Part 7

Toward evening a snow-storm blew in from the sea, but instead of scurrying for shelter, the little Eskimos joined the doctor in hauling wood for a big bonfire on the beach. There, while the surf beat upon the shore hardly a dozen steps away, and the storm whirled the snow-clouds in weird drifts over sea and land, they drew near the fire, and heard the doctor tell stories that seemed to come right out of the darkness and grow real while they listened. Dr. Wallace is a Southerner and lived his childhood with Br'er Rabbit and Mr. Fox, and they saw them plainly gamboling in the firelight as the story went on. For the doctor knows boys and loves them, that is how.

No one would have guessed that they were cripples, every one of that rugged band that sat down around the Christmas supper-table, rosy-cheeked and jolly--cripples condemned, but for Sea Breeze, to lives of misery and pain, most of them to an early death and suffering to others. For their enemy was that foe of mankind, the White Plague, that for thousands of years has taken tithe and toll of the ignorance and greed and selfishness of man, which sometimes we call with one name--the slum. Gimpy never would have dreamed that the tenement held no worse threat for the baby he yearned for than himself, with his crippled foot, when he was there. These things you could not have told even the fathers and mothers; or if you had, no one there but the doctor and the nurses would have believed you. They knew only too well. But two things you could make out, with no trouble at all, by the lamplight: one, that they were one and all on the homeward stretch to health and vigor--Gimpy himself was a different lad from the one who had crept shivering to bed the night before; and this other, that they were the sleepiest crew of youngsters ever got together. Before they had finished the first verse of "America" as their good night, standing up like little men, half of them were down and asleep with their heads pillowed upon their arms. And so Miss Brass, the head nurse, gathered them in and off to bed.

"And now, boys," she said as they were being tucked in, "your prayers." And of those who were awake each said his own: Willie his "Now I lay me," Mariano his "Ave," but little Bent from the Eastside tenement wailed that he didn't have any. Bent was a newcomer like Gimpy.

"Then," said six-year-old Morris, resolutely,--he also was a Jew,--"I learn him mine vat my fader tol' me." And getting into Bent's crib, he crept under the blanket with his little comrade. Gimpy saw them reverently pull their worsted caps down over their heads, and presently their tiny voices whispered together, in the jargon of the East Side, their petition to the Father of all, who looked lovingly down through the storm upon his children of many folds.

The last prayer was said, and all was still. Through the peaceful breathing of the boys all about him, Gimpy, alone wakeful, heard the deep bass of the troubled sea. The storm had blown over. Through the open windows shone the eternal stars, as on that night in the Judean hills when shepherds herded their flocks and

"The angels of the Lord came down."

He did not know. He was not thinking of angels; none had ever come to his slum. But a great peace came over him and filled his child-soul. It may be that the nurse saw it shining in his eyes and thought it fever. It may be that she, too, was thinking in that holy hour. She bent over him and laid a soothing hand upon his brow.

"You must sleep now," she said.

Something that was not of the tenement, something vital, with which his old life had no concern, welled up in Gimpy at the touch. He caught her hand and held it.

"I will if you will sit here," he said. He could not help it.

"Why, Jimmy?" She stroked back his shock of stubborn hair. Something glistened on her eyelashes as she looked at the forlorn little face on the pillow. How should Gimpy know that he was at that moment leading another struggling soul by the hand toward the light that never dies?

"'Cause," he gulped hard, but finished manfully--"'cause I love you."

Gimpy had learned the lesson of Christmas,

"And glory shone around."

AS TOLD BY THE RABBI

Three stories have come to me out of the past for which I would make friends in the present. The first I have from a rabbi of our own day whom I met last winter in the far Southwest. The other two were drawn from the wisdom of the old rabbis that is as replete with human contradiction as the strange people of whose life it was, and is, a part. If they help us to understand how near we live to one another, after all, it is well. Without other comment, I shall leave each reader to make his own application of them.

* * * * *

This was the story my friend the Arkansas rabbi told. It is from the folk-lore of Russia:

A woman who had lain in torment a thousand years lifted her face toward heaven and cried to the Lord to set her free, for she could endure it no longer. And he looked down and said: "Can you remember one thing you did for a human being without reward in your earth life?"

The woman groaned in bitter anguish, for she had lived in selfish ease; the neighbor had been nothing to her.

"Was there not one? Think well!"

"Once--it was nothing--I gave to a starving man a carrot, and he thanked me."

"Bring, then, the carrot. Where is it?"

"It is long since, Lord," she sobbed, "and it is lost."

"Not so; witness of the one unselfish deed of your life, it could not perish. Go," said the Lord to an angel, "find the carrot and bring it here."

The angel brought the carrot and held it over the bottomless pit, letting it down till it was within reach of the woman. "Cling to it," he said. She did as she was bidden, and found herself rising out of her misery.

Now, when the other souls in torment saw her drawn upward, they seized her hands, her waist, her feet, her garments, and clung to them with despairing cries, so that there rose out of the pit an ever-lengthening chain of writhing, wailing humanity clinging to the frail root. Higher and higher it rose till it was half-way to heaven, and still its burden grew. The woman looked down, and fear and anger seized her--fear that the carrot would break, and anger at the meddling of those strangers who put her in peril. She struggled, and beat with hands and feet upon those below her.

