A vast, motley crowd of poor Jews and Jewesses swayed outside the doors of the great Manchester synagogue, warmed against the winter afternoon by their desperate squeezing and pushing. They stretched from the broad-pillared portico down the steps and beyond the iron railings, far into the street. The wooden benches of the sacred building were already packed with a perspiring multitude, seated indiscriminately, women with men, and even men in the women's gallery, resentfully conscious—for the first time—of the grating. The hour of the address had already struck, but the body of police strove in vain to close the doors against the mighty human stream that pressed on and on, frenzied with the fear of disappointment and the long wait.
A policeman, worming his way in by the caretaker's entrance, bore to the hero of the afternoon the superintendent's message that unless he delayed his speech till the bulk of the disappointed could be got inside, a riot could not be staved off. And so the stream continued to force itself slowly forward, flowing into every nook and gangway, till it stood solid and immovable, heaped like the waters of the Red Sea. And when at last the doors were bolted, and thousands of swarthy faces, illumined faintly by clusters of pendent gas-globes, were turned towards the tall pulpitwhere the speaker stood, dominant, against the mystic background of the Ark-curtain, it seemed as if the whole Ghetto of Manchester—the entire population of Strange-ways and Redbank—had poured itself into this one synagogue in a great tidal wave, moved by one of those strange celestial influences which have throughout all history disturbed the torpor of the Jewries.
Of these poverty-stricken thousands, sucked hither by the fame of a soldier rumored to represent a Messianic millionaire bent on the restoration and redemption of Israel, Aaron the Pedlar was an atom—ugly, wan, and stooping, with pious ear-locks, and a long, fusty coat, little regarded even by those amid whom he surged and squeezed for hours in patience. Aaron counted for less than nothing in a world he helped to overcrowd, and of which he perceived very little. For, although he did not fail to make a profit on his gilded goods, and knew how to wheedle servants at side-doors, he was far behind his fellows in that misapprehension of the human hurly-burly which makes your ordinary Russian Jew a political oracle. Aaron's interest in politics was limited to the wars of the Kings of Israel and the misdeeds of Titus and Antiochus Epiphanes. To him the modern world was composed of Jews and heathen; and society had two simple sections—the rich and the poor.
"Don't you enjoy travelling?" one of the former section once asked him affably. "Even if it's disagreeable in winter you must pass through a good deal of beautiful scenery in summer."
"If I am on business," replied the pedlar, "how can I bother about the beautiful?"
And, flustered though he was by the condescension of the great person, his naïve counter-query expressed a truth. He lived, indeed, in a strange dream-world, andhad no eyes for the real except in the shape of cheap trinkets. He was happier in the squalid streets of Strange-ways, where strips of Hebrew patched the windows of cook-shops, and where a synagogue was ever at hand, than when striding across the purple moors under an open blue sky, or resting with his pack by the side of purling brooks. Stupid his enemies would have called him, only he was too unimportant to have enemies, the roughs and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by impersonal malice. To his friends—if the few who were aware of his existence could be called friends—he was aSchlemihl(a luckless fool).
"A man who earns a pound a week live without a wife!" complained theShadchan(marriage-broker) to a group of sympathetic cap-makers.
"I suppose he's such aSchlemihlno father would ever look at him!" said a father, with a bunch of black-eyed daughters.
"Oh, but hewasmarried in Russia," said another; "but just as he sent his wife the money to come over, she died."
"And yet you call him aSchlemihl!" cried Moshelé, the cynic.
"Ah, but her family stuck to the money!" retorted the narrator, and captured the laugh.
It was true. After three years of terrible struggle and privation, Aaron had prepared an English home for his Yenta, but she slept instead in a Russian grave. Perhaps if his friends had known how he had thrown away the chance of sending for her earlier, they would have been still more convinced that he was a bornSchlemihl. For within eighteen months of his landing in London docks, Aaron, through his rapid mastery of English and ciphering at the evening classes for Hebrew adults, had found a post as book-keeper to a clothes-store in Ratcliff Highway. Buthe soon discovered that he was expected to fake the invoices, especially when drunken sailors came to rig themselves up in mufti.
"Well, we'll throw the scarf in," the genial salesman would concede cheerily. "And the waistcoat? One-and-three—a good waistcoat, as clean as new, and dirt cheap, so 'elp me."
But when Aaron made out the bill he was nudged to put the one-and-three in the column for pounds and shillings respectively, and even, if the buyer were sufficiently in funds and liquor, to set down the date of the month in the same pecuniary partitions, and to add it up glibly with the rest, calendar and coin together. But Aaron, although he was not averse from honestly misrepresenting the value of goods, drew the line at trickery, and so he was kicked out. It took him a year of nondescript occupations to amass a little stock of mock jewellery wherewith to peddle, and Manchester he found a more profitable centre than the metropolis. Yenta dead, profit and holy learning divided his thoughts, and few of his fellows achieved less of the former or more of the latter than our itinerant idealist.
Such was one of the thousands of souls swarming that afternoon in the synagogue, such was one despised unit of a congregation itself accounted by the world a pitiable mass of superstitious poverty, and now tossing with emotion in the dim spaces of the sacred building.
