THE SONG TRIUMPHANT
The Story of Beret Pinsky, Poet of the People, who Sold his Soul for Wealth
“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 theshop? 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 ofdeadness? 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 lowand 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 hismoney. “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.
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 mejingles 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 starwho 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!”
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 beforeher 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 aschnorrerin 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 intorage. “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!”
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.
He strode to the window and raised the shade, but quickly pulled it down again. The sunlight hurt him. The innocent freshness of the morning blew accusingly against his hot brow.
He threw himself on the couch, but he could not rest. Like a distorted mirror, his mind reflected the happenings of the night before.
A table decked with flowers and glittering with silver and glass swam in vinous streaks of purple and amber. Berel saw white shoulders and sinuous arms—women’s soft flesh against the black background of men’s dress coats.
One mocking moment rose out of the reeling picture. A bright head pressed against his breast. His arms encircled a slender silken body. Pinnacled high above the devouring faces of his guests, hectic verses sputtered from his lips with automatic fluency.
It was this scene, spurting out of his blurred vision, that stabbed him like a hidden enemy within his soul. He had prostituted the divine in him for the swinish applause of the mob!
“God help me! God help me!” His body swayed back and forth in dumb, driven helplessness. “My sin!” he moaned, and sank to his knees.
Unconsciously he recalled the ritual chant ofthe Hebrews on the Day of Atonement—a chant he had not heard since he was a little child in Russia.
“‘My sin—the sin I committed wilfully and the sin without will. Behold, I am like a vessel filled with shame and confusion!’”
As he repeated the chant, beating his breast, his heart began to swell and heave with the old racial hunger for purging, for cleanness.
“My sin!” he cried. “I took my virgin gift of song and dragged it through the mud of Broadway!”
His turbulent penance burst into sobs—broke through the parched waste within him. From afar off a phrase fragrant as dew, but vague and formless, trembled before him. With a surge of joy, he seized pencil and paper. Only to catch and voice the first gush of his returning spirit!
“Wake up, you nut!”
Shapiro had come in unobserved, and stood before him like a grinning Mephistopheles. Berel looked up, startled. The air boiled before him.
“See here—we got the chance of our life!” Shapiro, in his enthusiasm, did not notice Berel’s grim mood. He shook the poet by the shoulder. “Ten thousand bucks, and not a worry in your bean! Just sign your name to this.”
With a shudder of shame, Berel glanced at the manuscript and flung it from him.
“Sign my name to this trash?”
“Huh! You’re mighty squeamish all of a sudden!”
“I can’t choke no more my conscience.”
“Conscience, rot! If we can’t get the dope from you, I tell you, we got to get it from somebody else till you get back on the job!”
A cloud seemed to thicken Berel’s glance.
“Here,” he said, taking from his desk his last typewritten songs, “I’ve done my level best to grind this out.”
Shapiro grasped the sheets with quickening interest. He read, and then shook his head with grieved finality.
“It’s no use. It’s not in you any more. You’ve lost the punch.”
“You mean to tell me that my verses wouldn’t go?”
Berel’s eyes shone like hot coals out of his blanched face.
“Look here, old pal,” replied Shapiro, with patronizing pity. “You’ve just gone dry.”
“You ghoul!” Berel lifted his fist threateningly. “It’s you who worked me dry—made of my name nothing but a trade-mark!”
“So that’s what I get for all I done for you!” Revulsion at the boy’s ingratitude swept through Shapiro like a fury. “What do you think I am? Business is business. If you ain’t got the dope no more, why, you ain’t better than the bunch of plumbers that I chucked!”
With a guttural cry, Berel hurled himself forward like a tiger.
“You bloodsucker, you!”
A shriek from Maizie standing in the doorway. A whirling figure in chiffon and furs thrust itself between them, the impact pushing Shapiro back.
“Baby darling, you’re killing me!” Soft arms clung about Berel’s neck. “You don’t want to hurt nobody—you know you don’t—and you make me cry!”
Savagely Berel thrust the girl’s head back and looked into her eyes. His face flashed with the shame of the betrayed manhood in him.
“I was a poet before you smothered my fire with your jazz!”
For an instant Maizie’s features froze, terrified by an anger that she could not comprehend. Then she threw herself on his shoulder again.
“But it’s in rehearsal—booked to the coast. It’s all up with me unless you sign!”
He felt her sobs pounding away his anger. A hated tenderness slowly displaced his fury. Unwillingly, his arms clasped her closer.
“This once, but never again,” he breathed in her ear as he crushed her to him.
Gently Maizie extricated herself, with a smile shining through her tear-daubed face.
“You darling old pet! I’ll be grateful till I die,” she said, thrusting the pen into Berel’s hand.
With tragic acceptance of his weakness, Berel scrawled his well-known signature on one sheet after another. With a beaten look of hatred he handed them to Shapiro, now pacified and smiling.
Long after they had gone, Berel still sat in the same chair. He made no move. He uttered no sound. With doubled fists thrust between his knees, he sat there, his head sunk on his breast.
In the depths of his anguish a sudden light flashed. He picked up the rejected songs and read them with regained understanding. All the cheap triteness, the jazz vulgarity of the lines, leaped at him and hit him in the face.
“Pfui!” he laughed with bitter loathing, as he flung the tawdry verses from him.
Like a prisoner unbound, he sprang to his feet. He would shake himself free from the shackles of his riches! All this clutter of things about him—this huge, stuffy house with its useless rooms—the servants—his limousine—each added luxury was only another bar shutting him out from the light.
