Part 11

Rebecca felt herself growing hard and inhuman. Didn’t she love her sister enough to respond to her cry of loneliness? But the next moment she knew that though it tore the heart out of her body she could never stand this bloated ease of the flesh into which Minnie was trying to beguile her.

“Would you want me to marry Moe and bury myself alive in cloaks and suits like you? I’d rather starve on dry crusts where life is real, where there’s still hope for higher things. It would kill me to stay here another day. Your fine food, your fresh air, your velvet limousine smothers me.... It’s all a desert of emptiness painted over with money. Nothing is real. The sky is too blue. The grass is too green. This beauty is all false paint, hiding dry rot. There’s only one hope for you. Leave your killing comforts and come with me.”

“And what about the children?” Minnie leaped to her feet in quick defence. “I want them to have a chance in life. I couldn’t bear to have them go through the misery and dirt that nearly killed me. You’re not a mother. You don’t know a mother’s heart.”

“Your mother’s heart--it’s only selfishness! You’re only trying to save yourself the pain of seeing your children go through the struggle that made you what you are. No,” she corrected, “that made you what you once were.”

Rebecca towered over her sister like the living spirit of struggle revolting against the deadening inertia of ease.

“What is this chance that you are giving your children? To rub sleeves with millionaire children? Will that feed their hungry young hearts? Fire their spirits for higher things? Children’s hands reach out for struggle. Their youth is hungry for hardships, for danger, for the rough fight with life even more than their bodies are hungry for bread.”

Minnie looked at her little sister. From where came that fire, that passion? She saw again Felix Weinberg’s flaming eyes. She heard again his biting truths, the very cadence of his voice.

Minnie buried her throbbing head in the pillows. As surely as Rebecca sold ribbons over the counter at ten cents a yard, so surely Minnie knew that she had sold her own soul for the luxuries which Abe’s money had bought. And now it was out of her power to call this real part of her back. The virus of luxury had eaten into her body and soul till she could no longer exist without it.

“If I could only go back with you,” she sobbed impotently, “if I could only go back.”

* * * * *

Love and hate tore at Rebecca’s heart--love of Minnie and hatred of the fleshpots that were destroying her sister. The days and nights of journey home were spent in tortured groping for the light. Ach--sisters! Flesh of one flesh, blood of one blood, aching to help one another in the loneliness of life, yet doomed like strangers to meet only to part again.

If she could only talk out her confusion to someone. Felix Weinberg! How he could make her clear! And suddenly she knew--knew with burning certainty that after ten years of worshipping him at a distance she must come to him face to face. Truth itself was driving her to him.

As she got off the train, her feet instinctively led her to the cellar café on East Broadway, where far into the morning hours Felix Weinberg and his high-thinking friends were to be found.

Even before she caught sight of him at a corner table surrounded by his followers, she felt a vast release. She looked in through the grated window. How different these--her own people--from the dollar-chasers she had just left! The dirt, the very squalor of the place was life to her, as the arrogant cleanliness, the strutting shirt-fronts of cloaks and suits had deadened her. Here rags talked high thoughts and world philosophies, like princes at a royal court. Here only what was in your heart and head counted, not your bank account or the shine of your diamonds.

Even the torn wall-plaster in this palace of dreams had a magic all its own. The pictures, the poems, the fragmentary bits of self-expression that were scribbled everywhere were marks of the vivid life that surged about--clamouring to be heard.

She never knew how she got inside, but as in a dream she heard herself talking to _him_--looking straight into Felix’s eyes in a miraculously natural way as though her whole life was but a leading up to this grand moment.

The youth who used to light up their little kitchen with his flaming presence was gone. In his place had come a man grown strong with suffering. Fine as silk and strong as steel shone every feature. He was scarred with all the hurts of the world--hurts that lay like whip lashes on the furrows of his face. She felt nothing would be too small or too big for him to understand.

“Years ago when I was only that big at your feet,” Rebecca measured the table height with her hand, “your words were life to me. Now I come three thousand miles to talk my heart out with you.” And she told him everything, her doubt of herself, her hard intolerance of the plain bread-and-butter people, her revolt against her own flesh and blood.

