Hungry Hearts Part 25

"Shah--shah! Wait only!" He gently halted their onrush and waved them back to their seats.

"The gla.s.ses for the wine!" Hanneh Breineh rushed about hither and thither in happy confusion. From the sink, the shelf, the window-sill, she gathered cracked gla.s.ses, cups without handles--anything that would hold even a few drops of the yellow wine.

Sacrificial solemnity filled the bas.e.m.e.nt as the children breathlessly watched Shmendrik cut the precious cake. Mouths--even eyes--watered with the intensity of their emotion.

With almost religious fervor Hanneh Breineh poured the grape-juice into the gla.s.ses held in the trembling hands of the children. So overwhelming was the occasion that none dared to taste till the ritual was completed. The suspense was agonizing as one and all waited for Shmendrik's signal.

"Hanneh Breineh--you drink from my Sabbath wine-gla.s.s!"

Hanneh Breineh clinked gla.s.ses with Schmendrik. "Long years on you--long years on us all!" Then she turned to Sophie, clinked gla.s.ses once more. "May you yet marry yourself from our bas.e.m.e.nt to a millionaire!" Then she lifted the gla.s.s to her lips.

The spell was broken. With a yell of triumph the children gobbled the cake in huge mouthfuls and sucked the golden liquid. All the traditions of wealth and joy that ever sparkled from the bubbles of champagne smiled at Hanneh Breineh from her gla.s.s of California grape-juice.

"Ach!" she sighed. "How good it is to forget your troubles, and only those that's got troubles have the chance to forget them!"

She sipped the grape-juice leisurely, thrilled into ecstacy with each lingering drop. "How it laughs yet in me, the life, the minute I turn my head from my worries!"

With growing wonder in her eyes, Sophie watched Hanneh Breineh. This ragged wreck of a woman--how pa.s.sionately she clung to every atom of life! Hungrily, she burned through the depths of every experience. How she flared against wrongs--and how every tiny spark of pleasure blazed into joy!

Within a half-hour this woman had touched the whole range of human emotions, from bitterest agony to dancing joy. The terrible despair at the onrush of her starving children when she cried out, "O that I should only bury you all in one day!" And now the leaping light of the words: "How it laughs yet in me, the life, the minute I turn my head from my worries."

"Ach, if I could only write like Hanneh Breineh talks!" thought Sophie. "Her words dance with a thousand colors. Like a rainbow it flows from her lips." Sentences from her own essays marched before her, stiff and wooden. How clumsy, how unreal, were her most labored phrases compared to Hanneh Breineh's spontaneity. Fascinated, she listened to Hanneh Breineh, drinking her words as a thirst-perishing man drinks water. Every bubbling phrase filled her with a drunken rapture to create.

"Up till now I was only trying to write from my head. It wasn't real--it wasn't life. Hanneh Breineh is real. Hanneh Breineh is life."

"Ach! What do the rich people got but dried-up dollars? Pfui on them and their money!" Hanneh Breineh held up her gla.s.s to be refilled. "Let me only win a fortune on the lotteree and move myself in my own bought house. Let me only have my first hundred dollars in the bank and I'll lift up my head like a person and tell the charities to eat their own cornmeal. I'll get myself an automobile like the kind rich ladies and ride up to their houses on Fifth Avenue and feed them only once on the eating they like so good for me and my children."

With a smile of benediction Shmendrik refilled the gla.s.ses and cut for each of his guests another slice of cake. Then came the handful of nuts and raisins.

As the children were scurrying about for hammers and iron lasts with which to crack their nuts, the bas.e.m.e.nt door creaked. Unannounced, a woman entered--the "friendly visitor" of the charities. Her look of awful amazement swept the group of merrymakers.

"Mr. Shmendrik!--Hanneh Breineh!" Indignation seethed in her voice. "What's this? A feast--a birthday?"

Gasps--bewildered glances--a struggle for utterance!

"I came to make my monthly visit--evidently I'm not needed."

Shmendrik faced the accusing eyes of the "friendly visitor."

"Holiday eating ..."

"Oh--I'm glad you're so prosperous."

