Hungry Hearts
"Marry! Marry yourself into that beggar house! Are you crazy?"
"A man could get to anywhere with such a beautiful girl."
"Koosh! Pretty faces is cheap like dirt. What has she got to bring
you in for your future? An empty pocketbook? A starving family to hang
over your neck?"
"You don't know nothing about her. You don't know what you're
saying. She comes from fine people in Russia. You can see her father is
a learned man."
"Ach! You make me a disgust with your calf talk! Poverty winking from
every corner of the house! Hunger hollering from all their starved
faces! I got too much sense to waste my love on beggars. And all
the time I was planning for you an American family, people which are
somebodies in this world, which could help you work up a practice! For
why did I waste my good dollars on you?"
"Gott! Ain't David answering?" my heart cries out. "Why don't
he throw him out of the house?"
"Perhaps I can't hear him," I think, and with my finger-nails I
pick thinner the broken plaster.
I push myself back to get away and not to do it. But it did itself with
my hands. "Don't let me hear nothing," I pray, and yet I strain
more to hear.
The uncle was still hollering. And David wasn't saying nothing for
me.
"Gazlen! You want to sink your life in a family of beggars?"
"But I love her. We're so happy together. Don't that count for
something? I can't live without her."
"Koosh! Love her! Do you want to plan your future with your heart
or with your head? Take for your wife an ignorant shopgirl without a
cent! Can two dead people start up a dance together?"
"So you mean not to help me with the office?"
"Yah-yah-yah! I'll run on all fours to do it! The impudence from
such penniless nobodies wanting to pull in a young man with a future
for a doctor! Nobody but such a yok like you would be such an easy
mark."
"Well, I got to live my own life, and I love her."
"That's all I got to say.--Where's my hat? Throw yourself away on
the pretty face, make yourself to shame and to laughter with a ragged
Melamid for a father-in-law, and I wash my hands from you for the rest
of your life."
* * * * *
A change came over David from that day. For the first time we was no
more one person together. We couldn't no more laugh and talk like we
used to. When I tried to look him in the eyes, he gave them a turn away
from me.
I used to lie awake nights turning over in my head David's looks,
David's words, and it made me frightened like something black rising
over me and pushing me out from David's heart. I could feel he was
blaming me for something I couldn't understand.
Once David asked me, "Don't you love me no more?"
I tried to tell him that there wasn't no change in my love, but I
couldn't no more talk out to him what was in my mind, like I used.
"I didn't want to worry you before with my worries," he said to
me at last.
"Worry me, David! What am I here for?"
"My uncle is acting like a stingy grouch," he answered me, "and I
can't stand no more his bossing me."
"Why didn't you speak yourself out to me what was on your mind,
David?" I asked him.
"You don't know how my plans is smashed to pieces," he said, with
a worried look on his face. "I don't see how I'll ever be able to
open my doctor's office. And how can we get married with your people
hanging on for your wages?"
"Ah, David, don't you no longer feel that love can find a way
out?"
He looked on me, down and up, and up and down, till I drawed myself
back, frightened.
But he grabbed me back to him. "I love you. I love you, heart
of mine," he said, kissing me on the neck, on my hair and my
eyes. "And nothing else matters, does it, does it?" and he kissed
me again and again, as if he wanted to swallow me up.
Next day I go out from the shop and down the steps to meet him, like on
every day.
I give a look around.
"Gott! Where is he? He wasn't never late before," gave a knock
my heart.
I waited out till all the girls was gone, and the streets was getting
empty, but David didn't come yet.
"Maybe an accident happened to him, and I standing round here like a
dummy," and I gave a quick hurry home.
But nobody had heard nothing.
"He's coming! He _must_ come!" I fighted back my fear. But by
evening he hadn't come yet.
I sent in my brother next door to see if he could find him.
"He moved to-day," comes in my brother to tell me.
"My God! David left me? It ain't possible!"
I walk around the house, waiting and listening. "Don't let nobody
see your nervousness. Don't let yourself out. Don't break down."
It got late and everybody was gone to bed.
I couldn't take my clothes off. Any minute he'll come up the steps
or knock on the wall. Any minute a telegram will come.
It's twelve o'clock. It's one. Two!
Every time I hear footsteps in the empty street, I am by the
window--"Maybe it's him."
It's beginning the day.
The sun is rising. Oi weh, how can the sun rise and he not here?
Mein Gott! He ain't coming!
I sit myself down on the floor by the window with my head on the sill.
Everybody is sleeping. I can't sleep. And I'm so tired.
Next day I go, like pushed on, to the shop, glad to be swallowed up by
my work.
The noise of the knocking machines is like a sleeping-medicine to the
cryings inside of me. All day I watched my hands push the waists up and
down the machine. I wasn't with my hands. It was like my breathing
stopped and I was sitting inside of myself, waiting for David.
The six o'clock whistle blowed. I go out from the shop.
I can't help it--I look for him.
"Oi, Gott! Do something for me once! Send him only!"
I hold on to the iron fence of the shop, because I feel my heart
bleeding away.
