TO THE STARS
“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 tomake my chancewhen 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 Sophiewith 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 ignorantimmigrant 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 anall-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 themwhat’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 inme,” her youth cried in her. “Whether I know how to write or don’t know how to write, I’ll be a writer.”
She was at the steaming stove of the restaurant at the usual hour the next morning. She stewed the sametzimmas, fried the sameblintzee, stuffed the samemiltz. 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. “Theblintzeeburning in front of her nose, and she stands there like ayokwith 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 mattressup 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.
Herhouse, 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 forgetmy 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 oftzimmas, hash, andmiltz.
No, she would never let herself sink back tothe 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.
“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 deaththan 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 waitingapplicants, 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.
SHORT-STORY COMPETITIONA Five-Hundred-Dollar Prize for the Best Love-Story of a Working-Girl
SHORT-STORY COMPETITION
A Five-Hundred-Dollar Prize for the Best Love-Story of a Working-Girl
As she read the magical words, the colour rushed to her cheeks. Forgotten was the humiliation of the superintendent’s refusal to take her in, forgotten were the cold, the hunger. Her whole being leaped at the words:
“Write your own love-story, but if you have never lived love, let it be your dream of love.”
“Write your own love-story, but if you have never lived love, let it be your dream of love.”
“Your dream of love.” The words were as wine in her blood. Was there ever a girl who hungered and dreamed of love as she? It was as though in the depths of her poverty and want the fates had challenged her to give substance to her dreams. She stumbled out of the huge building, her feet in the snow, her mind in the clouds.
“God from the world! the gas is burning again!” cried Hanneh Breineh as she groped her way back into her cellar-room. “The children are dancing over the fire like for a holiday. All day they had nothing to warm in their bellies, and the coffee tastes like wine from heaven.”
“Wine from heaven!” repeated the girl.“What wine but love from heaven?” and she clutched the magazine more tightly to her shrunken chest.
In the flicker of the gas-jet the photograph on the wall greeted her like a living thing. With the feel of the steady gaze upon her, she re-read the message that was to her an invitation and a challenge; and as she read, the dingy little room became alive with light. The understanding eyes seemed to pour vision into her soul. What was the purpose of all the harsh experiences that had been hers till now but to make her see just this, that love, and love only, was the one vital force of life? What was the purpose of all the privation and want she had endured but to make her see more poignantly this ethereal essence of love? The walls of her little room dissolved. The longing for love that lay dumb within her all her years took shape in human form. More real than life, closer than the beat within her heart, was this radiant, all-consuming vision that possessed her.
She groped for pencil and paper and wrote, unaware that she was writing. It was as though a hand stronger than her own was laid upon hers. Her power seemed to come from some vast, fathomless source. The starved passionsof all the starved ages poured through her in rhythmic torrent of words—words that flashed and leaped with the resistless fire of youth burning through generations of suppression.
Not until daylight filtered through the grating of her window did the writing cease, nor was she aware of any fatigue. An ethereal lightness, a sense of having escaped from the trammels of her body, lifted her as on wings. Her radiant face met the responsive glow of understanding that shone down on her from the wall. “It’s your light shining through me,” she exulted. “It’s your kind eyes looking into mine that made my dumbness speak.”
For the moment the contest was forgotten. She was seized by an irresistible impulse to take her outpourings to the man who had inspired her. “Let him only see what music he made of me.” Gathering tightly to her heart the scribbled sheets of paper, she hurried to the university.
A whole hour she waited at his office door. As she saw him coming, she could wait no longer, but ran towards him.
“Read it only,” she said, thrusting the manuscript at the bewildered man. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“What exotic creature was this, with her scattered pages of scrawling script and eager eyes?” President Irvine wondered. He concluded she was one of the immigrant group before which he had lectured.
She returned, to find the manuscript still in his hand.
“Tell me,” he asked with an enthusiasm new to him, “where did you get all this?”
