Ghetto Tragedies Part 25

I slipped into the building and on to a bench near the door. But for the veiled Ark at the end, I should not have known the place for a house of wors.h.i.+p. True, some men were sitting or standing about, shouting and singing, with odd spasmodic gestures, but the bulk were lounging, smoking clay pipes, drinking coffee, and chattering, while a few, looking like tramps, lay snoring on the hard benches, deaf to all the din. My eye sought at once for the Wonder Rabbi himself, but amid the many quaint physiognomies there was none with any apparent seal of supremacy. The note of all the faces was easy-going good-will, and even the pa.s.sionate contortions of melody and body which the wors.h.i.+ppers produced, the tragic clutchings at s.p.a.ce, the clinching of fists, and the beating of b.r.e.a.s.t.s had an air of cheery impromptu. They seemed to enjoy their very tears. And every now and then the inspiration would catch one of the gossipers and contort him likewise, while a wors.h.i.+pper would as suddenly fall to gossiping.

Very soon a frost-bitten old man I remembered coming across in the cemetery on the mountain-slope, where he was sweeping the fallen leaves from a tomb, and singing like the grave-digger in _Hamlet_, sidled up to me and asked me if I needed vodka. I thought it advisable to need some, and was quickly supplied from a box the old fellow seemed to keep under the Ark. The price was so moderate that I tipped him with as much again, doubtless to the enhancement of the "rich stranger's" reputation. Sipping it, I was able to follow with more show of ease the bursts of rambling conversation. Sometimes they talked about the floods, anon about politics, then about sacred texts and the illuminations of the _Zohar_. But there was one topic which ran like a winding pattern through all the talk, bursting in at the most unexpected places, and this was the wonders wrought by their rabbi.

As they dilated "with enkindlement" upon miracle after miracle, some wrought on earth and some in the higher spheres to which his soul ascended, my curiosity mounted, and calling for more vodka, "Where is the rabbi?" I asked the s.e.xton.

"He may perhaps come down to lunch," said he, in reverent accents, as if to imply that the rabbi was now in the upper spheres. I waited till tables were spread with plain fare in the _Klaus_ itself. At the savour the fountain of wors.h.i.+p was sealed; the snorers woke up. I was invited to partake of the meal, which, I was astonished to find, was free to all, provided by the rabbi.

"Truly royal hospitality," I thought. But our royal host himself did not "come down."

My neighbour, of whom I kept inquiring, at last told me, sympathetically, to have patience till Friday evening, when the rabbi would come to welcome in the Sabbath. But as it was then Tuesday, "Cannot I call upon him?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Ben David holds his court no more this year," he said. "He is in seclusion, preparing for the exalted soul-flights of the pilgrim season. The Sabbath is his only public day now."

There was nothing for it but to wait till the Friday eve, though in the meantime I got Yarchi to show me the royal palace--a plain two-storied Oriental-looking building with a flat roof, and a turret on the eastern side, whose high, ivy-mantled slit of window turned at the first rays of the sun into a great diamond.

"He couldn't come down, couldn't he?" Yarchi commented. "I daresay he wasn't sober enough."

Somehow this jarred upon me. I was beginning to conjure up romantic pictures, and a.s.suredly my one glimpse of the sect had not shown any intoxication save psychic.

"He is very generous, anyhow," I said. "He supplies a free lunch."

"Free to him," retorted the incorrigible Yarchi. "The wors.h.i.+ppers fancy it is free, but it is they who pay for it." And he snuffed himself, chuckling. "I'll tell you what is free," he added. "His morals!"

"But how do you know?"

"Oh, all those fellows go in for the Adamite life."

"What is the Adamite life?"

He winked. "Not the pre-Evite."

I saw it was fruitless to reason with his hunchbacked view of the subject.

On the Friday eve I repaired again to the _Klaus_, but this time it was not so easy to find a seat. However, by the grace of my friend the s.e.xton, I was accommodated near the Ark, where, amid a congregation clad in unexpected white, I sat, a conscious black discord. There was a certain palpitating fervour in the air, as though the imminence of the New Year and Judgment Day had strung all spirits to a higher tension. Suddenly a s.h.i.+ver seemed to run through the a.s.semblage, and all eyes turned to the door. A tall old man, escorted by several persons of evident consideration, walked with erect head but tottering gait to the little platform in front of the Ark, and, taking a praying-shawl from the reverential hand of the s.e.xton, held it a moment, as in abstraction, before drawing it over his head and shoulders. As he stood thus, almost facing me, yet unconscious of me, his image was photographed on my excited brain. He seemed very aged, with abundant white locks and beard, and he was clothed in a white satin robe cut low at the neck and ornamented at the breast with gold-laced, intersecting triangles of "the s.h.i.+eld of David."

