"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."