Part 5

“I used to think that I’d die a presser by pants. But since I read from Lincoln, something happened in me. I feel I got something for America--only I don’t know how to give it out. I’m yet too much of a dummox----”

“What’s in us must come out. I feel America needs you and me as much as she needs her Rockefellers and Morgans. Rockefellers and Morgans only pile up mountains of money; we bring to America the dreams and desires of ages--the youth that never had a chance to be young--the choked lives that never had a chance to live.”

A shadow filmed Moisheh’s brooding eyes. “I can’t begin yet to think from myself for a few years. First comes my brothers. If only Feivel would work for himself up for a big doctor and Berel for a big writer then I’ll feel myself free to do something....

“Shah! I got great news for you,” Moisheh announced. “Feivel has already his doctor’s office.”

“Where did he get all the money?”

“On the instalment plan I got him the chair and the office things. Now he’s beginning to earn already enough to pay almost half his rent.”

“Soon he’ll be for dinner.” The old lady jumped up. “I got to get his eating ready before he comes.” And she hastened back to the kitchen stove.

“And Berel--what does he do?” I inquired.

“Berel ain’t working yet. He’s still writing from his head,” explained Moisheh. “Wait only and I’ll call him. He’s locked himself up in his bedroom; nobody should bother him.”

“Berel!” he called, tapping respectfully at the door.

“_Yuk!_” came in a voice of nervous irritation. “What is it?”

“The _teacherin_ is here,” replied Moisheh.

“Only a minute.”

“It’s me,” I added. “I’d like to see you.”

Berel came out, hair dishevelled, with dreamy, absent look, holding pencil and paper in his hand. “I was just finishing a poem,” he said in greeting to me.

“I have been looking for your name in the magazines. Have you published anything yet?”

“I--publish in the American magazines?” he flung, hurt beyond words. “I wouldn’t mix my art with their empty drivel.”

“But, surely, there are some better magazines,” I protested.

“Pshah! Their best magazines--the pink-and-white jingles that they call poetry are not worth the paper they’re printed on. America don’t want poets. She wants plumbers.”

“But what will you do with the poetry you write?”

“I’ll publish it myself. Art should be free, like sunlight and beauty. The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts. If only Moisheh could give me the hundred dollars I’d have my volume printed at once.”

“But how can I raise all that money when I’m not yet paid out with Feivel’s doctor’s office?” remonstrated Moisheh. “Don’t you think if--maybe you’d get a little job?”

An expression of abstraction came over Betel’s face, and he snapped, impatiently: “Yes--yes--I told you that I would look for a job. But I must write this while I have the inspiration.”

“Can’t you write your inspiration out in the evening?” faltered Moisheh. “If you could only bring in a few dollars a week to help pay ourselves out to the instalment man.”

Berel looked at his brother with compassionate tolerance. “What are to you the things of the soul? All you care for is money--money--money! You’d want me to sell my soul, my poetry, my creative fire--to hand you a few dirty dollars.”

The postman’s whistle and the cry, “Berel Cinski!”

Moisheh hurried downstairs and brought back a large return envelope.

“Another one of those letters back,” deplored the mother, untactfully. “You’re only for making the post office rich with the stamps from Moisheh’s blood money.”

“Dammit!” Defeat enraged the young poet to the point of brutality. “Stop nagging me and mixing in with things you don’t understand!” He struck the rude table with his clenched fist. “It’s impossible to live with you thickheads--numskulls--money-grubbing worms.”

He threw on his hat and coat and paused for a moment glowering in the doorway. “Moisheh,” he demanded, “give me a quarter for car fare. I have to go uptown to the library.” Silently the big brother handed him the money, and Berel flung himself out of the room.

The door had no sooner closed on the poet than the doctor sauntered into the room. After a hasty “Hallo!” he turned to Moisheh. “I’ve had a wonderful opportunity offered me--but I can’t take advantage of it.”

“What!” cried Moisheh, his face brightening.

“My landlord invited me to his house to-night, to meet his only daughter.”

“Why not go?” demanded Moisheh.

“Sure you got to go,” urged the mother, as she placed the food before him. “The landlord only got to see how smart you are and he’ll pull you in the richest customers from uptown.”