On his head was a sort of white biretta. I noted a curious streak of yellow in the silvered eyebrows, as if youth clung on, so to speak, by a single hair, and underneath these arrestive eyebrows green pupils alternately glowed and smouldered. On his forefinger he wore a signet ring, set with amethysts and with a huge Persian emerald, which, as his hand rose and fell, and his fingers clasped and unclasped themselves in the convulsion of prayer, seemed to glare at me like a third green eye. And as soon as he began thus praying, every trace of age vanished. He trembled, but only from emotion; and his pa.s.sion mounted, till at last his whole body prayed. And the congregation joined in with shakings and quiverings and thunderings and ululations.

Not even in Prague had I experienced such sympathetic emotion. After the well-regulated frigidities of our American services, it was truly warming to be among wors.h.i.+ppers not ashamed to feel. Hours must have pa.s.sed, but I sat there as content as any. When the service ended, everybody crowded round the Wonder Rabbi to give the "Good Sabbath"

handshake. The scene jarred me by its incongruous suggestion of our American receptions at which the lion of the evening must extend his royal paw to every guest. But I went up among the rest, and murmured my salutation. The glow came into his eyes as they became conscious of me for the first time, and his gaunt bloodless hand closed crus.h.i.+ngly on mine, so that I almost fancied the signet ring was sealing my flesh.

"Good Sabbath, stranger," he replied. "You linger long here."

"As long as the floods," I said.

"Are you as dangerous to us?" he flashed back.

"I trust not," I said, a whit startled.

His jewelled forefinger drummed on the reading-stand, and his eyes no longer challenged mine, but were lowered as in abstraction.

"Your grandfather, who lies in Lemberg, was no friend to the followers of Besht. He laid the ban even on white Sabbath garments, and those who but wept in the synagogues he cla.s.sed with us."

I was more taken aback by his knowledge of my grandfather than by that ancient gentleman's hostility to the emotional heresy of his day.

"I never saw my grandfather," I replied simply.

"True. The son of the prairies should know more of G.o.d than the bookworms. Will you accept a seat at my table?"

"With pleasure, Rabbi," I murmured, dazed by his clairvoyant air.

They were now arranging the two tables, one with a white cloth for the master and his circle in strict order of precedence; and the other of bare wood for such of the rabble as could first scramble into the seats. I was placed on his right hand, and became at once an object of wonder and awe. The _Kiddush_ which initiated the supper was not a novel ceremony to me, but what I had never seen before was the eagerness with which each guest sipped from the circulating wine-cup of consecration, and the disappointment of such of the mob as could find no drop to drain. Still fiercer was the struggle for the Wonder Rabbi's soup, after he had taken a couple of spoonfuls; even I had no chance of distinction before this sudden simultaneous swoop, though of course I had my own plateful to drink. As sudden was the transition from soup to song, the whole company singing and swaying in victorious ecstasy. I turned to speak to my host, but his face awed me. The eyes had now their smouldering inward fire. The eyebrows seemed wholly white; the features were still. Then as I watched him his whole body grew rigid, he closed his eyes, his head fell back. The singing ceased; as tense a silence reigned as though the followers too were in a trance. My eyes were fixed on the Master's blind face, which had now not the dignity of death, but only the indignity of lifelessness, and, but for the suggestion of mystery behind, would have ceased to impress me. For there was now revealed a coa.r.s.eness of lips, a narrowness of forehead, an ugliness of high cheek-bone, which his imperial glance had transfigured, and which his flowing locks still abated. But as I gazed, the weird stillness took possession of me. I could not but feel with the rest that the Master was making a "soul-ascension."

It seemed very long--yet it may have been only a few minutes, for in absolute silence one's sense of time is disconcerted--ere waves of returning life began to traverse the cataleptic face and form. At last the Wonder Rabbi opened his eyes, and the hush grew profounder. Every ear was astrain for the revelations to come.

"Children," said he slowly, "as I pa.s.sed through the circles the souls cried to me. 'Haste, haste, for the Evil One plotteth and the Messianic day will be again delayed.' So I rose into the ante-chamber of Grace where the fiery wheels sang 'Holy, holy,' and there I came upon the Poison G.o.d waiting to see the glory of the Little Face. And with him was a soul, very strange, such as I had never seen, living neither in heaven nor h.e.l.l, perchance created of Satan himself for his instrument. Then with a great cry I uttered the Name, and the Poison G.o.d fled with a great fluttering, leaving the nameless, naked soul helpless amid the consuming, dazzling wheels. So I returned through the circles to rea.s.sure the souls, and they shouted with a great shout."

