A little boy in his father's arms, his image in miniature, with a miniature grimy caftan and miniature coal-black ringlets beneath his little black skull-cap. A human curiosity brought to interest the stranger and increase his bakhshísh.
For lo! the little boy had six fingers on his right hand! The child held it shyly clenched, but the father forcibly parted the fingers to exhibit them.
And the child lifted up his voice and wept bitterly.
And so, often in after days when the Scribe thought of Jerusalem, it was not of what he had been told he would think; not of Prophets and Angels and Crusaders—only of the crying of that little six-fingered Jewish child, washed by the great tides of human history on to the black rocks near the foot of the Mount of Olives.
II
Jerusalem—centre of pilgrimage to three great religions—unholiest city under the sun!
"For from Zion the Law shall go forth and the Word of God from Jerusalem." Gone forth of a sooth, thought the Scribe, leaving in Jerusalem itself only the swarming of sects about the corpse of Religion.
No prophetic centre, this Zion, even for Israel; only the stagnant, stereotyped activity of excommunicating Rabbis, and the capricious distribution of the paralyzing Chalukah, leaving an appalling multitudinous poverty agonizing in the steep refuse-laden alleys. The faint stirrings of new life, the dim desires of young Israel to regenerate at once itself and the soil of Palestine, the lofty patriotism of immigrant Dreamers as yet unable to overcome the long lethargy of holy study and of prayers for rain. A city where men go to die, but not to live.
An accursèd city, priest-ridden and pauperized, with cripples dragging about its shrines and lepers burrowing at the Zion gate; but a city infinitely pathetic, infinitely romantic withal, a centre through which pass all the great threads of history, ancient and mediæval, and now at last quivering with the telegraphic thread of the modern, yet only the more charged with the pathos of the past and the tears of things; symbol not only of the tragedy of the Christ, but of the tragedy of his people, nay of the great world-tragedy.