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 already your life. Give her also a chance to lift up her head in the world. Couldn’t you get yourself in an old man’s home?”
“These times you got to have money even in an old man’s home. You know how they say, if you oil the wheels you can ride. With dry hands you can’t get nothing in America.”
“So you got no pity on an orphan and your own relation? All her young years she choked herself in darkness and now comes already a little light for her, a man that can make a good living wants her—”
“And who’ll have pity on me if I’ll let her out from my hands? Who is this Motkeh, anyway? Is he good off? Would I also have a place where to lay my old head? Where stands he out with his pushcart?”
“On Essex Street near Delancey.”
“Oi-i! You mean Motkeh Pelz? Why, I know him yet from years ago. They say his wife died him from hunger. She had to chew the earth before she could beg herself out a cent from him. By me Shenah Pessah has at least enough to eat and shoes on her feet. I ask you only is it worth already to grab a man if you got to die from hunger for it?”
Shenah Pessah could listen no longer.
“Don’t you worry yourself for me,” she commanded, charging into the room. “Don’t take pity on my years. I’m living in America, not in Russia. I’m not hanging on anybody’s neck to support me. In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be fifty years old and without a man, and nobody pities her.”
Seizing her shawl, she ran out into the street. She did not know where her feet carried her. She had only one desire—to get away. A fierce rebellion against everything and everybody raged within her and goaded her on until she felt herself choked with hate.
All at once she visioned a face and heard a voice. The blacker, the more stifling the ugliness of her prison, the more luminous became the light of the miraculous stranger who had stopped for a moment to talk to her. It was as though inside a pit of darkness the heavens opened and hidden hopes began to sing.
Her uncle was asleep when she returned. In the dim gaslight she looked at his yellow, care-crushed face with new compassion in her heart. “Poor old man!” she thought, as she turned to her room. “Nothing beautiful never happened to him. What did he have in life outside the worry for bread and rent? Who knows, maybe if such a god of men would have shined on him—” She fell asleep and she awoke with visions opening upon visions of new, gleaming worlds of joy and hope. She leaped out of bed singing a song she had not heard since she was a little child in her mother’s home.
Several times during the day, she found herself, at the broken mirror, arranging and rearranging her dark mass of unkempt hair with fumbling fingers. She was all a-tremble with breathless excitement to imitate the fluffy style of the much-courted landlady’s daughter.
For the first time she realized how shabby and impossible her clothes were. “Oi weh!” she wrung her hands. “I’d give away everything in the world only to have something pretty to wear for him. My whole life hangs on how I’ll look in his eyes. I got to have a hat and a new dress. I can’t no more wear my ‘greenhorn’ shawl going out with an American.
“But from where can I get the money for new clothes? Oi weh! How bitter it is not to have the dollar! Woe is me! No mother, no friend, nobody to help me lift myself out of my greenhorn rags.”
“Why not pawn the feather bed your mother left you?” She jumped at the thought.
“What? Have you no heart? No feelings? Pawn the only one thing left from your dead mother?
“Why not? Nothing is too dear for him. If your mother could stand up from her grave, she’d cut herself in pieces, she’d tear the sun and stars out from the sky to make you beautiful for him.”
Late one evening Zaretsky sat in his pawnshop, absorbed in counting the money of his day’s sales, when Shenah Pessah, with a shawl over her head and a huge bundle over her shoulder, edged her way hesitantly into the store. Laying her sacrifice down on the counter, she stood dumbly and nervously fingered the fringes of her shawl.
The pawnbroker lifted his miserly face from the cash-box and shot a quick glance at the girl’s trembling figure.
“Nu?” said Zaretsky, in his cracked voice, cutting the twine from the bundle and unfolding a feather bed. His appraising hand felt that it was of the finest down. “How much ask you for it?”
The fiendish gleam of his shrewd eyes paralyzed her with terror. A lump came in her throat and she wavered speechless.
“I’ll give you five dollars,” said Zaretsky.
“Five dollars?” gasped Shenah Pessah. Her hands rushed back anxiously to the feather bed and her fingers clung to it as if it were a living thing. She gazed panic-stricken at the gloomy interior of the pawnshop with its tawdry jewels in the cases; the stacks of second-hand clothing hanging overhead, back to the grisly face of the pawnbroker. The weird tickings that came from the cheap clocks on the shelves behind Zaretsky, seemed to her like the smothered heart-beats of people who like herself had been driven to barter their last precious belongings for a few dollars.
“Is it for yourself that you come?” he asked, strangely stirred by the mute anguish in the girl’s eyes. This morgue of dead belongings had taken its toll of many a pitiful victim of want. But never before had Zaretsky been so affected. People bargained and rebelled and struggled with him on his own plane. But the dumb helplessness of this girl and her coming to him at such a late hour touched the man’s heart.
“Is it for yourself?” he repeated, in a softened tone.
The new note of feeling in his voice made her look up. The hard, crafty expression on his face had given place to a look of sympathy.
“Yes, it’s mine, from my mother,” she stammered, brokenly. “The last memory from Russia. How many winters
