§ 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?
Over the potato-barrel she flung a red shawl, once her mother’s, and
looked through her bag for something to cover an ugly break in the
plaster. She could find nothing but the page torn from the college
catalogue.
“It’s not so sunny and airy here as in your college office,” she said,
tacking the photograph on the wall; “but maybe you’d be a realer man if
once in your life you had to put up with a hole like this for a room.”
Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. With tense fingers she
wrote down the title of her story, then stopped, and stared wildly at
the ceiling.
Where was the vision that had haunted her all these days? Where were
the thoughts and feelings that surged like torrents through her soul?
Merely the act of putting her pencil to paper, her thoughts became a
blur, her feelings a dumb ache in her heart.
_Ach_, why must she kill herself to say what can never be said in
words? But how did Emerson and Shakespeare seize hold of their vision?
What was the source of their deathless power?
The rusty clock struck six.
“I ought to run out now for the stale bread, or it will be all sold
out, and I will have to pay twice as much for the fresh,” flashed
through her mind.
“_Oi weh!_” she wailed, covering her eyes, “it’s a stomach slave I am,
not a writer. I forget my story, I forget everything, thinking only of
saving a few pennies.”
She dragged herself back to the page in front of her and resumed her
task with renewed vigour.
“Sarah Lubin was sixteen years old when she came to America. She came
to get an education, but she had to go to a factory for bread,” she
wrote laboriously, and then drew back to study her work. The sentences
were wooden, dead, inanimate things. The words laughed up at her,
mockingly.
Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Writers never started stories
in this way. Her eyes wandered over to the bed, a hard, meagre cot. “I
must remember to fix the leg, or it will tip to-night,” she mused.
“Here I am,” she cried despairingly, “thinking of my comforts again!
And I thought I’d want nothing; I’d live only to write.” Her head sank
to the rough edge of the potato-barrel. “Perhaps I was a fool to give
up all for this writing.”
“Too many writers and too few cooks”: the dean’s words closed like a
noose around her anguished soul.
When she looked up, the kind face of the college president smiled down
at her.
“Then what is it in me that’s tearing and gnawing and won’t let me
rest?” she pleaded. The calm faith of the eyes levelled steadily at
her seemed to rebuke her despair. The sure faith of that lofty face
lifted her out of herself. She was humble before such unwavering power.
“_Ach!_” she prayed, “how can I be so sure like you? Help me!”
Sophie became a creature possessed. She lived for one idea, was driven
by one resistless passion, to write. As the weeks and months passed and
her savings began to dwindle, her cheeks grew paler and thinner, the
shadows under her restless eyes were black hollows of fear.
There came a day more deadly than death, when she had to face failure.
She took out the thinning wad from her stocking and counted out her
remaining cash: one, two, three dollars, and some nickels and dimes.
How long before the final surrender? If she kept up her rigorous ration
of dry bread and oatmeal, two or three weeks more at most. And then?
An end to dreams. An end to ambition. Back to the cook-stove, back to
the stifling smells of _tzimmas_, hash, and _miltz_.
No, she would never let herself sink back to the kitchen. But where
could she run from the terror of starvation?
The bitterest barb of her agony was her inability to surrender. She was
crushed, beaten, but she could not give up the battle. The unvoiced
dream in her still clamoured and ached and strained to find voice. A
resistless something in her that transcended reason rose up in defiance
of defeat.
§ 3
“A black year on the landlord!” screamed Hanneh Breineh through the
partition. “The rent he raised, so what does he need to worry yet if
the gas freezes? _Gottuniu!_ freeze should only the marrow from his
bones!”
Sophie turned back to the little stove in an attempt to light the gas
under the pan of oatmeal. The feeble flame flickered and with a faint
protest went out. Hanneh Breineh poked in her tousled head for sympathy.
“Woe is me! Woe on the poor what ain’t yet sick enough for the
hospital!”
As the chill of the gathering dusk intensified, Sophie seemed to see
herself carried out on a stretcher to the hospital, numb, frozen.
“God from the world! better a quick death than this slow freezing!”
With the perpetual gnawing of hunger sapping her strength, Sophie had
not the courage to face another night of torment. Drawing her shabby
shawl more tightly around her, she hurried out. “Where now?” she asked
as a wave of stinging snow blinded her. Hanneh Breineh’s words came
back to her: “the hospital!” Why not? Surely they couldn’t refuse to
shelter her just overnight in a storm like this.
But when she reached the Beth Israel her heart sank. She looked in
timidly at the warm, beckoning lights.
“_Ach!_ how can I have the gall to ask them to take me in? They’ll
think I’m only a beggar from the street.”
She paced the driveway of the building, back and forth and up and down,
in envy of the sick who enjoyed the luxury of warmth.
“To the earth with my healthy body!” she cursed. “Why can’t I only
break a bone or something?”
With a sudden courage of despair she mounted the steps to the
superintendent’s office; but one glance of the man’s well-fed face
robbed her of her nerve.
She sank down on the bench of the waiting applicants, glancing
stealthily at the others, feeling all the guilt of a condemned criminal.
When her turn came, the blood in her ears pounded from terror and
humiliation. She could not lift her eyes from the floor to face this
feelingless judge of the sick and the suffering.
“I’m so killed with the cold,” she stammered, twisting the fringes of
her shawl. “If I could only warm myself up in a bed for the night----”
The man looked at her suspiciously.
“If we fill up our place with people like you, we’ll have no room left
for the sick. We have a ’flu epidemic.”
“So much you’re doing for the ’flu people, why can’t you help me before
I get it?” She spoke with that suppressed energy which was the keynote
of her whole personality.
“Have you a fever?” he asked, his professional eye arrested by the
unnatural flush on her face.
“Fever?” she mumbled. “A person has got to be already dead in his
coffin before you’d lift a finger to help.” She sped from the office
into the dreary reception-hall.
On her way out her eye was caught by the black-faced type on the cover
of a magazine that lay on the centre-table.