Part 10

But now a curious difficulty arose. The Maggid knew from correspondence with Jerusalem Rabbis that a Russian subject would have great difficulty in slipping in at Jaffa or Beyrout, even aided by _bakhshish_. The only safe way was to enter as a British subject. Grotesque irony of the fates! For nigh half a century the old man had lived in England in his gabardine, and now that he was departing to die in gabardine lands, he was compelled to seek naturalization as a voluntary Englishman! He was even compelled to account mendaciously for his sudden desire to identify himself with John Bull's institutions and patriotic prejudices, and to live as a free-born Englishman. By the aid of a rich but pious West End Jew, who had sometimes been drawn Eastwards by the Maggid's exegetical eloquence, all difficulties were overcome. Armed with a passport, signed floridly as with a lion's tail rampant, the Maggid--after a quasi-death-bed blessing to Miriam by imposition of hands from the railway-carriage window upon her best bonnet--was whirled away toward his holy dying-place.

VII

Such disappointment as often befalls the visionary when he sees the land of his dreams was spared to the Maggid, who remained a visionary even in the presence of the real; beholding with spiritual eye the refuse-laden alleys and the rapacious _Schnorrers_ (beggars). He lived enswathed as with heavenly love, waiting for the moment of transition to the shining World-To-Come, and his supplications at the Wailing Wall for the restoration of Zion's glory had, despite their sympathetic fervour, the peaceful impersonality of one who looks forward to no worldly kingdom. To outward view he lived--in the rare intervals when he was not at a synagogue or a house-of-learning--somewhere up a dusky staircase in a bleak, narrow court, in one tiny room supplemented by a kitchen in the shape of a stove on the landing, itself a centre of pilgrimage to _Schnorrers_ innumerable, for whom the rich English Maggid was an unexpected windfall. Rich and English were synonymous in hungry Jerusalem, but these beggars' notion of charity was so modest, and the coin of the realm so divisible, that the Maggid managed to gratify them at a penny a dozen. At uncertain intervals he received a letter from Miriam, written in English. The daughter had not carried on the learned tradition of the mother, and so the Maggid was wont to have recourse to the head of the philanthropic technical school for the translation of her news into Hebrew. There was, however, not much of interest; Miriam's world had grown too alien: she could scrape together little to appeal to the dying man. And so his last ties with the past grew frailer and frailer, even as his body grew feebler and feebler, until at last, bent with great age and infirmity, so that his white beard swept the stones, he tottered about the sacred city like an incarnation of its holy ruin. He seemed like one bent over the verge of eternity, peering wistfully into its soundless depths. Surely God would send his Death-Angel now.

Then one day a letter from Miriam wrenched him back violently from his beatific vision, jerked him back to that other eternity of the dead past.

Isaac, Isaac had come home! Had come home to find desolation. Had then sought his sister, and was now being nursed by her through his dying hours. His life had come to utter bankruptcy: his possessions--by a cruel coincidence--had been sold up at the very moment that the doctors announced to him that he was a doomed man. And his death-bed was a premature hell of torture and remorse. He raved incessantly for his father. Would he not annul the curse, grant him his blessing, promise to say _Kaddish_ for his soul, that he might be saved from utter damnation? Would he not send his forgiveness by return, for Isaac's days were numbered, and he could not linger on more than a month or so?

The Maggid was terribly shaken. He recalled bitterly the years of suffering, crowned by Isaac's brutal heedlessness to the cry of his dying mother: but the more grievous the boy's sin, the more awful the anger of God in store for him.

And the mother--would not her own Gan-Iden be spoilt by her boy's agonizing in hell? For her sake he must forgive his froward offspring; perhaps God would be more merciful, then. The merits of the father counted: he himself was blessed beyond his deserts by the merits of the Fathers--of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem; perhaps his prayers would be heard at the Mercy-Seat.

With shaking hand the old man wrote a letter to his son, granting him a full pardon for the sin against himself, but begging him to entreat God day and night. And therewith an anthology of consoling Talmudical texts: "A man should pray for Mercy even till the last clod is thrown upon his grave.... For Repentance and Prayer and Charity avert the Evil Decree." The Charity he was himself distributing to the startled _Schnorrers_.

