III.
Dzyalin, the count’s estate was half an hour’s walk from the heart of the Gnesen. On Saturdays and summer evenings the gates were open and the town people were allowed to promenade through the wooded paths and the tree-lined winding alleys. The grounds were entered through a narrow portal and after passing the spacious courtyard, around which were located several imposing homes of the manager and his assistants, there was a tall iron gate which led to two broad shaded lanes. The one to the right led to the count’s castle and the one turning left was open to the public. The latter extended over more than a mile, rows of Lombardy poplars on either side, like sentinels on guard, and came to a sudden halt at the dam, which held the streams in check for the water mill. For farther left was a narrow river, beyond which spread the count’s vegetable gardens and grain fields.
Albert was at the designated spot ahead of time, and when he spied her in the distance he ran toward her with an extended hand but she overlooked it and remained standing stock still, pale, shy, trembling. Her cheeks looked almost bloodless for a moment and her eyes, which he had thought were jet black, were of a sapphire blue and devoid of all animation. A dark cashmere shawl, which had covered her head, had slipped to her shoulders, and the tassels at the ends were gathered in her clasped hands, with an expression of stunned fright on her face.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he mumbled.
She drew a long breath, her hands clinching the tassels in her hands, and a film of mist appeared in her dark-blue eyes.
“Some one might see me,” she muttered in a fretful voice and a frown of agony appeared on her countenance.
They moved back of the row of poplars, where the ground sloped toward the river, screened by shrubs and bushy willows.
He soon made her forget her fears. He began to ask her questions about the people in Gnesen, about herself, but she would not talk about herself. She wanted him to tell her about Berlin, of which she had heard so much. She sighed. She was tired of Gnesen and the people here. There was nothing new in Gnesen. The same gloom day after day, week after week, year after year. Ah, for a glimpse of Berlin!
He made attempts to console her. Her naiveté, her ignorance of the world, her simplicity, her artlessness, her evident truthfulness charmed him. She had never been outside the little town, and she was in her eighteenth year. She entertained strange notions of what a large city was like, and wished she could go to one—she would go anywhere to escape the tedium of Gnesen.
They were now seated in the screening shade of a clump of willows on one side and on the other were the bushy shrubs through which one caught only intermittent glimpses of the flowing stream below. Now and then were heard the quaint songs of the peasant women in the fields—Polish folk songs—the piping of a swineherd in the distance, the barking of a dog, the shrill drilling sound of the locust. He sat on the ground opposite Miriam, listening to her wistfully, catching the enchanting melodies around him, and looking, with narrowed eyes, at the beautiful maiden before him. There was an exhaling purity about her. Sheltered by her mother’s rigorous virtue she was like a soft-colored wild flower surrounded by high woods, never scorched by the burning rays of the sun, never harassed by gusts of cold winds. As he looked at her appealing dark-blue eyes with those exquisite long black eyelashes, her rich black hair combed straight back from her low, square forehead, and the faintest dimple in her chin, there was a strange sentiment in his heart. He was conscious of a desire to rest his hands upon her bowed head—barely touching it—as did the Jews of old, and murmur a prayer and a blessing that God may guard her sweet purity.
“You ought to be glad to be away from large cities,” he endeavored to cheer her. “Here you have treasures Berlin could never give you.”
He halted. A finch dropped a few sweet notes and sailed away, and then the chattering crickets accentuated the silence around them.
“Ah! you don’t understand—you don’t understand—” she was saying, sadness spreading over her face.
She was playing with the tassels of her cashmere shawl absent-mindedly. She could not explain what he did not understand, for she did not quite fully understand herself beyond the fact that she was weary of Gnesen. Life in Gnesen was a perpetual “You must not.” Being a rabbi’s daughter more things were forbidden her than other girls. And the sudden appearance of this elegantly dressed young man, with his intent eyes upon her, his charming voice and pure German speech, made her conscious of her circumscribed, narrow, drab existence with all its dinginess. Strange feelings had been stirring in her the past year or two but they only made her restless, without revealing to her, her inner desires. Recently she had overheard her mother complain that her father was not active enough to procure a husband for their daughter and the rabbi murmured that “the good Lord would provide.” Miriam trembled at the thought of marriage; a repulsive feeling came over her at the mere mention of it. Marriage in Gnesen meant shaving off her beautiful tresses and exchanging them for the detestable wig; it meant—she shuddered—the drudgery of married life in poverty.
On the day she caught a glimpse of Albert at the well she went home with her heart a-flutter. He was so unlike the young men in Gnesen. She had not thought he belonged to her people but his dreamy, intent look had not escaped her despite her seeming inattentiveness. No one had looked at her in the manner of this stranger.
The evening of their first meeting she remained seated on the steps of the porch, with her elbows on her knees, her pensive face between her hands, musing; at times her breasts heaved, though she knew not why. Her musing was interrupted by the approach of her father and Shloma, the marriage-broker. The two were conversing in a low confidential tone. She knew the topic of their conversation. The day before her father had been telling her mother that Shloma was proposing a suitable young man for Miriam. He mentioned his name. Miriam trembled. She had never spoken with the young man but she knew him by sight, an ungainly young man. When her father and the marriage-broker came near the porch Miriam went into the house and retired. She spent a troubled night, with a heart full of sorrow, and in the back of her brain was the picture of a young man, slender, handsomely dressed, with light-brown hair, and eyes that made her heart flutter.