His face lit with quick comprehension. He stopped sipping his glass of tea and leaned towards her across the table. With every word, with every gesture she revealed herself as one of his own kind! This girl of whose existence he had scarcely been aware all these years seemed suddenly to have grown up under his very eyes, and he had not seen her till now.

“Don’t you see, little heart,” he responded warmly, “the dollars are their dreams. They eat the fleshpots with the same passionate intensity that they once fasted in faith on the Day of Atonement. They’ve been hungry for so many centuries. Let them eat! Give them only a chance for a few generations. They’ll find their souls again. The deeper down under the surface you get, the more you see that the dollar-chasers are also pursuing a dream, but their dream is different from ours, that is all.”

“Where did you get to feel and know so much?” she breathed adoringly.

He did not answer. But his eyes dwelt on her in ardent reverie, marvelling at the gift of the gods that she was. Through unceasing frustration of the things for which he had striven, he had come to a point of understanding the materialists no less than the dreamers. He had learned to forgive even Minnie who had turned from his love for the security of wealth. But here was the glowing innocence of a girl with the heart and brain of a woman--a woman in his own poet’s world, one who had rejected the fleshpots of her own free will. It was as though after years of parching thirst life had suddenly brought him a draught of wine, a heady vintage of youth, of living poetry, of love perhaps. Straining closer to her, he abandoned himself to the exaltation that swept him and kissed her hand.

“No--no! It was Minnie you always loved,” Rebecca gasped, frightened at his ardour.

“Minnie I loved as a dreaming youth, a half-fledged poet,” he flashed back at her. “But you--you----”

She knew now why she had come back home again--back to the naked struggle for bread--back to the crooked, narrow streets filled with shouting children, the haggling push-carts and bargaining housewives--back to the relentless, penny-pinched poverty--but a poverty rich in romance, in dreams--rich in its very hunger of unuttered, unsung beauty.

THE SONG TRIUMPHANT

_The Story of Beret Pinsky, Poet of the People, who Sold his Soul for Wealth_

§ 1

“Where went your week’s wages?” demanded Hanneh Breineh, her bony back humping like an angry cat’s as she bent over the washtub.

Terrified, Moisheh gazed wildly at the ceiling, then dropped his eyes to the floor.

“Your whole week’s wages--where went it?” insisted Hanneh.

She turned from the tub and brandished her hands in his face.

“The shoes--Berel’s shoes,” Moisheh stumblingly explained. “I--I had to buy him shoes for his feet--not new shoes--only second-hand.”

“Shoes yet for such a loafer? I’d drive him out naked--barefoot. Let him get the chills--the fever--only to get rid from him quick!”

None of the roomers of Hanneh Breineh’s lodging-house could escape her tyrannous inquisition. Had she not been a second mother to Moisheh, the pants presser, and to Berel, his younger brother? Did she not cook their supper for them every night, without any extra charge? In return for this motherly service she demanded a precise account of their expenditures of money or time, and of every little personal detail of their lives.

Red glints shot from Hanneh Breineh’s sunken eyes.

“And for what more did you waste out my rent money?”

“Books--he got to have ’em--more’n eating--more’n life!”

“Got to have books?” she shrieked. “Beggars--_schnorrers_--their rent not paid--their clothes falling from them in rags--and yet they buy themselves books!” Viciously slapping the board with the shirt she had been rubbing, she straightened and faced Moisheh menacingly. “I been too good to you. I cooked and washed for you, and killed myself away to help you for nothing. So that’s my thanks!”

The door opened. A lean youth with shining eyes and a dishevelled mass of black hair rushed in.

“_Ach_, Moisheh! Already back from the shop? My good luck--I’m choking to tell you!”

The two drab figures huddled in the dim kitchen between the washtub and the stove gazed speechless at the boy. Even Hanneh Breineh was galvanized for the moment by the ecstatic, guileless face, the erect, live figure poised bird-like with desire.

“_Oi_, golden heart!” The boy grasped Moisheh’s arm impetuously. “A typewriter! It’s worth fifty dollars--maybe more yet--and I can get it for ten, if I grab it quick for cash!”

Moisheh glanced from the glowering landlady to his ardent brother. His gentle heart sank as he looked into Berel’s face, with its undoubting confidence that so reasonable a want would not be denied him.

“Don’t you think--maybe--ain’t there something you could do to earn the money?”

“What more can I do than I’m already doing? You think only pressing pants is work?”