The schoolmaster wrote out the envelope, as usual, but the Maggid did not post the letter. The image of his son's death-bed was haunting him. Isaac called to him in the old boyish tones. Could he let his boy die there without giving him the comfort of his presence, the visible assurance of his forgiveness, the touch of his hands upon his head in farewell blessing? No, he must go to him.

But to leave Jerusalem at his age? Who knew if he would ever get back to die there? If he should miss the hope of his life! But Isaac kept calling to him--and Isaac's mother. Yes, he had strength for the journey. It seemed to come to him miraculously, like a gift from Heaven and a pledge of its mercy.

He journeyed to Beyrout, and after a few days took ship for Marseilles.

VIII

Meantime in the London Ghetto the unhappy Ethelred P. Wyndhurst found each day a year. He was in a rapid consumption: a disorderly life had told as ruinously upon his physique as upon his finances. And with this double collapse had come a strange irresistible resurgence of early feelings and forgotten superstitions. The avenging hand was heavy upon him in life,--what horrors yet awaited him when he should be laid in the cold grave? The shadow of death and judgment over-brooded him, clouding his brain almost to insanity.

There would be no forgiveness for him--his father's remoteness had killed his hope of that. It was the nemesis, he felt, of his refusal to come to his dying mother. God had removed his father from his pleadings, had wrapped him in an atmosphere holy and aloof. How should Miriam's letter penetrate through the walls of Jerusalem, pierce through the stonier heart hardened by twenty years of desertion!

And so the day after she had sent it, the spring sunshine giving him a spurt of strength and courage, a desperate idea came to him. If he could go to Jerusalem himself! If he could fall upon his father's neck, and extort his blessing!

And then, too, he would die in Jerusalem!

Some half-obliterated text sounded in his ears: "And the land shall forgive sin."

He managed to rise--his betaking himself to bed, he found, as the sunshine warmed him, had been mere hopelessness and self-pity. Let him meet Death standing, aye, journeying to the sun-lands. Nay, when Miriam, getting over the alarm of his up-rising, began to dream of the Palestine climate curing him, he caught a last flicker of optimism, spoke artistically of the glow and colour of the East, which he had never seen, but which he might yet live to render on canvas, winning a new reputation. Yes, he would start that very day. Miriam pledged her jewellery to supply him with funds, for she dared not ask her husband to do more for the stranger.

But long before Ethelred P. Wyndhurst reached Jaffa he knew that only the hope of his father's blessing was keeping him alive.

Somewhere at sea the ships must have passed each other.

IX

When the gabardined Maggid reached Miriam's house, his remains of strength undermined by the long journey, he was nigh stricken dead on the door-step by the news that his journey was vain.

"It is the will of God," he said hopelessly. The sinner was beyond mercy. He burst into sobs and tears ran down his pallid cheeks and dripped from his sweeping white beard.

"Thou shouldst have let us know," said Miriam gently. "We never dreamed it was possible for thee to come."

"I came as quickly as a letter could have announced me."

"But thou shouldst have cabled."

"Cabled?" The process had never come within his ken. "But how should I dream he could travel? Thy letter said he was on his death-bed. I prayed God I might but arrive in time."

He was for going back at once, but Miriam put him to bed--the bed Isaac should have died in.

"Thou canst cable thy forgiveness, at least," she said, and so, without understanding this new miracle, he bade her ask the schoolmaster to convey his forgiveness to his son.

"Isaac will inquire for me, if he arrives alive," he said. "The schoolmaster will hear of him. It is a very small place, alas! for God hath taken away its glory by reason of our sins."

The answer came the same afternoon. "Message just in time. Son died peacefully."

The Maggid rent his bed-garment. "Thank God!" he cried. "He died in Jerusalem. Better he than I! Isaac died in Jerusalem! God will have mercy on his soul."

Tears of joy sprang to his bleared eyes. "He died in Jerusalem," he kept murmuring happily at intervals. "My Isaac died in Jerusalem."

