“You poor child!” broke from the heart of the man, the scientific inquisition of the sociologist momentarily swept away by his human sympathy.
Who had ever said “poor child” to her—and in such a voice? Tears gathered in Shenah Pessah’s eyes. For the first time she mustered the courage to look straight at him. 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