Hungry Hearts Part 6

"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 s.h.i.+ne of the high wages and the easy money and I kept pus.h.i.+ng myself from one city to another, and saving and saving till I saved up enough for my s.h.i.+p-ticket to the new world. And then when I landed here, I fell into the hands of a c.o.c.kroach boss."

"A c.o.c.kroach 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 s.h.i.+p with a smiling face of welcome to all the greenhorns what had n.o.body 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?"

"G.o.d 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-sh.e.l.l. 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 n.o.body--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 s.h.i.+nes the beautifulness!" exulted Hanneh Hayyeh over her newly painted kitchen. She cast a glance full of wors.h.i.+p and adoration at the picture of her son in uniform; eyes like her own, s.h.i.+ning 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 ap.r.o.n. "Every penny I earned myself from the extra was.h.i.+ng."

"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?"