Ghetto Tragedies Part 27

"Does she still stalk about in a shroud?" He did not wait for an answer, but went off into unending laughter, which doubled him up till his hunch protruded upward like a camel's.

"She does not go about at all now," I said freezingly. But this set Yarchi cachinnating worse than ever.

"He daren't trust even his own disciples, you see! Ha! ha! ha!"

"Yarchi!" I cried angrily, "you know Bethulah must be kept sacred from this rabble," and I switched with my riding-whip at the poppies that grew among the maize in the little front garden, as if they were pilgrims and I a Tarquin.

"Yes, I know that's Ben David's game. But I wish some man would marry her and ruin his business. Ha! ha! ha!"

"It would ruin yours too," I reminded him, more angrily. "You are ready enough to let lodgings to the pilgrims."

Yarchi shrugged his hump. "If fools are fools, wise men are wise men,"

he replied oracularly.

I strode away, but he had heated my brain with a new idea, or one that I now allowed myself to see clearly. Some man might marry her. Then why should I not be that man? Why should I not carry Bethulah back to America with me--the most precious curiosity of the Old World--a frank, virginal creature with that touch of the angel which I had dreamed of but had never met among our smart girls--up to then. And even if it were true that Ben David was a fraud, and needed the girl for his Cabalistic mystifications, even so I was rich enough to recoup him. The girl herself was no conscious accessory; of that I felt certain.

When my brain cooled, suggestions of the other aspects of the question began to find entrance. What of Bethulah herself? Why should she care to marry me? Or to go to the strange, raw country? And such a union--was it not too incongruous, too fantastic, for practical life?

Thus I wrestled with myself for three days, all the while watching Bethulah's turret or the roads she might come by. On the third night I saw a wild mob of men at the turret end of the house, dancing in a ring and singing, with their eyes turned upward to the light that burnt on high. Their words I could not catch at first through the tumultuous howl, but it went on and on, like their circ.u.mvolutions, over and over again, till my brain reeled. It seemed to be an appeal to Bethulah to plead their cause on the coming _Yom-Hadin_ (New-Year day of Judgment):--

"By thy soul without sin, Enter heaven within, This divine _Yom-Hadin_, Holy Maid.

"Undertake thou our plea; Let the Poison G.o.d be Answered stoutly by thee, Holy Queen."

When I came to write this down afterward, I discovered it was an acrostic on her name, as is customary with festival prayers. And this I have preserved in my rough translation.

V

Despite my new spiritual insight, I could not bring myself to sympathize with such crude earthly visionings of the heavenly judgment bar (doubtless borrowed from the book of Job, which our enlightened Western rabbis rightly teach to be allegorical). Temporary absorption into the Over-Soul seemed to me to sum up the limits of _Cha.s.sidic_ experience. Besides, Bethulah was not a being to be employed as a sort of supernatural advocate, but a sad, tender creature needing love and protection.

This mob howling outside my lady's chamber added indignation to my strange pa.s.sion for this beautiful "sister of the shroud." I would rescue her from this grotesque environment. I would go to her father and formally demand her hand, as, I had learnt, was the custom among these people. I slept upon the resolution, yet in the morning it was still uncrumpled; and immediately after breakfast I took my stand among the jostling crowd outside the turreted house, and unfairly secured precedence by a gold piece slipped into the palm of the doorkeeper. The scribe I found stationed in the ante-chamber made me write my wish on a piece of paper, which, however, I was instructed to carry in myself.

Ben David was seated in a curious soft-cushioned, high-backed chair, with the intersecting triangles making a carved apex to it, but otherwise there was no mark of what Yarchi would have called charlatanism. His face, set between a black velvet biretta and the white ma.s.ses of his beard, had the dignity with which it had first impressed me, and his long, fur-trimmed robe gave him an air of mediaeval wisdom.

"Peace be to you, long-lingering stranger," he said, though his green eyes glittered ominously.

"Peace," I murmured uneasily.

With his left hand he put the still folded paper to his brow. I watched the light playing on the Persian emerald seal of the ring on the forefinger of his right hand. Suddenly I perceived he too was looking at the stone--nay, into it--and that while that continued to glitter, his own eyes had grown glazed.

"Strange, strange," he muttered. "Again I see the fiery wheels, and the strange soul fashioned of Satan that dwells neither in heaven nor in h.e.l.l." And his eyes lit up terribly again and rolled like fiery wheels.

"What do you want?" he cried harshly.

"It is written on the paper," I faltered, "just two words."

He opened the paper and read out, "Your daughter!" His eyes rolled again. "What know you of my daughter?"

"Oh, I know all about her," I said airily.

"Then you know that my daughter does not receive pilgrims."