The Oriental imagination of the hearers magnified the simple soldierly sentences of the orator, touched them with color and haloed them with mystery, till, as the deep gasps and sobs of the audience struck back like blows on the speaker's chest, the contagion of their passion thrilled him to responsive emotion. And, seen through tears, arose for him and them a picture of Israel again enthroned in Palestine, the land flowing once more with milk and honey,rustling with corn and vines planted by their own hands, and Zion—at peace with all the world—the recognized arbitrator of the nations, making true the word of the Prophet: "For from Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of God from Jerusalem."
To Aaron the vision came like a divine intoxication. He stamped his feet, clapped, cried, shouted. He felt tears streaming down his cheeks like the rivers that watered Paradise. What! This hope that had haunted him from boyhood, wafting from the pages of the holy books, was not then a shadowy splendor on the horizon's rim. It was a solidity, within sight, almost within touch. He himself might hope to sit in peace under his own fig-tree, no more the butt of the street boys. And the vague vision, though in becoming definite it had been transformed to earthliness, was none the less grand for that. He had always dimly expected Messianic miracles, but in that magic afternoon the plain words of the soldier unsealed his eyes, and suddenly he saw clearly that just as, in Israel, every man was his own priest, needing no mediator, so every man was his own Messiah.
And as he squeezed out of the synagogue, unconscious of the chattering, jostling crowd, he saw himself in Zion, worshipping at the Holy Temple, that rose spacious and splendid as the Manchester Exchange. Yes; the Jews must return to Palestine, there must be a great voluntary stream—great, if gradual. Slowly but surely the Jews must win back their country; they must cease trafficking with the heathen and return to the soil, sowing and reaping, so that the Feast of the Ingathering might become a reality instead of a prayer-service. Then should the atonement of Israel be accomplished, and the morning stars sing together as at the first day.
As he walked home along the squalid steeps of FernieStreet and Verdon Street, and gazed in at the uncurtained windows of the one-story houses, a new sense of their sordidness, as contrasted with that bright vision, was borne in upon him. Instead of large families in one ragged room, encumbered with steamy washing, he saw great farms and broad acres; and all that beauty of the face of earth, to which he had been half blind, began to appeal to him now that it was mixed up with religion. In this wise did Aaron become a politician and a modern.
Passing through the poulterer's on his way to his room—the poulterer and he divided the house between them, renting a room each—he paused to talk with the group of women who were plucking the fowls, and told them glad tidings of great fowl-rearing farms in Palestine. He sat down on the bed, which occupied half the tiny shop, and became almost eloquent upon the great colonization movement and the "Society of Lovers of Zion," which had begun to ramify throughout the world.
"Yes; but if all Israel has farms, who will buy my fowls?" said the poulterer's wife.
"You will not need to sell fowls," Aaron tried to explain.
The poulterer shook his head. "The whole congregation is gone mad," he said. "For my part I believe that when the Holy One, blessed be He, brings us back to Palestine, it will be without any trouble of our own. As it is written, I will bear thee upon eagles' wings."
Aaron disputed this notion—which he had hitherto accepted as axiomatic—with all the ardor of the convert. It was galling to find, as he discussed the thing during the next few weeks, that many even of those present at the speech read miracle into the designs of Providence and the millionaire. But Aaron was able to get together a little band of brother souls bent on emigrating together toPalestine, there to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, literally as well as metaphorically. This enthusiasm, however, did not wear well. Gradually, as the memory of the magnetic meeting faded, the pilgrim brotherhood disintegrated, till at last only its nucleus—Aaron—was left in solitary determination.
"You have only yourself," pleaded the backsliders. "We have wife and children."
"I have more than myself," retorted Aaron bitterly. "I have faith."
And, indeed, his faith in the vision was unshakable. Every man being his own Messiah, he, at least, would not draw back from the prospective plough to which he had put his hand. He had been saving up for the great voyage and a little surplus wherewith to support him in Palestine while looking about him. Once established in the Holy Land, how forcibly he would preach by epistle to the men of little faith! They would come out and join him. He—the despised Aaron—the least of the House of Israel—would have played a part in the restoration of his people.
"You will come back," said the poulterer sceptically, when his fellow-tenant bade him good-bye; and parodying the sacred aspiration—"Next year in Manchester," he cried, in genial mockery. The fowl-plucking females laughed heartily, agitating the feathery fluff in the air.
"Not so," said Aaron. "I cannot come back. I have sold the goodwill of my round to Joseph Petowski, and have transferred to him all my customers."
Some of the recreant brotherhood, remorsefully admiring, cheered him up by appearing on the platform of the station to wish him God-speed.
"Next year in Jerusalem!" he prophesied for them, too, recouping himself for the poulterer's profane scepticism.
He went overland to Marseilles, thence by ship to AsiaMinor. It was a terrible journey. Piety forebade him to eat or drink with the heathen, or from their vessels. His portmanteau held a little store of provisions and crockery, and dry bread was all he bought on the route.
