Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 53

"And yet you call him a _Schlemihl_!" cried Moshele, the cynic.

"Ah, but her family stuck to the money!" retorted the narrator, and captured the laugh.

It was true. After three years of terrible struggle and privation, Aaron had prepared an English home for his Yenta, but she slept instead in a Russian grave. Perhaps if his friends had known how he had thrown away the chance of sending for her earlier, they would have been still more convinced that he was a born _Schlemihl_. For within eighteen months of his landing in London docks, Aaron, through his rapid mastery of English and ciphering at the evening cla.s.ses for Hebrew adults, had found a post as book-keeper to a clothes-store in Ratcliff Highway. But he soon discovered that he was expected to fake the invoices, especially when drunken sailors came to rig themselves up in mufti.

"Well, we'll throw the scarf in," the genial salesman would concede cheerily. "And the waistcoat? One-and-three--a good waistcoat, as clean as new, and dirt cheap, so 'elp me."

But when Aaron made out the bill he was nudged to put the one-and-three in the column for pounds and s.h.i.+llings respectively, and even, if the buyer were sufficiently in funds and liquor, to set down the date of the month in the same pecuniary part.i.tions, and to add it up glibly with the rest, calendar and coin together. But Aaron, although he was not averse from honestly misrepresenting the value of goods, drew the line at trickery, and so he was kicked out. It took him a year of nondescript occupations to ama.s.s a little stock of mock jewellery wherewith to peddle, and Manchester he found a more profitable centre than the metropolis. Yenta dead, profit and holy learning divided his thoughts, and few of his fellows achieved less of the former or more of the latter than our itinerant idealist.

Such was one of the thousands of souls swarming that afternoon in the synagogue, such was one despised unit of a congregation itself accounted by the world a pitiable ma.s.s of superst.i.tious poverty, and now tossing with emotion in the dim s.p.a.ces of the sacred building.

The Oriental imagination of the hearers magnified the simple soldierly sentences of the orator, touched them with color and haloed them with mystery, till, as the deep gasps and sobs of the audience struck back like blows on the speaker's chest, the contagion of their pa.s.sion thrilled him to responsive emotion. And, seen through tears, arose for him and them a picture of Israel again enthroned in Palestine, the land flowing once more with milk and honey, rustling with corn and vines planted by their own hands, and Zion--at peace with all the world--the recognized arbitrator of the nations, making true the word of the Prophet: "For from Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of G.o.d from Jerusalem."

To Aaron the vision came like a divine intoxication. He stamped his feet, clapped, cried, shouted. He felt tears streaming down his cheeks like the rivers that watered Paradise. What! This hope that had haunted him from boyhood, wafting from the pages of the holy books, was not then a shadowy splendor on the horizon's rim. It was a solidity, within sight, almost within touch. He himself might hope to sit in peace under his own fig-tree, no more the b.u.t.t of the street boys. And the vague vision, though in becoming definite it had been transformed to earthliness, was none the less grand for that. He had always dimly expected Messianic miracles, but in that magic afternoon the plain words of the soldier unsealed his eyes, and suddenly he saw clearly that just as, in Israel, every man was his own priest, needing no mediator, so every man was his own Messiah.

And as he squeezed out of the synagogue, unconscious of the chattering, jostling crowd, he saw himself in Zion, wors.h.i.+pping at the Holy Temple, that rose s.p.a.cious and splendid as the Manchester Exchange. Yes; the Jews must return to Palestine, there must be a great voluntary stream--great, if gradual. Slowly but surely the Jews must win back their country; they must cease trafficking with the heathen and return to the soil, sowing and reaping, so that the Feast of the Ingathering might become a reality instead of a prayer-service.

Then should the atonement of Israel be accomplished, and the morning stars sing together as at the first day.

As he walked home along the squalid steeps of Fernie Street and Verdon Street, and gazed in at the uncurtained windows of the one-story houses, a new sense of their sordidness, as contrasted with that bright vision, was borne in upon him. Instead of large families in one ragged room, enc.u.mbered with steamy was.h.i.+ng, he saw great farms and broad acres; and all that beauty of the face of earth, to which he had been half blind, began to appeal to him now that it was mixed up with religion. In this wise did Aaron become a politician and a modern.

Pa.s.sing through the poulterer's on his way to his room--the poulterer and he divided the house between them, renting a room each--he paused to talk with the group of women who were plucking the fowls, and told them glad tidings of great fowl-rearing farms in Palestine. He sat down on the bed, which occupied half the tiny shop, and became almost eloquent upon the great colonization movement and the "Society of Lovers of Zion," which had begun to ramify throughout the world.

