contact with him in a well-lighted room made her aware that “there were other things to the person besides the dress-up.” She had noticed their well-kept hands on the desk and she became aware that her own were calloused and rough. That is why she felt her dirty finger-nails curl in awkwardly to hide themselves as she held the pen to sign her name.
When they were out in the street again, he turned to her and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to walk back. The night is so fine and I’ve been in the stuffy office all day.”
“I don’t mind”—the words echoed within her. If he only knew how above all else she wanted this walk.
“It was grand in there, but the electric lights are like so many eyes looking you over. In the street it is easier for me. The dark covers you up so good.”
He laughed, refreshed by her unconscious self-revelation.
“As long as you feel in your element let’s walk on to the pier.”
“Like for a holiday, it feels itself in me,” she bubbled, as he took her arm in crossing the street. “Now see I America for the first time!”
It was all so wonderful to Barnes that in the dirt and noise of the overcrowded ghetto, this erstwhile drudge could be transfigured into such a vibrant creature of joy. Even her clothes that had seemed so bold and garish awhile ago, were now inexplicably in keeping with the carnival spirit that he felt steal over him.
As they neared the pier, he reflected strangely upon the fact that out of the thousands of needy, immigrant girls whom he might have befriended, this eager young being at his side was ordained by some peculiar providence to come under his personal protection.
“How long did you say you have been in this country, Shenah Pessah?”
“How long?” She echoed his words as though waking from a dream. “It’s two years already. But that didn’t count life. From now on I live.”
“And you mean to tell me that in all this time, no one has taken you by the hand and shown you the ways of our country? The pity of it!”
“I never had nothing, nor nobody. But now—it dances under me the whole earth! It feels in me grander than dreams!”
He drank in the pure joy out of her eyes. For the moment, the girl beside him was the living flame of incarnate Spring.
“He feels for me,” she rejoiced, as they walked on in silence. The tenderness of his sympathy enfolded her like some blessed warmth.
When they reached the end of the pier, they paused and watched the moonlight playing on the water. In the shelter of a truck they felt benignly screened from any stray glances of the loiterers near by.
How big seemed his strength as he stood silhouetted against the blue night! For the first time Shenah Pessah noticed the splendid straightness of his shoulders. The clean glowing youth of him drew her like a spell.
“Ach! Only to keep always inside my heart the kindness, the gentlemanness that shines from his face,” thought Shenah Pessah, instinctively nestling closer.
“Poor little immigrant!” murmured John Barnes. “How lonely, how barren your life must have been till—” In an impulse of compassion, his arms opened and Shenah Pessah felt her soul swoon in ecstasy as he drew her toward him.
It was three days since the eventful evening on the pier and Shenah Pessah had not seen John Barnes since. He had vanished like a dream, and yet he was not a dream. He was the only thing real in the unreal emptiness of her unlived life. She closed her eyes and she saw again his face with its joy-giving smile. She heard again his voice and felt again his arms around her as he kissed her lips. Then in the midst of her sweetest visioning a gnawing emptiness seized her and the cruel ache of withheld love sucked dry all those beautiful feelings his presence inspired. Sometimes there flashed across her fevered senses the memory of his compassionate endearments: “Poor lonely little immigrant!” And she felt his sweet words smite her flesh with their cruel mockery.
She went about her work with restlessness. At each step, at each sound, she started, “Maybe it’s him! Maybe!” She could not fall asleep at night, but sat up in bed writing and tearing up letters to him. The only lull to the storm that uprooted her being was in trying to tell him how every throb within her clamored for him, but the most heart-piercing cry that she could utter only stabbed her heart with the futility of words.
In the course of the week it was Shenah Pessah’s duty to clean Mrs. Stein’s floor. This brought her to Mr. Barnes’s den in his absence. She gazed about her, calling up his presence at the sight of his belongings.
“How fine to the touch is the feel from everything his,” she sighed, tenderly resting her cheek on his dressing-gown. With a timid hand she picked up a slipper that stood beside his bed and she pressed it to her heart reverently. “I wish I was this leather thing only to hold his feet!” Then she turned to his dresser and passed her hands caressingly over the ivory things on it. “Ach! You lucky brush—smoothing his hair every day!”
All at once she heard footsteps, and before she could collect her thoughts, he entered. Her whole being lit up with the joy of his coming. But one glance at him revealed to her the changed expression that darkened his face. His arms hung limply at his side—the arms she expected to stretch out to her and enfold her. As if struck in the face by his heartless rebuff, she rushed out blindly.
“Just a minute, please,” he managed to detain her. “As a gentleman, I owe you an apology. That night—it was a passing moment of forgetfulness. It’s not to happen again—”
Before he had finished, she had run out scorched with shame by his words.
“Good Lord!” he ejaculated, when he found he was alone. “Who’d ever think that she would take it so? I suppose there is no use trying to explain to her.”
For some time he sat on his bed, staring ruefully. Then, springing to his feet, he threw his things together in a valise. “You’d be a cad if you did not clear out of here at once,” he muttered to himself. “No matter how valuable the scientific inquiry might prove to be, you can’t let the girl run away with herself.”
Shenah Pessah was at the window when she saw John Barnes go out with his suitcases.
“In God’s name, don’t leave me!” she longed to cry out. “You are the only bit of light that I ever had, and now it will be darker and emptier for my eyes than ever before!” But no voice could rise out of her parched lips. She felt a faintness stunning her senses as though some one had cut open the arteries of her wrists and all the blood rushed out of her body.
“Oi weh!” she moaned. “Then it was all nothing to him. Why did he make bitter to me the little sweetness that was dearer to me than my life? What means he a gentleman?
“Why did he make me to shame telling me he didn’t mean nothing? Is it because I’m not a lady alike to him? Is a gentleman only a make-believe man?”
With a defiant resolve she seized hold of herself and rose to her feet. “Show him what’s in you. If it takes a year, or a million years, you got to show him you’re a person. From now on, you got why to live. You got to work not with the strength of one body and one brain, but with the strength of a million bodies and a million brains. By day and by night, you got to push, push yourself up till you get to him and can look him in his
