Hungry Hearts
glowing with the frank conceit of the self-made man, his neglected
teeth, thick, red lips, with that of the Other One--made ever more
beautiful with longings and dreams.
"But in all these black years, I was always hoping to get to the
golden country," Sam Arkin's voice went on, but she heard it as
from afar. "Before my eyes was always the shine of the high wages
and the easy money and I kept pushing myself from one city to another,
and saving and saving till I saved up enough for my ship-ticket to
the new world. And then when I landed here, I fell into the hands of a
cockroach boss."
"A cockroach boss?" she questioned absently and reproached herself
for her inattention.
"A black year on him! He was a landsman, that's how he fooled me
in. He used to come to the ship with a smiling face of welcome to all
the greenhorns what had nobody to go to. And then he'd put them to
work in his sweatshop and sweat them into their grave."
"Don't I know it?" she cried with quickened understanding.
"Just like my uncle, Moisheh Rifkin."
"The blood-sucker!" he gasped. "When I think how I slaved for him
sixteen hours a day--for what? Nothing!"
She gently stroked his hand as one might a child in pain. He looked up
and smiled gratefully.
"I want to forget what's already over. I got enough money now to
start for myself--maybe a tailor-shop--and soon--I--I want to marry
myself--but none of those crazy chickens for me." And he seemed to
draw her unto himself by the intensity of his gaze.
Growing bolder, he exclaimed: "I got a grand idea. It's Monday
and the bank is open yet till nine o'clock. I'll write over my
bank-book on your name? Yes?"
"My name?" She fell back, dumbstruck.
"Yes--you--everything I only got--you--" he mumbled. "I'll give
you dove's milk to drink--silks and diamonds to wear--you'll hold
all my money."
She was shaken by this supreme proof of his devotion.
"But I--I can't--I got to work myself up for a person. I got
a head. I got ideas. I can catch on to the Americans quicker'n
lightning."
"My money can buy you everything. I'll buy you teachers. I'll
buy you a piano. I'll make you for a lady. Right away you can stop
from work." He leaned toward her, his eyes welling with tears of
earnestness.
"Take your hard-earned money? Could I be such a beggerin?"
"God from the world! You are dearer to me than the eyes from my
head! I'd give the blood from under my nails for you! I want only to
work for you--to live for you--to die for you--" He was spent with
the surge of his emotion.
Ach! To be loved as Sam Arkin loved! She covered her eyes, but it only
pressed upon her the more. Home, husband, babies, a bread-giver for
life!
And the Other--a dream--a madness that burns you up alive. "You might
as well want to marry yourself to the President of America as to want
him. But I can't help it. _Him and him only_ I want."
She looked up again. "No--no!" she cried, cruel in the self-absorption
of youth and ambition. "You can't make me for a person.
It's not only that I got to go up higher, but I got to push
myself up by myself, by my own strength--"
"Nu, nu," he sobbed. "I'll not bother you with me--only give
you my everything. My bank-book is more than my flesh and blood--only
take it, to do what you want with it."
Her eyes deepened with humility. "I know your goodness--but there's
something like a wall around me--him in my heart."
"Him?" The word hurled itself at him like a bomb-shell. He went
white with pain. And even she, immersed in her own thoughts, lowered
her head before the dumb suffering on his face. She felt she owed it to
him to tell him.
"I wanted to talk myself out to you about him yet before.--He ain't
just a man. He is all that I want to be and am not yet. He is the
hunger of me for the life that ain't just eating and sleeping and
slaving for bread."
She pushed back her chair and rose abruptly. "I can't be inside
walls when I talk of him. I need the earth, the whole free sky to
breathe when I think of him. Come out in the air."
They walked for a time before either spoke. Sam Arkin followed where
she led through the crooked labyrinth of streets. The sight of the
young mothers with their nursing infants pressed to their bared bosoms
stabbed anew his hurt.
Shenah Pessah, blind to all but the vision that obsessed her, talked
on. "All that my mother and father and my mother's mother and
father ever wanted to be is in him. This fire in me, it's not just
the hunger of a woman for a man--it's the hunger of all my people
back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!"
A veil of silence fell between them. She felt almost as if it were a
sacrilege to have spoken of that which was so deeply centered within
her.
Sam Arkin's face became lifeless as clay. Bowed like an
old man, he dragged his leaden feet after him. The world was
dead--cold--meaningless. Bank-book, money--of what use were they
now? All his years of saving couldn't win her. He was suffocated in
emptiness.
* * * * *
On they walked till they reached a deserted spot in the park. So spent
was he by his sorrow that he lost the sense of time or place or that
she was near.
Leaning against a tree, he stood, dumb, motionless, unutterable
bewilderment in his sunken eyes.
"I lived over the hunger for bread--but this--" He clutched at his
aching bosom. "Highest One, help me!" With his face to the ground
he sank, prostrate.
"Sam Arkin!" She bent over him tenderly. "I feel the emptiness of
words--but I got to get it out. All that you suffer I have suffered,
and must yet go on suffering. I see no end. But only--there is
a something--a hope--a help out--it lifts me on top of my hungry
body--the hunger to make from myself a person that can't be crushed
by nothing nor nobody--the life higher!"