"Yes; but if all Israel has farms, who will buy my fowls?" said the poulterer's wife.

"You will not need to sell fowls," Aaron tried to explain.

The poulterer shook his head. "The whole congregation is gone mad," he said. "For my part I believe that when the Holy One, blessed be He, brings us back to Palestine, it will be without any trouble of our own. As it is written, I will bear thee upon eagles' wings."

Aaron disputed this notion--which he had hitherto accepted as axiomatic--with all the ardor of the convert. It was galling to find, as he discussed the thing during the next few weeks, that many even of those present at the speech read miracle into the designs of Providence and the millionaire. But Aaron was able to get together a little band of brother souls bent on emigrating together to Palestine, there to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, literally as well as metaphorically. This enthusiasm, however, did not wear well.

Gradually, as the memory of the magnetic meeting faded, the pilgrim brotherhood disintegrated, till at last only its nucleus--Aaron--was left in solitary determination.

"You have only yourself," pleaded the backsliders. "We have wife and children."

"I have more than myself," retorted Aaron bitterly. "I have faith."

And, indeed, his faith in the vision was unshakable. Every man being his own Messiah, he, at least, would not draw back from the prospective plough to which he had put his hand. He had been saving up for the great voyage and a little surplus wherewith to support him in Palestine while looking about him. Once established in the Holy Land, how forcibly he would preach by epistle to the men of little faith!

They would come out and join him. He--the despised Aaron--the least of the House of Israel--would have played a part in the restoration of his people.

"You will come back," said the poulterer sceptically, when his fellow-tenant bade him good-bye; and parodying the sacred aspiration--"Next year in Manchester," he cried, in genial mockery.

The fowl-plucking females laughed heartily, agitating the feathery fluff in the air.

"Not so," said Aaron. "I cannot come back. I have sold the goodwill of my round to Joseph Petowski, and have transferred to him all my customers."

Some of the recreant brotherhood, remorsefully admiring, cheered him up by appearing on the platform of the station to wish him G.o.d-speed.

"Next year in Jerusalem!" he prophesied for them, too, recouping himself for the poulterer's profane scepticism.

He went overland to Ma.r.s.eilles, thence by s.h.i.+p to Asia Minor. It was a terrible journey. Piety forebade him to eat or drink with the heathen, or from their vessels. His portmanteau held a little store of provisions and crockery, and dry bread was all he bought on the route.

Fleeced and bullied by touts and cabmen, he found himself at last on board a cheap Mediterranean steamer which pitched and rolled through a persistent spell of stormy weather. His berth was a s.n.a.t.c.hed corner of the bare deck, where heaps of earth's failures, of all races and creeds and colors, grimily picturesque, slept in their clothes upon such bedding as they had brought with them. There was a sp.a.w.n of babies, a litter of animals and fowls in coops, a swarm of human bundles, scarcely distinguishable from bales except for a protruding hand or foot. There were Bedouins, Armenians, Spaniards, a Turk with several wives in an improvised tent, some Greek women, a party of Syrians from Mount Lebanon. There were also several Jews of both s.e.xes. But Aaron did not sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with these at first--they lay yards away, and he was half dead with sea-sickness and want of food. He had counted on making tea in his own cup with his own little kettle, but the cook would not trouble to supply him with hot water.

Only the great vision drawing hourly nearer and nearer sustained him.

It was the attempt of a half-crazy Egyptian Jewess to leap overboard with her new-born child that brought him into relation with the other Jewish pa.s.sengers. He learnt her story: the everyday story of a woman divorced in New York, after the fas.h.i.+on of its Ghetto, and sent back with scarcely a penny to her native Cairo, while still lightheaded after childbirth. He heard also the story of the buxom, kind-hearted Jewess who now shadowed her protectingly; the no less everyday story of the good-looking girl inveigled by a rascally Jew to a situation in Ma.r.s.eilles. They contributed with the men, a Russian Jew from Chicago, and a German from Brindisi, to give Aaron of Manchester a new objective sense of the tragedy of wandering Israel, interminably tossed betwixt persecution and poverty, perpetually tempted by both to be false to themselves: the tragedy that was now--thank G.o.d!--to have its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians, Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them--that which he, Aaron, was now accomplis.h.i.+ng. To his joy one of his new acquaintances--the Russian--shared the dream of a Palestine flowing once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a "Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an old billy-c.o.c.k and a dingy cotton s.h.i.+rt, but he combined all the lore of the old-fas.h.i.+oned, hard-sh.e.l.l Jew with a living realization of what his formulae meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage--till the Russian landed at Alexandria--was softened and shortened by sitting wors.h.i.+pfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from Bachja's _Duties of the Heart_ or Saadja Gaon's _Book of the Faith_.