"Hallelujah!" came in a great shout from the wrought-up listeners, and then they burst into a lilting chant of triumph. But by this time my mood had changed. The spell of novelty had begun to wear off; perhaps also I was fatigued by the long strain. I recalled the coa.r.s.er face of the comatose saint, and I found nothing but gibberish in the oracular "revelation" which he had brought down with such elaborate pains from the circles amid which he seemed to move.

Thanking him for his hospitality, I slipped from the hot, roaring room.

Ah! what a waft of fresh air and sense of starlit s.p.a.ce! The young moon floated in the star-sprinkled heavens like a golden boat, with a faint suggestion of the full-sailed orb. The true glamour and mystery of the universe were again borne in upon me, as in our rich, constellated prairie nights, and all the artificial abracadabra of the _Klaus_ seemed akin to its heated, noisy atmosphere. The lights of the village were extinguished, and, looking at my watch, I found it was close upon midnight. But as I pa.s.sed the saint's "palace" I was astonished to find a light twinkling from the turret window. I wondered who kept vigil. Then I bethought me it was Friday night when no light could be struck, and this must be Ben David's bed-room lamp, awaiting his return.

"I thought he had taken you up in his fiery chariot," grumbled Yarchi sleepily, as he unbarred the door.

"The fiery chariot must not run on the Sabbath," I said smiling. "And, moreover, Ben David takes no pa.s.sengers to the circles."

"Circles! He ought to have a circle of rope round his neck."

"The soup was good," I pleaded, as I groped my way toward my quaint, tall bed.

III

I cannot explain why, when Yarchi asked me sarcastically, over the Sabbath dinner, whether I was going to the "Supper of the Holy Queen,"

I knew at once that I should be found at this mysterious meal. Perhaps it was that I had nothing better to do; perhaps my sympathy was returning to those strange, good-humoured, musical loungers, so far removed from the New York ideal of life. Or perhaps I was vaguely troubled by the dream I had wrestled with more or less obscurely all night long--that I stood naked in a whirl of burning wheels that sang, as they turned, the melody of the _Cha.s.sidim_. Was I this nondescript soul, I wondered, half smilingly, fas.h.i.+oned of the Evil One to delay the Messianic era?

The sun was set, the three stars already in the sky, and my pious landlord had performed the Ceremony of Division ere I set out, declining the bread and fish Yarchi offered to make up in a package.

"Sat.u.r.day nights every man must bring his own meal," he said.

I replied that I went not to eat, but to look on. However, I was so late in arriving that, as there were no lights, looking on was well-nigh reduced to listening. In the gray twilight the _Klaus_ seemed full of uncanny forms rocking in monotonous sing-song. Through the gathering gloom the old Wonder Rabbi's face loomed half ghostlike, half regal. As the mystic dusk grew deeper and darkness fell, the fascination of it all began to overcome me: the dim, tossing, crooning figures, divined rather than seen, washed round lappingly and swayingly by their own rhythmic melody, full of wistful sweetness. My soul too tossed in this circ.u.mlapping tide. The complex world of modern civilization fell away from me as garments fall from a bather. Even this primitive mountain village pa.s.sed into nothingness, and in a timeless, s.p.a.celess universe I floated in a lulling, measureless music.

aeons might have elapsed ere the glare of light dazzled my eyes when the week-day candles were lit, and the supper to escort the departing Holy Queen--the Sabbath--began. Again I was invited to the upper table, despite Yarchi's warning. But I had no appet.i.te for earthly things, was jarred by the prosaic gusto with which the mystics threw themselves upon the tureen of red _Borsch_ and the black pottle of brandy.

"Der Rabbi hat geheissen Branntwein trinken," hummed the s.e.xton joyously. But little by little, as their stomachs grew satiate, the holy singing started afresh, and presently they leaped up, pulled aside the table, and made a whirling ring. I was caught up into the human cyclone, and round and round we flew, our hands upon one another's shoulders, with blind ecstatic faces, our legs kicking out madly, to repel, I understood, the embryonic demons outside the magic circle. And again methought I made a "soul-ascension," or at least hovered as near to the ineffable mysteries as the demoniacles to our magic circle.

Oh, what inexpressible religious raptures were mine! What no gorgeous temple, nor pealing organ, nor white-robed minister had ever wrought for me was wrought in this barracklike room with its rude benches and wooden ark. "Children of the Palace" we sang, and as I strove to pick up the words I thought we were indeed sons of our Father who is in Heaven.

CHILDREN OF THE PALACE