Slowly, he rose to his feet, drawn from his weakness by the spell of
her. "With one hand you throw me down and with the other you lift
me up to life again. Say to me only again, your words," he pleaded,
helplessly.
"Sam Arkin! Give yourself your own strength!" She shook him
roughly. "I got no pity on you, no more than I got pity on me."
He saw her eyes fill with light as though she were seeing something far
beyond them both. "This," she breathed, "is only the beginning
of the hunger that will make from you a person who'll yet ring in
America."
THE LOST "BEAUTIFULNESS"
"Oi weh! How it shines the beautifulness!" exulted Hanneh Hayyeh
over her newly painted kitchen. She cast a glance full of worship and
adoration at the picture of her son in uniform; eyes like her own,
shining with eagerness, with joy of life, looked back at her.
"Aby will not have to shame himself to come back to his old home,"
she rejoiced, clapping her hands--hands blistered from the paintbrush
and calloused from rough toil. "Now he'll be able to invite all the
grandest friends he made in the army."
The smell of the paint was suffocating, but she inhaled in it huge
draughts of hidden beauty. For weeks she had dreamed of it and felt in
each tin of paint she was able to buy, in each stroke of the brush, the
ecstasy of loving service for the son she idolized.
Ever since she first began to wash the fine silks and linens for
Mrs. Preston, years ago, it had been Hanneh Hayyeh's ambition to have
a white-painted kitchen exactly like that in the old Stuyvesant Square
mansion. Now her own kitchen was a dream come true.
Hanneh Hayyeh ran in to her husband, a stoop-shouldered, care-crushed
man who was leaning against the bed, his swollen feet outstretched,
counting the pennies that totaled his day's earnings.
"Jake Safransky!" she cried excitedly, "you got to come in and
give a look on my painting before you go to sleep."
"Oi, let me alone. Give me only a rest."
Too intoxicated with the joy of achievement to take no for an answer,
she dragged him into the doorway. "Nu? How do you like it? Do I know
what beautiful is?"
"But how much money did you spend out on that paint?"
"It was my own money," she said, wiping the perspiration off her
face with a corner of her apron. "Every penny I earned myself from
the extra washing."
"But you had ought save it up for the bad times. What'll you do
when the cold weather starts in and the pushcart will not wheel itself
out?"
"I save and pinch enough for myself. This I done in honor for my
son. I want my Aby to lift up his head in the world. I want him to be
able to invite even the President from America to his home and shame
himself."
"You'd pull the bananas off a blind man's pushcart to bring to
your Aby. You know nothing from holding tight to a dollar and saving a
penny to a penny like poor people should."
"What do I got from living if I can't have a little beautifulness
in my life? I don't allow for myself the ten cents to go to a moving
picture that I'm crazy to see. I never yet treated myself to an
ice-cream soda even for a holiday. Shining up the house for Aby is my
only pleasure."
"Yah, but it ain't your house. It's the landlord's."
"Don't I live in it? I soak in pleasure from every inch of my
kitchen. Why, I could kiss the grand white color on the walls. It
lights up my eyes like sunshine in the room."
Her glance traveled from the newly painted walls to the geranium on the
window-sill, and back to her husband's face.
"Jake!" she cried, shaking him, "ain't you got eyes? How can
you look on the way it dances the beautifulness from every corner and
not jump in the air from happiness?"
"I'm only thinking on the money you spent out on the landlord's
house. Look only on me! I'm black from worry, but no care lays on
your head. It only dreams itself in you how to make yourself for an
American and lay in every penny you got on fixing out the house like
the rich."
"I'm sick of living like a pig with my nose to the earth, all the
time only pinching and scraping for bread and rent. So long my Aby is
with America, I want to make myself for an American. I could tear the
stars out from heaven for my Aby's wish."
Her sunken cheeks were flushed and her eyes glowed with light as she
gazed about her.
"When I see myself around the house how I fixed it up with my own
hands, I forget I'm only a nobody. It makes me feel I'm also a
person like Mrs. Preston. It lifts me with high thoughts."
"Why didn't you marry yourself to a millionaire? You always want to
make yourself like Mrs. Preston who got millions laying in the bank."
"But Mrs. Preston does make me feel that I'm alike with her,"
returned Hanneh Hayyeh, proudly. "Don't she talk herself out to me
like I was her friend? Mrs. Preston says this war is to give everybody
a chance to lift up his head like a person. It is to bring together the
people on top who got everything and the people on the bottom who got
nothing. She's been telling me about a new word--democracy. It got me
on fire. Democracy means that everybody in America is going to be with
everybody alike."
"Och! Stop your dreaming out of your head. Close up your mouth from
your foolishness. Women got long hair and small brains," he finished,
muttering as he went to bed.
At the busy gossiping hour of the following morning when the
butcher-shop was crowded with women in dressing-sacks and wrappers
covered over with shawls, Hanneh Hayyeh elbowed her way into the
clamorous babel of her neighbors.
"What are you so burning? What are you so flaming?"
"She's always on fire with the wonders of her son."
"The whole world must stop still to listen to what news her son
writes to her."
"She thinks her son is the only one soldier by the American army."
"My Benny is also one great wonder from smartness, but I ain't such
a crazy mother like she."