On a serene afternoon in May, Asriel drove up to Pravly in a peasant's
wagon. He sat listlessly gazing at the unbroken line of wattle-fences
and running an imaginary stick along the endless zigzag of their
tops. The activity of his senses seemed suspended.
Presently a whiff of May aroma awakened his eye to a many-colored
waving expanse, and his ear to the languorous whisper of birds. He
recognized the plushy clover knobs in the vast array of placid
magnificence, and the dandelions and the golden buttercups, although
his poor mother-tongue could not afford a special name for each
flower, and he now addressed them collectively as _tzatzkes_--a word
he had not used for thirty-five years. He looked at the tzatzkes, as
they were swaying thoughtfully hither and thither, and it somehow
seemed to him that it was not the birds but the clover blossoms which
did the chirping. The whole scene appealed to his soul as a nodding,
murmuring congregation engrossed in the solemnity of worship. He felt
as though there were no such flowers in America, and that he had not
seen any since he had left his native place.
Echoes of many, many years ago called to Asriel from amid the
whispering host. His soul burst into song. He felt like shutting his
eyes and trusting himself to the caressing breath of the air, that it
might waft him whithersoever it chose. His senses were in confusion:
he beheld a sea of fragrance; he inhaled heavenly music; he listened
to a symphony of hues.
"What a treat to breathe! What a paradise!" he exclaimed in his heart.
"The cholera take it, how delicious! Do you deserve it, old sinner
you? Ten plagues you do! But hush! the field is praying"--
With a wistful babyish look he became absorbed in a gigantic
well-sweep suspended from the clear sky, and then in the landscape it
overhung. The woody mass darkling in the distance was at once racing
about and standing still. Fleecy clouds crawled over a hazy hill-top.
And yonder--behold! a long, broad streak of silver gleaming on the
horizon! Is it a lake? Asriel's eyes are riveted and memories stir in
his breast. He recalls not the place itself, but he can remember his
reminiscences of it. During his first years in America, at times when
he would surrender himself to the sweet pangs of homesickness and
dwell, among other things, on the view that had seen him off to the
unknown land, his mind would conjure up something like the effect now
before his eyes. As a dream does it come back to him now. The very
shadows of thirty-five years ago are veiled.
Asriel gazes before him in deep reverence. The sky is letting itself
down with benign solemnity, its measureless trough filled with melody,
the peasant's wagon creaking an accompaniment to it all--to every
speck of color, as well as to every sound of the scene.
At one moment he felt as though he had strayed into the other world;
at another, he was seized with doubt as to his own identity. "Who are
you?" he almost asked himself, closing and reopening his hand
experimentally. "Who or what is that business which you call life? Are
you alive, Asriel?" Whereupon he somehow remembered Flora's
photograph, and, taking it out of his bosom pocket, fell to
contemplating it.
The wagon turned into a side-road, and the Polish peasant, leaning
forward, cursed and whipped the animal into a peevish trot. Presently
something gray hove in sight. Far away, below, hazy blotches came
creeping from behind the sky. The wagon rolls downhill. Asriel is in a
flurry. He feels like one on the eve of a great event, he knows not
exactly what.
The wagon dashes on. Asriel's heart is all of a flutter. Suddenly--O
Lord of the Universe! Why, there glistens the brook--what do you call
it? "Repka?" he asks the driver.
"Repka!" the other replies, without facing about.
"Repka, a disease into her heart! Repka, dear, may she live long! Who
could beat Asriel in swimming?" Over there, on the other side, it was
where Asriel's father once chased him for bathing during Nine Days. He
bumped his head against the angle of a rock, did the little scamp, and
got up with a deep, streaming gash in his lower lip. The mark is still
there, and Asriel delights to feel it with his finger now. As he does
so the faces of some of his playmates rise before him. Pshaw! he could
whip every one of them! Was he not a dare-devil of a loafer! But how
many of those fellow truants of his will he find alive? he asks
himself, and the question wrings his heart.
Asriel strains his eyes at the far distance till, behold! smoke is
spinning upward against the blue sky. He can make out the
chimney-pots. His soul overflows. Sobs choke his breath. "Say!" he
begins, addressing himself to the driver. But "Say" is English.
"_Sloukhai!_" he shouts, with delight in the Polish word. He utters
the names of the surrounding places, and the dull peasant's nods of
assent thrill him to the core. He turns this way and that, and in his
paroxysm of impatience all but leaps out of the wagon.
The rambling groups of houses define their outlines. Asriel recognizes
the Catholic church. His heart bounds with joy. "Hush, wicked thing!