Fleeced and bullied by touts and cabmen, he found himself at last on board a cheap Mediterranean steamer which pitched and rolled through a persistent spell of stormy weather. His berth was a snatched corner of the bare deck, where heaps of earth's failures, of all races and creeds and colors, grimily picturesque, slept in their clothes upon such bedding as they had brought with them. There was a spawn of babies, a litter of animals and fowls in coops, a swarm of human bundles, scarcely distinguishable from bales except for a protruding hand or foot. There were Bedouins, Armenians, Spaniards, a Turk with several wives in an improvised tent, some Greek women, a party of Syrians from Mount Lebanon. There were also several Jews of both sexes. But Aaron did not scrape acquaintance with these at first—they lay yards away, and he was half dead with sea-sickness and want of food. He had counted on making tea in his own cup with his own little kettle, but the cook would not trouble to supply him with hot water. Only the great vision drawing hourly nearer and nearer sustained him.
It was the attempt of a half-crazy Egyptian Jewess to leap overboard with her new-born child that brought him into relation with the other Jewish passengers. He learnt her story: the everyday story of a woman divorced in New York, after the fashion of its Ghetto, and sent back with scarcely a penny to her native Cairo, while still lightheaded after childbirth. He heard also the story of the buxom, kind-hearted Jewess who now shadowed her protectingly; the no less everyday story of the good-looking girl inveigled by a rascally Jew to a situation in Marseilles.They contributed with the men, a Russian Jew from Chicago, and a German from Brindisi, to give Aaron of Manchester a new objective sense of the tragedy of wandering Israel, interminably tossed betwixt persecution and poverty, perpetually tempted by both to be false to themselves: the tragedy that was now—thank God!—to have its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians, Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them—that which he, Aaron, was now accomplishing. To his joy one of his new acquaintances—the Russian—shared the dream of a Palestine flowing once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a "Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an old billy-cock and a dingy cotton shirt, but he combined all the lore of the old-fashioned, hard-shell Jew with a living realization of what his formulæ meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage—till the Russian landed at Alexandria—was softened and shortened by sitting worshipfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from Bachja'sDuties of the Heartor Saadja Gaon'sBook of the Faith. There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity of the swarming deck, loved to pose as a man of common sense, free from superstition.
"The only reason men go to Palestine," he maintained, "is because they think, as the psalm says, the land forgives sin. And they believe, too, that those bodies which are not burned in Palestine, when the Messiah's last trump sounds, will have to roll under lands and seas to get to Jerusalem. So they go to die there, so as to escape the underground route. Besides, Maimonides says the Messianic period will only last forty years. So perhaps theyare afraid all the fun will be over and the Leviathan eaten up before they arrive."
"Fools there are always in the world," replied the Russian, "and their piety cannot give them brains. These literal folk are the sort who imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says howsoever great a multitude flocked to worship therein, there was always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is! Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says, 'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit is working to-day. But through our own souls. No Messiah will ever come from a split heaven. If a Christian does anything wrong, it is the individual; if a Jew, it is the nation. Why? Because we have no country, and hence are set apart in all countries. But a country we must and shall have. The fact that we still dream of our land shows that it is to be ours again. Without a country we are dead. Without us the land is dead. It has been waiting for us. Why has no other nation possessed it and cultivated it?"
"Why? Why do the ducks go barefoot?" The German quoted the Yiddish proverb with a sneer.
"The land waits for us," replied the young Russian fervidly, "so that we may complete our mission. Jerusalem—whose very name means the heritage of double Peace—must be the watch-tower of Peace on earth. The nations shall be taught to compete neither with steel weapons nor with gold, but with truth and purity. Every man shall be taught that he exists for another man, else were men as the beasts. And thus at last 'the knowledge of God shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.'"
"If they would only remain covering the sea!" said theGerman irreverently, as the spray of a wave swept over his mattress.
"Those who have lost this faith are no longer Jews," curtly replied the Russian. "Without this hope the preservation of the Jewish race is a superstition. Let the Jews be swallowed up in the nations—and me in the sea. If I thought that Israel's hope was a lie I should jump overboard."
The German shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly. "You and the Egyptian woman are a pair."
At Alexandria, where some of the cargo and his Jewish fellow-passengers were to be landed, Aaron was tantalized for days by the quarantine, so that he must needs fret amid the musty odors long after he had thought to tread the sacred streets of Jerusalem. But at last he found himself making straight for the Holy Land; and one magic day, the pilgrim, pallid and emaciated, gazed in pious joy upon the gray line of rocks that changed gradually into terraces of red sloping roofs overbrooded by a palm-tree. Jaffa! But a cruel, white sea still rolled and roared betwixt him and these holy shores, guarded by the rock of Andromeda and tumbling and leaping billows; and the ship lay to outside the ancient harbor, while heavy boats rowed by stalwart Arabs and Syrians, in red fez and girdle, clamored for the passengers. Aaron was thrown unceremoniously over the ship's side at the favorable moment when the boat leapt up to meet him; he fell into it, soused with spray, but glowing at heart. As his boat pitched and tossed along, a delicious smell of orange-blossom wafted from the orange-groves, and seemed to the worn pilgrim a symbol of the marriage betwixt him and Zion. The land of his fathers—there it lay at last, and in a transport of happiness the wanderer had, for the first time in his life, a sense of the restful dignity of an ancestral home. But as the boatlabored without apparent progress towards the channel betwixt the black rocks, over which the spray flew skywards, a foreboding tortured him that some ironic destiny would drown him in sight of his goal. He prayed silently with shut eyes and his petition changed to praise as the boat bumped the landing-stage and he opened them on a motley Eastern crowd and the heaped barrels of a wharf. Shouldering his portmenteau, which, despite his debilitated condition, felt as light as the feathers at the poulterer's, he scrambled ecstatically up some slippery steps on to the stone platform, and had one foot on the soil of the Holy Land, when a Turkish official in a shabby black uniform stopped him.
