Hungry Hearts. Anzia Yezierska

take it, to do what you want with it.”

      Her eyes deepened with humility. “I know your goodness—but there’s something like a wall around me—him in my heart.”

      “Him?” The word hurled itself at him like a bomb-shell. He went white with pain. And even she, immersed in her own thoughts, lowered her head before the dumb suffering on his face. She felt she owed it to him to tell him.

      “I wanted to talk myself out to you about him yet before.—He ain’t just a man. He is all that I want to be and am not yet. He is the hunger of me for the life that ain’t just eating and sleeping and slaving for bread.”

      She pushed back her chair and rose abruptly. “I can’t be inside walls when I talk of him. I need the earth, the whole free sky to breathe when I think of him. Come out in the air.”

      They walked for a time before either spoke. Sam Arkin followed where she led through the crooked labyrinth of streets. The sight of the young mothers with their nursing infants pressed to their bared bosoms stabbed anew his hurt.

      Shenah Pessah, blind to all but the vision that obsessed her, talked on. “All that my mother and father and my mother’s mother and father ever wanted to be is in him. This fire in me, it’s not just the hunger of a woman for a man—it’s the hunger of all my people back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!”

      A veil of silence fell between them. She felt almost as if it were a sacrilege to have spoken of that which was so deeply centered within her.

      Sam 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.”