“From the hunger in me. I was born to beat out the meaning of things out of my own heart.”
Puzzled, he studied her. She was thin, gaunt, with a wasting power of frustrated passion in young flesh. There was the shadow of blank nights staring out of her eyes. Here was a personality, he thought, who might reveal to him those intangible qualities of the immigrant—qualities he could not grasp, which baffled, fascinated him.
He questioned her, and she poured out her story to him with eager abandon.
“I couldn’t be an actress or a singer, because you got to be young and pretty for that; but fora writer nobody cares who or what you are so long as the thoughts you give out are beautiful.”
He laughed, and it was an appreciative, genial laugh.
“You ain’t at all like a professor, cold and hard like ice. You are a person so real,” she naïvely said, interrupting the tale of her early struggles, her ambitions, and the repulse that had been hers in this very university of his. And then in sudden apprehension she cried out: “Maybe the dean and the English professor were right. Maybe only those with a long education get a hearing in America. If you would only fix this up for me—change the immigrant English.”
“Fix it up?” he protested. “There are things in life bigger than rules of grammar. The thing that makes art live and stand out throughout the ages is sincerity. Unfortunately, education robs many of us of the power to give spontaneously, as mother earth gives, as the child gives.
“You have poured out not a part, but the whole of yourself. That’s why it can’t be measured by any of the prescribed standards. It’s uniquely you.”
Her face lighted with joy at his understanding.
“I never knew why I hated to be Americanized. I was always burning to dig out the thoughts from my own mind.”
“Yes, your power lies in that you are yourself. Your message is that of your people, and it is all the stronger because you are not a so-called assimilated immigrant.”
Ach!just to hear him talk! It was like the realization of a power in life itself to hold her up and carry her to the heights.
“Will you leave this manuscript here, so I can have my secretary type it for you?” he asked as he took her to the door. “I can have it done easily. And I shall write you when I’ll have time for another long talk about your work.”
Only after she had left did she fully realize the wonder of this man’s kindness.
“That’s America,” she whispered. “Where but in America could something so beautiful happen? A crazy, choked-in thing like me and him such a gentleman talking together about art and life like born equals. I poverty, and he plenty; I ignorance, and he knowledge; I from the bottom, and he from the top, and yet hemaking me feel like we were from always friends.”
A few days later the promised note came. How quick he was with his help, as if she were his only concern! Bare-headed, uncoated, she ran to him, this prince of kindness, repeating over and over again the words of the letter.
Her spirit crashed to the ground when she learned that he had been suddenly called to a conference at Washington. “He would return in a fortnight,” said the model-mannered secretary who answered her feverish questions.
Wait a fortnight? She couldn’t. Why, the contest would be over by that time. Then it struck her, the next best thing—the professor of English. With a typewritten manuscript in her hand, he must listen to her. And just to be admitted to his short-story class for one criticism was all she would ask.
But small a favour as it seemed to her, it was greater than the professor was in a position to grant.
“To concede to your request would establish a precedent that would be at variance with the university regulations,” he vouchsafed.
“University regulations, precedents? What are you talking?” And clutching at his sleeve,hysterically, she pleaded: “Just this once, my life hangs on getting this story perfect, and you can save me by this one criticism.”
Her burning desire knew no barrier, recognized no higher authority. And the professor, contrary to his reason, contrary to his experienced judgment, yielded without knowing why to the preposterous demands of this immigrant girl.
In the end of the last row of the lecture-hall Sophie waited breathlessly for the professor to get to her story. After a lifetime of waiting it came. As from a great distance she heard him announce the title.
“This was not written by a member of the class,” he went on, “but is the attempt of a very ambitious young person. Its lack of form demonstrates the importance of the fundamentals of technique in which we have drilled.”
His reading aloud of the manuscript was followed by a chorus of criticism—criticism that echoed the professor’s own sentiments: “It’s not a story; it has no plot”; “feeling without form”; “erotic, over-emotional.”
