Fifty copies of _The Brotherhood of the Peoples_ went off by post the
next day to the clergy and gentry of the larger Jewry. In the course
of the next fortnight seventeen of the recipients acknowledged the
receipt with formal thanks, four sent the shilling mentioned on the
cover, and one sent five shillings. This last depressed Zussmann more
than all the others. "Does he take me for a _Schnorrer_?" he said,
almost angrily, as he returned the postal order.
He did not forsee the day when, a _Schnorrer_ indeed, he would have
taken five shillings from anybody who could afford it: had no
prophetic intuition of that long, slow progression of penurious days
which was to break down his spirit. For though he managed for a time
to secure enough work to keep himself and the Red Beadle going, his
ruin was only delayed. Little by little his apparatus was sold off,
his benches and polishing-irons vanished from the garret, only one
indispensable set remaining, and master and man must needs quest each
for himself for work elsewhere. The Red Beadle dropped out of the
ménage, and was reduced to semi-starvation. Zussmann and Hulda, by the
gradual disposition of their bits of jewellery and their Sabbath
garments, held out a little longer, and Hulda also got some sewing of
children's under-garments. But with the return of winter, Hulda's
illness returned, and then the beloved books began to leave bare the
nakedness of the plastered walls. At first, Hulda, refusing to be
visited by doctors who charged, struggled out bravely through rain and
fog to a free dispensary, where she was jostled by a crowd of
head-shawled Polish crones, and where a harassed Christian physician,
tired of jargon-speaking Jewesses, bawled and bullied. But at last
Hulda grew too ill to stir out, and Zussmann, still out of
employment, was driven to look about him for help. Charities enough
there were in the Ghetto, but to charity, as to work, one requires an
apprenticeship. He knew vaguely that there were persons who had the
luck to be ill and to get broths and jellies. To others, also, a board
of guardian angels doled out payments, though some one had once told
him you had scant chance unless you were a Dutchman. But the
inexperienced in begging are naturally not so successful as those
always at it. 'Twas vain for Zussmann to kick his heels among the
dismal crowd in the corridor, the whisper of his misdeeds had been
before him, borne by some competitor in the fierce struggle for
assistance. What! help a hypocrite to sit on the twin stools of
Christendom and Judaism, fed by the bounty of both! In this dark hour
he was approached by the thin-nosed gentlewomen, who had got wind of
his book and who scented souls. Zussmann wavered. Why, indeed, should
he refuse their assistance? He knew their self-sacrificing days, their
genuine joy in salvation. On their generosities he was far better
posted than on Jewish--the lurid legend of these Mephistophelian
matrons included blankets, clothes, port wine, and all the delicacies
of the season. He admitted that Hulda had indeed been brought low, and
permitted them to call. Then he went home to cut dry bread for the
bedridden, emaciated creature who had once been beautiful, and to
comfort her--for it was Friday evening--by reading the Sabbath
prayers; winding up, "A virtuous woman who can find? For her price is
far above rubies."
On the forenoon of the next day arrived a basket, scenting the air
with delicious odors of exquisite edibles.
Zussmann received it with delight from the boy who bore it. "God bless
them!" he said. "A chicken--grapes--wine. Look, Hulda!"
Hulda raised herself in bed; her eyes sparkled, a flush of color
returned to the wan cheeks.
"Where do these come from?" she asked.
Zussmann hesitated. Then he told her they were the harbingers of a
visit from the good sisters.
The flush in her cheek deepened to scarlet.
"My poor Zussmann!" she cried reproachfully. "Give them back--give
them back at once! Call after the boy."
"Why?" stammered Zussmann.
"Call after the boy!" she repeated imperatively. "Good God! If the
ladies were to be seen coming up here, it would be all over with your
Idea. And on the Sabbath, too! People already look upon you as a tool
of the missionaries. Quick! quick!"
His heart aching with mingled love and pain, he took up the basket and
hurried after the boy. Hulda sank back on her pillow with a sigh of
relief.