I can't go away. The girls all come out from the shops, and the
streets get empty and still. But at the end of the block once in a
while somebody crosses and goes out from sight.
I watch them. I begin counting, "One, two, three--"
Underneath my mind is saying, "Maybe it's him. Maybe the next
one!"
My eyes shut themselves. I feel the end from everything.
"Ah, David! David! Gott! Mein Gott!"
I fall on the steps and clinch the stones with the twistings of my
body. A terrible cry breaks out from me--"David! David!" My soul is
tearing itself out from my body. It is gone.
Next day I got news--David opened a doctor's office uptown.
Nothing could hurt me no more. I didn't hope for nothing. Even if he
wanted me back, I couldn't go to him no more. I was like something
dying what wants to be left alone in darkness.
But still something inside of me wanted to see for itself how all is
dead between us, and I write him:
"David Novak: You killed me. You killed my love. Why did you leave me
yet living? Why must I yet drag on the deadness from me?"
I don't know why I wrote him. I just wanted to give a look on him. I
wanted to fill up my eyes with him before I turned them away forever.
I was sitting by the table in the kitchen, wanting to sew, but my hands
was lying dead on the table, when the door back of me burst open.
"O God! What have I done? Your face is like ashes! You look like you
are dying!" David gave a rush in.
His hair wasn't combed, his face wasn't shaved, his clothes was all
wrinkled. My letter he was holding crushed in his hand.
"I killed you! I left you! But I didn't rest a minute since I went
away! Heart of mine, forgive me!"
He gave a take my hand, and fell down kneeling by me.
"Sarale, speak to me!"
"False dog! Coward!" cried my father, breaking in on us. "Get
up! Get out! Don't dare touch my child again! May your name and
memory be blotted out!"
David covered up his head with his arm and fell back to the wall like
my father had hit him.
"You yet listen to him?" cried my father, grabbing me by the arm
and shaking me. "Didn't I tell you he's a Meshumid, a denier of
God?"
"Have pity! Speak to me! Give me only a word!" David begged me.
I wanted to speak to him, to stretch out my hands to him and call him
over, but I couldn't move my body. No voice came from my lips no more
than if I was locked in my grave.
I was dead, and the David I loved was dead.
I married Sam because he came along and wanted me, and I didn't care
about nothing no more.
But for long after, even when the children began coming, my head was
still far away in the dream of the time when love was. Before my eyes
was always his face, drawing me on. In my ears was always his voice,
but thin, like from far away.
I was like a person following after something in the dark.
For years when I went out into the street or got into a car, it gave a
knock my heart--"Maybe I'll see him yet to-day."
When I heard he got himself engaged, I hunted up where she lived,
and with Sammy in the carriage and the three other children hanging on
to my skirts, I stayed around for hours to look up at the grand stone
house where she lived, just to take a minute's look on her.
When I seen her go by, it stabbed awake in me the old days.
It ain't that I still love him, but nothing don't seem real to me
no more. For the little while when we was lovers I breathed the air
from the high places where love comes from, and I can't no more come
down.
SOAP AND WATER
What I so greatly feared, happened! Miss Whiteside, the dean of our
college, withheld my diploma. When I came to her office, and asked her
why she did not pass me, she said that she could not recommend me as a
teacher because of my personal appearance.
She told me that my skin looked oily, my hair unkempt, and my
finger-nails sadly neglected. She told me that I was utterly unmindful
of the little niceties of the well-groomed lady. She pointed out that
my collar did not set evenly, my belt was awry, and there was a lack
of freshness in my dress. And she ended with: "Soap and water are
cheap. Any one can be clean."
In those four years while I was under her supervision, I was always
timid and diffident. I shrank and trembled when I had to come near
her. When I had to say something to her, I mumbled and stuttered, and
grew red and white in the face with fear.
Every time I had to come to the dean's office for a private
conference, I prepared for the ordeal of her cold scrutiny, as a
patient prepares for a surgical operation. I watched her gimlet eyes
searching for a stray pin, for a spot on my dress, for my unpolished
shoes, for my uncared-for finger-nails, as one strapped on the
operating table watches the surgeon approaching with his tray of
sterilized knives.
She never looked into my eyes. She never perceived that I had a
soul. She did not see how I longed for beauty and cleanliness. How I
strained and struggled to lift myself from the dead toil and exhaustion
that weighed me down. She could see nothing in people like me, except
the dirt and the stains on the outside.
But this last time when she threatened to withhold my diploma, because
of my appearance, this last time when she reminded me that "Soap and
water are cheap. Any one can be clean," this last time, something
burst within me.
I felt the suppressed wrath of all the unwashed of the earth break
loose within me. My eyes blazed fire. I didn't care for myself, nor
the dean, nor the whole laundered world. I had suffered the cruelty
of their cleanliness and the tyranny of their culture to the breaking
point. I was too frenzied to know what I said or did. But I saw clean,
immaculate, spotless Miss Whiteside shrivel and tremble and cower
before me, as I had shriveled and trembled and cowered before her for
so many years.
Why did she give me my diploma? Was it pity? Or can it be that in my
outburst of fury, at the climax of indignities that I had suffered, the