“Berel,” said Moisheh, with frank downrightness, “you got your education. Why don’t you take up a night school? They’re looking for teachers.”

“Me a teacher? Me in that treadmill of deadness? Why, the dullest hand in a shop got more chance to use his brains than a teacher in their schools!”

“Well, then, go to work in a shop--only half-days--the rest of the time give yourself over to your dreams in the air.”

“Brother, are you gone crazy?” Berel gesticulated wildly. “I should go into that terrible sweat and grind of the machines? All the fire that creates in me would die in a day!”

The poet looked at the toil-scarred face of his peasant brother. For all his crude attempts at sympathy, how could he, with the stink of steam soaked into his clothes, with his poverty-crushed, sweatshop mind--how could he understand the anguish of thwarted creation, of high-hearted hopes that died unvoiced?

“But everybody got to work,” Moisheh went on. “All your poetry is grand, but it don’t pay nothing.”

“Is my heart cry nothing, then? Nothing to struggle by day and by night for the right word in this strange English, till I bleed away from the torture of thoughts that can’t come out?”

Berel stopped, and his eyes seemed transfigured with an inner light. His voice grew low and tense. Each word came deliberately, with the precision he used when swayed by poetic feeling.

“_Ach_, if I could only tell you of the visions that come to me! They flash like burning rockets over the city by night. Lips, eyes, a smile--they whisper to me a thousand secrets. The feelings that leap in my heart are like rainbow-coloured playthings. I toss them and wrestle with them; and yet I must harness them. Only then can they utter the truth, when they are clear and simple so that a young child could understand.”

Turning swiftly, the words hissed from the poet’s lips.

“Why do I have to bite the dirt for every little crumb you give me? I, who give my life, the beat of my heart, the blood of my veins, to bring beauty into the world--why do I have to beg--beg!”

He buried his face in his hands, utterly overcome.

Moisheh, with an accusing glance at Hanneh Breineh, as if she was in some measure to blame for this painful outburst, soothed the trembling Berel as one would a child.

“_Shah!_” He took from his pocket all his money. “Two dollars is all I yet got left, and on this I must stick out till my wages next Monday. But here, Berel, take half.”

Shamed by Moisheh’s generosity, and embittered by the inadequacy of the sum, Berel’s mood of passionate pleading gave way to sullenness.

“Keep it!” he flung over his shoulder, and left the room.

§ 2

Berel’s thoughts surged wildly as he raced through the streets.

“Why am I damned and despised by them all? What is my crime? That I can’t compromise? That I fight with the last breath to do my work--the work for which I was born?”

Instinctively his feet led him to the public library, his one sanctuary of escape from the sordidness of the world. But now there seemed no peace for him even here.

“Money--money!” kept pounding and hammering in his ears. “Get money or be blotted out!”

A tap on his shoulder. Berel turned and looked into a genial face, sleeked and barbered into the latest mould of fashion.

“Jake Shapiro!” cried the poet.

Five years ago these two had met on the ship bound for America. What dreams they had dreamed together on that voyage--Berel Pinsky, the poet, and Shapiro, the musician!

“What are you doing for a living? Still writing poetry?” asked Shapiro, as he glanced appraisingly at the haggard-eyed youth. In one swift look he took in the shabby garments that covered the thin body, the pride and the eagerness of the pale, hungry face. “I guess,” added the musician, “your poetry ain’t a very paying proposition!”

Incensed at the unconscious gibe, Berel turned with a supercilious curl of his lips.

“What’s a sport like you doing here in the library?”

Shapiro pointed to a big pile of books from the copyright office.

“Chasing song titles,” he said. “I’m a melody writer. I got some wonderful tunes, and I thought I’d get a suggestion for a theme from these catalogues.”

“_Oi weh_, if for ideas you have to go to copyright catalogues!”

“Man, you should see the bunch of lyric plumbers I have to work with. They give me jingles and rhymes, but nothing with a real heart thrill.” He turned on Berel with sudden interest. “Show us some of your soul stuff.”

Berel handed several pages to the composer. One after another, Shapiro read.

“Highbrow--over the heads of the crowd,” was his invariable comment.

Suddenly he stopped.

