Ghetto Tragedies Part 18

And while the very monument has mouldered away in Ararat, Buffalo sits throned amid her waters, the Queen City of the Empire State, with the world's commerce at her feet. And from their palaces of Medina sandstone the Christian railroad kings go out to sail in their luxurious yachts,--vessels not of bulrushes but driven by steam, as predicted by Mordecai Manuel Noah, Governor and Judge of Israel.

IV

THE LAND OF PROMISE

IV

THE LAND OF PROMISE

I

"Telegraph how many pieces you have."

In this wise did the Steams.h.i.+p Company convey to the astute agent its desire to know how many Russian Jews he was smuggling out of the Pale into the steerage of its Atlantic liner.

The astute agent's task was simple enough. The tales he told of America were only the clarification of a nebulous vision of the land flowing with milk and honey that hovered golden-rayed before all these hungry eyes. To the denizens of the Pale, in their cellars, in their gutter-streets, in their semi-subterranean shops consisting mainly of shutters and annihilating one another's profits; to the congested populations newly reinforced by the driving back of thousands from beyond the Pale, and yet multiplying still by an improvident reliance on Providence; to the old people pauperized by the removal of the vodka business to Christian hands, and the young people dammed back from their natural outlets by Pan-Slavic ukases, and clogged with whimsical edicts and rescripts--the astute agent's offer of getting you through Germany, without even a Russian pa.s.sport, by a simple pa.s.sage from Libau to New York, was peculiarly alluring.

It was really almost an over-baiting of the hook on the part of the too astute agent to whisper that he had had secret information of a new thunderbolt about to be launched at the Pale; whereby the period of service for Jewish conscripts would be extended to fifteen years, and the area of service would be extended to Siberia.

"Three hundred and seventy-seven pieces," ran his telegram in reply.

In a letter he suggested other business he might procure for the line.

"Confine yourself to freight," the Company wrote cautiously, for even under sealed envelopes you cannot be too careful. "The more the better."

Freight! The word was not inexact. Did not even the Government reports describe these exploiters of the Muzhik as in some places packed in their hovels like salt herrings in a barrel; as sleeping at night in serried ma.s.ses in sties which by day were tallow or leather factories?

To be s.h.i.+pped as cargo came therefore natural enough. Nevertheless, each of these "pieces," being human after all, had a history, and one of these histories is here told.

II

Nowhere was the poverty of the Pale bitterer than in the weavers'

colony, in which Srul betrothed himself to Biela. The dowries, which had been wont to kindle so many young men's pa.s.sions, had fallen to freezing-point; and Biela, if she had no near prospect of marriage, could console herself with the knowledge that she was romantically loved. Even the attraction of _kest_--temporary maintenance of the young couple by the father-in-law--was wanting in Biela's case, for the simple reason that she had no father, both her parents having died of the effort to get a living. For marriage-portion and _kest_, Biela could only bring her dark beauty, and even that was perhaps less than it seemed. For you scarcely ever saw Biela apart from her homely quasi-mother, her elder sister Leah, who, like the original Leah, had "tender eyes," which combined with a pock-marked face to ensure for her premature recognition as an old maid. The inflamed eyelids were the only legacy Leah's father had left her.

From Srul's side, though his parents were living, came even fainter hope of the wedding-canopy. Srul's father was blind--perhaps a further evidence that the local hygienic conditions were nocuous to the eye in particular--and Srul himself, who had occupied most of his time in learning to weave Rabbinic webs, had only just turned his attention to cloth, though Heaven was doubtless pleased with the gear of _Gemara_ he had gathered in his short sixteen years. The old weaver had--in more than one sense--seen better days before his affliction and the great factories came on: days when the independent hand-weaver might sit busily before the loom from the raw dawn to the black midnight, taking his meals at the bench; days when, moreover, the "piece" of satin-faced cloth was many ells shorter. "But they make up for the extra length," he would say with pathetic humour, "by cutting the pay shorter."

The same sense of humour enabled him to bear up against the forced rests that increasing slackness brought the hand-weavers, while the factories whirred on. "Now is the proverb fulfilled," he cried to his unsmiling wife, "for there are two Sabbaths a week." Alas! as the winter grew older and colder, it became a week of Sabbaths. The wheels stood still; in all the colony not a spool was reeled. It was unprecedented. Gradually the factories had stolen the customers. Some sat waiting dazedly for the raw yarns they knew could no longer come at this season; others left the suburb in which the colony had drowsed from time immemorial, and sought odd jobs in the town, in the frowning shadows of the factories. But none would enter the factories themselves, though these were ready to suck them in on one sole condition.