"Dear heart!" she thought, as she took advantage of his absence to
cough freely. "For me he does what he would starve rather than do for
himself. A nice thing to imperil his Idea--the dream of his life! When
the Jews see he makes no profit by it, they will begin to consider it.
If he did not have the burden of me he would not be tempted. He could
go out more and find work farther afield. This must end--I must die or
be on my feet again soon."
Zussmann came back, empty-handed and heavy-hearted.
"Kiss me, my own life!" she cried. "I shall be better soon."
He bent down and touched her hot, dry lips. "Now I see," she
whispered, "why God did not send us children. We thought it was an
affliction, but lo! it is that your Idea shall not be hindered."
"The English Rabbis have not yet drawn attention to it," said Zussmann
huskily.
"All the better," replied Hulda. "One day it will be translated into
English--I know it, I feel it here." She touched her chest, and the
action made her cough.
Going out later for a little fresh air, at Hulda's insistence, he was
stopped in the broad hall on which the stairs debouched by Cohen, the
ground-floor tenant, a black-bearded Russian Jew, pompous in Sabbath
broadcloth.
"What's the matter with my milk?" abruptly asked Cohen, who supplied
the local trade besides selling retail. "You might have complained,
instead of taking your custom out of the house. Believe me, I don't
make a treasure heap out of it. One has to be up at Euston to meet the
trains in the middle of the night, and the competition is so
cut-throat that one has to sell at eighteen pence a barn gallon. And
on Sabbath one earns nothing at all. And then the analyst comes poking
his nose into the milk."
"You see--my wife--my wife--is ill," stammered Zussmann. "So she
doesn't drink it."
"Hum!" said Cohen. "Well, _you_ might oblige me then. I have so much
left over every day, it makes my reputation turn quite sour. Do, do me
a favor and let me send you up a can of the leavings every night. For
nothing, of course; would I talk business on the Sabbath? I don't like
to be seen pouring it away. It would pay me to pay _you_ a penny a
pint," he wound up emphatically.
Zussmann accepted unsuspiciously, grateful to Providence for enabling
him to benefit at once himself and his neighbor. He bore a can
upstairs now and explained the situation to the shrewder Hulda, who,
however, said nothing but, "You see the Idea commences to work. When
the book first came out, didn't he--though he sells secretly to the
trade on Sabbath mornings--call you an Epicurean?"
"Worse," said Zussmann joyously, with a flash of recollection.
He went out again, lightened and exalted. "Yes, the Idea works," he
said, as he came out into the gray street. "The Brotherhood of the
Peoples will come, not in my time, but it will come." And he murmured
again the Hebrew aspiration: "In that day shall God be One and His
name One."
"Whoa, where's your ---- eyes?"
Awakened by the oath, he just got out of the way of a huge Flemish
dray-horse dragging a brewer's cart. Three ragged Irish urchins, who
had been buffeting each other with whirling hats knotted into the ends
of dingy handkerchiefs, relaxed their enmities in a common rush for
the projecting ladder behind the dray and collided with Zussmann on
the way. A one-legged, misery-eyed hunchback offered him penny
diaries. He shook his head in impotent pity, and passed on, pondering.
"In time God will make the crooked straight," he thought.
Jews with tall black hats and badly made frock-coats slouched along,
their shoulders bent. Wives stood at the open doors of the old houses,
some in Sabbath finery, some flaunting irreligiously their every-day
shabbiness, without troubling even to arrange their one dress
differently, as a pious Rabbi recommended. They looked used-up and
haggard, all these mothers in Israel. But there were dark-eyed damsels
still gay and fresh, with artistic bodices of violet and green picked
out with gold arabesque.
He turned a corner and came into a narrow street that throbbed with
the joyous melody of a piano-organ. His heart leapt up. The roadway
bubbled with Jewish children, mainly girls, footing it gleefully in
the graying light, inventing complex steps with a grace and an abandon
that lit their eyes with sparkles and painted deeper flushes on their
olive cheeks. A bounding little bow-legged girl seemed unconscious of
her deformity; her toes met each other as though in merry dexterity.