“By heck, there’s a good idea for a sob song! What a title--‘Aching Hearts’!” He grasped Berel’s hand with genuine friendliness. “Your lines have the swing I’ve been looking for. Only a little more zip, a change here and there, and----”

“Change this?” Berel snatched the verses and put them back in his pocket. “There’s my heart’s blood in every letter of it!”

“Yes, it’s heart stuff all right,” placated the composer, realizing a good thing, and impatient as a hound on the scent. “Come along!” He took Berel by the arm. “I want to read your sob stuff to a little friend.”

Flattered, but vaguely apprehensive, Berel followed Shapiro to the delectable locality known as Tin Pan Alley, and into the inner shrine of one of the many song houses to be found there.

“Maizie!” cried Shapiro to a vaudeville star who had been waiting none too patiently for his return. “I’ve found an honest-to-God poet!”

He introduced Berel, who blushed like a shy young girl.

“So you’re a poet?” said Maizie.

Her eyes were pools of dancing lights as she laughed, aware of her effect on the transfixed youth. Berel stared in dazzled wonder at the sudden apparition of loveliness, of joy, of life. Soft, feminine perfume enveloped his senses. Like a narcotic, it stole over him. It was the first time he had ever been touched by the seductive lure of woman.

Shapiro sat down at a piano, and his hands brought from the tortured instrument a smashing medley of syncopated tunes.

“This needs lyric stuff with a heartbeat in it,” he flung over his shoulder; “and you have just the dope.”

His eyes met Maizie’s significantly, and then veered almost imperceptibly in the direction of Berel.

“Go ahead, kid--vamp him! We’ve got to have him,” was the message they conveyed to her.

Maizie put her hand prettily on the youth’s arm.

“With an air like that, and the right lines--oh, boy, I’d flood Broadway with tears!”

Berel stood bewildered under the spell of her showy beauty. Unconsciously his hand went to his pocket, where lay his precious verses.

“I--I can’t change my lines for the mob,” he stammered.

But Maizie’s little hand crept down his arm until it, too, reached his pocket, while her face was raised alluringly to his.

“Let’s see it, Mr. Poet--do, please!”

Suddenly, with a triumphant ripple of laughter, she snatched the pages and glanced rapidly through the song. Then, with her highly manicured fingers, she grasped the lapels of Berel’s coat, her eyes dancing with a coquettish little twinkle.

“It’s wonderful!” she flattered. “Just give me the chance to put it over, and all the skirts from here to Denver will be singing it!”

Shapiro placed himself in front of Berel and said with businesslike directness:

“I’ll advance you two hundred bucks on this song, if you’ll put a kick in it.”

Two hundred dollars! The suddenness of the overwhelming offer left Berel stunned and speechless.

“Money--_ach_, money! To get a breath of release from want!” he thought. “Just a few weeks away from Hanneh Breineh’s cursing and swearing! A chance to be quiet and alone--a place where I can have a little beauty!”

Shapiro, through narrowed lids, watched the struggle that was going on in the boy. He called for his secretary.

“Write out a contract,” he ordered. “Words by Berel Pinsky--my melody.”

Then he turned to the poet, who stood nervously biting his lips.

“If this song goes over, it’ll mean a big piece of change for you. You get a cent and a half on every copy. A hit sometimes goes a million copies. Figure it out for yourself. I’m not counting the mechanical end of it--phonograph records--pianola rolls--hurdy-gurdies.”

At the word “hurdy-gurdy” an aching fear shot through the poet’s heart. His pale face grew paler as he met the smooth smile of the composer.

“Only to get a start,” he told himself, strengthening his resolve to sell his poem with an equal resolve never to do so again.

“Well?” chuckled Shapiro.

He drew out a thick wallet from his pocket, and began counting out the fresh, green bills.

“I’ll do it this once,” said Berel, in a scarcely audible voice, as he pocketed the money.

“Gassed with gold!” exulted Shapiro to Maizie after Berel left. “He’s ours body and soul--bought and paid for!”

§ 3

Hanneh Breineh’s lodging-house was in a hubbub of excitement. A limousine had stopped before the dingy tenement, and Berel--a Berel from another world--stepped into the crowded kitchen.

How he was dressed! His suit was of the latest cut. The very quality of his necktie told of the last word in grooming. The ebony cane hanging on his arm raised him in the eyes of the admiring boarders to undreamed-of heights of wealth.