"Your passport," he said, in Arabic. Aaron could not understand. Somebody interpreted.
"I have no passport," he answered, with a premonitory pang.
"Where are you going?"
"To live in Palestine."
"Where do you come from?"
"England," he replied triumphantly, feeling this was a mighty password throughout the world.
"You are not an Englishman?"
"No-o," he faltered. "I have lived in England some—many years."
"Naturalized?"
"No," said Aaron, when he understood.
"What countryman are you?"
"Russian."
"And a Jew, of course?"
"Yes."
"No Russian Jews may enter Palestine."
Aaron was hustled back into the boat and restored safely to the steamer.
The Red Beadle shook his head. "There is nothing but Nature," he said obstinately, as his hot iron polished the boot between his knees. He was called the Red Beadle because, though his irreligious opinions had long since lost him his synagogue appointment and driven him back to his old work of bootmaking, his beard was still ruddy.
"Yes, but who made Nature?" retorted his new employer, his strange, scholarly face aglow with argument, and the flame of the lamp suspended over his bench by strings from the ceiling. The other clickers and riveters of the Spitalfields workshop, in their shocked interest in the problem of the origin of Nature, ceased for an instant breathing in the odors of burnt grease, cobbler's wax, and a coke fire replenished with scraps of leather.
"Nature makes herself," answered the Red Beadle. It was his declaration of faith—or of war. Possibly it was the familiarity with divine things which synagogue beadledom involves that had bred his contempt for them. At any rate, he was not now to be coerced by Zussmann Herz, even though he was fully alive to the fact that Zussmann's unique book-lined workshop was the only one that had opened to him, when the more pious shoemakers of theGhetto had professed to be "full up." He was, indeed, surprised to find Zussmann a believer in the Supernatural, having heard whispers that the man was as great an "Epicurean" as himself. Had not Zussmann—ay, and his wigless wife, Hulda, too—been seen emerging from the mighty Church that stood in frowsy majesty amid its tall, neglected box-like tombs, and was to the Ghetto merely a topographical point and the chronometric standard? And yet, here was Zussmann an assiduous attendant at the synagogue of the first floor—nay, a scholar so conversant with Hebrew, not to mention European, lore, that the Red Beadle felt himself a Man-of-the-Earth, only retaining his superiority by remembering that learning did not always mean logic.
"Nature make herself!" Zussmann now retorted, with a tolerant smile. "As well say this boot made itself! The theory of Evolution only puts the mystery further back, and already in the Talmud we find—"
"Naturemade the boot," interrupted the Red Beadle. "Nature made you, and you made the boot. But nobody made Nature."
"But what is Nature?" cried Zussmann. "The garment of God, as Goethe says. Call Him Noumenon with Kant or Thought and Extension with Spinoza—I care not."
The Red Beadle was awed into temporary silence by these unknown names and ideas, expressed, moreover, in German words foreign to his limited vocabulary of Yiddish.
The room in which Zussmann thought and worked was one of two that he rented from the Christian corn-factor who owned the tall house—a stout Cockney who spent his life book-keeping in a little office on wheels, but whom the specimens of oats and dog-biscuits in his window investedwith an air of roseate rurality. This personage drew a little income from the population of his house, whose staircases exhibited strata of children of different social developments, and to which the synagogue on the first floor added a large floating population. Zussmann's attendance thereat was not the only thing in him that astonished the Red Beadle. There was also a gentle deference of manner not usual with masters, or with pious persons. His consideration for his employés amounted, in the Beadle's eyes, to maladministration, and the grave loss he sustained through one of his hands selling off a crate of finished goods and flying to America was deservedly due to confidence in another pious person.
Despite the Red Beadle's Rationalism, which, basing itself on the facts of life, was not to be crushed by high-flown German words, the master-shoemaker showed him marked favor and often invited him to stay on to supper. Although the Beadle felt this was but the due recognition of one intellect by another, if an inferior intellect, he was at times irrationally grateful for the privilege of a place to spend his evenings in. For the Ghetto had cut him—there could be no doubt of that. The worshippers in his old synagogue whom he had once dominated as Beadle now passed him by with sour looks—"a dog one does not treat thus," the Beadle told himself, tugging miserably at his red beard.
"It is not as if I were a Meshummad—a convert to Christianity." Some hereditary instinct admittedthatas a just excuse for execration. "I can't make friends with the Christians, and so I am cut off from both."
When after a thunderstorm two of the hands resigned their places at Zussmann's benches on the avowed ground that atheism attracts lightning, Zussmann's loyalty to the freethinker converted the Beadle's gratitude from fitfulness into a steady glow.