Feivel looked at his clothes with resigned contempt. “H--m,” he smiled bitterly. “Go in this shabby suit? I have too much respect for myself.”

There was troubled silence. Both brother and mother were miserable that their dear one should be so deprived.

Moisheh moved over to the window, a worried look on his face. Presently he turned to his brother. “I’d give you the blood from under my nails for you but I’m yet so behind with the instalment man.”

The doctor stamped his foot impatiently. “I simply have to have a suit! It’s a question of life and death.... Think of the chance! The landlord took a liking to me--rich as Rockefeller--and an only daughter. If he gives me a start in an uptown office I could _coin_ money. All I need is a chance--the right location. Ten--twenty--fifty dollars an hour. There’s no limit to a dentist’s fee. If he sets me up on Riverside Drive I could charge a hundred dollars for work I get five for in Rutgers Street!”

“Can I tear myself in pieces? Squeeze the money from my flesh?”

“But do you realize that, once I get uptown, I could earn more in an hour than you could in a month? I’ll pay you back every penny a hundred times over.”

“_Nu_--tell me only--what can I do? Anything you’ll say----”

“Why--you have your gold watch.”

Moisheh’s hand leaped to the watch in his vest pocket. “My gold watch! My prize from the night school?” he pleaded. “It ain’t just a watch--it’s given me by the principal for never being absent for a whole year.”

“Oh, rot!--you, with your sentimentality! Try to understand something once.” The doctor waved his objections aside. “Once I get my start in an uptown office I can buy you a dozen watches. I’m telling you my whole future depends on the front I put up at the landlord’s house, and still you hesitate!”

Moisheh looked at his watch, fingering it. His eyes filled with tears. “_Oi weh!_” he groaned. “It’s like a piece from my heart. My prize from the night school,” he mumbled, brokenly; “but take it if you got to have it.”

“You’ll get it back,” confidently promised the doctor, “get it back a hundred times over.” And as he slipped the watch into his pocket, Moisheh’s eyes followed it doggedly. “So long, _mammeniu_; no dinner for me to-day.” Feivel bestowed a hasty good-bye caress upon his old mother.

* * * * *

The doctor was now living in an uptown boarding-house, having moved some weeks before, giving the excuse that for his business it was necessary to cultivate an uptown acquaintance. But he still kept up his office in Rutgers Street.

One morning after he had finished treating my teeth, he took up a cigarette, nervously lit it, attempted to smoke, and then threw it away. I had never seen the suave, complacent man so unnerved and fidgety. Abruptly he stopped in front of me and smiled almost affectionately.

“You are the very person I want to speak to this morning--you are the only person I want to speak to,” he repeated.

I was a little startled, for his manner was most unlike him. Seldom did he even notice me, just as he did not notice most of Moisheh’s friends. But his exuberant joyousness called out my instinctive response, and before I knew it I was saying, “If there’s anything I can do for you I’ll be only too happy.”

He took a bill from his pocket, placed it in my hand, and said, with repressed excitement: “I want you to take my mother and Moisheh to see ‘Welcome Stranger.’ It’s a great show. It’s going to be a big night with me, and I want them to be happy, too.”

I must have looked puzzled, for he narrowed his eyes and studied me, twice starting to speak, and both times stopping himself.

“You must have thought me a selfish brute all this time,” he began. “But I’ve only been biding my time. I must make the most of myself, and now is my only chance--to rise in the world.”

He stopped again, paced the floor several times, placed a chair before me, and said: “Please sit down. I want to talk to you.”

There was a wistful pleading in his voice that none could resist, and for the first time I was aware of the compelling humanness of this arrogant intellectual.

“I’ll tell you everything just as it is,” he started. And then he stopped again. “_Ach!_” he groaned. “There’s something I would like to talk over with you--but I just can’t. You wouldn’t understand.... A great thing is happening in my life to-night--but I can’t confide it to anyone--none can understand. But--I ask of you just this: will you give Moisheh and my mother a good time? Let the poor devils enjoy themselves for once?”

As I walked out of the office, the bill still crumpled in my hand, I reproached myself for my former harsh condemnation of the doctor. Perhaps all those months, when I had thought him so brutally selfish, he had been building for the future.

But what was this mysterious good fortune that he could not confide to anyone--and that none could understand?

