A policeman, worming his way in by the caretaker's entrance, bore to the hero of the afternoon the superintendent's message that unless he delayed his speech till the bulk of the disappointed could be got inside, a riot could not be staved off. And so the stream continued to force itself slowly forward, flowing into every nook and gangway, till it stood solid and immovable, heaped like the waters of the Red Sea. And when at last the doors were bolted, and thousands of swarthy faces, illumined faintly by clusters of pendent gas-globes, were turned towards the tall pulpit where the speaker stood, dominant, against the mystic background of the Ark-curtain, it seemed as if the whole Ghetto of Manchester—the entire population of Strange-ways and Redbank—had poured itself into this one synagogue in a great tidal wave, moved by one of those strange celestial influences which have throughout all history disturbed the torpor of the Jewries.
Of these poverty-stricken thousands, sucked hither by the fame of a soldier rumored to represent a Messianic millionaire bent on the restoration and redemption of Israel, Aaron the Pedlar was an atom—ugly, wan, and stooping, with pious ear-locks, and a long, fusty coat, little regarded even by those amid whom he surged and squeezed for hours in patience. Aaron counted for less than nothing in a world he helped to overcrowd, and of which he perceived very little. For, although he did not fail to make a profit on his gilded goods, and knew how to wheedle servants at side-doors, he was far behind his fellows in that misapprehension of the human hurly-burly which makes your ordinary Russian Jew a political oracle. Aaron's interest in politics was limited to the wars of the Kings of Israel and the misdeeds of Titus and Antiochus Epiphanes. To him the modern world was composed of Jews and heathen; and society had two simple sections—the rich and the poor.
"Don't you enjoy travelling?" one of the former section once asked him affably. "Even if it's disagreeable in winter you must pass through a good deal of beautiful scenery in summer."
"If I am on business," replied the pedlar, "how can I bother about the beautiful?"
And, flustered though he was by the condescension of the great person, his naïve counter-query expressed a truth. He lived, indeed, in a strange dream-world, and had no eyes for the real except in the shape of cheap trinkets. He was happier in the squalid streets of Strange-ways, where strips of Hebrew patched the windows of cook-shops, and where a synagogue was ever at hand, than when striding across the purple moors under an open blue sky, or resting with his pack by the side of purling brooks. Stupid his enemies would have called him, only he was too unimportant to have enemies, the roughs and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by impersonal malice. To his friends—if the few who were aware of his existence could be called friends—he was a Schlemihl (a luckless fool).
"A man who earns a pound a week live without a wife!" complained the Shadchan (marriage-broker) to a group of sympathetic cap-makers.
"I suppose he's such a Schlemihl no father would ever look at him!" said a father, with a bunch of black-eyed daughters.
"Oh, but he was married in Russia," said another; "but just as he sent his wife the money to come over, she died."
"And yet you call him a Schlemihl!" cried Moshelé, the cynic.
"Ah, but her family stuck to the money!" retorted the narrator, and captured the laugh.