Zussmann's eyes were full of tears. "Dance on, dance on," he murmured.
"God shall indeed make the crooked straight."
Fixed to one side of the piano-organ on the level of the handle he saw
a little box, in which lay, as in a cradle, what looked like a monkey,
then like a doll, but on closer inspection turned into a tiny live
child, flaxen-haired, staring with wide gray eyes from under a blue
cap, and sucking at a milk-bottle with preternatural placidity,
regardless of the music throbbing through its resting-place.
"Even so shall humanity live," thought Zussmann, "peaceful as a babe,
cradled in music. God hath sent me a sign."
He returned home, comforted, and told Hulda of the sign.
"Was it an Italian child?" she asked.
"An English child," he answered. "Fair-eyed and fair-haired."
"Then it is a sign that through the English tongue shall the Idea move
the world. Your book will be translated into English--I shall live to
see it."
V
A few afternoons later the Red Beadle, his patched garments
pathetically spruced up, came to see his friends, goaded by the news
of Hulda's illness. There was no ruddiness in his face, the lips of
which were pressed together in defiance of a cruel and credulous
world. That Nature in making herself should have produced creatures
who attributed their creation elsewhere, and who refused to allow her
one acknowledger to make boots, was indeed a proof, albeit vexatious,
of her blind workings.
When he saw what she had done to Hulda and to Zussmann, his lips were
pressed tighter, but as much to keep back a sob as to express extra
resentment.
But on parting he could not help saying to Zussmann, who accompanied
him to the dark spider-webbed landing, "Your God has forgotten you."
"Do you mean that men have forgotten Him?" replied Zussmann. "If I am
come to poverty, my suffering is in the scheme of things. Do you not
remember what the Almighty says to Eleazar ben Pedos, in the Talmud,
when the Rabbi complains of poverty? 'Wilt thou be satisfied if I
overthrow the universe, so that perhaps thou mayest be created again
in a time of plenty?' No, no, my friend, we must trust the scheme."
"But the fools enjoy prosperity," said the Red Beadle.
"It is only a fool who _would_ enjoy prosperity," replied Zussmann.
"If the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes flourish,
that is just the very condition of virtue. What! would you have
righteousness always pay and wickedness always fail! Where then would
be the virtue in virtue? It would be a mere branch of commerce. Do you
forget what the Chassid said of the man who foreknew in his lifetime
that for him there was to be no heaven? 'What a unique and enviable
chance that man had of doing right without fear of reward!'"
The Red Beadle, as usual, acquiesced in the idea that he had forgotten
these quotations from the Hebrew, but to acquiesce in their teachings
was another matter. "A man who had no hope of heaven would be a fool
not to enjoy himself," he said doggedly, and went downstairs, his
heart almost bursting. He went straight to his old synagogue, where he
knew a _Hesped_ or funeral service on a famous _Maggid_ (preacher) was
to be held. He could scarcely get in, so dense was the throng. Not a
few eyes, wet with tears, were turned angrily on him as on a mocker
come to gloat, but he hastened to weep too, which was easy when he
thought of Hulda coughing in her bed in the garret. So violently did
he weep that the _Gabbai_ or treasurer--one of the most pious
master-bootmakers--gave him the "Peace" salutation after the service.
"I did not expect to see you weeping," said he.
"Alas!" answered the Red Beadle. "It is not only the fallen Prince in
Israel that I weep; it is my own transgressions that are brought home
to me by his sudden end. How often have I heard him thunder and
lighten from this very pulpit!" He heaved a deep sigh at his own
hypocrisy, and the _Gabbai_ sighed in response. "Even from the grave
the _Tsaddik_ (saint) works good," said the pious master-bootmaker.
"May my latter end be like his!"
"Mine, too!" suspired the Red Beadle. "How blessed am I not to have
been cut off in my sin, denying the Maker of Nature!" They walked
along the street together.
The next morning, at the luncheon-hour, a breathless Beadle, with a
red beard and a very red face, knocked joyously at the door of the
Herz garret.
"I am in work again," he explained.