Before any one had gained presence of mind enough to explain things, the door had clanked. The "friendly visitor" had vanished.

"Pfui!" Hanneh Breineh s.n.a.t.c.hed up her gla.s.s and drained its contents. "What will she do now? Will we get no more dry bread from the charities because once we ate cake?"

"What for did she come?" asked Sophie.

"To see that we don't over-eat ourselves!" returned Hanneh Breineh. "She's a 'friendly visitor'! She learns us how to cook cornmeal. By pictures and lectures she shows us how the poor people should live without meat, without milk, without b.u.t.ter, and without eggs. Always it's on the end of my tongue to ask her, 'You learned us to do without so much, why can't you yet learn us how to eat without eating?'"

The children seized the last crumbs of cake that Shmendrik handed them and rushed for the street.

"What a killing look was on her face," said Sophie. "Couldn't she be a little glad for your gladness?"

"Charity ladies--gladness?" The joy of the grape-wine still rippled in Hanneh Breineh's laughter. "For poor people is only cornmeal. Ten cents a day--to feed my children!"

Still in her rollicking mood Hanneh Breineh picked up the baby and tossed it like a Bacchante. "Could you be happy a lot with ten cents in your stomach? Ten cents--half a can of condensed milk--then fill yourself the rest with water!... Maybe yet feed you with all water and save the ten-cent pieces to buy you a carriage like the Fifth Avenue babies!..."

The soft sound of a limousine purred through the area grating and two well-fed figures in seal-skin coats, led by the "friendly visitor,"

appeared at the door.

"Mr. Bernstein, you can see for yourself." The "friendly visitor" pointed to the table.

The merry group shrank back. It was as if a gust of icy wind had swept all the joy and laughter from the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"You are charged with intent to deceive and obtain a.s.sistance by dishonest means," said Mr. Bernstein.

"Dishonest?" Shmendrik paled.

Sophie's throat strained with pa.s.sionate protest, but no words came to her release.

"A friend--a friend"--stammered Shmendrik--"sent me the holiday eating."

The superintendent of the Social Betterment Society faced him accusingly. "You told us that you had no friends when you applied to us for a.s.sistance."

"My friend--he knew me in my better time." Shmendrik flushed painfully. "I was once a scholar--respected. I wanted by this one friend to hold myself like I was."

Mr. Bernstein had taken from the bookshelf a number of letters, glanced through them rapidly and handed them one by one to the deferential superintendent.

Shmendrik clutched at his heart in an agony of humiliation. Suddenly his bent body straightened. His eyes dilated. "My letters--my life--you dare?"

"Of course we dare!" The superintendent returned Shmendrik's livid gaze, made bold by the confidence that what he was doing was the only scientific method of administering philanthropy. "These dollars, so generously given, must go to those most worthy.... I find in these letters references to gifts of fruit and other luxuries you did not report at our office."

"He never kept nothing for himself!" Hanneh Breineh broke in defensively. "He gave it all for the children."

Ignoring the interruption Mr. Bernstein turned to the "friendly visitor." "I'm glad you brought my attention to this case. It's but one of the many impositions on our charity ... Come ..."

"Kossacks! Pogromschiks!" Sophie's rage broke at last. "You call yourselves Americans? You dare call yourselves Jews? You bosses of the poor! This man Shmendrik, whose house you broke into, whom you made to shame like a beggar--he is the one Jew from whom the Jews can be proud! He gives all he is--all he has--as G.o.d gives. _He is_ charity.

"But you--you are the greed--the shame of the Jews! _All-right-niks_--fat bellies in fur coats! What do you give from yourselves?

You may eat and bust eating! Nothing you give till you've stuffed yourselves so full that your hearts are dead!"

The door closed in her face. Her wrath fell on indifferent backs as the visitors mounted the steps to the street.

Shmendrik groped blindly for the Bible. In a low, quavering voice, he began the chant of the oppressed--the wail of the downtrodden. "I am afraid, and a trembling taketh hold of my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, mighty in power?"

Hanneh Breineh and the children drew close around the old man. They were weeping--unconscious of their weeping--deep-buried memories roused by the music, the age-old music of the Hebrew race.