She could hardly wait for the hour to be over to get back this living thing of hers that they were killing. When she left the class all the air seemed to have gone out of her lungs. Shedragged her leaden feet back to her room and sank on her cot a heap of despair.
All at once she jumped up.
“What do they know, they, with only their book-learning?” If the president had understood her story, there might be others who would understand. She must have faith enough in herself to send it forth for a judgment of a world free from rules of grammar. In a fury of defiance she mailed the story.
Weeks of tortuous waiting for news of the contest followed—weeks when she dogged the postman’s footsteps and paced the lonely streets in restless suspense. How could she ever have hoped to win the prize? Why was she so starving for the golden hills on the sky? If only for one day she could stop wasting her heart for the impossible!
Exhausted, spent, she lay on her cot when Hanneh Breineh, more than usually disturbed by the girl’s driven look, opened the door softly.
“Here you got it, a letter. I hope it’s such good luck in it as the paper is fine.”
“What’s the matter?” cried Hanneh Breinehin alarm at the girl’s sudden pallor as the empty envelope fluttered from limp fingers.
For answer Sophie held up the cheque.
“Five hundred dollars,” she cried, “and the winner of the first prize!”
Hanneh Breineh felt the cheque. She read it. It was actually true. Five hundred dollars! In a flurry of excitement she called the neighbours in the hall-ways, and then hurried to the butcher, pushing through the babbling women who crowded around the counter. “People listen only! Myroomerkehgot a five-hundred-dollar prize!”
“Five hundred dollars?” The words leaped from lips to lips like fire in the air. “Ach!only the little bit of luck! Did she win it on the lotteree?”
“Not from the lottery. Just wrote something from her head. And you ought to see her, only a dried-up bone of a girl, and yet so smart.”
In a few moments Sophie was mobbed in her cellar by the gesticulating crowd of women who hurried in to gaze upon the miracle of good luck. With breathless awe hands felt her, and, reverently, the cheque. Yes, even mouths watered with an envy that was almost worship. They fell on her neck and kissed her.
“May we all live to have such luck to get rich quick!” they chorused.
The following day Sophie’s picture was in the Jewish evening paper. The Ghetto was drunk with pride because one of their number, and “only a dried-up bone of a girl,” had written a story good enough to be printed in a magazine of America. Their dreams of romance had found expression in the overwhelming success of this greenhorn cook.
In one day Sophie was elevated to a position of social importance by her achievement. When she walked in the street, people pointed at her with their fingers. She was deluged with requests “to give a taste” of the neighbours’ cooking.
When she went to the baker for her usual stale bread, the man picked out the finest loaf.
“Fresh bread for you in honour of your good luck. And here’s yet an applestrudelfor good measure.” Nor would he take the money she offered. “Only eat it with good health. I’m paid enough with the honour that somebody with such luck steps into my store.”
“Of course,” explained Hanneh Breineh. “People will give you the last bite from their mouth when you’re lucky, because you don’t needtheir favours. But if you’re poor, they’re afraid to be good to you, so you should not hang on their necks for help.”
But the greatest surprise that awaited Sophie was the letter from the professor congratulating her upon her success.
“The students have unanimously voted you to be their guest of honour at luncheon on Saturday,” it read. “May we hope for the honour of your company on that occasion?”
The sky is falling to the earth—she a guest of honour of a well-fed, well-dressed world! She to break bread with those high up in rules of grammar! Sophie laughed aloud for the first time in months. Lunch at the hotel! A vision of snowy tablecloths, silver forks, delicate china, and sparkling glasses dazzled her. Yes, she would go, and go as she was. The clothes that had been good enough to starve and struggle in must be good enough to be feasted and congratulated in.
She was surprised at the sense of cold detachment with which she entered the hotel lobby.
“Maybe it’s my excuse to myself for going that makes me feel that I’m so above it,” she told herself. The grandeur, the lights, thelustre, and glamour of the magnificent hotel—she took it all in, her nose in the air.