Ah! here was the irony of the tragedy. The one condition was the one condition the poor weavers could not accept. It was open to them to reduce the week of Sabbaths to its ancient and diurnal dimensions, provided the Sabbath itself came on Sunday. Nay, even the working-day offered them was less, and the wage was more than their own. The deeper irony within this irony was that the proprietor of every one of these factories was a brother in Israel! Jeshurun grown fat and kicking.

Even the old blind man's composure deserted him when it began to be borne in on his darkness that the younger weavers meditated surrender.

The latent explosives generated through the years by their perusal of un-Jewish books in insidious "Yiddish" versions, now bade fair to be touched to eruption by this paraded prosperity of wickedness; wickedness that had even discarded the caftan and shaved the corners of its beard.

"But thou, apple of my eye," the old man said to Srul, "thou wilt die rather than break the Sabbath?"

"Father," quoted the youth, with a shuddering emotion at the bare idea, "I have been young and now I am old, but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging for bread."

"My son! A true spark of the Patriarchs!" And the old man clasped the boy to his arms and kissed him on the pious cheeks down which the ear-locks dangled.

"But if Biela should tempt thee, so that thou couldst have the wherewithal to marry her," put in his mother, who could not keep her thoughts off grandchildren.

"Not for apples of gold, mother, will I enter the service of these serpents."

"Nevertheless, Biela is fair to see, and thou art getting on in years," murmured the mother.

"Leah would not give Biela to a Sabbath-breaker," said the old man rea.s.suringly.

"Yes, but suppose she gives her to a bread-winner," persisted the mother. "Do not forget that Biela is already fifteen, only a year younger than thyself."

But Leah kept firm to the troth she had plighted on behalf of Biela, even though the young man's family sank lower and lower, till it was at last reduced from the little suburban wooden cottage, with the s.p.a.cious courtyard, to one corner of a large town-cellar, whose population became amphibious when the Vistula overflowed.

And Srul kept firm to the troth Israel had plighted with the Sabbath-bride, even when his father's heart no longer beat, so could not be broken. The old man remained to the last the most cheerful denizen of the cellar: perhaps because he was spared the vision of his emaciated fellow-troglodytes. He called the cellar "Arba Kanfos,"

after the four-cornered garment of fringes which he wore: and sometimes he said these were the "Four Corners" from which, according to the Prophets, G.o.d would gather Israel.

III

In such a state of things an agent scarcely needed to be astute.

"Pieces" were to be had for the picking up. The only trouble was that they were not gold pieces. The idle weavers could not defray the pa.s.sage-money, still less the agent's commission for smuggling them through.

"If I only had a few hundred roubles," Srul lamented to Leah, "I could get to a land where there is work without breaking the Sabbath, a land to which Biela could follow me when I waxed in substance."

Leah supported her household of three--for there was a younger sister, Tsirrele, who, being only nine, did not count except at meal-times--on the price of her piece-work at the Christian umbrella factory, where, by a considerate Russian law, she could work on Sunday, though the Christians might not. Thus she earned, by literal sweating in a torrid atmosphere, three roubles, all except a varying number of kopecks, every week. And when you live largely on black bread and coffee, you may, in the course of years, save a good deal, even if you have three mouths. Therefore, Leah had the sum that Srul mentioned so wistfully, put by for a rainy day (when there should be no umbrellas to make).

And as the sum had kept increasing, the notion that it might form the nucleus of an establishment for Biela and Srul had grown clearer and clearer in her mind, which it tickled delightfully. But the idea that now came to her of staking all on a possible future was agitating.

"We might, perhaps, be able to get together the money," she said tentatively. "But--" She shook her head, and the Russian proverb came to her lips. "Before the sun rises the dew may destroy you."

Srul plunged into an eager recapitulation of the agent's a.s.surances.

And before the eyes of both the marriage-canopy reared itself splendid in the Land of Promise, and the figure of Biela flitted, crowned with the bridal wreath.

"But what will become of your mother?" Leah asked.