"Let go," she cried; "it is _my_ carrot."

The words were hardly out of her mouth before the carrot broke, and she fell, with them all, back into torment, and the pit swallowed them up.

* * * * *

In a little German town the pious Rabbi Jisroel Isserlheim is deep in the study of the sacred writings, when of a sudden the Messiah stands before him. The time of trial of his people is past, so runs his message; that very evening he will come, and their sufferings will be over. He prays that his host will summon a carriage in which he may make his entry into town. Trembling with pride and joy, the rabbi falls at his feet and worships. But in the very act of rising doubts assail him.

"Thou temptest me, Master!" he exclaims; "it is written that the Messiah shall come riding upon an ass."

"Be it so. Send thou for the ass." But in all the countryside far and near no ass is to be found; the rabbi knows it. The Messiah waits.

"Do you not see that you are barring the way with your scruples to the salvation you long for? The sun is far in the west; do not let it set, for if this day pass, the Jews must suffer for untold ages to come. Would you set an ass between me and the salvation of my people?"

The man stands irresolute. "Ten minutes, and I must go," urges his visitor. But at last the rabbi has seen his duty clear.

"No Messiah without the ass," he cries; and the Messiah goes on his way.

* * * * *

Once, so runs the legend, there lived in far Judean hills two affectionate brothers, tilling a common field together. One had a wife and a houseful of children; the other was a lonely man. One night in the harvest time the older brother said to his wife: "My brother is a lonely man. I will go out and move some of the sheaves from my side of the field over on his, so that when he sees them in the morning his heart will be cheered by the abundance." And he did.

That same night the other brother said to his workmen: "My brother has a houseful and many mouths to fill. I am alone, and do not need all this wealth. I will go and move some of my sheaves over on his field, so that he shall rejoice in the morning when he sees how great is his store." And he did. They did it that night and the next, in the sheltering dark. But on the third night the moon came out as they met face to face, each with his arms filled with sheaves. On that spot, says the legend, was built the Temple of Jerusalem, for it was esteemed that there earth came nearest heaven.

THE STRAND FROM ABOVE

From the Danish of JOHANNES JÖRGENSEN

The sun rose on a bright September morning. A thousand gems of dew sparkled in the meadows, and upon the breeze floated, in the wake of summer, the shining silken strands of which no man knoweth the whence or the whither.

One of them caught in the top of a tree, and the skipper, a little speckled yellow spider, quit his airship to survey the leafy demesne there. It was not to his liking, and, with prompt decision, he spun a new strand and let himself down straight into the hedge below.

There were twigs and shoots in plenty there to spin a web in, and he went to work at once, letting the strand from above, by which he had come, bear the upper corner of it.

A fine large web it was when finished, and with this about it that set it off from all the other webs thereabouts, that it seemed to stand straight up in the air, without anything to show what held it. It takes pretty sharp eyes to make out a single strand of a spider-web, even a very little way off.

The days went by. Flies grew scarcer, as the sun rose later, and the spider had to make his net larger that it might reach farther and catch more. And here the strand from above turned out a great help. With it to brace the structure, the web was spun higher and wider, until it covered the hedge all the way across. In the wet October mornings, when it hung full of shimmering raindrops, it was like a veil stitched with precious pearls.

The spider was proud of his work. No longer the little thing that had come drifting out of the vast with nothing but its unspun web in its pocket, so to speak, he was now a big, portly, opulent spider, with the largest web in the hedge.

One morning he awoke very much out of sorts. There had been a frost in the night, and daylight brought no sun. The sky was overcast; not a fly was out. All the long gray autumn day the spider sat hungry and cross in his corner. Toward evening, to kill time, he started on a tour of inspection, to see if anything needed bracing or mending. He pulled at all the strands; they were firm enough. But though he found nothing wrong, his temper did not improve; he waxed crosser than ever.

At the farthest end of the web he came at last to a strand that all at once seemed strange to him. All the rest went this way or that--the spider knew every stick and knob they were made fast to, every one. But this preposterous strand went nowhere--that is to say, went straight up in the air and was lost. He stood up on his hind legs and stared with all his eyes, but he could not make it out. To look at, the strand went right up into the clouds, which was nonsense.

The longer he sat and glared to no purpose, the angrier the spider grew. He had quite forgotten how on a bright September morning he himself had come down this same strand. And he had forgotten how, in the building of the web and afterward when it had to be enlarged, it was just this strand he had depended upon. He saw only that here was a useless strand, a fool strand, that went nowhere in sense or reason, only up in the air where solid spiders had no concern....

"Away with it!" and with one vicious snap of his angry jaws he bit the strand in two.

That instant the web collapsed, the whole proud and prosperous structure fell in a heap, and when the spider came to he lay sprawling in the hedge with the web all about his head like a wet rag. In one brief moment he had wrecked it all--because he did not understand the use of _the strand from above_.

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