Hungry Hearts — Context and Discussion

The man’s face, his voice, his bearing, so different from any one she had ever known, and yet what was there about him that made her so strangely at ease with him? She went on talking, led irresistibly by the friendly glow in his eyes.

“I got yet a lot of luck. I learned myself English from a Jewish English reader, and one of the boarders left me a grand book. When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.” Her whole face and figure lit up with animation as she poured herself out to him.

“So even in the midst of these sordid surroundings were ‘wings’ and ‘high thoughts,’” he mused. Again the gleam of the visionary--the eternal desire to reach out and up, which was the predominant racial trait of the Russian immigrant.

“What is the name of your book?” he continued, taking advantage of this providential encounter.

“The book is ‘Dreams,’ by Olive Schreiner.”

“H--m,” he reflected. “So these are the ‘wings’ and ‘high thoughts.’ No wonder the blushes--the tremulousness. What an opportunity for a psychological test-case, and at the same time I could help her by pointing the way out of her nebulous emotionalism and place her feet firmly on earth.” He made a quick, mental note of certain books that he would place in her hands and wondered how she would respond to them.

“Do you belong to a library?”

“Library? How? Where?”

Her lack of contact with Americanizing agencies appalled him.

“I’ll have to introduce you to the library when I come to live here,” he said.

“Oi-i! You really like it, the room?” Shenah Pessah clapped her hands in a burst of uncontrollable delight.

“I like the room very much, and I shall be glad to take it if you can get it ready for me by next week.”

Shenah Pessah looked up at the man. “Do you mean it? You really want to come and live here, in this place? The sky is falling to the earth!”

“Live here?” Most decidedly he would live here. He became suddenly enthusiastic. But it was the enthusiasm of the scientist for the specimen of his experimentation--of the sculptor for the clay that would take form under his touch.

“I’m coming here to live--” He was surprised at the eager note in his voice, the sudden leaven of joy that surged through his veins. “And I’m going to teach you to read sensible books, the kind that will help you more than your dream book.”

Shenah Pessah drank in his words with a joy that struck back as fear lest this man--the visible sign of her answered prayer--would any moment be snatched up and disappear in the heavens where he belonged. With a quick leap toward him she seized his hand in both her own. “Oi, mister! Would you like to learn me English lessons too? I’ll wash for you your shirts for it. If you would even only talk to me, it would be more to me than all the books in the world.”

He instinctively recoiled at this outburst of demonstrativeness. His eyes narrowed and his answer was deliberate. “Yes, you ought to learn English,” he said, resuming his professional tone, but the girl was too overwrought to notice the change in his manner.

“There it is,” he thought to himself on his way out. “The whole gamut of the Russian Jew--the pendulum swinging from abject servility to boldest aggressiveness.”

Shenah Pessah remained standing and smiling to herself after Mr. Barnes left. She did not remember a thing she had said. She only felt herself whirling in space, millions of miles beyond the earth. The god of dreams had arrived and nothing on earth could any longer hold her down.

Then she hurried back to the basement and took up the broken piece of mirror that stood on the shelf over the sink and gazed at her face trying to see herself through his eyes. “Was it only pity that made him stop to talk to me? Or can it be that he saw what’s inside me?”

Her eyes looked inward as she continued to talk to herself in the mirror.

“God from the world!” she prayed. “I’m nothing and nobody now, but ach! How beautiful I would become if only the light from his eyes would fall on me!”

Covering her flushed face with her hands as if to push back the tumult of desire that surged within her, she leaned against the wall. “Who are you to want such a man?” she sobbed.

“But no one is too low to love God, the Highest One. There is no high in love and there is no low in love. Then why am I too low to love him?”

“Shenah Pessah!” called her uncle angrily. “What are you standing there like a yok, dreaming in the air? Don’t you hear the tenants knocking on the pipes? They are hollering for the hot water. You let the fire go out.”

At the sound of her uncle’s voice all her “high thoughts” fled. The mere reminder of the furnace with its ashes and cinders smothered her buoyant spirits and again she was weighed down by the strangling yoke of her hateful, daily round.

It was evening when she got through with her work. To her surprise she did not feel any of the old weariness. It was as if her feet danced under her. Then from the open doorway of their kitchen she overheard Mrs. Melker, the matchmaker, talking to her uncle.

“Motkeh, the fish-peddler, is looking for a wife to cook him his eating and take care on his children,” she was saying in her shrill, grating voice. “So I thought to myself this is a golden chance for Shenah Pessah to grab. You know a girl in her years and without money, a single man wouldn’t give a look on her.”

Shenah Pessah shuddered. She wanted to run away from the branding torture of their low talk, but an unreasoning curiosity drew her to listen.

