Children of the Ghetto Part 99

"Yes," she cried, and there was no answering tremor in her voice. "Now thou knowest! I am not a good Jewish maiden. Levi and I are brother and sister. His touch profane me, forsooth!" She laughed bitterly.

"Thou wilt take this journey though I forbid thee?" he cried in acrid accents, still mingled with surprise.

"Yes; would I had taken the journey thou wouldst have forbidden ten years ago!"

"What journey? thou talkest madness."

"I talk truth. Thou hast forgotten David Brandon; I have not. Ten years last Pa.s.sover I arranged to fly with him, to marry him, in defiance of the Law and thee."

A new pallor overspread the Reb's countenance, already ashen. He trembled and almost fell backwards.

"But thou didst not?" he whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

"I did not, I know not why," she said sullenly; "else thou wouldst never have seen me again. It may be I respected thy religion, although thou didst not dream what was in my mind. But thy religion shall not keep me from this journey."

The Reb had hidden his face in his hands. His lips were moving; was it in grateful prayer, in self-reproach, or merely in nervous trembling?

Hannah never knew. Presently the Reb's arms dropped, great tears rolled down towards the white beard. When he spoke, his tones were hushed as with awe.

"This man--tell me, my daughter, thou lovest him still?"

She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of reckless despair.

"What does it matter? My life is but a shadow."

The Reb took her to his breast, though she remained stony to his touch, and laid his wet face against her burning cheeks.

"My child, my poor Hannah; I thought G.o.d had sent thee peace ten years ago; that He had rewarded thee for thy obedience to His Law."

She drew her face away from his.

"It was not His Law; it was a miserable juggling with texts. Thou alone interpretedst G.o.d's law thus. No one knew of the matter."

He could not argue; the breast against which he held her was shaken by a tempest of grief, which swept away all save human remorse, human love.

"My daughter," he sobbed, "I have ruined thy life!" After an agonized pause, he said: "Tell me, Hannah, is there nothing I can do to make atonement to thee?"

"Only one thing, father," she articulated chokingly; "forgive Levi."

There was a moment of solemn silence. Then the Reb spake.

"Tell thy mother to put on her things and take what she needs for the journey. Perchance we may be away for days."

They mingled their tears in sweet reconciliation. Presently, the Reb said:

"Go now to thy mother, and see also that the boy's room be made ready as of old. Perchance G.o.d will hear my prayer, and he will yet be restored to us."

A new peace fell upon Hannah's soul. "My sacrifice was not in vain after all," she thought, with a throb of happiness that was almost exultation.

But Levi never came back. The news of his death arrived on the eve of _Yom Kippur_, the Day of Atonement, in a letter to Esther who had been left in charge of the house.

"He died quietly at the end," Hannah wrote, "happy in the consciousness of father's forgiveness, and leaning trustfully upon his interposition with Heaven; but he had delirious moments, during which he raved painfully. The poor boy was in great fear of death, moaning prayers that he might be spared till after _Yom Kippur_, when he would be cleansed of sin, and babbling about serpents that would twine themselves round his arm and brow, like the phylacteries he had not worn. He made father repeat his 'Verse' to him over and over again, so that he might remember his name when the angel of the grave asked it; and borrowed father's phylacteries, the headpiece of which was much too large for him with his shaven crown. When he had them on, and the _Talith_ round him, he grew easier, and began murmuring the death-bed prayers with father. One of them runs: 'O may my death be an atonement for all the sins, iniquities and transgressions of which I have been guilty against Thee!' I trust it may be so indeed. It seems so hard for a young man full of life and high spirits to be cut down, while the wretched are left alive. Your name was often on his lips. I was glad to learn he thought so much of you. 'Be sure to give Esther my love,' he said almost with his last breath, 'and ask her to forgive me.' I know not if you have anything to forgive, or whether this was delirium. He looks quite calm now--but oh! so worn.

They have closed the eyes. The beard he shocked father so by shaving off, has sprouted scrubbily during his illness. On the dead face it seems a mockery, like the _Talith_ and phylacteries that have not been removed."

A phrase of Leonard James vibrated in Esther's ears: "If the chappies could see me!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

HOPES AND DREAMS.