"_Mazzeltov!_" Zussmann gave him the Hebrew congratulation, but
softly, with finger on lip, to indicate Hulda was asleep. "With whom?"
"Harris the _Gabbai_."
"Harris! What, despite your opinions?"
The Red Beadle looked away.
"So it seems!"
"Thank God!" said Hulda. "The Idea works."
Both men turned to the bed, startled to see her sitting up with a rapt
smile.
"How so?" said the Red Beadle uneasily. "I am not a _Goy_ (Christian)
befriended by a _Gabbai_."
"No, but it is the brotherhood of humanity."
"Bother the brotherhood of humanity, Frau Herz!" said the Red Beadle
gruffly. He glanced round the denuded room. "The important thing is
that you will now be able to have a few delicacies."
"_I?_" Hulda opened her eyes wide.
"Who else? What I earn is for all of us."
"God bless you!" said Zussmann; "but you have enough to do to keep
yourself."
"Indeed he has!" said Hulda. "We couldn't dream of taking a farthing!"
But her eyes were wet.
"I insist!" said the Red Beadle.
She thanked him sweetly, but held firm.
"I will advance the money on loan till Zussmann gets work."
Zussmann wavered, his eyes beseeching her, but she was inflexible.
The Red Beadle lost his temper. "And this is what you call the
brotherhood of humanity!"
"He is right, Hulda. Why should we not take from one another? Pride
perverts brotherhood."
"Dear husband," said Hulda, "it is not pride to refuse to rob the
poor. Besides, what delicacies do I need? Is not this a land flowing
with milk?"
"You take Cohen's milk and refuse my honey!" shouted the Red Beadle
unappeased.
"Give me of the honey of your tongue and I shall not refuse it," said
Hulda, with that wonderful smile of hers which showed the white teeth
Nature had made; the smile which, as always, melted the Beadle's mood.
That smile could repair all the ravages of disease and give back her
memoried face.
After the Beadle had been at work a day or two in the _Gabbai's_
workshop, he broached the matter of a fellow-penitent, one Zussmann
Herz, with no work and a bedridden wife.
"That _Meshummad!_" (apostate) cried the _Gabbai_." He deserves all
that God has sent him."
Undaunted, the Red Beadle demonstrated that the man could not be of
the missionary camp, else had he not been left to starve, one
converted Jew being worth a thousand pounds of fresh subscriptions.
Moreover he, the Red Beadle, had now convinced the man of his
spiritual errors, and _The Brotherhood of the Peoples_ was no longer
on sale. Also, being unable to leave his wife's bedside, Zussmann
would do the work at home below the Union rates prevalent in public.
So, trade being brisk, the _Gabbai_ relented and bargained, and the
Red Beadle sped to his friend's abode and flew up the four flights of
stairs.
"Good news!" he cried. "The _Gabbai_ wants another hand, and he is
ready to take you."
"Me?" Zussmann was paralyzed with joy and surprise.
"Now will you deny that the Idea works?" cried Hulda, her face flushed
and her eyes glittering. And she fell a-coughing.
"You are right, Hulda; you are always right," cried Zussmann, in
responsive radiance. "Thank God! Thank God!"
"God forgive me," muttered the Red Beadle.
"Go at once, Zussmann," said Hulda. "I shall do very well here--this
has given me strength. I shall be up in a day or two."
"No, no, Zussmann," said the Beadle hurriedly. "There is no need to
leave your wife. I have arranged it all. The _Gabbai_ does not want
you to come there or to speak to him, because, though the Idea works
in him, the other 'hands' are not yet so large-minded: I am to bring
you the orders, and I shall come here to fetch them."
The set of tools to which Zussmann clung in desperate hope made the
plan both feasible and pleasant.
And so the Red Beadle's visits resumed their ancient frequency even as
his Sabbath clothes resumed their ancient gloss, and every week's-end
he paid over Zussmann's wages to him--full Union rate.
But Hulda, although she now accepted illogically the Red Beadle's
honey in various shapes, did not appear to progress as much as the
Idea, or as the new book which she stimulated Zussmann to start for
its further propagation.