Hungry Hearts
"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