At the entrance of the banquet-hall stood the professor, smiling, smiling. And all these people in silks and furs and broadcloth wanted to shake hands with her. Again, without knowing why, she longed to laugh aloud.
Not until Professor ——, smiling more graciously than ever, reached the close of his speech, not until he referred to her for the third time as having reached “the stars through difficulties,” did she realize that she who had looked on, she who had listened, she who had wanted so to laugh, was a person quite different from the uncouth girl with the shabby sweater and broken shoes whom the higher-ups were toasting and flattering.
“I’ve never made a talk yet in my life,” she said in answer to the calls for “Speech! speech!” “But these are grand words from the professor, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She looked around on these stars of the college world whom, after all her struggles, she had reached. “Yes, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She nodded with a queer little smile, and sat down amidst a shower of applause.
In a daze Sophie left the heated banquet-hall. She walked blindly, struggling to get hold of herself, struggling in vain. Every reality, every human stay, seemed to slip from her. A stifled sense of emptiness weighed her down like a dead weight.
“What’s the matter with me?” she cried. “Why do the higher-ups crush me so with nothing? Why is their smiling politeness only a hidden hurt in my heart?”
The flattering voices, the puppet-like smiles, the congratulations that sounded like mockery, were now so distant, so unreal as was the girl with her nose in the air. What cared these people wrapped in furs that the winter wind pierced through her shabby sweater? What cared they if her heart died in her from loneliness?
An aching need for human fellowship pressed upon her, a need for someone who cared for her regardless of failure or success. In a sudden dimming of vision she saw the only real look of sympathy that had ever warmed her soul. Of them all, this man with the understanding eyes had known that what she wanted to say wasworth saying before it got into print. If she could only see him—him himself!
If she could only pass the building where he was she would feel calm and serene again! All her bitterness and resentment would dissolve, all her doubts turn to faith. Who knows? Perhaps he had come back already. Her feet seemed winged as they flew without her will, almost without her consciousness, towards the place where she thought he might be.
As she ran up the steps she knew he was there without being told. Even as she sent her name in, the door opened, and he stood there, the living light of the late afternoon glow.
He wasn’t a bit startled by her sudden appearance. He merely greeted her, and led her in silence to his inner study. But there was a quality about the silence that made her feel at ease, as though he had been expecting her.
“I have things to say to you,” she faltered. “Do you have time?”
For answer he pushed closer to the blazing logs an easy chair, and motioned her into it.
There no longer seemed any need to say what she had planned. His mere presence filled her with a healing peace.
“And it was so black for my eyes only a while before!” She spoke aloud her thought and paused, embarrassed.
“Black for your eyes?” he repeated, leaning towards her with an inviting interest.
“You know I was first on the table by the hotel?”
His eyebrows lifted whimsically.
“Tell me about it,” he urged.
“All those higher-ups what didn’t care a pinch of salt for me myself making such a fuss over a little accident of good luck!”
“Accident! You have won your way inch by inch grappling with life.” His calm, compelling look seemed to flood her with strength. “You have what our colleges cannot give, the courage to face yourself, the power to think. And now all your past experiences are so much capital to be utilized. Do you see the turning-point I mean?”
“The turning-point in my life is to know I got a friend. I owe it to the world to do something, to be something, after this miracle of your kindness.” And at his deepening smile, “But you are not kind in a leaning-down sort of kindness. You got none of that what-can-I-do-for-you-my-poor-child-look in you.”
Her effusiveness embarrassed him.
“You make too much out of nothing.”
“Nothing?” Her eyes were misty with emotion. “I was something wild up in the air, and I couldn’t get hold of myself all alone, and you—you made me for a person.”
“I cannot tell you how it affects me that in some way I do not understand I have been the means of bringing release to you. Of course,” he added quickly, “I was only an instrument, not a cause. Just as a spade which digs the ground is not a cause of the fertility of the soil or of the lovely flowers which spring forth. I cannot get away from the poetic, the religious experience which has so unexpectedly overtaken me.”
