“My heart pulls me so to go back to my uncle.” She swallowed hard her crust of black bread. “He’s so used to have me help him. What’ll he do—alone?”
“You got to look out for yourself in this world.” Sadie Kranz gesticulated with a hot potato. “With your quickness, you got a chance to make money and buy clothes. You can go to shows—dances. And who knows—maybe meet a man to get married.”
“Married? You know how it burns in every girl to get herself married—that’s how it burns in me to work myself up for a person.”
“Ut! For what need you to work yourself up. Better marry yourself up to a rich feller and you’re fixed for life.”
“But him I want—he ain’t just a man. He is—” She paused seeking for words and a mist of longing softened the heavy peasant features. “He is the golden hills on the sky. I’m as far from him as the earth is from the stars.”
“Yok! Why wills itself in you the stars?” her companion ridiculed between swallows.
Shenah Pessah flung out her hands with Jewish fervor. “Can I help it what’s in my heart? It always longs in me for the higher. Maybe he has long ago forgotten me, but only one hope drives in me like madness—to make myself alike to him.”
“I’ll tell you the truth,” laughed Sadie Kranz, fishing in the pot for the last frankfurter. “You are a little out of your head—plain mehsugeh.”
“Mehsugeh?” Shenah Pessah rose to her feet vibrant with new resolve. “Mehsugeh?” she challenged, her peasant youth afire with ambition. “I’ll yet show the world what’s in me. I’ll not go back to my uncle—till it rings with my name in America.”
She entered the factory, the next day, with a light in her face, a sureness in her step that made all pause in wonder. “Look only! How high she holds herself her head! Has the matchmaker promised her a man?”
Then came her first real triumph. Shenah Pessah was raised above old hands who had been in the shop for years and made assistant to Sam Arkin, the man who had welcomed her that first day in the factory. As she was shown to the bench beside him, she waited expectantly for a word of welcome. None came. Instead, he bent the closer to his machine and the hand that held the shirt trembled as though he were cold, though the hot color flooded his face.
Resolutely, she turned to her work. She would show him how skillful she had become in those few weeks. The seams sped under her lightning touch when a sudden clatter startled her. She jumped up terror-stricken.
“The belt! The belt slipped! But it’s nothing, little bird,” Sam Arkin hastened to assure her. “I’ll fix it.” And then the quick warning, “Sh-h! The foreman is coming!”
Accustomed to her uncle’s harsh bickering, this man’s gentleness overwhelmed her. There was something she longed to say that trembled on her lips, but her voice refused to come.
Sam Arkin, too, was inarticulate. He felt he must talk to her, must know more of her. Timidly he touched her sleeve. “Lunch-time—here—wait for me,” he whispered, as the foreman approached.
A shrill whistle—the switch thrown—the slowing-down of the machines, then the deafening hush proclaiming noon. Followed the scraping of chairs, raucous voices, laughter, and the rush on the line to reach the steaming cauldron. One by one, as their cups of tea were filled, the hungry workers dispersed into groups. Seated on window-sills, table-tops, machines, and bales of shirts, they munched black bread and herring and sipped tea from saucers. And over all rioted the acrid odor of garlic and onions.
Rebecca Feist, the belle of the shop, pulled up the sleeve of her Georgette waist and glanced down at her fifty-nine-cent silk stocking. “A lot it pays for a girl to kill herself to dress stylish. Give only a look on Sam Arkin, how stuck he is on that new hand.”
There followed a chorus of voices. “Such freshness! We been in the shop so long and she just gives a come-in and grabs the cream as if it’s coming to her.”
“It’s her innocent-looking baby eyes that fools him in—”
“Innocent! Pfui! These make-believe innocent girls! Leave it to them! They know how to shine themselves up to a feller!”
Bleemah Levine, a stoop-shouldered, old hand, grown gray with the grayness of unrelieved drudgery, cast a furtive look in the direction of the couple. “Ach! The little bit of luck! Not looks, not smartness, but only luck, and the world falls to your feet.” Her lips tightened with envy. “It’s her greenhorn, red cheeks—”
Rebecca Feist glanced at herself in the mirror of her vanity bag. It was a pretty, young face, but pale and thin from undernourishment. Adroitly applying a lip-stick, she cried indignantly: “I wish I could be such a false thing like her. But only, I’m too natural—the hypocrite!”
Sadie Kranz rose to her friend’s defense. “What are you falling on her like a pack of wild dogs, just because Sam Arkin gives a smile on her? He ain’t marrying her yet, is he?”
“We don’t say nothing against her,” retorted Rebecca Feist, tapping her diamond-buckled foot, “only, she pushes herself too much. Give her a finger and she’ll grab your whole hand. Is there a limit to the pushings of such a green animal? Only a while ago, she was a learner, a nobody, and soon she’ll jump over all our heads and make herself for a forelady.”
Sam Arkin, seated beside Shenah Pessah on the window-sill, had forgotten that it was lunch-hour and that he was savagely hungry. “It shines so from your eyes,” he beamed. “What happy thoughts lay in your head?”
“Ach! When I give myself a look around on all the people laughing and talking, it makes me so happy I’m one of them.”
“Ut! These Americanerins! Their heads is only on ice-cream soda and style.”
“But it makes me feel so grand to be with all these hands alike. It’s as if I just got out from the choking prison into the open air of my own people.”
She paused for breath—a host of memories overpowering her. “I can’t give it out in words,” she went on. “But just as there ain’t no bottom to being poor, there ain’t no bottom to being lonely. Before, everything I done was alone, by myself. My heart hurt so with hunger for people. But here, in the factory, I feel I’m with everybody together. Just the sight of people lifts me on wings in the air.”
Opening her bag of lunch which had lain unheeded in her lap, she turned to him with a queer, little laugh, “I don’t know why I’m so talking myself out to you—”
“Only talk more. I want to know everything about yourself.” An aching tenderness rushed out of his heart to her, and in his grave simplicity he told her how he had overheard one of the girls say that she, Shenah Pessah, looked like a “greeneh yenteh,” just landed from the ship, so that he cried out, “Gottuniu! If only the doves from the sky were as beautiful!”
They looked at each other solemnly—the girl’s lips parted, her eyes wide and serious.
“That first day I came to the shop, the minute I gave a look on you, I felt right away, here’s somebody from home. I used to tremble so to talk to a man, but you—you—I could talk myself out to you like thinking in myself.”
“You’re all soft silk and fine velvet,” he breathed reverently. “In this hard world, how could such fineness be?”
An embarrassed silence fell between them as she knotted and unknotted her colored kerchief.
“I’ll take you home? Yes?” he found voice at last.
Under lowered lashes she smiled her consent.
“I’ll wait for you downstairs, closing time.” And he was gone.
The noon hour was not yet over, but Shenah Pessah returned to