For an instant he pondered how to get rid of his stifling wealth. Should he leave it to Moisheh or Hanneh Breineh? No—they should not be choked under this mantle of treasure that had nearly choked the life in him.
A flash of inspiration—Maizie! God help her, poor life-loving Maizie! He would give it to her outright—everything, down to the last kitchen pot—only to be a free man again!
As quick as thought Berel scribbled a note to his lawyer, directing him to carry out this reckless whim. Then he went to the closet where, out of some strange, whimsical sentiment, he still kept his shabby old coat and hat. In a moment he was the old Berel again. Still in his frenzy, he strode towards the door.
“Back—back to Hanneh Breineh—toMoisheh—back to my own people! Free—free!”
He waved his hands exultantly. The walls resounded with his triumphant laughter. Grasping his shabby old cap in his hand, he raised it high over his head and slammed the gold-panelled door behind him with a thundering crash.
“Last lot cheap! Apples sweet like honey!”
“Fish, live, fresh fish!”
“Shoe laces, matches, pins!”
The raucous orchestra of voices rose and fell in whining, blatant discord. Into the myriad sounds the rumbling Elevated bored its roaring thunder. Dirty, multi-coloured rags—the pinions of poverty—fluttered from the crowded windows. Streams of human atoms surged up and down the side-walk littered with filth. Horses and humans pounded and scuttled through the middle of the street.
Berel’s face shone exultant out of the crowd. In the quickening warmth of this old, familiar poverty his being expanded and breathed in huge drafts of air. The jostling mass of humanity thatpressed about him was like the close embrace of countless friends.
Ach, here in this elemental struggle for existence was the reality he was seeking! It cried to him out of the dirty, driven faces. Here was the life that has never yet been fully lived. Here were the songs that have not yet been adequately sung.
“A black year on you, robber, swindler! If I go to buy rotten apples, should you charge me for fruit from heaven?”
The familiar voice shot like a bolt to his awakening heart. He looked up to see Hanneh Breineh’s ragged figure wedged in between two pushcarts, her face ecstatic with the zest of bargaining.
“Hanneh Breineh!” he cried, seizing her market basket, and almost throwing himself on her neck in a rush of exuberant affection. “I’ve come back to you and Moisheh!”
“God from the world! What’s this—you in rags?” A quick look of suspicion crept into her face. “Did you lose your money? Did you maybe play cards?”
“I left it all to her—you know—every cent of the ill-gotten money.”
“Left your money to that doll’s face?”
Hanneh clutched her head and peered at him out of her red-lidded eyes.
“Where’s Moisheh?” Berel asked.
He came closer to her, his whole face expressing the most childlike faith in her acceptance of his helplessness, in the assurance of her welcome.
“Don’t you yet know the pants pressers was on a strike, and he owed me the rent for so long he went away from shame?”
“But where is he—my brother?” cried Berel in despair.
“The devil knows, not me. I only know he owes me the rent!”
“Moisheh gone?” He felt the earth slipping from under him. He seized Hanneh Breineh’s hand imploringly. “You can squeeze me in with the other boarders—put me up on chairs—over the washtub—anywhere. I got no one but you!”
“No one but me?” Thrusting him down to his knees, she towered above him like some serpent-headed fury. “What did you ever done for me when you had it good that I should take pity on you now? Why was you such a stingy to me when you were rolling yourself in riches?”
Her voice came in thick gusts of passion, as the smouldering feeling of past neglect burstfrom her in volcanic wrath. “You black-heartedschnorrer, you!”
A crowd of neighbours and passers-by, who had gathered at her first cursing screams, now surged closer. With her passion for harangue, she was lifted to sublime heights of vituperative eloquence by her sensation-hungry audience.
“People! Give a look only! This soft idiot throws away all his money on a doll’s face, and then wants me to take the bread from the mouths of my own children to feed him!” She shook her fist in Berel’s face. “Loafer—liar! I was always telling you your bad end!”
A hoarse voice rose from the crowd.
“Pfui! the rotten rich one!”
“He used to blow from himself like a Vanderbilt!”
“Came riding around in automobiles!”
All the pent-up envy that they never dared express while he was in power suddenly found voice.
“He’s crazy—meshugeh!”
The mob took up the abuse and began to press closer. A thick piece of mud from an unknown hand flattened itself on the ashen cheek of the shaken poet. Instantly the lust for persecution swept the crowd. Mud rained on thecrouching figure in their midst. Hoarse invectives, shrieks, infamous laughter rose from the mob, now losing all control.
With the look of a hunted beast, Berel drove his way through the merciless crowd. His clothing swirled in streaming rags behind him as he fled on, driven by the one instinct to escape alive.
When he had outdistanced those who pursued, he dropped in a dark hallway of an alley. Utter exhaustion drained him of all thought, all feeling.
Dawn came. Still Berel slept. From the near-by street the clattering of a morning milk wagon roused him slightly. He stirred painfully, then sank back into a dream which grew as vivid as life.
He saw himself a tiny, black ant in an ant-hill. While plodding toilfully with the teeming hive, he suddenly ventured on a path of his own. Then a huge, destroying force overwhelmed and crushed him, to the applause of the other ants, slaves of their traditional routine.
The pounding of a hammer rang above his head. He opened his eyes. A man was nailing a sign to the doorway into which he had sunk the night before. Berel rubbed his heavy-lidded eyes and, blinking, read the words:
MACHINE HANDS WANTED
MACHINE HANDS WANTED
“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.
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 pieceof 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 poemthat 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!”
“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!”