The Promised Land Part 8

If any one in Polotzk had been idle and curious enough to inquire into the state of mind of a little child, I wonder if his findings would not have disturbed this simple cla.s.sification.

There used to be a little girl in Polotzk who recited the long Hebrew prayers, morning and evening, before and after meals, and never skipped a word; who kissed the _mezuzah_ when going or coming; who abstained from food and drink on fast days when she was no bigger than a sacrificial hen; who spent Sabbath mornings over the lengthy ritual for the day, and read the Psalms till daylight failed.

This pious child could give as good an account of the Creation as any boy of her age. She knew how G.o.d made the world. Undeterred by the fate of Eve, she wanted to know more. She asked her wise rebbe how G.o.d came to be in His place, and where He found the stuff to make the world of, and what was doing in the universe before G.o.d undertook His task. Finding from his unsatisfying replies that the rebbe was but a barren branch on the tree of knowledge, the good little girl never betrayed to the world, by look or word, her discovery of his limitations, but continued to accord him, outwardly, all the courtesy due to his calling.

Her teacher having failed her, the young student, with admirable persistence, carried her questions from one to another of her acquaintances, putting their answers to the test whenever it was possible. She established by this means two facts: first, that she knew as much as any of those who undertook to instruct her; second, that her oracles sometimes gave false answers. Did the little inquisitor charge her betrayers with the lie? Magnanimous creature, she kept their falseness a secret, and ceased to probe their shallow depths.

What you would know, find out for yourself: this became our student's motto; and she pa.s.sed from the question to the experiment. Her grandmother told her that if she handled "blind flowers" she would be stricken blind. She found by test that the pretty flowers were harmless. She tested everything that could be tested, till she hit at last on an impious plan to put G.o.d Himself to the proof.

The pious little girl arose one Sabbath afternoon from her religious meditations, when all the house was taking its after-dinner nap, and went out in the yard, and stopped at the gate. She took out her pocket handkerchief. She looked at it. Yes, that would do for the experiment.

She put it back into her pocket. She did not have to rehea.r.s.e mentally the sacred admonition not to carry anything beyond the house-limits on the Sabbath day. She knew it as she knew that she was alive. And with her handkerchief in her pocket the audacious child stepped into the street!

She stood a moment, her heart beating so that it pained. Nothing happened! She walked quite across the street. The Sabbath peace still lay on everything. She felt again of the burden in her pocket. Yes, she certainly was committing a sin. With an access of impious boldness, the sinner walked--she ran as far as the corner, and stood still, fearfully expectant. What form would the punishment take? She stood breathing painfully for an eternity. How still everything was--how close and still the air! Would it be a storm? Would a sudden bolt strike her? She stood and waited. She could not bring her hand to her pocket again, but she felt that it bulged monstrously. She stood with no thought of moving again. Where were the thunders of Jehovah?

No sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue--not even "Hear, O Israel." She felt that she was in direct communication with G.o.d--awful thought!--and He would read her mind and would send His answer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SABBATH LOAVES FOR SALE (BREAD MARKET, POLOTZK)]

An age pa.s.sed in blank expectancy. Nothing happened! Where was the wrath of G.o.d? _Where was G.o.d?_

When she turned to go home, the little philosopher had her handkerchief tied around her wrist in the proper way. The experiment was over, though the result was not clear. G.o.d had not punished her, but nothing was proved by His indifference. Either the act was no sin, and her preceptors were all deceivers; or it was indeed a sin in the eyes of G.o.d, but He refrained from stern justice for high reasons of His own. It was not a searching experiment she had made. She was bitterly disappointed, and perhaps that was meant as her punishment: G.o.d refused to give her a reply. She intended no sin for the sake of sin; so, being still in doubt, she tied her handkerchief around her wrist. Her eyes stared more than ever,--this was the child with the staring eyes,--but that was the only sign she gave of a consciousness suddenly expanded, of a self-consciousness intensified.

When she went back into the house, she gazed with a new curiosity at her mother, at her grandmother, dozing in their chairs. They looked _different_. When they awoke and stretched themselves and adjusted wig and cap, they looked _very_ strange. As she went to get her grandmother her Bible, and dropped it accidentally, she kissed it by way of atonement just as a proper child should.

How, I wonder, would this Psalm-singing child have be enlabelled by the investigator of her mind? Would he have called her a Jew? She was too young to be called an apostate. Perhaps she would have been dismissed as a little fraud; and I should be content with that cla.s.sification, if slightly modified. I should say the child was a piteously puzzled little fraud.