And, other considerations apart, those were enjoyable suppers after the toil and grime of the day. The Beadle especially admired Zussmann's hands when the black grease had been washed off them, the fingers were so long and tapering. Why had his own fingers been made so stumpy and square-tipped? Since Nature made herself, why was she so uneven a worker? Nay, why could she not have given him white teeth like Zussmann's wife? Not that these were ostentatious—you thought more of the sweetness of the smile of which they were part. Still, as Nature's irregularity was particularly manifest in his own teeth, he could not help the reflection.
If the Red Beadle had not been a widower, the unfeigned success of the Herz union might have turned his own thoughts to that happy state. As it was, the sight of their happiness occasionally shot through his breast renewed pangs of vain longing for his Leah, whose death from cancer had completed his conception of Nature. Lucky Zussmann, to have found so sympathetic a partner in a pretty female! For Hulda shared Zussmann's dreams, and was even copying out his great work for the press, for business was brisk and he would soon have saved up enough money to print it. The great work, in the secret of which the Red Beadle came to participate, was written in Hebrew, and the elegant curves and strokes would have done honor to a Scribe. The Beadle himself could not understand it, knowing only the formal alphabet such as appears in books and scrolls, but the first peep at it which the proud Zussmann permitted him removed his last disrespect for theintellect of his master, without, however, removing the mystery of that intellect's aberrations.
"But you dream with the eyes open," he said, when the theme of the work was explained to him.
"How so?" asked Hulda gently, with that wonderful smile of hers.
"Reconcile the Jews and the Christians!Meshuggas—madness." He laughed bitterly. "Do you forget what we went through in Poland? And even here in free England, can you walk in the street without every littleshegetzcalling after you and asking, 'Who killed Christ?'"
"Yes, but herein my husband explains that it was not the Jews who killed Christ, but Herod and Pilate."
"As it says in Corinthians," broke in Zussmann eagerly: "'We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, which none of the princes of this world knew; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.'"
"So," said the Red Beadle, visibly impressed.
"Assuredly," affirmed Hulda. "But, as Zussmann explains here, they threw the guilt upon the Jews, who were too afraid of the Romans to deny it."
The Beadle pondered.
"Once the Christians understand that," said Zussmann, pursuing his advantage, "they will stretch out the hand to us."
The Beadle had a flash. "But how will the Christians read you? No Christian understands Hebrew."
Zussmann was taken momentarily aback. "But it is not so much for the Christians," he explained. "It is for the Jews—that they should stretch out the hand to the Christians."
The Red Beadle stared at him in shocked silent amaze. "Still greater madness!" he gasped at length. "They will treat you worse than they treat me."
"Not when they read my book."
"Just when they read your book."
Hulda was smiling serenely. "They can do nothing to my husband; he is his own master, God be thanked; no one can turn him away."
"They can insult him."
Zussmann shook his head gently. "No one can insult me!" he said simply. "When a dog barks at me I pity it that it does not know I love it. Now draw to the table. The pickled herring smells well."
But the Red Beadle was unconvinced. "Besides, what should we make it up with the Christians for—the stupid people?" he asked, as he received his steaming coffee cup from Frau Herz.
"It is a question of the Future of the World," said Zussmann gravely, as he shared out the herring, which had already been cut into many thin slices by the vendor and pickler. "This antagonism is a perversion of the principles of both religions. Shall we allow it to continue for ever?"
"It will continue till they both understand that Nature makes herself," said the Red Beadle.
"It will continue till they both understand my husband's book," corrected Hulda.
"Not while Jews live among Christians. Even here they say we take the bread out of the mouths of the Christian shoemakers. If we had our own country now—"
"Hush!" said Zussmann. "Do you share that materialistic dream? Our realm is spiritual. Nationality—the world stinks with it! Germany for the Germans, Russia for the Russians. Foreigners to the devil—pah! Egomania posing as patriotism. Human brotherhood is what we stand for. Have you forgotten how the Midrash explains the verse in the Song of Solomon: 'I charge you, O yedaughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love till he please'?"
The Red Beadle, who had never read a line of the Midrash, did not deny that he had forgotten the explanation, but persisted: "And even if we didn't kill Christ, what good will it do to tell the Jews so? It will only make them angry."
"Why so?" said Zussmann, puzzled.
"They will be annoyed to have been punished for nothing."
"But they have not been punished for nothing!" cried Zussmann, setting down his fork in excitement. "They have denied their greatest son. For, as He said in Matthew, 'I come to fulfil the Law of Moses,' Did not all the Prophets, His predecessors, cry out likewise against mere form and sacrifice? Did not the teachers in Israel who followed Him likewise insist on a pure heart and a sinless soul? Jesus must be restored to His true place in the glorious chain of Hebrew Prophets. As I explain in my chapter on the Philosophy of Religion, which I have founded on Immanuel Kant, the ground-work of Reason is—"
But here the Red Beadle, whose coffee had with difficulty got itself sucked into the right channel, gasped—"You have put that into your book?"
The wife touched the manuscript with reverent pride. "It all stands here," she said.
"What! Quotations from the New Testament?"
"From our Jewish Apostles!" said Zussmann. "Naturally! On every page!"
"Then God help you!" said the Red Beadle.