When she beheld the stranger in the company of the count her heart stood still for a second and the blood rushed to her face. To Miriam the day of miracles had not yet passed. All her life she had heard of nothing but miracles. Her dreams were not of knights and princes but of the thousands of miracles God had performed for her people.
After Albert and the count had left Miriam threw her cashmere shawl over her head and took a long walk, to the very end of the town. She was not thinking of the stranger. She was not thinking of anything. Only her head was thumping and she was restless.
During Albert’s next visit Miriam sat in the adjoining room and drank in every word, every syllable. She loved to listen to his voice, to his pure German, and frequently blushed at the comical attempts of her father to make his patois sound Germanic. She hoped the young man would come again.
Then the miracle happened. The young man called when her father was away and he handed her that note. She cherished the scrap of paper and secretly read it over again and again. She did not hesitate about going to meet him but she trembled with fear. In her innocence the thought that she was running any risk never occurred to her until she had reached the meeting place.
On her departure from their first secret meeting she readily agreed to come the following day. She wanted to hear more of the great city where the streets were paved and lit by lamps at night. She naively asked him what street he lived on and when he told her she asked him to put the address on a piece of paper. Then she made a new discovery; the houses in Berlin were numbered! In Gnesen the houses needed no numbers. One knew the occupants of all the houses and instead of numbers, there were little descriptive signs over the doors, indicating what each owner must furnish in case of fire. The picture of a ladder was above the door of one house, that of an axe over another, and there were sketches—not very graphic—of long hooks and pails and besoms, and, in fact, of all the instruments of the Gnesen fire brigade.
During one of their clandestine meetings Albert remained seated on the ground, his hands around his knee, staring at her as if she were a work of art which aroused his innermost admiration.
Tears of ecstasy were in his eyes as he continued looking at her in silence.
The past three years Albert had learned considerably about the lure of sex—sensuality was no longer an unsolved mystery to him—but though Miriam drew him toward her with a thousand invisible chains he was conscious of an inner fear—the fear of touching a sacred shrine—whenever he touched her cashmere shawl or passed his hand, ever so lightly, over her sleeves, or when he clasped her hand in parting.
Miriam looked up at him and for a moment let her eyes rest upon his sensitive face. She did not understand the meaning of the mist in his eyes but she was conscious of an overwhelming desire to touch him, to let her hand rest upon his.
This was the first touch of romance in the young girl’s life, the first conscious awakening of the mysterious being within her. It was the first tiny opening of the bursting bud, the first petal catching the light of the sun, though its warmth had long before penetrated it. She thought of nothing save the irresistible sweetness of sitting under the willow tree with this young stranger. He seemed a mystery to her, part of the mystery of the great world, of which she knew nothing. The boundaries of her world were the bluish tree tops on the horizon to the left of Gnesen and the dome of the cathedral to the right. And it was midsummer and the Fearful Days—as the group of holidays at the end of summer were symbolically named—were soon at hand. Sadness! sadness! sadness! as if life in Gnesen was not sad enough without fasts, without heart-rending lamentations, without wailing and praying and torturing of the flesh.
“I can’t meet you tomorrow,” she said one day as they parted.
“And why not?” he inquired eagerly.
“Don’t you know what tomorrow is?”
He shook his head.
A strange expression stole over her face. Her eyes contracted, there was a deep dent between her eyebrows, and she stared at him as if sudden fear possessed her.
“So it is not true,” she muttered in a husky voice, “that you are a Jew.”
Albert threw his head back and laughed.
“Too much of a Jew, Miriam—too much of one to be left in peace.” The sunny smile now vanished from his eyes, the deep corners of his mouth drooped and twitched, the wing of melancholy brushed his flushed cheeks. “Why do you doubt it?” He again made an attempt at smiling.
“You couldn’t be a Jew without knowing that tomorrow is a Jewish holiday!”
He looked puzzled at her. He did not observe Jewish holidays.
However, she soon yielded and promised to come.
The next day they were seated in their secluded place, Albert reciting a song he had written the night before. He told her that if he had not met her the song would not have been written.
There were tears in his eyes; he uttered the last verse in a whisper almost, and then silence. The day was hot, without the slightest breeze; nothing stirred, not even the drooping feather-like boughs of the willow overhead.
Suddenly the sound of footsteps behind them arrested their attention. A tall, red-bearded, round-faced man was staring at them as if frightened by an apparition. He was Getzel the Beadle.
Miriam leaped up and like a frightened deer, sped through the bushes before Albert had fully realized what had happened.
He waited but she did not return. He called at the same place the next day and the next but she did not appear. Each new love was a first love to him, only it lashed his soul with greater fury. Ah! the shades of the past, they were nothing more than a memory to him now. The wilted flower of yesterday is always forgotten when the perfume of the living one is wafted into our nostrils. No one was like Miriam. There never was any other woman as sweet as Miriam. His whole being yearned for her. Hedwiga, Hilda, Eugenie—they were all fancies—but Miriam—everything swam before his feverish eyes as he thought of her. Nothing in life mattered any more—nothing! He tried to see her at her home—to tell her parents of his love for their daughter, but the rabbi, like Eugenie’s father, shut the door in his face.
He suddenly awoke from his poet’s dream. He saw nothing but abject misery around him. He could no longer share in his host’s gayety.