To return to the honest first person, I _was_ something of a fraud.

The days when I believed everything I was told did not run much beyond my teething time. I soon began to question if fire was really hot, if the cat would really scratch. Presently, as we have seen, I questioned G.o.d. And in those days my religion depended on my mood. I could believe anything I wanted to believe. I did believe, in all my moods, that there was a G.o.d who had made the world, in some fas.h.i.+on unexplained, and who knew about me and my doings; for there was the world all about me, and somebody must have made it. And it was conceivable that a being powerful enough to do such work could be aware of my actions at all times, and yet continue to me invisible.

The question remained, what did He think of my conduct? Was He really angry when I broke the Sabbath, or pleased when I fasted on the Day of Atonement? My belief as to these matters wavered. When I swung the sacrifice around my head on Atonement Eve, repeating, "Be thou my sacrifice," etc., I certainly believed that I was bargaining with the Almighty for pardon, and that He was interested in the matter. But next day, when the fast was over, and I enjoyed all of my chicken that I could eat, I believed as certainly that G.o.d could not be party to such a foolish transaction, in which He got nothing but words, while I got both the feast and the pardon. The sacrifice of money, to be spent for the poor, seemed to me a more reliable insurance against d.a.m.nation. The well-to-do pious offered up both living sacrifice and money for the poor-box, but it was a sign of poverty to offer only money. Even a lean rooster, to be killed, roasted, and garnished for the devotee's own table at the breaking of the fast, seemed to be considered a more respectable sacrifice than a groschen to increase the charity fund. All this was so illogical that it unsettled my faith in minor points of doctrine, and on these points I was quite happy to believe to-day one thing, to-morrow another.

As unwaveringly as I believed that we Jews had a G.o.d who was powerful and wise, I believed that the G.o.d of my Christian neighbors was impotent, cruel, and foolish. I understood that the G.o.d of the Gentiles was no better than a toy, to be dressed up in gaudy stuffs and carried in processions. I saw it often enough, and turned away in contempt. While the G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--my G.o.d--enjoined on me honesty and kindness, the G.o.d of Vanka bade him beat me and spit on me whenever he caught me alone. And what a foolish G.o.d was that who taught the stupid Gentiles that we drank the blood of a murdered child at our Pa.s.sover feast! Why, I, who was only a child, knew better. And so I hated and feared and avoided the great white church in the Platz, and hated every sign and symbol of that monstrous G.o.d who was kept there and hated my own person, when, in our play of a Christian funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried the hideous cross.

Perhaps I have established that I was more Jew than Gentile, though I can still prove that I was none the less a fraud. For instance, I remember how once, on the eve of the Ninth of Ab--the anniversary of the fall of the Temple--I was looking on at the lamentations of the women. A large circle had gathered around my mother, who was the only good reader among them, to listen to the story of the cruel destruction. Sitting on humble stools, in stocking feet, shabby clothes, and dishevelled hair, weeping in chorus, and wringing their hands, as if it was but yesterday that the sacred edifice fell and they were in the very dust and ashes of the ruin, the women looked to me enviously wretched and pious. I joined the circle in the candlelight. I wrung my hands, I moaned; but I was always slow of tears--I could not weep. But I wanted to look like the others. So I streaked my cheeks with the only moisture at hand.

Alas for my pious ambition! alas for the n.o.ble lament of the women!

Somebody looked up and caught me in the act of manufacturing tears. I grinned, and she giggled. Another woman looked up. I grinned, and they giggled. Demoralization swept around the circle. Honest laughter snuffed out artificial grief. My mother at last looked up, with red and astonished eyes, and I was banished from the feast of tears.

I returned promptly to my playmates in the street, who were amusing themselves, according to the custom on that sad anniversary, by pelting each other with burrs. Here I was distinguished, more than I had been among my elders. My hair being curly, it caught a generous number of burrs, so that I fairly bristled with these emblems of mortification and woe.

Not long after that sinful experiment with the handkerchief I discovered by accident that I was not the only doubter in Polotzk. One Friday night I lay wakeful in my little bed, staring from the dark into the lighted room adjoining mine. I saw the Sabbath candles sputter and go out, one by one,--it was late,--but the lamp hanging from the ceiling still burned high. Everybody had gone to bed. The lamp would go out before morning if there was little oil; or else it would burn till Natasha, the Gentile ch.o.r.ewoman, came in the morning to put it out, and remove the candlesticks from the table, and unseal the oven, and do the dozen little tasks which no Jew could perform on the Sabbath. The simple prohibition to labor on the Sabbath day had been construed by zealous commentators to mean much more. One must not even touch any instrument of labor or commerce, as an axe or a coin.

