Hungry Hearts
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
paean 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 Cafe 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!"
"Did it come hard to learn?" she asked under her breath.
"Hard?" His face purpled with excitement. "It would be easier for
me to lift up this whole house on my shoulders than to make one little
dot of a letter. When I took my pencil--Oi weh! The sweat would break
out on my face! 'I can't, I can't!' I cried, but something
in me jumped up. 'You can--you yok--you must!'--Six months, night
after night, I stuck to it--and I learned to twist around the little
black hooks till it means--me--Sam Arkin."
He had the rough-hewn features of the common people, but he lifted his
head with the pride of a king. "Since I can write out my name, I feel
I can do anything. I can sign checks, put money in the bank, or take it
out without nobody to help me."
As Shenah Pessah listened, unconsciously she compared Sam Arkin,