Hungry Hearts
With the suitcase containing all her worldly possessions under
her arm, Sophie Sapinsky elbowed her way through the noisy
ghetto crowds. Pushcart peddlers and pullers-in shouted and
gesticulated. Women with market-baskets pushed and shoved one another,
eyes straining with the one thought--how to get the food a penny
cheaper. With the same strained intentness, Sophie scanned each
tenement, searching for a room cheap enough for her dwindling means.
In a dingy basement window a crooked sign, in straggling, penciled
letters, caught Sophie's eye: "Room to let, a bargain, cheap."
The exuberant phrasing was quite in keeping with the extravagant
dilapidation of the surroundings. "This is the very place," thought
Sophie. "There couldn't be nothing cheaper in all New York."
At the foot of the basement steps she knocked.
"Come in!" a voice answered.
As she opened the door she saw an old man bending over a pot of
potatoes on a shoemaker's bench. A group of children in all degrees
of rags surrounded him, greedily snatching at the potatoes he handed
out.
Sophie paused for an instant, but her absorption in her own problem was
too great to halt the question: "Is there a room to let?"
"Hanneh Breineh, in the back, has a room." The old man was so
preoccupied filling the hungry hands that he did not even look up.
Sophie groped her way to the rear hall. A gaunt-faced woman answered
her inquiry with loquacious enthusiasm. "A grand room for the
money. I'll let it down to you only for three dollars a month. In the
whole block is no bigger bargain. I should live so."
As she talked, the woman led her through the dark hall into an airshaft
room. A narrow window looked out into the bottom of a chimney-like pit,
where lay the accumulated refuse from a score of crowded kitchens.
"Oi weh!" gasped Sophie, throwing open the sash. "No air and no
light. Outside shines the sun and here it's so dark."
"It ain't so dark. It's only a little shady. Let me only
turn up the gas for you and you'll quick see everything like with
sunshine."
The claw-fingered flame revealed a rusty, iron cot, an inverted potato
barrel that served for a table, and two soap-boxes for chairs.
Sophie felt of the cot. It sagged and flopped under her touch. "The
bed has only three feet!" she exclaimed in dismay.
"You can't have Rockefeller's palace for three dollars a
month," defended Hanneh Breineh, as she shoved one of the boxes
under the legless corner of the cot. "If the bed ain't so steady,
so you got good neighbors. Upstairs lives Shprintzeh Gittle, the
herring-woman. You can buy by her the biggest bargains in fish,
a few days older.... What she got left over from the Sabbath, she
sells to the neighbors cheap.... In the front lives Shmendrik, the
shoemaker. I'll tell you the truth, he ain't no real shoemaker. He
never yet made a pair of whole shoes in his life. He's a learner
from the old country--a tzadik, a saint; but every time he sees in
the street a child with torn feet, he calls them in and patches them
up. His own eating, the last bite from his mouth, he divides up with
them."
"Three dollars," deliberated Sophie, scarcely hearing Hanneh
Breineh's chatter. "I will never find anything cheaper. It has a
door to lock and I can shut this woman out ... I'll take it," she
said, handing her the money.
Hanneh Breineh kissed the greasy bills gloatingly. "I'll treat you
like a mother! You'll have it good by me like in your own home."
"Thanks--but I got no time to shmoos. I got to be alone to get my
work done."
The rebuff could not penetrate Hanneh Breineh's joy over the sudden
possession of three dollars.
"Long years on you! May we be to good luck to one another!" was
Hanneh Breineh's blessing as she closed the door.
Alone in her room--_her_ room, securely hers--yet with the flash of
triumph, a stab of bitterness. All that was hers--so wretched and so
ugly! Had her eager spirit, eager to give and give, no claim to a bit
of beauty--a shred of comfort?
Perhaps her family was right in condemning her rashness. Was it
worth while to give up the peace of home, the security of a regular
job--suffer hunger, loneliness, and want--for what? For something she
knew in her heart was beyond her reach. Would her writing ever amount
to enough to vindicate the uprooting of her past? Would she ever become
articulate enough to express beautifully what she saw and felt? What
had she, after all, but a stifling, sweatshop experience, a meager,
night-school education, and this wild, blind hunger to release the
dumbness that choked her?
Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. Resting her elbows on
the potato barrel, she clutched her pencil with tense fingers. In the
notebook before her were a hundred beginnings, essays, abstractions,
outbursts of chaotic moods. She glanced through the titles: "Believe
in Yourself," "The Quest of the Ideal."
Meaningless tracings on the paper, her words seemed to her now--a
restless spirit pawing at the air. The intensity of experience,
the surge of emotion that had been hers when she wrote--where were
they? The words had failed to catch the life-beat--had failed to
register the passion she had poured into them.
Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Had the years and years of
night-study been in vain? Choked with discouragement, the cry broke
from her, "O--God--God help me! I feel--I see, but it all dies in
me--dumb!"
* * * * *
Tedious days passed into weeks. Again Sophie sat staring into her
notebook. "There's nothing here that's alive. Not a word yet says
what's in me ...
"But it _is_ in me!" With clenched fist she smote her bosom. "It
must be in me! I believe in it! I got to get it out--even if it tears
my flesh in pieces--even if it kills me!...
"But these words--these flat, dead words ...