It was forbidden to light a fire, or to touch anything that contained a fire, or had contained fire, were it only a cold candlestick or a burned match. Therefore the lamp at which I was staring must burn till the Gentile woman came to put it out.

The light did not annoy me in the least; I was not thinking about it.

But apparently it troubled somebody else. I saw my father come from his room, which also adjoined the living-room. What was he going to do? What was this he was doing? Could I believe my eyes? My father touched the lighted lamp!--yes, he shook it, as if to see how much oil there was left.

I was petrified in my place. I could neither move nor make a sound. It seemed to me he must feel my eyes bulging at him out of the dark. But he did not know that I was looking; he thought everybody was asleep.

He turned down the light a very little, and waited. I did not take my eyes from him. He lowered the flame a little more, and waited again. I watched. By the slightest degrees he turned the light down. I understood. In case any one were awake, it would appear as if the lamp was going out of itself. I was the only one who lay so as to be able to see him, and I had gone to bed so early that he could not suppose I was awake. The light annoyed him, he wanted to put it out, but he would not risk having it known.

I heard my father find his bed in the dark before I dared to draw a full breath. The thing he had done was a monstrous sin. If his mother had seen him do it, it would have broken her heart--his mother who fasted half the days of the year, when he was a boy, to save his teacher's fee; his mother who walked almost barefoot in the cruel snow to carry him on her shoulders to school when she had no shoes for him; his mother who made it her pious pride to raise up a learned son, that most precious offering in the eyes of the great G.o.d, from the hand of a poor struggling woman. If my mother had seen it, it would have grieved her no less--my mother who was given to him, with her youth and good name and her dowry, in exchange for his learning and piety; my mother who was taken from her play to bear him children and feed them and keep them, while he sat on the benches of the scholars and repaid her labors with the fame of his learning. I did not put it to myself just so, but I understood that learning and piety were the things most valued in our family, that my father was a scholar, and that piety, of course, was the fruit of sacred learning. And yet my father had deliberately violated the Sabbath.

His act was not to be compared with my carrying the handkerchief. The two sins were of the same kind, but the sinners and their motives were different. I was a child, a girl at that, not yet of the age of moral responsibility. He was a man full grown, pa.s.sing for one of G.o.d's elect, and accepting the reverence of the world as due tribute to his scholarly merits. I had by no means satisfied myself, by my secret experiment, that it was not sinful to carry a burden on the Sabbath day. If G.o.d did not punish me on the spot, perhaps it was because of my youth or perhaps it was because of my motive.

According to my elders, my father, by turning out the lamp, committed the sin of Sabbath-breaking. What did my father intend? I could not suppose that his purpose was similar to mine. Surely he, who had lived so long and studied so deeply, had by this time resolved all his doubts. Surely G.o.d had instructed _him_. I could not believe that he did wrong knowingly, so I came to the conclusion that he did not hold it a sin to touch a lighted lamp on Sabbath. Then why was he so secret in his action? That, too, became clear to me. I myself had instinctively adopted secret methods in all my little investigations, and had kept the results to myself. The way in which my questions were received had taught me much. I had a dim, inarticulate understanding of the horror and indignation which my father would excite if he, supposedly a man of piety, should publish the heretical opinion that it was not wrong to handle fire on the Sabbath. To see what remorse my mother suffered, or my father's mother, if by some accident she failed in any point of religious observance, was to know that she could never be brought to doubt the sacred importance of the thousand minutiae of ancient Jewish practice. That which had been taught them as the truth by their fathers and mothers was the whole truth to my good friends and neighbors--that and nothing else. If there were any people in Polotzk who had strange private opinions, such as I concluded my father must hold, it was possible that he had a secret acquaintance with them. But it would never do, it was plain to me, to make public confession of his convictions. Such an act would not only break the hearts of his family, but it would also take the bread from the mouths of his children, and ruin them forever. My sister and my brother and I would come to be called the children of Israel the Apostate, just as Gutke, my playmate, was called the granddaughter of Yankel the Informer. The most innocent of us would be cursed and shunned for the sin of our father.

All this I came to understand, not all at once, but by degrees, as I put this and that together, and brought my childish thoughts to order.