“Doctor Feivel gave me money to take you to the theatre,” I announced as I entered the house.

“Theatre!” chorused Moisheh and his mother, excitedly.

“Yes,” I said. “Feivel seemed so happy to-day, and he wanted you to share his happiness.”

“Feivel, the golden heart!” The old mother’s eyes were misty with emotion.

“_Ach!_ Didn’t I tell you even if my brother is high-educated, he won’t shame himself from us?” Moisheh faced me triumphantly. “I was so afraid since he moved himself into an uptown boarding-house that maybe we are losing him, even though he still kept up his office on Rutgers Street.” Moisheh’s eyes shone with delight.

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” said he, leaning forward confidentially. “I’m planning to give a surprise to Feivel. In another month I’ll pay myself out for the last of Feivel’s office things. And for days and nights I’m going around thinking and dreaming about buying him an electric sign. Already I made the price with the instalment man for it.” By this time his recital was ecstatic. “And think only--what _mein_ doctor will say, when he’ll come one morning from his uptown boarding-house and find my grand surprise waiting for him over his office door!”

All the way to the theatre Moisheh and his mother drank in the glamour and the glitter of the electric signs of Broadway.

“_Gottuniu!_ If I only had the money for such a sign for Feivel,” Moisheh sighed, pointing to the chewing-gum advertisement on the roof of a building near the Astor. “If I only had Rockefeller’s money, I’d light up America with Feivel’s doctor sign!”

When we reached the theatre, we found we had come almost an hour too early.

“Never mind--_mammeniu_!” Moisheh took his mother’s arm tenderly. “We’ll have time now to walk ourselves along and see the riches and lights from America.”

“I should live so,” he said, surveying his mother affectionately. “That red velvet waist and this new shawl over your head makes your face so shine, everybody stops to give a look on you.”

“Yeh--yeh! You’re always saying love words to every woman you see.”

“But this time it’s my mother, so I mean it from my heart.”

Moisheh nudged me confidentially. “_Teacherin!_ See only how a little holiday lifts up my _mammeniu_! Don’t it dance from her eyes the joy like from a young girl?”

“Stop already making fun from your old mother.”

“You old?” Moisheh put his strong arm around his mother’s waist. “Why, people think we’re a young couple on our honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon--_ach_!” The faded face shone with inward visioning. “My only wish is to see for my eyes my sons marry themselves in good luck. What’s my life--but only the little hope from my children? To dance with the bride on my son’s wedding will make me the happiest mother from America.”

“Feivel will soon give you that happiness,” responded Moisheh. “You know how the richest American-born girls are trying to catch on to him. And no matter how grand the girl he’ll marry himself to, you’ll have the first place of honour by the wedding.”

As we turned in at Forty-fifth Street a curious crowd blocked our path. A row of sleek limousines stood before the arched entrance of the Van Suydden Hotel.

“Look only--a wedding! Let’s give a look on the bride!” exclaimed Moisheh’s mother, eagerly. A wedding was, in her religion, the most significant ceremony in life. And for her sake we elbowed our way towards the front.

A procession of bridesmaids in shimmering chiffons, bedecked with flowers, were the first to tread the carpeted steps.

Then we saw the bride.... And then----Good God!--was it possible?

Moisheh clutched his mother’s hand convulsively. Could it really be their Feivel?

The two stood gaping blindly, paralysed by the scene before them.

Suddenly--roused by the terrible betrayal--the mother uttered a distorted sob of grief. “Feivel--son _mein_! What have you done to me?”

Moisheh grasped the old woman more firmly as the bride tossed her head coquettishly and turned possessive eyes on her husband--their son and brother.

The onlookers murmured appreciatively, thrilled by the pretty romance.

Enraged by the stupid joy of the crowd which mocked her misery, the old mother broke from Moisheh’s hold with wiry strength and clawed wildly at the people around her.

“Feivel--black curses----!” she hissed--and then she crumpled, fainting, into Moisheh’s arms.

Unaware of the disturbance outside, the happy couple passed into the festive reception hall.

With quick self-control, Moisheh motioned to a taxicab out of which had just emerged another wedding guest. Then he gently lifted the fainting form of the little mother in beside him.