"Whether I can write or can't write--I can't stop writing. I
can't rest. I can't breathe. There's no peace, no running away
for me on earth except in the struggle to give out what's in me. The
beat from my heart--the blood from my veins--must flow out into my
words."
She returned to her unfinished essay, "Believe in Yourself." Her
mind groping--clutching at the misty incoherence that clouded her
thoughts--she wrote on.
"These sentences are yet only wood--lead; but I can't help
it--I'll push on--on--I'll not eat--I'll not sleep--I'll not
move from this spot till I get it to say on the paper what I got in my
heart!"
Slowly the dead words seemed to begin to breathe. Her eyes
brightened. Her cheeks flushed. Her very pencil trembled with the eager
onrush of words.
Then a sharp rap sounded on her door. With a gesture of irritation
Sophie put down her pencil and looked into the burning, sunken eyes of
her neighbor, Hanneh Breineh.
"I got yourself a glass of tea, good friend. It ain't much I got to
give away, but it's warm even if it's nothing."
Sophie scowled. "You mustn't bother yourself with me. I'm so
busy--thanks."
"Don't thank me yet so quick. I got no sugar." Hanneh Breineh
edged herself into the room confidingly. "At home, in Poland, I not
only had sugar for tea--but even jelly--a jelly that would lift you up
to heaven. I thought in America everything would be so plenty, I could
drink the tea out from my sugar-bowl. But ach! Not in Poland did my
children starve like in America!"
Hanneh Breineh, in a friendly manner, settled herself on the sound end
of the bed, and began her jeremiad.
"Yosef, my man, ain't no bread-giver. Already he got consumption
the second year. One week he works and nine weeks he lays sick."
In despair Sophie gathered her papers, wondering how to get the woman
out of her room. She glanced through the page she had written, but
Hanneh Breineh, unconscious of her indifference, went right on.
"How many times it is tearing the heart out from my body--should I
take Yosef's milk to give to the baby, or the baby's milk to give
to Yosef? If he was dead the pensions they give to widows would help
feed my children. Now I got only the charities to help me. A black year
on them! They should only have to feed their own children on what they
give me."
Resolved not to listen to the intruder, Sophie debated within
herself: "Should I call my essay 'Believe in Yourself,' or
wouldn't it be stronger to say, 'Trust Yourself'? But if I say,
'Trust Yourself,' wouldn't they think that I got the words from
Emerson?"
Hanneh Breineh's voice went on, but it sounded to Sophie like a faint
buzzing from afar. "Gotteniu! How much did it cost me my life to go
and swear myself that my little Fannie--only skin and bones--that she
is already fourteen! How it chokes me the tears every morning when
I got to wake her and push her out to the shop when her eyes are yet
shutting themselves with sleep!"
Sophie glanced at her wrist-watch as it ticked away the precious
minutes. She must get rid of the woman! Had she not left her own
sister, sacrificed all comfort, all association, for solitude and its
golden possibilities? For the first time in her life she had the chance
to be by herself and think. And now, the thoughts which a moment ago
had seemed like a flock of fluttering birds had come so close--and this
woman with her sordid wailing had scattered them.
"I'm a savage, a beast, but I got to ask her to get out--this very
minute," resolved Sophie. But before she could summon the courage to
do what she wanted to do, there was a timid knock at the door, and the
wizened little Fannie, her face streaked with tears, stumbled in.
"The inspector said it's a lie. I ain't yet fourteen," she
whimpered.
Hanneh Breineh paled. "Woe is me! Sent back from the shop? God
from the world--is there no end to my troubles? Why didn't you hide
yourself when you saw the inspector come?"
"I was running to hide myself under the table, but she caught me and
she said she'll take me to the Children's Society and arrest me and
my mother for sending me to work too soon."
"Arrest me?" shrieked Hanneh Breineh, beating her breast. "Let
them only come and arrest me! I'll show America who I am! Let
them only begin themselves with me!... Black is for my eyes ... the
groceryman will not give us another bread till we pay him the bill!"
"The inspector said ..." The child's brow puckered in an effort
to recall the words.
"What did the inspector said? Gotteniu!" Hanneh Breineh wrung her
hands in passionate entreaty. "Listen only once to my prayer! Send
on the inspector only a quick death! I only wish her to have her own
house with twenty-four rooms and each of the twenty-four rooms should
be twenty-four beds and the chills and the fever should throw her from
one bed to another!"
"Hanneh Breineh, still yourself a little," entreated Sophie.
"How can I still myself without Fannie's wages? Bitter is me! Why
do I have to live so long?"
"The inspector said ..."
"What did the inspector said? A thunder should strike the
inspector! Ain't I as good a mother as other mothers? Wouldn't I
better send my children to school? But who'll give us to eat? And
who'll pay us the rent?"
Hanneh Breineh wiped her red-lidded eyes with the corner of her apron.
"The president from America should only come to my bitter heart. Let
him go fighting himself with the pushcarts how to get the eating
a penny cheaper. Let him try to feed his children on the money the
charities give me and we'd see if he wouldn't better send his
littlest ones to the shop better than to let them starve before
his eyes. Woe is me! What for did I come to America? What's my
life--nothing but one terrible, never-stopping fight with the grocer
and the butcher and the landlord ..."
Suddenly Sophie's resentment for her lost morning was forgotten. The