I was by no means absorbed in this problem. I played and danced with the other children as heartily as ever, but I brooded in my window corner when there was nothing else to do. I had not the slightest impulse to go to my father, charge him with his unorthodox conduct, and demand an explanation of him. I was quite satisfied that I understood him, and I had not the habit of confidences. I was still in the days when I was content to _find out_ things, and did not long to communicate my discoveries. Moreover, I was used to living in two worlds, a real world and a make-believe one, without ever knowing which was which. In one world I had much company--father and mother and sister and friends--and did as others did, and took everything for granted. In the other world I was all alone, and I had to discover ways for myself; and I was so uncertain that I did not attempt to bring a companion along. And did I find my own father treading in the unknown ways? Then perhaps some day he would come across me, and take me farther than I had yet been; but I would not be the first to whisper that I was there. It seems strange enough to me now that I should have been so uncommunicative; but I remind myself that I have been thoroughly made over, at least once, since those early days.

I recall with sorrow that I was sometimes as weak in morals as I was in religion. I remember stealing a piece of sugar. It was long ago--almost as long ago as anything that I remember. We were still living in my grandfather's house when this dreadful thing happened and I was only four or five years old when we moved from there. Before my mother figured this out for me I scarcely had the courage to confess my sin.

And it was thus: In a corner of a front room, by a window, stood a high chest of drawers. On top of the chest stood a tin box, decorated with figures of queer people with queer flat parasols; a Chinese tea-box, in a word. The box had a lid. The lid was shut tight. But I knew what was in that gorgeous box and I coveted it. I was very little--I never could reach anything. There stood a chair suggestively near the chest. I pushed the chair a little and mounted it. By standing on tiptoe I could now reach the box. I opened it and took out an irregular lump of sparkling sugar. I stood on the chair admiring it. I stood too long. My grandmother came in--or was it Itke, the housemaid?--and found me with the stolen morsel.

I saw that I was fairly caught. How could I hope to escape my captor, when I was obliged to turn on my stomach in order to descend safely, thus presenting my jailer with the most tempting opportunity for immediate chastis.e.m.e.nt? I took in the situation before my grandmother had found her voice for horror. Did I rub my eyes with my knuckles and whimper? I wish I could report that I was thus instantly struck with a sense of my guilt. I was impressed only with the absolute certainty of my impending doom, and I promptly seized on a measure of compensation.

While my captor--I really think it was a grandmother--rehea.r.s.ed her entire vocabulary of reproach, from a distance sufficient to enable her to hurl her voice at me with the best effect, I stuffed the lump of sugar into my mouth and munched it as fast as I could. And I had eaten it all, and had licked my sticky lips, before the avenging rod came down.

I remember no similar lapses from righteousness, but I sinned in lesser ways more times than there are years in my life. I sinned, and more than once I escaped punishment by some trick or sly speech. I do not mean that I lied outright, though that also I did, sometimes; but I would twist my naughty speech, if forced to repeat it, in such an artful manner, or give such ludicrous explanation of my naughty act, that justice was overcome by laughter and threw me, as often as not, a handful of raisins instead of a knotted strap. If by such successes I was encouraged to cultivate my natural slyness and duplicity, I throw the blame on my unwise preceptors, and am glad to be rid of the burden for once.

I have said that I used to lie. I recall no particular occasion when a lie was the cause of my disgrace; but I know that it was always my habit, when I had some trifling adventure to report, to garnish it up with so much detail and circ.u.mstance that n.o.body who had witnessed my small affair could have recognized it as the same, had I not insisted on my version with such fervid conviction. The truth is that everything that happened to me really loomed great and shone splendid in my eyes, and I could not, except by conscious effort, reduce my visions to their actual shapes and colors. If I saw a pair of geese leading about a lazy goose girl, they went through all sorts of antics before my eyes that fat geese are not known to indulge in. If I met poor Blind Munye with a frown on his face, I thought that a cloud of wrath overspread his countenance; and I ran home to relate, panting, how narrowly I had escaped his fury. I will not pretend that I was absolutely unconscious of my exaggerations; but if you insist, I will say that things as I reported them might have been so, and would have been much more interesting had they been so.

The n.o.ble reader who never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. What proof has he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle, if, by my own confession, my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and dreams? I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, that the proof of my conversion to veracity is engraven in his own soul. Do you not remember, you spotless one, how you used to steal and lie and cheat and rob? Oh, not with your own hand, of course! It was your remote ancestor who lived by plunder, and was honored for the blood upon his hairy hands. By and by he discovered that cunning was more effective than violence, and less troublesome. Still later he became convinced that the greatest cunning was virtue, and made him a moral code, and subdued the world. Then, when you came along, stumbling through the wilderness of cast-off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time bellowing in your ear, "Now be good! It pays!"