“Living is so high,” went on Mrs. Melker, “that single men don’t want to marry themselves even to _young_ girls, except if they can get themselves into a family with money to start them up in business. It is Shenah Pessah’s luck yet that Motkeh likes good eating and he can’t stand it any more the meals in a restaurant. He heard from people what a good cook and housekeeper Shenah Pessah is, so he sent me around to tell you he would take her as she stands without a cent.”

Mrs. Melker dramatically beat her breast. “I swear I shouldn’t live to go away from here alive, I shouldn’t live to see my own children married if I’m talking this match for the few dollars that Motkeh will pay me for it, but because I want to do something good for a poor orphan. I’m a mother, and it weeps in me my heart to see a girl in her years and not married.”

“And who’ll cook for me my eating, if I’ll let her go?” broke out her uncle angrily. “And who’ll do me my work? Didn’t I spend out fifty dollars to send for her the ticket to America? Oughtn’t I have a little use from her for so many dollars I laid out on her?”

“Think on God!” remonstrated Mrs. Melker. “The girl is an orphan and time is pushing itself on her. Do you want her to sit till her braids grow gray, before you’ll let her get herself a man? It stands in the Talmud that a man should take the last bite away from his mouth to help an orphan get married. You’d beg yourself out a place in heaven in the next world--”

“In America a person can’t live on hopes for the next world. In America everybody got to look out for himself. I’d have to give up the janitor’s work to let her go, and then where would I be?”

“You lived already your life. Give her also a chance to lift up her head in the world. Couldn’t you get yourself in an old man’s home?”

“These times you got to have money even in an old man’s home. You know how they say, if you oil the wheels you can ride. With dry hands you can’t get nothing in America.”

“So you got no pity on an orphan and your own relation? All her young years she choked herself in darkness and now comes already a little light for her, a man that can make a good living wants her--”

“And who’ll have pity on me if I’ll let her out from my hands? Who is this Motkeh, anyway? Is he good off? Would I also have a place where to lay my old head? Where stands he out with his pushcart?”

“On Essex Street near Delancey.”

“Oi-i! You mean Motkeh Pelz? Why, I know him yet from years ago. They say his wife died him from hunger. She had to chew the earth before she could beg herself out a cent from him. By me Shenah Pessah has at least enough to eat and shoes on her feet. I ask you only is it worth already to grab a man if you got to die from hunger for it?”

Shenah Pessah could listen no longer.

“Don’t you worry yourself for me,” she commanded, charging into the room. “Don’t take pity on my years. I’m living in America, not in Russia. I’m not hanging on anybody’s neck to support me. In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be fifty years old and without a man, and nobody pities her.”

Seizing her shawl, she ran out into the street. She did not know where her feet carried her. She had only one desire--to get away. A fierce rebellion against everything and everybody raged within her and goaded her on until she felt herself choked with hate.

All at once she visioned a face and heard a voice. The blacker, the more stifling the ugliness of her prison, the more luminous became the light of the miraculous stranger who had stopped for a moment to talk to her. It was as though inside a pit of darkness the heavens opened and hidden hopes began to sing.

Her uncle was asleep when she returned. In the dim gaslight she looked at his yellow, care-crushed face with new compassion in her heart. “Poor old man!” she thought, as she turned to her room. “Nothing beautiful never happened to him. What did he have in life outside the worry for bread and rent? Who knows, maybe if such a god of men would have shined on him--” She fell asleep and she awoke with visions opening upon visions of new, gleaming worlds of joy and hope. She leaped out of bed singing a song she had not heard since she was a little child in her mother’s home.

Several times during the day, she found herself, at the broken mirror, arranging and rearranging her dark mass of unkempt hair with fumbling fingers. She was all a-tremble with breathless excitement to imitate the fluffy style of the much-courted landlady’s daughter.

For the first time she realized how shabby and impossible her clothes were. “Oi weh!” she wrung her hands. “I’d give away everything in the world only to have something pretty to wear for him. My whole life hangs on how I’ll look in his eyes. I got to have a hat and a new dress. I can’t no more wear my ‘greenhorn’ shawl going out with an American.

“But from where can I get the money for new clothes? Oi weh! How bitter it is not to have the dollar! Woe is me! No mother, no friend, nobody to help me lift myself out of my greenhorn rags.”

“Why not pawn the feather bed your mother left you?” She jumped at the thought.

“What? Have you no heart? No feelings? Pawn the only one thing left from your dead mother?

“Why not? Nothing is too dear for him. If your mother could stand up from her grave, she’d cut herself in pieces, she’d tear the sun and stars out from the sky to make you beautiful for him.”

Late one evening Zaretsky sat in his pawnshop, absorbed in counting the money of his day’s sales, when Shenah Pessah, with a shawl over her head and a huge bundle over her shoulder, edged her way hesitantly into the store. Laying her sacrifice down on the counter, she stood dumbly and nervously fingered the fringes of her shawl.

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.