The morning of the Great White Fast broke bleak and gray. Esther, alone in the house save for the servant, wandered from room to room in dull misery. The day before had been almost a feast-day in the Ghetto--everybody providing for the morrow. Esther had scarcely eaten anything. Nevertheless she was fasting, and would fast for over twenty-four hours, till the night fell. She knew not why. Her record was unbroken, and instinct resented a breach now. She had always fasted--even the Henry Goldsmiths fasted, and greater than the Henry Goldsmiths! Q.C.'s fasted, and peers, and prize-fighters and actors. And yet Esther, like many far more pious persons, did not think of her sins for a moment. She thought of everything but them--of the bereaved family in that strange provincial town; of her own family in that strange distant land. Well, she would soon be with them now. Her pa.s.sage was booked--a steerage pa.s.sage it was, not because she could not afford cabin fare, but from her morbid impulse to identify herself with poverty. The same impulse led her to choose a vessel in which a party of Jewish pauper immigrants was being shipped farther West. She thought also of Dutch Debby, with whom she had spent the previous evening; and of Raphael Leon, who had sent her, _via_ the publishers, a letter which she could not trust herself to answer cruelly, and which she deemed it most prudent to leave unanswered. Uncertain of her powers of resistance, she scarcely ventured outside the house for fear of his stumbling across her. Happily, every day diminished the chance of her whereabouts leaking out through some unsuspected channel.

About noon, her restlessness carried her into the streets. There was a festal solemnity about the air. Women and children, not at synagogue, showed themselves at the doors, pranked in their best. Indifferently pious young men sought relief from the ennui of the day-long service in lounging about for a breath of fresh air; some even strolled towards the Strand, and turned into the National Gallery, satisfied to reappear for the twilight service. On all sides came the fervent roar of prayer which indicated a synagogue or a _Chevrah_, the number of places of worship having been indefinitely increased to accommodate those who made their appearance for this occasion only.

Everywhere friends and neighbors were asking one another how they were bearing the fast, exhibiting their white tongues and generally comparing symptoms, the physical aspects of the Day of Atonement more or less completely diverting attention from the spiritual. Smelling-salts pa.s.sed from hand to hand, and men explained to one another that, but for the deprivation of their cigars, they could endure _Yom Kippur_ with complacency.

Esther pa.s.sed the Ghetto school, within which free services were going on even in the playground, poor Russians and Poles, fanatically observant, fore-gathering with lax fishmongers and welshers; and without which hulking young men hovered uneasily, feeling too out of tune with religion to go in, too conscious of the terrors of the day to stay entirely away. From the interior came from sunrise to nightfall a throbbing thunder of supplication, now pealing in pa.s.sionate outcry, now subsiding to a low rumble. The sounds of prayer that pervaded the Ghetto, and burst upon her at every turn, wrought upon Esther strangely; all her soul went out in sympathy with these yearning outbursts; she stopped every now and then to listen, as in those far-off days when the Sons of the Covenant drew her with their melancholy cadences.

At last, moved by an irresistible instinct, she crossed the threshold of a large _Chevrah_ she had known in her girlhood, mounted the stairs and entered the female compartment without hostile challenge. The reek of many breaths and candles nearly drove her back, but she pressed forwards towards a remembered window, through a crowd of be-wigged women, shaking their bodies fervently to and fro.

This room had no connection with the men's; it was simply the room above part of theirs, and the declamations of the unseen cantor came but faintly through the flooring, though the clamor of the general masculine chorus kept the pious _au courant_ with their husbands. When weather or the whims of the more important ladies permitted, the window at the end was opened; it gave upon a little balcony, below which the men's chamber projected considerably, having been built out into the back yard. When this window was opened simultaneously with the skylight in the men's synagogue, the fervid roulades of the cantor were as audible to the women as to their masters.

Esther had always affected the balcony: there the air was comparatively fresh, and on fine days there was a glimpse of blue sky, and a perspective of sunny red tiles, where brown birds fluttered and cats lounged and little episodes arose to temper the tedium of endless invocation: and farther off there was a back view of a nunnery, with visions of placid black-hooded faces at windows; and from the distance came a pleasant drone of monosyllabic spelling from fresh young voices, to relieve the ear from the monotony of long stretches of meaningless mumbling.