"Nay, 'tis I that wish to receive your daughter," I ventured jocosely, with a touch of levity I did not feel. He raised his clinched hand as if to strike me, and I had a lurid sense of three green eyes glaring at me. I stood my ground as coolly as possible, and said, in dry, formal tones, "I wish to make application for her hand."

A great blackness came over the frosted visage, as if his black biretta had been suddenly drawn forward, and his erst blanched eyebrows gloomed like a black lightning-cloud over the baleful eyes.

I shrank back, then I had a sudden vision of the wagons clattering down Broadway in a live, sunlit, go-ahead world, and the Wonder Rabbi turned into an absurd old parent with a beautiful daughter and a bad temper.

"I am a man of substance," I went on dryly. "In my country I have fat lands."

The horribleness of thus bidding for Bethulah flashed on me even as I spoke. To mix up a creature of mist and moonlight with substance and fat lands! Monstrous! And yet I knew that thus, and thus only, by honourable talk with her guardian, could a Zloczszol bride be won.

But the Wonder Rabbi sprang to his feet so vehemently that his high-backed chair rocked as in a gale.

"Dog!" he shrieked. "Blasphemer!"

I summoned all my American sang-froid.

"Dog," I agreed, "inasmuch as I follow your daughter like a dog, humbly, lovingly. But blasphemer? Say rather worshipper. For I worship Bethulah."

"Then worship her like the others," he roared. Had I not heard him pray, I should have expected the h.o.a.ry patriarch to collapse after such an outburst.

"Thank you," I said. "I don't want her to fly up to heaven for me. I want her to come down to earth--from her turret."

"She will not come down to any earthly spouse," he said more gently.

"Quite the reverse."

"Then I will make a soul-ascension," I said defiantly.

"Get back to h.e.l.l, sp.a.w.n of Satan!" he thundered again. "Or since, strange son of the New World, you neither believe nor disbelieve, hover eternally between h.e.l.l and heaven!"

"Meantime I am here," I said good-humouredly, "between you and your daughter. Come, come, be sensible; you are a very old man. Where in Zloczszol will you find a superior husband for your child?"

"The Lord, to whom she is consecrated, forgive you your blasphemy," he said, in a changed voice, and rang his bell, so that the next applicant came in and I had to go.

It was plain the girl was kept as a sacred celibate, a sort of vestal virgin--Bethulah was the very Hebrew for virgin, it suddenly flashed upon me. But how came such practices into Judaism--Judaism, with its cheery creed, "increase and multiply?" And _Cha.s.sidism_, I had hitherto imagined, was the cheeriness of Judaism concentrated! In Yarchi's version it was even license--"the Adamite life." I raked up my memories of the Bible--remembered Jephtha's daughter. But no! there could be no question of a vow; this was some new _Cha.s.sidic_ mystery.

The crown and the shroud! The shroud of renunciation, the crown of victory!

And for some fantastic shadow-myth a beautiful young life was to be immolated. My respect for _Cha.s.sidism_ vanished as suddenly as it came.

But I was powerless. I could only wait till the flood of pilgrims oozed back, even as the waters had done. Then perhaps Bethulah might walk again upon the moonlit mountain-peak, or in the "house of life,"

as the cemetery was mystically called.

The penitential season, with its trumpets and terrors, judgment-writings and sealings, was over at last, and Tabernacles came like a breath of air and nature. Yarchi hammered up a little wooden booth in the corner of his front garden, and hung grapes and oranges and flowers from its loose roof of boughs, through which the stars peeped at us as we ate. It struck me as a very pretty custom, and I wondered why American Judaism had let it fall into desuetude. Ere the break-up of these booths the pilgrims had begun to melt away, the old sleepiness to fall upon Zloczszol.

Hence I was startled one morning by the pa.s.sage of a joyous procession that carried torches and played on flutes and tambourines. I ran out and discovered that I was part of a wedding procession escorting a bride. As this was a company not of _Cha.s.sidim_, but of everyday Jews, bound for the little Gothic synagogue, I was surprised, despite my experience of the Tabernacles, to find such picturesque goings-on, and I went all the way to the courtyard, where the rabbi came out to meet us with the bridegroom, who, it seemed, had already been conducted hither with parallel pomp. The happy youth--for he could only have been sixteen--was arrayed in festival finery, with white shoes on his feet and black phylacteries on his forehead, which was further over-gloomed by a cowl. He took the bride's hand, and then we all threw wheat over their heads, crying three times, "_Peru, Urvu_" (Be fruitful and multiply). But just when I expected the ceremony to begin, the bride was s.n.a.t.c.hed away, and we all filed into the synagogue to await her return.

I had fallen into a mournful reverie--perhaps the suggestion of my own infelicitous romance was too strong--when I felt a stir of excitement animating my neighbours, and, looking up, lo! I saw a tall female figure in a white shroud, with a veiled face, and on her head a crown of roses and myrtles and olive branches. A shiver ran through me.