“Food! _Oi weh_, a bite to eat! A job should I take?”
The disjointed thoughts of his tired brain urged him to move. He tried
to rise, but he ached in every limb. The pain in his stiff body brought
back to him the terror through which he had lived the day before. More
than starvation, he feared the abyss of madness that yawned before him.
“Machine hand--anything,” he told himself. “Only to be sane--only to be
like the rest--only to have peace!”
This new humility gave him strength. He mounted the stairs of the
factory and took his place in the waiting line of applicants for work.
§ 6
For weeks Berel Pinsky worked, dull and inanimate as the machines he
had learned to drive. Work, eat, sleep--eat, sleep, work. Day after day
he went to and from his hall bedroom, day after day to and from the
shop.
He had ceased to struggle. He had ceased to be an individual, a soul
apart. He was a piece of a mass, a cog of a machine, an ant of an ant
hill. Individually he was nothing--they were nothing. Together they
made up the shop.
So he went on. Inert, dumb as a beast in a yoke, he brushed against
his neighbours. He never talked. As if in a dream, he heard the shrill
babble of the other shop hands rise above the roaring noises of the
machines.
One day, while eating his scanty lunch, lost in a dull, wandering
daydream, he felt a movement at his elbow. Looking up, he saw Sosheh,
the finisher, furtively reaching for a crust that had dropped from his
thick slice of bread.
“You don’t want it yet?” she questioned, her face colouring with
confusion.
“No,” he answered, surprised out of his silence. “But didn’t you have
any lunch?”
“I’m saving myself from my lunches to buy me a red feather on my new
spring hat.”
He looked at Sosheh curiously, and noticed for the first time the
pinched look of the pale young face.
“Red over that olive paleness!” he mused. “How bright and singing that
colour would be!”
Moved by an impulse of friendliness, he pushed an apple towards her.
“Take it,” he said. “I had one for my lunch already.”
He watched her with smiling interest as she bit hungrily into the juicy
fruit.
“Will your feather be as red as this apple?” he asked.
“_Ach!_” she said, with her mouth full. “If you could only give a look
how that feather is to me becoming! The redness waves over my black
hair like waves from red wine!”
“Why, that girl is a poet!” he thought, thrilled by the way her mind
leaped in her dumb yearning for beauty.
The next noon she appeared with a paper bag in her hand. Reverently she
drew forth a bright red cock’s feather.
“Nu, ain’t it grand? For two weeks my lunch money it is.”
“How they want to shine, the driven things, even in the shop!” he
mused. “Starving for a bit of bright colour--denying themselves food
for the shimmering touch of a little beauty!”
One morning, when he had risen to go to work in the grey dawn, he
found his landlady bending over an ironing board in the dim gaslight,
pressing a child’s white dress. She put down the iron to give Berel his
breakfast.
“My little Gittel is going to speak a piece to-day.” Her face glowed as
she showed him the frock. “Give a look only on those flowers I stitched
out myself on the sash. Don’t they smell almost the fields to you?”
He gazed in wonder at the mother’s face beaming down at him. How could
Tzipeh Yenteh still sense the perfume of the fields in this dead grind
of work? How could his care-crushed landlady, with seven hungry mouths
to feed--how could she still reach out for the beautiful? His path to
work was lit up by Tzipeh Yenteh’s face as she showed him her Gittel’s
dress in all its freshness.
Little by little he found himself becoming interested in the people
about him. Each had his own hidden craving. Each one longed for
something beautiful that was his and no one else’s.
Beauty--beauty! _Ach_, the lure of it, the tender hope of it! How it
filled every heart with its quickening breath! It made no difference
what form it took--whether it was the craving for a bright feather, a
passion for an ideal, or the love of man for woman. Behind it all was
the same flaming hope, the same deathless outreaching for the higher
life!
God, what a song to sing! The imperishable glamour of beauty, painting
the darkest sweatshop in rainbow colours of heaven, splashing the gloom
of the human ant-hill with the golden pigments of sunrise and sunset!
Lifted to winged heights by the onrush of this new vision, Berel swept
home with the other toilers pouring from shops and factories.
How thankful he was for the joy of his bleak little room! He shut the
door, secure in his solitude. Voices began to speak to him. Faces began
to shine for him--the dumb, the oppressed, the toil-driven multitudes
who lived and breathed unconscious of the cryings-out in them. All the
thwarted longings of their lives, all the baffled feelings of their
hearts, all the aching dumbness of their lips, rose to his sympathetic
lips, singing the song of the imperishable soul in them.
Berel thought how Beethoven lay prone on the ground, his deaf ears
hearing the beat of insects’ wings, the rustle of grass, the bloom of
buds, all the myriad voices of the pregnant earth. For the first time
since the loss of his gift in the jazz pit of Tin Pan Alley, the young
poet heard the rhythm of divine creation.
He drew a sheet of white paper before his eyes. From his trembling
fingers flowed a poem that wrote its own music--every line a song--the
whole a symphony of his regeneration.
“To think that I once despised them--my own people!” he mused. “_Ach_,
I was too dense with young pride to see them then!”
His thoughts digging down into the soil of his awakened spirit, he
cried aloud:
“Beauty is everywhere, but I can sing it only of my own people. Some
one will find it even in Tin Pan Alley--among Maizie’s life-loving
crowd; but I, in this life, must be the poet of the factories--of my
own East Side!”
§ 7
“It’s me--Hanneh Breineh!”
A loud thumping at the door and a shrill chatter of voices broke in
upon Berel’s meditations.
“Me--Moisheh!”
“Come in!” he cried, welcoming this human inbreak after his long vigil.
“Here we got him!” Berel was smothered in Hanneh Breineh’s gushing
embrace. “Where did you run away that time, you crazy? Don’t you yet
know my bitter heart? I never mean nothing when I curse.”
“For months it dried out our eyes from our heads looking for you,”
gulped Moisheh, tearing him from Hanneh’s greedy arms.
Berel fell on his brother’s neck, weeping out the whole rush and tide
of his new-born humility.
“Mine own brother, with the old shine from his eyes!”
Moisheh held Berel off, then crushed him in another long hug. Hanneh
Breineh, with ostentatious importance, held up her capacious market
basket and drew forth a greasy bundle.
“Let’s make from it a holiday, for good luck. It’s only a bargain, this
apple strudel,” she said apologetically, breaking it in pieces and
giving one to each.
Berel’s tears rang out in laughter.
“My own hearts--my own people!”
“_Mazeltuf!_ Good luck!” chanted Hanneh Breineh, sipping hungrily the
last drops of luscious juice that oozed from the apple strudel.
Raising his piece on high, Moisheh chimed in:
“Good luck and the new life!”