The Brotherhood of the Peopleswas published. Though the bill was far heavier than the Hebrew printer's estimate—there being all sorts of mysterious charges for corrections, which took away the lastGroschenof their savings, Hulda and her husband were happy. They had sown the seed, and waited in serene faith the ingathering, the reconciliation of Israel with the Gentiles.
The book, which was in paper covers, was published at a shilling; five hundred copies had been struck off for the edition. After six months the account stood thus: Sales, eighty-four copies; press notices, two in the jargon papers (printed in the same office as his book and thus amenable to backstairs influence). The Jewish papers written in English, which loomed before Zussmann's vision as world-shaking, did not even mention its appearance; perhaps it had been better if the jargon papers had been equally silent, for, though less than one hundred copies ofThe Brotherhood of the Peopleswere in circulation, the book was in everybody's mouth—like a piece of pork to be spat out again shudderingly. The Red Beadle's instinct had been only too sound. The Ghetto, accustomed by this time to insidious attacks on its spiritual citadel, feared writers even bringing Hebrew. Despite the Oriental sandal which the cunning shoemaker had fashioned, his fellow-Jews saw the cloven hoof. They were not to be deceived by the specious sanctity which Darwin and Schopenhauer—probably Bishops of the Established Church—borrowed from their Hebrew lettering. Why, that was the very trick of the Satans who sprinkled the sacred tongue freely about handbills inviting souls that sought for light to come and find it in the Whitechapel Road between three and seven.It had been abandoned as hopeless even by the thin-nosed gentlewomen who had begun by painting a Hebrew designation over their bureau of beneficence. But the fact that the Ghetto was perspicacious did not mitigate the author's treachery to his race and faith. Zussmann was given violently to understand that his presence in the little synagogue would lead to disturbances in the service. "The Jew needs no house of prayer," he said; "his life is a prayer, his workshop a temple."
His workmen deserted him one by one as vacancies occurred elsewhere.
"We will get Christians," he said.
But the work itself began to fail. He was dependent upon a large firm whose head was Parnass of a North London congregation, and when one of Zussmann's workers, anxious to set up for himself, went to him with the tale, the contract was transferred to him, and Zussmann's security-deposit returned. But far heavier than all these blows was Hulda's sudden illness, and though the returned trust-money came in handy to defray the expense of doctors, the outlook was not cheerful. But "I will become a hand myself," said Zussmann cheerfully. "The annoyance of my brethren will pass away when they really understand my Idea; meantime it is working in them, for even to hate an Idea is to meditate upon it."
The Red Beadle grunted angrily. He could hear Hulda coughing in the next room, and that hurt his chest.
But it was summer now, and quite a considerable strip of blue sky could be seen from the window, and the mote-laden sun-rays that streamed in encouraged Hulda to grow better. She was soon up and about again, but the doctor said her system was thoroughly upset and she aught to have sea air. But that, of course, was impossible now. Hulda herself declared there was much better air to be got higher up,in the garret, which was fortunately "to let." It is true there was only one room there. Still, it was much cheaper. The Red Beadle's heart was heavier than the furniture he helped to carry upstairs. But the unsympathetic couple did not share his gloom. They jested and laughed, as light of heart as the excited children on the staircases who assisted at the function. "My Idea has raised me nearer heaven," said Zussmann. That night, after the Red Beadle had screwed up the four-poster, he allowed himself to be persuaded to stay to supper. He had given up the habit as soon as Zussmann's finances began to fail.
By way of house-warming, Hulda had ordered in baked potatoes and liver from the cook-shop, and there were also three tepid slices of plum-pudding.
"Plum-pudding!" cried Zussmann in delight, as his nostrils scented the dainty. "What a good omen for the Idea!"
"How an omen?" inquired the Red Beadle.
"Is not plum-pudding associated with Christmas, with peace on earth?"
Hulda's eyes flashed. "Yes, it is a sign—the Brotherhood of the Peoples! The Jew will be the peace-messenger of the world." The Red Beadle ate on sceptically. He had studiedThe Brotherhood of the Peoplesto the great improvement of his Hebrew but with little edification. He had even studied it in Hulda's original manuscript, which he had borrowed and never intended to return. But still he could not share his friends' belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Perhaps if they had known how he had tippled away his savings after his wife's death, they might have thought less well of humanity and its potentialities of perfection. After all, Huldas were too rare to make the world sober, much less fraternal. And, charming as they were, honesty demanded one should not curry favor with them by fostering their delusions.
"What put such an idea into your head, Zussmann!" he cried unsympathetically. Zussmann answered naïvely, as if to a question—
"I have had the idea from a boy. I remember sitting stocking-footed on the floor of the synagogue in Poland on the Fast of Ab, wondering why we should weep so over the destruction of Jerusalem, which scattered us among the nations as fertilizing seeds. How else should the mission of Israel be fulfilled? I remember"—and here he smiled pensively—"I was awakened from my day-dream by aPatsch(smack) in the face from my poor old father, who was angry because I wasn't saying the prayers."
"There will be always somebody to give you thatPatsch," said the Red Beadle gloomily. "But in what way is Israel dispersed? It seems to me our life is everywhere as hidden from the nations as if we were all together in Palestine."