She listened to him in silent wonder. How different he was from the college people she had met at luncheon that day!
“I can’t put it in words,” she fumbled, “but I owe it to you, this confession. I can’t help it. I used to hate so the educated! ‘Why should they know everything, and me nothing?’ it cried in me. ‘Here I’m dying to learn, to be something, and they holding tight all the learning like misers hiding gold.’”
President Irvine did not answer. After a while he began talking in his calm voice of his dream of democracy in education, of the plans under way for the founding of the new school.
“I see it all!” She leaped to her feet under the inspiration of his words. “This new school is not to be only for the higher-ups by the higher-ups. It’s to be for everybody—the tailor and the fish-pedlar and the butcher. And the teachers are not to be professors, talking to us down from their heads, but living people, talking out of their hearts. It’s to be what there never yet was in this country—a school for the people.”
President Irvine had the sensation of being swept out of himself upon strange, sunlit shores. The bleak land of merely intellectual perception lay behind him. Her ardour, her earnestness broke through the habitual restraint of the Anglo-Saxon.
“Let me read you part of my lecture on the new school,” he said, the contagion of her enthusiasm vibrant in his low voice. “Teachers, above all others, have occasion to be distressed when the earlier idealism of welcome to the oppressed is treated as a weak sentimentalism,when sympathy for the unfortunate and those who have not had a fair chance is regarded as a weak indulgence fatal to efficiency. The new school must aim to make up to the disinherited masses by conscious instruction, by the development of personal power for the loss of external opportunities consequent upon the passing of our pioneer days. Otherwise, power is likely to pass more and more into the hands of the wealthy, and we shall end with the same alliance between intellectual and artistic culture and economic power due to riches which has been the curse of every civilization in the past, and which our fathers in their democratic idealism thought this nation was to put an end to.”
“Grand!” she cried, clapping her hands ecstatically. “Your language is a little too high over my head for me to understand what you’re talking about, but I feel I know what you mean to say. You mean, in the new school, America is to be America, after all.” Eyes tense, brilliant, held his. “I’ll give you an advice,” she went on. “Translate your lecture in plain words like they translate things from Russian into English, or English into Russian. If you want your new school to be for the people, so you got to begin by talking in the plain words of the people. Yougot to feel out your thoughts from the heart and not from the head.”
Her words were like bullets that shot through the static security of his traditional past.
“Perhaps I can learn from you how to be simple.”
“Sure! I feel I can learn you how to put flesh and blood into your words so that everybody can feel your thoughts close to the heart.” The gesticulating hands swam before him like waves of living flame. “Stand before your eyes the people, the dumb, hungry people—hungry for knowledge. You got that knowledge. And when you talk in that high-headed lecture language, it’s like you threw stones to those who are hungry for bread.”
Then they were both silent, lost in their thoughts. There was a new light in her eyes, new strength in her arms and fingers, when she rose to go.
“I shall never see the America which is to be,” he said as he took her hand in parting; “it will not come in my day. But I have seen its soul like a free wild bird, beating its wings not against bars, but against the skies that the light might come through and reveal the earth to be.”
She walked down the corridor and out of thebuilding still under the spell of his presence. “Like a free wild bird! like a free wild bird!” sang in her heart.
She had nearly reached home when she became aware that tears were running down her cheeks, but they were tears of a soul filled to the brim—tears of vision and revelation. The glow of the setting sun illuminated the whole earth. She saw the soul beneath the starved, penny-pinched faces of the Ghetto. The raucous voices of the hucksters, the haggling women, the shrill cries of the children—all seemed to blend and fuse into one song of new dawn, of hope, of faith fulfilled.
“After all,” she breathed in prayerful gratitude, “it is ‘to the stars through difficulties.’ Ameshugenehlike me, a cook from Rosinsky’s Restaurant burning her way up to the president for a friend!”