This is the whole history of your saintliness. But all people do not take up life at the same point of human development. Some are backward at birth, and have to make up, in the brief s.p.a.ce of their individual history, the stages they missed on their way out of the black past.

With me, for example, it actually comes to this: that I have to recapitulate in my own experience all the slow steps of the progress of the race. I seem to learn nothing except by the p.r.i.c.k of life on my own skin. I am saved from living in ignorance and dying in darkness only by the sensitiveness of my skin. Some men learn through borrowed experience. Shut them up in a gla.s.s tower, with an un.o.bstructed view of the world, and they will go through every adventure of life by proxy, and be able to furnish you with a complete philosophy of life; and you may safely bring up your children by it. But I am not of that G.o.dlike organization. I am a thinking animal. Things are as important to me as ideas. I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body. There are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible to me than a cricket far off in the field. The earth was my mother, the earth is my teacher. I am a dutiful pupil: I listen ever with my ear close to her lips. It seems to me I do not know a single thing that I did not learn, more or less directly, through the corporal senses. As long as I have my body, I need not despair of salvation.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] A piece of parchment inscribed with a pa.s.sage of Scripture, rolled in a case and tacked to the doorpost. The pious touch or kiss this when leaving or entering a house.

CHAPTER VII

THE BOUNDARIES STRETCH

The long chapter of troubles which led to my father's emigration to America began with his own illness. The doctors sent him to Courland to consult expensive specialists, who prescribed tedious courses of treatment. He was far from cured when my mother also fell ill, and my father had to return to Polotzk to look after the business.

Trouble begets trouble. After my mother took to her bed everything continued to go wrong. The business gradually declined, as too much money was withdrawn to pay the doctors' and apothecaries' bills; and my father, himself in poor health, and worried about my mother, was not successful in coping with the growing difficulties. At home, the servants were dismissed, for the sake of economy, and all the housework and the nursing fell on my grandmother and my sister.

Fetchke, as a result, was overworked, and fell ill of a fever. The baby, suffering from unavoidable neglect, developed the fractious temper of semi-illness. And by way of a climax, the old cow took it into her head to kick my grandmother, who was laid up for a week with a bruised leg.

Neighbors and cousins pulled us through till grandma got up, and after her, Fetchke. But my mother remained on her bed. Weeks, months, a year she lay there, and half of another year. All the doctors in Polotzk attended her in turn, and one doctor came all the way from Vitebsk.

Every country pract.i.tioner for miles around was consulted, every quack, every old wife who knew a charm. The apothecaries ransacked their shops for drugs the names of which they had forgotten, and kind neighbors brought in their favorite remedies. There were midnight prayers in the synagogue for my mother, and pet.i.tions at the graves of her parents; and one awful night when she was near death, three pious mothers who had never lost a child came to my mother's bedside and bought her, for a few kopecks, for their own, so that she might gain the protection of their luck, and so be saved.

Still my poor mother lay on her bed, suffering and wasting. The house a.s.sumed a look of desolation. Everybody went on tiptoe; we talked in whispers; for weeks at a time there was no laughter in our home. The ominous night lamp was never extinguished. We slept in our clothes night after night, so as to wake the more easily in case of sudden need. We watched, we waited, but we scarcely hoped.

Once in a while I was allowed to take a short turn in the sick-room.

It was awful to sit beside my mother's bed in the still night and see her helplessness. She had been so strong, so active. She used to lift sacks and barrels that were heavy for a man, and now she could not raise a spoon to her mouth. Sometimes she did not know me when I gave her the medicine, and when she knew me, she did not care. Would she ever care any more? She looked strange and small in the shadows of the bed. Her hair had been cut off after the first few months; her short curls were almost covered by the ice bag. Her cheeks were red, red, but her hands were so white as they had never been before. In the still night I wondered if she cared to live.

The night lamp burned on. My father grew old. He was always figuring on a piece of paper. We children knew the till was empty when the silver candlesticks were taken away to be p.a.w.ned. Next, superfluous featherbeds were sold for what they would bring, and then there came a day when grandma, with eyes blinded by tears, groped in the big wardrobe for my mother's satin dress and velvet mantle; and after that it did not matter any more what was taken out of the house.