"You touch a great truth! Oh, if I could only write in English! But though I read it almost as easily as the German, I can write it as little. You know how one has to learn German in Poland—by stealth—the Christians jealous on one hand, the Jews suspicious on the other. I could not risk the Christians laughing at my bad German—that would hurt my Idea. And English is a language like the Vale of Siddim—full of pits."
"We ought to have it translated," said Hulda. "Not only for the Christians, but for the rich Jews, who are more liberal-minded than those who live in our quarter."
"But we cannot afford to pay for the translating now," said Zussmann.
"Nonsense; one has always a jewel left," said Hulda.
Zussmann's eyes grew wet. "Yes," he said, drawing her to his breast, "one has always a jewel left."
"Moremeshuggas!" cried the Red Beadle huskily."Much the English Jews care about ideas! Did they even acknowledge your book in their journals? But probably they couldn't read it," he added with a laugh. "A fat lot of Hebrew little Sampson knows! You know little Sampson—he came to report the boot-strike forThe Flag of Judah. I got into conversation with him—a rank pork-gorger. He believes with me that Nature makes herself."
But Zussmann was scarcely eating, much less listening.
"You have given me a new scheme, Hulda," he said, with exaltation. "I will send my book to the leading English Jews—yes, especially to the ministers. They will see my Idea, they will spread it abroad, they will convert first the Jews and then the Christians."
"Yes, but they will give it as their own Idea," said Hulda.
"And what then? He who has faith in an Idea, his Idea it is. How great for me to have had the Idea first! Is not that enough to thank God for? If only my Idea gets spread in English! English! Have you ever thought what that means, Hulda? The language of the future! Already the language of the greatest nations, and the most on the lips of men everywhere—in a century it will cover the world." He murmured in Hebrew, uplifting his eyes to the rain-streaked sloping ceiling. "And in that day God shall be One and His name One."
"Your supper is getting cold," said Hulda gently.
He began to wield his knife and fork as hypnotized by her suggestion, but his vision was inwards.
Fifty copies ofThe Brotherhood of the Peopleswent off by post the next day to the clergy and gentry of the larger Jewry. In the course of the next fortnight seventeen of the recipients acknowledged the receipt with formal thanks, four sent the shilling mentioned on the cover, and one sent five shillings. This last depressed Zussmann more than all the others. "Does he take me for aSchnorrer?" he said, almost angrily, as he returned the postal order.
He did not forsee the day when, aSchnorrerindeed, he would have taken five shillings from anybody who could afford it: had no prophetic intuition of that long, slow progression of penurious days which was to break down his spirit. For though he managed for a time to secure enough work to keep himself and the Red Beadle going, his ruin was only delayed. Little by little his apparatus was sold off, his benches and polishing-irons vanished from the garret, only one indispensable set remaining, and master and man must needs quest each for himself for work elsewhere. The Red Beadle dropped out of the ménage, and was reduced to semi-starvation. Zussmann and Hulda, by the gradual disposition of their bits of jewellery and their Sabbath garments, held out a little longer, and Hulda also got some sewing of children's under-garments. But with the return of winter, Hulda's illness returned, and then the beloved books began to leave bare the nakedness of the plastered walls. At first, Hulda, refusing to be visited by doctors who charged, struggled out bravely through rain and fog to a free dispensary, where she was jostled by a crowd of head-shawled Polish crones, and where a harassed Christian physician, tired of jargon-speaking Jewesses, bawled and bullied. But at last Hulda grew too ill to stirout, and Zussmann, still out of employment, was driven to look about him for help. Charities enough there were in the Ghetto, but to charity, as to work, one requires an apprenticeship. He knew vaguely that there were persons who had the luck to be ill and to get broths and jellies. To others, also, a board of guardian angels doled out payments, though some one had once told him you had scant chance unless you were a Dutchman. But the inexperienced in begging are naturally not so successful as those always at it. 'Twas vain for Zussmann to kick his heels among the dismal crowd in the corridor, the whisper of his misdeeds had been before him, borne by some competitor in the fierce struggle for assistance. What! help a hypocrite to sit on the twin stools of Christendom and Judaism, fed by the bounty of both! In this dark hour he was approached by the thin-nosed gentlewomen, who had got wind of his book and who scented souls. Zussmann wavered. Why, indeed, should he refuse their assistance? He knew their self-sacrificing days, their genuine joy in salvation. On their generosities he was far better posted than on Jewish—the lurid legend of these Mephistophelian matrons included blankets, clothes, port wine, and all the delicacies of the season. He admitted that Hulda had indeed been brought low, and permitted them to call. Then he went home to cut dry bread for the bedridden, emaciated creature who had once been beautiful, and to comfort her—for it was Friday evening—by reading the Sabbath prayers; winding up, "A virtuous woman who can find? For her price is far above rubies."
On the forenoon of the next day arrived a basket, scenting the air with delicious odors of exquisite edibles.
Zussmann received it with delight from the boy who bore it. "God bless them!" he said. "A chicken—grapes—wine. Look, Hulda!"
Hulda raised herself in bed; her eyes sparkled, a flush of color returned to the wan cheeks.
"Where do these come from?" she asked.
Zussmann hesitated. Then he told her they were the harbingers of a visit from the good sisters.
The flush in her cheek deepened to scarlet.
