Arkin’s face became lifeless as clay. Bowed like an old man, he dragged his leaden feet after him. The world was dead—cold—meaningless. Bank-book, money—of what use were they now? All his years of saving couldn’t win her. He was suffocated in emptiness.
On they walked till they reached a deserted spot in the park. So spent was he by his sorrow that he lost the sense of time or place or that she was near.
Leaning against a tree, he stood, dumb, motionless, unutterable bewilderment in his sunken eyes.
“I lived over the hunger for bread—but this—” He clutched at his aching bosom. “Highest One, help me!” With his face to the ground he sank, prostrate.
“Sam Arkin!” She bent over him tenderly. “I feel the emptiness of words—but I got to get it out. All that you suffer I have suffered, and must yet go on suffering. I see no end. But only—there is a something—a hope—a help out—it lifts me on top of my hungry body—the hunger to make from myself a person that can’t be crushed by nothing nor nobody—the life higher!”
Slowly, he rose to his feet, drawn from his weakness by the spell of her. “With one hand you throw me down and with the other you lift me up to life again. Say to me only again, your words,” he pleaded, helplessly.
“Sam Arkin! Give yourself your own strength!” She shook him roughly. “I got no pity on you, no more than I got pity on me.”
He saw her eyes fill with light as though she were seeing something far beyond them both. “This,” she breathed, “is only the beginning of the hunger that will make from you a person who’ll yet ring in America.”
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