There was a new look in his eyes--the look of the man who has arrived and who knows that he has. Gone was the gloom of the insulted and the injured. Success had blotted out the ethereal, longing gaze of the hungry ghetto youth. Nevertheless, to a discerning eye, a lurking discontent, like a ghost at a feast, still cast its shadow on Berel’s face.

“He’s not happy. He’s only putting on,” thought Moisheh, casting sidelong glances at his brother.

“You got enough to eat, and it shows on you so quick,” purred Hanneh Breineh, awed into ingratiating gentleness by Berel’s new prosperity.

With a large-hearted gesture, Berel threw a handful of change into the air for the children. There was a wild scramble of tangled legs and arms, and then a rush to the street for the nearest pushcart.

“Oi weh!” Hanneh Breineh touched Berel with reverent gratitude. “Give a look only how he throws himself around with his money!”

Berel laughed gleefully, a warm glow coming to his heart at this bubbling appreciation of his generosity.

“Hanneh Breineh,” he said, with an impressive note in his voice, “did you ever have a twenty-dollar gold piece in your hand?”

An intake of breath was the only answer.

“Here it is.”

Berel took from his pocket a little satin case and handed it to her, his face beaming with the lavishness of the gift.

Hanneh Breineh gazed at the gold piece, which glistened with unbelievable solidity before her enraptured eyes. Then she fell on Berel’s neck.

“You diamond prince!” she gushed. “Always I stood for your part when they all said you was crazy!”

The lean, hungry-faced boarders drank him in, envious worship in their eyes.

“Rockefeller--Vanderbilt!”

Exclamations of wonder and awe leaped from lip to lip as they gazed at this Midas who was once a _schnorrer_ in their midst.

Basking in their adulation like a bright lizard in the sun, Berel, with feigned indifference, lighted a thick cigar. He began to hum airily one of his latest successes.

“Ten thousand dollars for my last song!” he announced casually, as he puffed big rings of smoke to the ceiling.

“Riches rains on you!” Hanneh Breineh threw up her hands in an abandon of amazement. “Sing to me only that millionaires’ song!”

Lifting her ragged skirts, she began to step in time to the tune that Berel hummed.

Out of all the acclaimers Moisheh remained the only unresponsive figure in the room.

“Why your long face?” Hanneh Breineh shrieked. “What thunder fell on you?”

Moisheh shifted uncomfortably.

“I don’t know what is with me the matter. I don’t get no feelings from the words. It’s only boom--boom--nothing!”

“Is ten thousand dollars nothing?” demanded the outraged Hanneh Breineh. “Are a million people crazy? All America sings his songs, and you turn up your nose on them. What do you know from life? You sweat from morning till night pressing out your heart’s blood on your ironing board, and what do you get from it? A crooked back--a dried out herring face!”

“‘The prosperity of fools slayeth them,’” quoted Moisheh in Hebrew.

Berel turned swiftly on his brother.

“It’s the poets who are slain and the fools who are exalted. Before I used to spend three months polishing one little cry from the heart. Sometimes I sold it for five dollars, but most of the time I didn’t. Now I shoot out a song in a day, and it nets me a fortune!”

“But I would better give you the blood from under my nails than you should sell yourself for dollars,” replied Moisheh.

“Would you want me to come back to this hell of dirt and beg from you again for every galling bite of bread?” cried Berel, flaring into rage. “Your gall should burst, you dirt-eating muzhik!” he shouted with unreasoning fury, and fled headlong from the room.

This unaccountable anger from the new millionaire left all but Hanneh Breineh in a stupor of bewilderment.

“Muzhik! Are we all muzhiks, then?” she cried. A biting doubt of the generosity of her diamond prince rushed through her. “Twenty dollars only from so many thousands? What if he did dress out his stingy present in a satin box?”

She passed the gold piece around disdainfully.

“After all, I can’t live on the shine from it. What’ll it buy me--only twenty dollars? I done enough for him when he was a starving beggar that he shouldn’t be such a piker to me!”

§ 4

A night of carousing had just ended. Berel Pinsky looked about his studio. Wineglasses were strewn about. Hairpins and cigarette ashes littered the floor. A woman’s rainbow-coloured scarf, reeking with tobacco smoke and perfume, lay wantonly across the piano keys.