Three days later the Maggid died in London.

* * * * *

VI

BETHULAH

* * * * *

VI

BETHULAH

I

The image of her so tragically trustful in that mountain village of Bukowina still haunts my mind, and refuses to be exorcised, as of yore, by the prose of life. One who is very dear to me advises driving her out at the point of the pen. Whether such recording of my life's strangest episode will lay these memories or not, the story itself may at least instruct my fellow-Jews in New York how variously their religion has manifested itself upon this perplexing planet. Doubtless many are still as ignorant as I was respecting their mediaeval contemporaries in Eastern Europe. True, they have now opportunities in their own Ghetto--which is, for cosmopolitanism, a New York within a New York--of studying strata from other epochs of Judaism spread out on the same plane of time as their own, even as upon the white sheet of that wonderful invention my aged eyes have lived to see, sequent events may be pictured simultaneously. In my youth these opportunities did not exist. Only in Baltimore and a few of the great Eastern cities was there any aggregation of Jews, and these were all--or wanted to be--good Yankees; while beyond the Mississippi, where my father farmed and hunted like a Christian, and where you might have scoured a thousand square miles to get _minyan_ (ten Jews for worship), our picturesque customs and ceremonies dwindled away from sheer absence of fellowship. My father used to tell of a bronzed trapper he breakfasted with on the prairie, who astonished him by asking him over their bacon if he were a Jew. "Yes," said my father. "Shake!" said the trapper. "You're the first fellow-Jew I've met for twenty years." Though in my childhood my father taught me the Hebrew he had brought from Europe, and told me droll Jewish stories in his native German, it will readily be understood that the real influences I absorbed were the great American ideals of liberty and humanity, emancipation and enlightenment, and that therefore the strange things I witnessed among the Carpathians were far more startling to me than they can be to the Jews of to-day upon whom the Old World has poured its archaic inhabitants. Nevertheless, I cannot but think that even those who have met strange drifts of sects in New York will be astonished by the tradition which I stumbled upon so blindly in my first European tour. For, so far as I can gather, the Zloczszol legend is unique in Jewish history and confined exclusively to this out-of-the-way corner, however near other heresies may have approached to some of the underlying conceptions. My landlord Yarchi's view that it was a mere piece of local commercial myth-making, a gross artifice, would have at least the merit of explaining this uniqueness. It has, in my eyes, no other.

This tour of mine was to make not a circle, but a half-circle, for, landing at Hamburg I was to return by the Baltic, after a circuit through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Buda-Pesth, Lemberg, (where my grandfather had once been a rabbi of consideration), Moscow, and St. Petersburg. I did not linger at Hamburg; purchasing a stout horse, I started on my long ride. Of course it did not seem so long to me--who had already ridden from Kansas to both of our seaboards--as it would to a young gentleman of to-day accustomed to parlour cars, though the constant change of dialects and foods was somewhat unsettling.

But money speaks all languages, and a good Western stomach digests all diets. Bad water, however, no stomach can cope with; and I was laid up at Prague with a fever, which left me too weak to hurry on. I rambled about the Ghetto--the Judenstadt--which gave me my first insight into mediaeval Judaism, and was fascinated by the quaint alleys and houses, the Jewish town-hall, and the cellarlike _Alt-Neu_ synagogue with its miraculous history of unnumbered centuries. I heard the story of the great red flag on the pillar, with its "shield of David" and the Swede's hat, and was shown on the walls the spatterings of the blood of the martyrs of 1389.

