Hungry Hearts Read online

  The pawnbroker lifted his miserly face from the cash-box and shot a quick glance at the girl’s trembling figure.

  “Nu?” said Zaretsky, in his cracked voice, cutting the twine from the bundle and unfolding a feather bed. His appraising hand felt that it was of the finest down. “How much ask you for it?”

  The fiendish gleam of his shrewd eyes paralyzed her with terror. A lump came in her throat and she wavered speechless.

  “I’ll give you five dollars,” said Zaretsky.

  “Five dollars?” gasped Shenah Pessah. Her hands rushed back anxiously to the feather bed and her fingers clung to it as if it were a living thing. She gazed panic-stricken at the gloomy interior of the pawnshop with its tawdry jewels in the cases; the stacks of second-hand clothing hanging overhead, back to the grisly face of the pawnbroker. The weird tickings that came from the cheap clocks on the shelves behind Zaretsky, seemed to her like the smothered heart-beats of people who like herself had been driven to barter their last precious belongings for a few dollars.

  “Is it for yourself that you come?” he asked, strangely stirred by the mute anguish in the girl’s eyes. This morgue of dead belongings had taken its toll of many a pitiful victim of want. But never before had Zaretsky been so affected. People bargained and rebelled and struggled with him on his own plane. But the dumb helplessness of this girl and her coming to him at such a late hour touched the man’s heart.

  “Is it for yourself?” he repeated, in a softened tone.

  The new note of feeling in his voice made her look up. The hard, crafty expression on his face had given place to a look of sympathy.

  “Yes, it’s mine, from my mother,” she stammered, brokenly. “The last memory from Russia. How many winters it took my mother to pick together the feathers. She began it when I was yet a little baby in the cradle—and—” She covered her face with her shawl and sobbed.

  “Any one sick? Why do you got to pawn it?”

  She raised her tear-stained face and mutely looked at him. How could she explain and how could he possibly understand her sudden savage desire for clothes?

  Zaretsky, feeling that he had been clumsy and tactless, hastened to add, “Nu—I’ll give you—a—a—a—ten dollars,” he finished with a motion of his hand, as if driving from him the onrush of generosity that seized him.

  “Oi, mister!” cried Shenah Pessah, as the man handed her the bill. “You’re saving me my life! God will pay you for this goodness.” And crumpling the money in her hand, she hurried back home elated.

  The following evening, as soon as her work was over, Shenah Pessah scurried through the ghetto streets, seeking in the myriad-colored shop windows the one hat and the one dress that would voice the desire of her innermost self. At last she espied a shining straw with cherries so red, so luscious, that they cried out to her, “Bite me!” That was the hat she bought.

  The magic of those cherries on her hat brought back to her the green fields and orchards of her native Russia. Yes, a green dress was what she craved. And she picked out the greenest, crispest organdie.

  That night, as she put on her beloved colors, she vainly tried to see herself from head to foot, but the broken bit of a mirror that she owned could only show her glorious parts of her. Her clothes seemed to enfold her in flames of desire leaping upon desire. “Only to be beautiful! Only to be beautiful!” she murmured breathlessly. “Not for myself, but only for him.”

  Time stood still for Shenah Pessah as she counted the days, the hours, and the minutes for the arrival of John Barnes. At last, through her basement window, she saw him walk up the front steps. She longed to go over to him and fling herself at his feet and cry out to him with what hunger of heart she awaited his coming. But the very intensity of her longing left her faint and dumb.

  He passed to his room. Later, she saw him walk out without even stopping to look at her. The next day and the day after, she watched him from her hidden corner pass in and out of the house, but still he did not come to her.

  Oh, how sweet it was to suffer the very hurt of his oblivion of her! She gloried in his great height that made him so utterly unaware of her existence. It was enough for her worshiping eyes just to glimpse him from afar. What was she to him? Could she expect him to greet the stairs on which he stepped? Or take notice of the door that swung open for him? After all, she was nothing but part of the house. So why should he take notice of her? She was the steps on which he walked. She was the door that swung open for him. And he did not know it.

  For four evenings in succession, ever since John Barnes had come to live in the house, Shenah Pessah arrayed herself in her new things and waited. Was it not a miracle that he came the first time when she did not even dream that he was on earth? So why shouldn’t the miracle happen again? This evening, however, she was so spent with the hopelessness of her longing that she had no energy left to put on her adornments.

  All at once she was startled out of her apathy by a quick tap on her window-pane. “How about going to the library, to-morrow evening?” asked John Barnes.

  “Oi-i-i! Yes! Thanks—” she stammered in confusion.

  “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 tenement. “Ach!” she sighed. “How can his face still burn so in me when he is so long gone? How the deadness in me flames up with life at the thought of him!”

  The dark hallway seemed flooded with white radiance. She closed her eyes that she might see more vividly the beloved features. The glowing smile that healed all ills of life and changed her from the weary drudge into the vibrant creature of joy.

  It was all a miracle—his coming, this young professor from one of the big colleges. He had rented a room in the very house where she was janitress so as to be near the people he was writing about. But more wonderful than all was the way he stopped to talk to her, to question her about herself as though she were his equal. What warm friendliness had prompted him to take her out of her dark basement to the library where there were books to read!

  And then—that unforgettable night on the way home, when the air was poignant with spring! Only a moment—a kiss—a pressure of hands! And the world shone with light—the empty, unlived years filled with love!

  She was lost in dreams of her one hour of romance when a woman elbowed her way through the dim passage, leaving behind her the smell of herring and onions.