It's a church of Gentiles." But the wicked thing surreptitiously
resumes its greeting. And over there, whitening at some distance from
the other dwellings--what is it? "The nobleman's palace, as sure as I
am a Jew!" He had forgotten all about it, as sure as he was a Jew! But
what is the nobleman's name? Is he alive?--And there is the mill--the
same mill! "I'll swoon away!" he says to himself audibly.
Asriel regains some composure.
Half an hour later he made his entry into his native town. Here he had
expected his agitation to pass the bounds of his physical strength;
but it did not. At this moment he was solemnly serene.
The town had changed little, and he recognized it at once. Every spot
greeted him, and his return of the salutation was a speechless
devotional pathos. He found several things which had faded out of his
enshrined picture of the place, and the sight of these moved his soul
even more powerfully than those he had looked forward to. Only in one
instance was he taken aback. Sure enough, this is Synagogue Lane, as
full of puddles as ever; but what has come over him? He well remembers
that little alley in the rear; and yet it runs quite the other way.
Length has turned into width.
And here is Leizer Poisner's inn. "But how rickety it has become!"
Asriel's heart exclaims with a pang, as though at sight of a friend
prematurely aged and run to seed. He can almost smell the stable
occupying the entire length of the little building, and he remembers
every room--Hello! The same market place, the same church with the
bailiff's office by its side! The sparse row of huts on the
river-bank, the raft bridge, the tannery,--everything was the same as
he had left it; and yet it all had an odd, mysterious, far-away
air--like things seen in a cyclorama. It was Pravly and at the same
time it was not; or, rather, it certainly was the same dear old
Pravly, but added to it was something else, through which it now gazed
at Asriel. Thirty-five years lay wrapped about the town.
Still, Stroon feels like Asrielke Thirteen Hairs, as his nickname had
been here. Then he relapses into the Mott Street landlord, and for a
moment he is an utter stranger in his birthplace. Why, he could buy it
all up now! He could discount all the rich men in town put together;
and yet there was a time when he was of the meanest hereabout. An
overpowering sense of triumph surged into his breast. Hey, there!
Where are your bigbugs--Zorach Latozky, Reb Lippe, Reb Nochum? Are
they alive? Thirty-five years ago Asrielke considered it an honor to
shake their palm branch on the Feast of Tabernacles, while now--out
with your purses, you proud magnates, measure fortunes with Asrielke
the heckler, if you dare! His heart swells with exultation. And
yet--the black year take it!--it yearns and aches, does Asriel's
heart. He looks at Pravly, and his soul is pining for Pravly--for the
one of thirty-five years ago, of which this is only a reflection,--for
the one in which he was known as a crackbrained rowdy of a mechanic,
a poor devil living on oatmeal and herring.
With the townspeople of his time Asriel's experience was somewhat
different from what he felt in the case of inanimate Pravly. As he
confronted them some faces lighted up with their identity at once; and
there were even some younger people in whom he instantly recognized
the transcribed images of their deceased parents. But many a
countenance was slow to catch the reflection of the past which shone
out of his eyes; and in a few instances it was not until the name was
revealed to Asriel that the retrospective likeness would begin to
struggle through the unfamiliar features before him.
"Shmulke!" he shrieked, the moment he caught sight of an old crony, as
though they had been parted for no move than a month. Shmulke is not
the blooming, sprightly young fellow of yore. He has a white beard and
looks somewhat decrepit. Asriel, however, feels as if the beard were
only glued to the smooth face he had known. But how Asriel's heart
does shrink in his bosom! The fever of activity in which he had passed
the thirty-five years had kept him deaf to the departing footsteps of
Time. Not until recently had he realized that the words "old man"
applied to him; but even then the fact never came home to him with
such convincing, with such terrible force, as it did now that he stood
face to face with Shmulke. Shmulke was his mirror.
"Shmulke, Angel of Death, an inflammation into your bones!" he
shouted, as he suddenly remembered his playmate's by-name and fell on
his shoulder.
Shmulke feels awkward. He is ashamed of the long-forgotten nickname,
and is struggling to free himself from the unwelcome embrace; but
Asriel is much the stronger of the two, and he continues to squeeze
him and pat him, grunting and puffing for emotion as he does so.
Aunt Sarah-Rachel, whom Asriel had left an elderly but exceedingly
active and clever tradeswoman, he found a bag of bones and in her
dotage.
"Don't you know me, auntie?" he implored her. She made no reply, and
went on munching her lips. "Can it be that you don't know Asrielke,
who used to steal raisins from your grocery?"
"She does not understand anything!" Asriel whispered, in
consternation.