What emotions I had in the old graveyard--a Ghetto of the dead--where the graves were huddled together, three and four deep, and the very tombstones and corpses had undergone Ghetto persecution! A whole new world opened out to me, crooked as the Ghetto alleys--so alien from the free life of the flowering prairies--as I walked about this "Judengarten," studying the Hebrew inscriptions and the strange symbolic sculptures--the Priest's hands of blessing, the Levite's ewer, the Israelites' bunch of grapes, the Virgin with roses--and trying to reconstruct the life these dead had lived. Strange ancestral memories seemed thrilling through me, helping me to understand. Many stories did I hear, too, of the celebrated Rabbi Loew, and of the _golem_ he created, which brought him his meals: in sign whereof I was shown his grave, and his house marked with a lion on a blue background. I listened with American incredulity but hereditary sympathy. I was astonished to find men who still believed in a certain Sabbatai Zevi, Messiah of the Jews, and one showed me a Sabbatian prayer-book with a turbaned head of this Redeemer side by side with King David's, and another who scoffed at this seventeenth-century impostor, yet told me the tradition in his own family, how they had sold their business and were about to start for Palestine, when the news reached them that so far from deposing the Sultan, this Redeemer of Israel had become his doorkeeper and a Mohammedan.

The year was passing toward the Fall ere I got to Buda-Pesth (in those days the enchanted gateway of the Orient, resounding with gypsy music, and not the civilized capital I found it the other day), and I had not proceeded far on the northerly bend of my journey when, soon after crossing the Carpathians, I was imprisoned in the mountain village of Zloczszol by the sudden overflow of the Dniester. The village itself was sheltered from the floods by a mountain between it and the tributary of the Dniester; but all the roads northward were impassable, and the water came round by clefts and soused our bordering fields and oozed very near the maize-garden of Yarchi's pine cottage, to which I had removed from the dirty inn, where a squalling baby in a cradle had shared the private sitting-room. It was a very straggling village, which began to straggle at the mountain-foot, but, for fear of avalanches, I was told, the houses did not grow companionable till some half a mile down the plain.

In the centre of the village was a cobble-paved "Ring-Place" and market-place, on which gave a few streets of shops (the provision-shops benefiting hugely by the floods, which made imports difficult). It was a Jewish colony, with the exception of a few outlying farms, whose peasants brought touches of gorgeous colour into the procession of black gabardines. It was strange to me to live in a place in which every door-post bore a _Mezuzah_. It gave me a novel sense of being in a land of Israel, and sometimes I used to wonder how these people could feel such a sense of local patriotism as seemed to possess them. And yet I reflected that, like the giant cedar of Lebanon which rose from the plain in such strange contrast with the native trees of Zloczszol, Israel could be transplanted everywhere, and was made of as enduring and undying a wood--nay, that, even like this cedar-wood, it had strange properties of conserving other substances and arresting putrefaction. Hence its ubiquitous patriotism was universally profitable. Nevertheless, this was one of the surprises of my journey--to find Jews speaking every language under the European sun, regarding themselves everywhere as part of the soil, and often patriotic to the point of resenting immigrant Jews as foreigners. I myself was popularly known as "the Stranger," though I was not resented, because the couple of dollars at which I purchased the privilege of "ark-opening" on my first visit to the synagogue--a little Gothic building standing in a court-yard--gave me a further reputation as "the rich stranger." Once I blushed to overhear myself called "the handsome stranger," and I looked into my cracked mirror with fresh interest. But I told myself modestly a stalwart son of the prairies had an unfair advantage in such a world of stooping sallow students. Certainly I felt myself favoured both in youth and looks when I stepped into the Beth-Hamedrash, the house of study (which I had at first taken for a little mosque, like those I had seen on the slopes of Buda), and watched the curious gnarled graybeards crooning and rocking the livelong day over worm-eaten folios.

Despite such odd glimpses of the interesting, I grew as tired of waiting for the waters to abate as Noah himself must have felt in his zoological institute.

One day as I was gazing from my one-story window at the melancholy marsh to which the flood had reduced the landscape, I said glumly to my hunchbacked landlord, who stood snuffing himself under the porch, "I suppose it will be another week before I can get away."

"Alas! yes," Yarchi replied.

"Why alas?" I asked. "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and the longer I stay the better for you."

He shook his head. "The flood that keeps you here keeps away the pilgrims."

"The pilgrims!" I echoed.

"Ay," said he. "There will be three in that bed of yours."

"But what pilgrims?"

He stared at me. "Don't you know the New Year is nigh?"

"Of course," I said mendaciously. I felt ashamed to confess my ignorant unconcern as to the proximity of the solemn season of ram's-horn blasts and penitence.