And all through the night the bitter tears of betrayed motherhood poured over the shrunken bosom where Feivel, as a suckling infant, had once helped himself to life.

TO THE STARS

§ 1

“There are too many writers and too few cooks.” The dean laughed at her outright. His superior glance placed her. “The trouble with you is that you are a Russian Jewess. You want the impossible.”

Sophie Sapinsky’s mouth quivered at the corners, and her teeth bit into the lower lip to still its trembling.

“How can you tell what’s possible in me before I had a chance?” she said.

“My dear child”--Dean Lawrence tried to be kind--“the magazine world is overcrowded with native-born writers who do not earn their salt. What chance is there for you, with your immigrant English? You could never get rid of your foreign idiom. Quite frankly, I think you are too old to begin.”

“I’m not so old like I look.” Sophie heard a voice that seemed to come from somewhere within her speak for her. “I’m only old from the crushed-in things that burn me up. It dies in me, my heart, if I don’t give out what’s in me.”

“My dear young woman”--the dean’s broad tolerance broke forth into another laugh--“you are only one of the many who think that they have something to say that the world is languishing to hear.” His easy facetiousness stung her into further vehemence.

“But I’m telling you I ain’t everybody.” With her fist she struck his desk, oblivious of what she was doing. “I’m smart from myself, not from books. I never had a chance when I was young, so I got to _make my chance_ when I’m ‘too old.’ I feel I could yet be younger than youth if I could only catch on to the work I love.”

“Take my advice. Retain the position that assures you a living. Apply yourself earnestly to it, and you will secure a measure of satisfaction.”

The dean turned to the mahogany clock on his desk. Sophie Sapinsky was quick to take the hint. She had taken up too much of his time, but she could not give up without another effort.

“I can’t make good at work that chokes me.”

“Well, then see the head of the English department,” he said, with a gesture of dismissal.

The professor of English greeted Sophie with a tired, lifeless smile that fell like ashes on her heart. A chill went through her as she looked at his bloodless face. But the courage of despair drove her to speak.

“I wasted all my youth slaving for bread, but now I got to do what I want to do. For me--oh, you can’t understand--but for me, it’s a case of life or death. I got to be a writer, and I want to take every course in English and literature from the beginning to the end.”

The professor did not laugh at Sophie Sapinsky as the dean had done. He had no life left for laughter. But his cold scrutiny condemned her.

“I know,” she pleaded, “I ain’t up to those who had a chance to learn from school, but inside me I’m always thinking from life, just like Emerson. I understand Emerson like he was my own brother. And he says: ‘Trust yourself. Hold on to the thoughts that fly through your head, and the world has got to listen to you even if you’re a nobody.’ Ideas I got plenty. What I want to learn from the college is only the words, the quick language to give out what thinks itself in me--just like Emerson.”

The preposterous assumption of this ignorant immigrant girl in likening herself to the revered sage of Concord staggered the professor. He coughed.

“Well--er”--he paused to get the exact phrase to set her right--“Emerson, in his philosophy, assumed a tolerant attitude that, unfortunately, the world does not emulate. Perhaps you remember the unhappy outcome of your English entrance examination.”

Sophie Sapinsky reddened painfully. The wound of her failure was still fresh.

“In order to be eligible for our regular college courses, you would have to spend two or three years in preparation.”

Blindly, Sophie turned to go. She reached for the door. The professor’s perfunctory good-bye fell on deaf ears.

She swung the door open. The president of the college stood before her. She remembered it was he who had welcomed the extension students on the evening of her first attendance. He moved deferentially aside for her to pass. For one swift instant Sophie looked into kindly eyes. “Could he understand? Should I cry out to him to help me?” flashed through her mind. But before she could say a word he passed and the door had closed.

Sophie stopped in the hall. Had she the courage to wait until he came out? “He’s got feelings,” her instincts urged her. “He’s not an _all-rightnik_, a stone heart like the rest of them.”

“_Ach!_” cried her shattered spirit, “what would he, the head of them all, have to do with me? He wouldn’t even want to stop to listen.”

Too crushed to endure another rebuff, she dragged her leaden feet down the stairs and out into the street. All the light went out of her eyes, the strength out of her arms and fingers. She could think or feel nothing but the choked sense of her defeat.