There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity of the swarming deck, loved to pose as a man of common sense, free from superst.i.tion.

"The only reason men go to Palestine," he maintained, "is because they think, as the psalm says, the land forgives sin. And they believe, too, that those bodies which are not burned in Palestine, when the Messiah's last trump sounds, will have to roll under lands and seas to get to Jerusalem. So they go to die there, so as to escape the underground route. Besides, Maimonides says the Messianic period will only last forty years. So perhaps they are afraid all the fun will be over and the Leviathan eaten up before they arrive."

"Fools there are always in the world," replied the Russian, "and their piety cannot give them brains. These literal folk are the sort who imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says howsoever great a mult.i.tude flocked to wors.h.i.+p therein, there was always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is!

Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says, 'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit is working to-day. But through our own souls. No Messiah will ever come from a split heaven.

If a Christian does anything wrong, it is the individual; if a Jew, it is the nation. Why? Because we have no country, and hence are set apart in all countries. But a country we must and shall have. The fact that we still dream of our land shows that it is to be ours again.

Without a country we are dead. Without us the land is dead. It has been waiting for us. Why has no other nation possessed it and cultivated it?"

"Why? Why do the ducks go barefoot?" The German quoted the Yiddish proverb with a sneer.

"The land waits for us," replied the young Russian fervidly, "so that we may complete our mission. Jerusalem--whose very name means the heritage of double Peace--must be the watch-tower of Peace on earth.

The nations shall be taught to compete neither with steel weapons nor with gold, but with truth and purity. Every man shall be taught that he exists for another man, else were men as the beasts. And thus at last 'the knowledge of G.o.d shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.'"

"If they would only remain covering the sea!" said the German irreverently, as the spray of a wave swept over his mattress.

"Those who have lost this faith are no longer Jews," curtly replied the Russian. "Without this hope the preservation of the Jewish race is a superst.i.tion. Let the Jews be swallowed up in the nations--and me in the sea. If I thought that Israel's hope was a lie I should jump overboard."

The German shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly. "You and the Egyptian woman are a pair."

At Alexandria, where some of the cargo and his Jewish fellow-pa.s.sengers were to be landed, Aaron was tantalized for days by the quarantine, so that he must needs fret amid the musty odors long after he had thought to tread the sacred streets of Jerusalem. But at last he found himself making straight for the Holy Land; and one magic day, the pilgrim, pallid and emaciated, gazed in pious joy upon the gray line of rocks that changed gradually into terraces of red sloping roofs overbrooded by a palm-tree. Jaffa! But a cruel, white sea still rolled and roared betwixt him and these holy sh.o.r.es, guarded by the rock of Andromeda and tumbling and leaping billows; and the s.h.i.+p lay to outside the ancient harbor, while heavy boats rowed by stalwart Arabs and Syrians, in red fez and girdle, clamored for the pa.s.sengers.

Aaron was thrown unceremoniously over the s.h.i.+p's side at the favorable moment when the boat leapt up to meet him; he fell into it, soused with spray, but glowing at heart. As his boat pitched and tossed along, a delicious smell of orange-blossom wafted from the orange-groves, and seemed to the worn pilgrim a symbol of the marriage betwixt him and Zion. The land of his fathers--there it lay at last, and in a transport of happiness the wanderer had, for the first time in his life, a sense of the restful dignity of an ancestral home. But as the boat labored without apparent progress towards the channel betwixt the black rocks, over which the spray flew skywards, a foreboding tortured him that some ironic destiny would drown him in sight of his goal. He prayed silently with shut eyes and his pet.i.tion changed to praise as the boat b.u.mped the landing-stage and he opened them on a motley Eastern crowd and the heaped barrels of a wharf.

Shouldering his portmenteau, which, despite his debilitated condition, felt as light as the feathers at the poulterer's, he scrambled ecstatically up some slippery steps on to the stone platform, and had one foot on the soil of the Holy Land, when a Turkish official in a shabby black uniform stopped him.

"Your pa.s.sport," he said, in Arabic. Aaron could not understand.

Somebody interpreted.

"I have no pa.s.sport," he answered, with a premonitory pang.

"Where are you going?"

"To live in Palestine."

"Where do you come from?"

"England," he replied triumphantly, feeling this was a mighty pa.s.sword throughout the world.

"You are not an Englishman?"

"No-o," he faltered. "I have lived in England some--many years."

"Naturalized?"

"No," said Aaron, when he understood.