IV

The floods abated before the New Year dawned, as was testified by the

arrival, not of doves with olive leaves, but of pilgrims from the

north with shekels. The road was therefore open for me to go, yet I

lingered. I told myself it was the fascination of the pilgrims, that

curious new population which brought quite a bustle into the

"Ring-Place" of Zloczszol, and gave even the shops of the native

_Chassidim_ a live air. There were unpleasant camp-followers in the

train of the invading army, cripples and consumptives, both rich and

poor; but, on the whole, it was a cheery, well-to-do company. I

retained my room by paying the rent of three lodgers, and even then

Yarchi would come in and look at the big, tall bed wistfully, as if it

were a waste of sleeping material.

The great episode of each day was now the royal levee. Crowds besieged

the door of the "palace," in quest of health, wealth, and happiness,

and the proprietor of fields had to squeeze in with the tramp, and the

peasant woman and her neglected brat jostled the jewelled dame from

the towns. I was glad to think that the "Holy Queen" was hidden safely

away in her turret, and this consoled me for not meeting her again,

though I walked or trotted about on my bay mare at all hours and in

all places in quest of her.

It may seem curious that I did not boldly call and ask to see her, but

that would bring the commonplace into our so poetic relation. Besides

which, I divined that she would not be easily on view. Beyond

indirectly justifying my intuition that she was Ben David's daughter

by satisfying myself that the Wonder Rabbi had once had three girls,

two of whom had died, I would not even make inquiries. I feared to

dissipate the mystery and sacredness of our relation by gossip.

Perhaps Yarchi would tell me she was mad, or treat me to some other

coarse misconception due to the callous feelers with which he

apprehended the world.

I did not even know for certain that the light I saw in the turret was

hers. But when at night it was out, I hastened to the river-side, to

see only my own shadow on the hushed mountain slope or on the white

tombs. It seemed clear that she was being kept sacred from the

pilgrims' gaze; perhaps, too, the deserted, untravelled road which was

safe as her own home in normal times, was less secure now.

When I at last ventured to say casually to Yarchi that Ben David's

daughter seemed to be kept strictly to the house, the ribald grin I

had feared distorted his malicious mouth.

"Oh, you have seen Bethulah!" he said.

"Yes," I murmured, turning my flushed face away, but glad to learn her

name. Bethulah! Bethulah! my heart seemed to beat to the music of it.

"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 circumvolutions,

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 God 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 _Chassidic_

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 passion 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 masses 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 hell." 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!"