"Well, it is at New Year the pilgrims flock to their Wonder Rabbi, that he may hear their petitions and bear them on high, likewise wrestle with Satan, and entreat for their forgiveness at the throne of Grace." There was a twinkle in Yarchi's eyes not quite consistent with the gravity of his words.

"Do Wonder Rabbis live nowadays?" I asked.

A pinch of snuff Yarchi was taking fell from between his fingers. "Do they live!" he cried. "Yes--and off white bread, for poverty!"

"We have none in America. I only heard of one in Prague," I murmured apologetically, fearing the genus might be of the very elements of Judaism.

"Ah, yes, the high Rabbi Loew, his memory for a blessing," he said reverently. "But these new Wonder Rabbis can only work one miracle."

"What is that?" I asked.

"The greatest of all--making their worshippers support them like princes." And he laughed in admiration of his own humour.

"Then you are a heretic?" I said.

"Heretic!" Yarchi's black eyes exchanged their twinkle for a flash of resentment. "Nay; they are the heretics, breeding dissension in Israel. Did they not dance on the grave of the sainted Elijah Wilna?"

Tired of tossing the ball of conversation up and down, I left the window and joined the philosopher under his porch, where I elicted from him his version of the eighteenth-century movement of _Chassidim_, (the pious ones), which, in these days of English books on Judaism, will not be so new to American Jews as it was to me. These Shakers (or, as we should perhaps say nowadays, Salvationists), these protestants against cut-and-dried Judaism, who arose among the Carpathians under the inspiration of Besht (a word which Yarchi explained to me was made out of the initials of Baal Shem Tob--the Master of the Good Name), had, it seemed, pullulated into a thousand different sects, each named after the Wonder Rabbi whom it swore by, and in whose "exclusive divine right" (the phrase is Yarchi's) it believed.

"But _we_ have the divinest chief," concluded Yarchi, grinning.

"That's what they all say, eh?" I said, smiling in response.

"Yes; but the Zloczszol rabbi is stamped with the royal seal. He professes to be of the Messianic seed, a direct descendant of David, the son of Jesse." And the hunchback chuckled with malicious humour.

"I should like to see him," I said, feeling as if Providence had provided a new interest for my boredom.

Yarchi pointed silently with his discoloured thumb over the plain.

"You don't mean he is kept in that storehouse!" I said.

Yarchi guffawed in high good-humour.

"That! That's the _Klaus_!"

"And what's the _Klaus_?"

"The _Chassidim Stubele_ (little room)."

"Is that where the miracles are done?"

"No; that's their synagogue."

"Oh, they just pray there!"

"Pray? They get as drunk as Lot."

II

I returned to my window and gazed curiously at the _Klaus_, and now that my eye was upon it I saw it was astir with restless life. Men came and went continually. I looked toward the synagogue, and the more pretentious building seemed dead. Then I remembered what Yarchi had told me, that the _Chassidim_ had revolted against set prayer-times. ("They pray and drink at all hours," was his way of putting it.) Something must always be forward in the _Klaus_, I thought, as I took my hat and stick, on exploring bent. Instinctively I put my pistol in my hip pocket, then bethought myself with a laugh that I was not likely to be molested by the "pious ones." But as it was unloaded, I let it remain in the pocket.

I slipped into the building and on to a bench near the door. But for the veiled Ark at the end, I should not have known the place for a house of worship. True, some men were sitting or standing about, shouting and singing, with odd spasmodic gestures, but the bulk were lounging, smoking clay pipes, drinking coffee, and chattering, while a few, looking like tramps, lay snoring on the hard benches, deaf to all the din. My eye sought at once for the Wonder Rabbi himself, but amid the many quaint physiognomies there was none with any apparent seal of supremacy. The note of all the faces was easy-going good-will, and even the passionate contortions of melody and body which the worshippers produced, the tragic clutchings at space, the clinching of fists, and the beating of breasts had an air of cheery impromptu. They seemed to enjoy their very tears. And every now and then the inspiration would catch one of the gossipers and contort him likewise, while a worshipper would as suddenly fall to gossiping.