"My poor Zussmann!" she cried reproachfully. "Give them back—give them back at once! Call after the boy."
"Why?" stammered Zussmann.
"Call after the boy!" she repeated imperatively. "Good God! If the ladies were to be seen coming up here, it would be all over with your Idea. And on the Sabbath, too! People already look upon you as a tool of the missionaries. Quick! quick!"
His heart aching with mingled love and pain, he took up the basket and hurried after the boy. Hulda sank back on her pillow with a sigh of relief.
"Dear heart!" she thought, as she took advantage of his absence to cough freely. "For me he does what he would starve rather than do for himself. A nice thing to imperil his Idea—the dream of his life! When the Jews see he makes no profit by it, they will begin to consider it. If he did not have the burden of me he would not be tempted. He could go out more and find work farther afield. This must end—I must die or be on my feet again soon."
Zussmann came back, empty-handed and heavy-hearted.
"Kiss me, my own life!" she cried. "I shall be better soon."
He bent down and touched her hot, dry lips. "Now I see," she whispered, "why God did not send us children. We thought it was an affliction, but lo! it is that your Idea shall not be hindered."
"The English Rabbis have not yet drawn attention to it," said Zussmann huskily.
"All the better," replied Hulda. "One day it will be translated into English—I know it, I feel it here." She touched her chest, and the action made her cough.
Going out later for a little fresh air, at Hulda's insistence, he was stopped in the broad hall on which the stairs debouched by Cohen, the ground-floor tenant, a black-bearded Russian Jew, pompous in Sabbath broadcloth.
"What's the matter with my milk?" abruptly asked Cohen, who supplied the local trade besides selling retail. "You might have complained, instead of taking your custom out of the house. Believe me, I don't make a treasure heap out of it. One has to be up at Euston to meet the trains in the middle of the night, and the competition is so cut-throat that one has to sell at eighteen pence a barn gallon. And on Sabbath one earns nothing at all. And then the analyst comes poking his nose into the milk."
"You see—my wife—my wife—is ill," stammered Zussmann. "So she doesn't drink it."
"Hum!" said Cohen. "Well,youmight oblige me then. I have so much left over every day, it makes my reputation turn quite sour. Do, do me a favor and let me send you up a can of the leavings every night. For nothing, of course; would I talk business on the Sabbath? I don't like to be seen pouring it away. It would pay me to payyoua penny a pint," he wound up emphatically.
Zussmann accepted unsuspiciously, grateful to Providence for enabling him to benefit at once himself and his neighbor. He bore a can upstairs now and explained the situation to the shrewder Hulda, who, however, said nothing but, "You see the Idea commences to work. When the book first came out, didn't he—though he sells secretly to the trade on Sabbath mornings—call you an Epicurean?"
"Worse," said Zussmann joyously, with a flash of recollection.
He went out again, lightened and exalted. "Yes, the Idea works," he said, as he came out into the gray street. "The Brotherhood of the Peoples will come, not in my time, but it will come." And he murmured again the Hebrew aspiration: "In that day shall God be One and His name One."
"Whoa, where's your —— eyes?"
Awakened by the oath, he just got out of the way of a huge Flemish dray-horse dragging a brewer's cart. Three ragged Irish urchins, who had been buffeting each other with whirling hats knotted into the ends of dingy handkerchiefs, relaxed their enmities in a common rush for the projecting ladder behind the dray and collided with Zussmann on the way. A one-legged, misery-eyed hunchback offered him penny diaries. He shook his head in impotent pity, and passed on, pondering.
"In time God will make the crooked straight," he thought.
Jews with tall black hats and badly made frock-coats slouched along, their shoulders bent. Wives stood at the open doors of the old houses, some in Sabbath finery, some flaunting irreligiously their every-day shabbiness, without troubling even to arrange their one dress differently, as a pious Rabbi recommended. They looked used-up and haggard, all these mothers in Israel. But there were dark-eyed damsels still gay and fresh, with artistic bodices of violet and green picked out with gold arabesque.
He turned a corner and came into a narrow street that throbbed with the joyous melody of a piano-organ. His heart leapt up. The roadway bubbled with Jewish children, mainly girls, footing it gleefully in the graying light, inventing complex steps with a grace and an abandon thatlit their eyes with sparkles and painted deeper flushes on their olive cheeks. A bounding little bow-legged girl seemed unconscious of her deformity; her toes met each other as though in merry dexterity.
Zussmann's eyes were full of tears. "Dance on, dance on," he murmured. "God shall indeed make the crooked straight."
Fixed to one side of the piano-organ on the level of the handle he saw a little box, in which lay, as in a cradle, what looked like a monkey, then like a doll, but on closer inspection turned into a tiny live child, flaxen-haired, staring with wide gray eyes from under a blue cap, and sucking at a milk-bottle with preternatural placidity, regardless of the music throbbing through its resting-place.
"Even so shall humanity live," thought Zussmann, "peaceful as a babe, cradled in music. God hath sent me a sign."
He returned home, comforted, and told Hulda of the sign.
"Was it an Italian child?" she asked.
"An English child," he answered. "Fair-eyed and fair-haired."
"Then it is a sign that through the English tongue shall the Idea move the world. Your book will be translated into English—I shall live to see it."