Here, lost in a sweet melancholy, Esther dreamed away the long gray day, only vaguely conscious of the stages of the service--morning dovetailing into afternoon service, and afternoon into evening; of the heavy-jowled woman behind her reciting a jargon-version of the Atonement liturgy to a devout coterie; of the prostrations full-length on the floor, and the series of impa.s.sioned sermons; of the interminably rhyming poems, and the acrostics with their recurring burdens shouted in devotional frenzy, voice rising above voice as in emulation, with special staccato phrases flung heavenwards; of the wailing confessions of communal sin, with their accompaniment of sobs and tears and howls and grimaces and clenchings of palms and beatings of the breast. She was lapped in a great ocean of sound that broke upon her consciousness like the waves upon a beach, now with a cooing murmur, now with a majestic crash, followed by a long receding moan. She lost herself in the roar, in its barren sensuousness, while the leaden sky grew duskier and the twilight crept on, and the awful hour drew nigh when G.o.d would seal what He had written, and the annual scrolls of destiny would be closed, immutable.

She saw them looming mystically through the skylight, the swaying forms below, in their white grave-clothes, oscillating weirdly backwards and forwards, bowed as by a mighty wind.

Suddenly there fell a vast silence; even from without no sound came to break the awful stillness. It was as if all creation paused to hear a pregnant word.

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G.o.d, the Lord is One!" sang the cantor frenziedly.

And all the ghostly congregation answered with a great cry, closing their eyes and rocking frantically to and fro:

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G.o.d, the Lord is One!"

They seemed like a great army of the sheeted dead risen to testify to the Unity. The magnetic tremor that ran through the synagogue thrilled the lonely girl to the core; once again her dead self woke, her dead ancestors that would not be shaken off lived and moved in her. She was sucked up into the great wave of pa.s.sionate faith, and from her lips came, in rapturous surrender to an overmastering impulse, the half-hysterical protestation:

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G.o.d, the Lord is One!"

And then in the brief instant while the congregation, with ever-ascending rhapsody, blessed G.o.d till the climax came with the sevenfold declaration, "the Lord, He is G.o.d," the whole history of her strange, unhappy race flashed through her mind in a whirl of resistless emotion. She was overwhelmed by the thought of its sons in every corner of the earth proclaiming to the sombre twilight sky the belief for which its generations had lived and died--the Jews of Russia sobbing it forth in their pale of enclosure, the Jews of Morocco in their _mellah_, and of South Africa in their tents by the diamond mines: the Jews of the New World in great free cities, in Canadian backwoods, in South American savannahs: the Australian Jews on the sheep-farms and the gold-fields and in the mushroom cities; the Jews of Asia in their reeking quarters begirt by barbarian populations. The shadow of a large mysterious destiny seemed to hang over these poor superst.i.tious zealots, whose lives she knew so well in all their everyday prose, and to invest the unconscious shunning sons of the Ghetto with something of tragic grandeur. The gray dusk palpitated with floating shapes of prophets and martyrs, scholars and sages and poets, full of a yearning love and pity, lifting hands of benediction. By what great high-roads and queer by-ways of history had they travelled hither, these wandering Jews, "sated with contempt," these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these human paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energizing in every field of activity, omnipresent like sonic great natural force, indestructible and almost inconvertible, surviving--with the incurable optimism that overlay all their poetic sadness--Babylon and Carthage, Greece and Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the Inquisition, illusive of all baits, unshaken by all persecutions--at once the greatest and meanest of races? Had the Jew come so far only to break down at last, sinking in mora.s.ses of modern doubt, and irresistibly dragging down with him the Christian and the Moslem; or was he yet fated to outlast them both, in continuous testimony to a hand moulding incomprehensibly the life of humanity? Would Israel develop into the sacred phalanx, the n.o.bler brotherhood that Raphael Leon had dreamed of, or would the race that had first proclaimed--through Moses for the ancient world, through Spinoza for the modern--

"One G.o.d, one Law, one Element,"

become, in the larger, wilder dream of the Russian _idealist_, the main factor in