He went overland to Marseilles, thence by ship to Asia Minor. It was a terrible journey. Piety forebade him to eat or drink with the heathen, or from their vessels. His portmanteau held a little store of provisions and crockery, and dry bread was all he bought on the route.
Fleeced and bullied by touts and cabmen, he found himself at last on board a cheap Mediterranean steamer which pitched and rolled through a persistent spell of stormy weather. His berth was a snatched corner of the bare deck, where heaps of earth's failures, of all races and creeds and colors, grimily picturesque, slept in their clothes upon such bedding as they had brought with them. There was a spawn of babies, a litter of animals and fowls in coops, a swarm of human bundles, scarcely distinguishable from bales except for a protruding hand or foot. There were Bedouins, Armenians, Spaniards, a Turk with several wives in an improvised tent, some Greek women, a party of Syrians from Mount Lebanon. There were also several Jews of both sexes. But Aaron did not scrape acquaintance with these at first—they lay yards away, and he was half dead with sea-sickness and want of food. He had counted on making tea in his own cup with his own little kettle, but the cook would not trouble to supply him with hot water. Only the great vision drawing hourly nearer and nearer sustained him.
It was the attempt of a half-crazy Egyptian Jewess to leap overboard with her new-born child that brought him into relation with the other Jewish passengers. He learnt her story: the everyday story of a woman divorced in New York, after the fashion of its Ghetto, and sent back with scarcely a penny to her native Cairo, while still lightheaded after childbirth. He heard also the story of the buxom, kind-hearted Jewess who now shadowed her protectingly; the no less everyday story of the good-looking girl inveigled by a rascally Jew to a situation in Marseilles. They contributed with the men, a Russian Jew from Chicago, and a German from Brindisi, to give Aaron of Manchester a new objective sense of the tragedy of wandering Israel, interminably tossed betwixt persecution and poverty, perpetually tempted by both to be false to themselves: the tragedy that was now—thank God!—to have its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians, Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them—that which he, Aaron, was now accomplishing. To his joy one of his new acquaintances—the Russian—shared the dream of a Palestine flowing once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a "Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an old billy-cock and a dingy cotton shirt, but he combined all the lore of the old-fashioned, hard-shell Jew with a living realization of what his formulæ meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage—till the Russian landed at Alexandria—was softened and shortened by sitting worshipfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from Bachja's Duties of the Heart or Saadja Gaon's Book of the Faith. There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity of the swarming deck, loved to pose as a man of common sense, free from superstition.
"The only reason men go to Palestine," he maintained, "is because they think, as the psalm says, the land forgives sin. And they believe, too, that those bodies which are not burned in Palestine, when the Messiah's last trump sounds, will have to roll under lands and seas to get to Jerusalem. So they go to die there, so as to escape the underground route. Besides, Maimonides says the Messianic period will only last forty years. So perhaps they are afraid all the fun will be over and the Leviathan eaten up before they arrive."
"Fools there are always in the world," replied the Russian, "and their piety cannot give them brains. These literal folk are the sort who imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says howsoever great a multitude flocked to worship therein, there was always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is! Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says, 'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit is working to-day. But through our own souls. No Messiah will ever come from a split heaven. If a Christian does anything wrong, it is the individual; if a Jew, it is the nation. Why? Because we have no country, and hence are set apart in all countries. But a country we must and shall have. The fact that we still dream of our land shows that it is to be ours again. Without a country we are dead. Without us the land is dead. It has been waiting for us. Why has no other nation possessed it and cultivated it?"
"Why? Why do the ducks go barefoot?" The German quoted the Yiddish proverb with a sneer.
"The land waits for us," replied the young Russian fervidly, "so that we may complete our mission. Jerusalem—whose very name means the heritage of double Peace—must be the watch-tower of Peace on earth. The nations shall be taught to compete neither with steel weapons nor with gold, but with truth and purity. Every man shall be taught that he exists for another man, else were men as the beasts. And thus at last 'the knowledge of God shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.'"
"If they would only remain covering the sea!" said the German irreverently, as the spray of a wave swept over his mattress.
"Those who have lost this faith are no longer Jews," curtly replied the Russian. "Without this hope the preservation of the Jewish race is a superstition. Let the Jews be swallowed up in the nations—and me in the sea. If I thought that Israel's hope was a lie I should jump overboard."
The German shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly. "You and the Egyptian woman are a pair."