you. My room is hardly big enough for a push-in of one person.”

“What say you to a bite of eating with me?” he blurted.

She thought of her scant supper upstairs and would have responded eagerly, but glancing down at her clothes, she hesitated. “Could I go dressed like this in a restaurant?”

“You look grander plain, like you are, than those twisted up with style. I’ll take you to the swellest restaurant on Grand Street and be proud with you!”

She flushed with pleasure. “Nu, come on, then. It’s good to have a friend that knows himself on what’s in you and not what’s on you, but still, when I go to a place, I like to be dressed like a person so I can feel like a person.”

“You’ll yet live to wear diamonds that will shine up the street when you pass!” he cried.

Through streets growing black with swarming crowds of toil-released workers they made their way. Sam Arkin’s thick hand rested with a lightness new to him upon the little arm tucked under his. The haggling pushcart peddlers, the newsboys screaming, “Tageblatt, Abendblatt, Herold,” the roaring noises of the elevated trains resounded the pæan of joy swelling his heart.

“America was good to me, but I never guessed how good till now.” The words were out before he knew it. “Tell me only, what pulled you to this country?”

“What pulls anybody here? The hope for the better. People who got it good in the old world don’t hunger for the new.”

A mist filled her eyes at memory of her native village. “How I suffered in Savel. I never had enough to eat. I never had shoes on my feet. I had to go barefoot even in the freezing winter. But still I love it. I was born there. I love the houses and the straw roofs, the mud streets, the cows, the chickens and the goats. My heart always hurts me for what is no more.”

The brilliant lights of Levy’s Café brought her back to Grand Street.

“Here is it.” He led her in and over to a corner table. “Chopped herring and onions for two,” he ordered with a flourish.

“Ain’t there some American eating on the card?” interposed Shenah Pessah.

He laughed indulgently. “If I lived in America for a hundred years I couldn’t get used to the American eating. What can make the mouth so water like the taste and the smell from herring and onions?”

“There’s something in me—I can’t help—that so quickly takes on to the American taste. It’s as if my outside skin only was Russian; the heart in me is for everything of the new world—even the eating.”

“Nu, I got nothing to complain against America. I don’t like the American eating, but I like the American dollar. Look only on me!” He expanded his chest. “I came to America a ragged nothing—and—see—” He exhibited a bank-book in four figures, gesticulating grandly, “And I learned in America how to sign my name!”