That night she lay awake staring into the darkness. Every nerve within her cried aloud with the gnawing ache of her unlived life. Out of the dim corners the spectre of her stunted girlhood rose to mock her--the wasted, poverty-stricken years smothered in the steaming pots of other people’s kitchens. “Must I always remain buried alive in the black prison of my dumbness? Can’t I never learn to give out what’s in me? Must I choke myself in the smoke of my own fire?”

Centuries of suppression, generations of illiterates, clamoured in her: “Show them what’s in you! If you can’t write in college English, write in ‘immigrant English.’”

She flung from her the college catalogue. About to trample on it, she stopped. The catalogue had fallen open at the photograph of the president. There looked up at her the one kind face in that heartless college world. The president’s eyes gazed once more steadily into hers. Sophie hesitated; but not to be thwarted of her vengeance, she tore out his picture and laid it on the table, then she ripped the catalogue, and stuffed the crumpled pages into the stove. It roared up the chimney like the song of the Valkyrie. She threw back her head with triumph, and once more her eyes met the president’s.

“Let them burn, these dead-heads. Who are they, the bosses of education? What are they that got the say over me if I’m fit to learn or not fit to learn? Dust and ashes, ashes and dust. But you,” she picked up the picture, “you still got some life. But if you got life, don’t their dry dust choke you?”

The wrestlings of her sleepless night only strengthened her resolve to do the impossible, just because it seemed impossible. “I can’t tear the stars out of heaven if it wills itself in me,” her youth cried in her. “Whether I know how to write or don’t know how to write, I’ll be a writer.”

§ 2

She was at the steaming stove of the restaurant at the usual hour the next morning. She stewed the same _tzimmas_, fried the same _blintzee_, stuffed the same _miltz_. But she was no longer the same. Her head was in a whirl with golden dreams of her visionary future.

All at once a scream rent the air.

“_Koosh!_ where in goodness’ name is your head?” thundered her employer. “The _blintzee_ burning in front of her nose, and she stands there like a _yok_ with her eyes in the air!”

“Excuse me,” she mumbled in confusion, setting down the pan. “I was only thinking for a minute.”

“Thinking!” His greasy face purpled with rage. “Do I pay you to think or to cook? For what do I give you such wages? What’s the world coming to? _Pfui!_ A cook, a greenhorn, a nothing--also me a thinker!”

Sophie’s eyes flamed.

“Maybe in Smyrna, from where you come, a cook is a nothing. In America everybody is a person.”

“Bolshevik!” he yelled. “Look only what fresh mouths the unions make from them! Y’understand me, in my restaurant one thing on a time: you cook or you think. If you wan’ to think, you’ll think outside.”

“All right, then; give me my wages!” she retorted, flaring up. “The Tsar is dead. In America cooks are also people.”

Sophie tore off her apron, and thrust it at the man.

To the cheapest part of the East Side she went in her search for a room. Through the back alleys and yards she sought for a place that promised to be within her means. And then a smeared square of cardboard held between the iron grating of a basement window caught her eye. “Room to let--a bargain--cheap!”

“Only three dollars a month,” said the woman in answer to Sophie’s inquiry.

The girl opened a grimy window that faced a blank wall.

“_Oi, weh!_ not a bit of air!”

“What do you need yet air for the winter?” cried Hanneh Breineh. “When the cold comes, the less air that blows into your room, the warmer you can keep yourself. And when it gets hot in summer you can take your mattress up on the roof. Everybody sleeps on the roof in summer.”

“But there’s so little light,” said Sophie.

“What more light do you yet need? A room is only for to sleep by night. When you come home from work, it’s dark, anyway. _Gottuniu!_ it’s so dark on my heart with trouble, what difference does it make a little darkness in the room?”

“But I have to work in my room all day. I must have it light.”

“_Nu_, I’ll let you keep the gas lighted all day long,” Hanneh Breineh promised.

“Three dollars a month,” deliberated Sophie. The cheapness would give her a sense of freedom that would make up for the lack of light and air. She paid down her first month’s rent.

_Her_ house, securely hers. Yet with the flash of triumph came a stab of bitterness. All that was hers was so wretched and so ugly! Had her eager spirit, eager to give, no claim to a bit of beauty, a shred of comfort?