When I came to write this down afterward, I discovered it was an acrostic on her name, as is customary with festival prayers. And this I have preserved in my rough translation.
V
Despite my new spiritual insight, I could not bring myself to sympathize with such crude earthly visionings of the heavenly judgment bar (doubtless borrowed from the book of Job, which our enlightened Western rabbis rightly teach to be allegorical). Temporary absorption into the Over-Soul seemed to me to sum up the limits of Chassidic experience. Besides, Bethulah was not a being to be employed as a sort of supernatural advocate, but a sad, tender creature needing love and protection.
This mob howling outside my lady's chamber added indignation to my strange passion for this beautiful "sister of the shroud." I would rescue her from this grotesque environment. I would go to her father and formally demand her hand, as, I had learnt, was the custom among these people. I slept upon the resolution, yet in the morning it was still uncrumpled; and immediately after breakfast I took my stand among the jostling crowd outside the turreted house, and unfairly secured precedence by a gold piece slipped into the palm of the doorkeeper. The scribe I found stationed in the ante-chamber made me write my wish on a piece of paper, which, however, I was instructed to carry in myself.
Ben David was seated in a curious soft-cushioned, high-backed chair, with the intersecting triangles making a carved apex to it, but otherwise there was no mark of what Yarchi would have called charlatanism. His face, set between a black velvet biretta and the white masses of his beard, had the dignity with which it had first impressed me, and his long, fur-trimmed robe gave him an air of mediæval wisdom.
"Peace be to you, long-lingering stranger," he said, though his green eyes glittered ominously.
"Peace," I murmured uneasily.
With his left hand he put the still folded paper to his brow. I watched the light playing on the Persian emerald seal of the ring on the forefinger of his right hand. Suddenly I perceived he too was looking at the stone—nay, into it—and that while that continued to glitter, his own eyes had grown glazed.
"Strange, strange," he muttered. "Again I see the fiery wheels, and the strange soul fashioned of Satan that dwells neither in heaven nor in hell." And his eyes lit up terribly again and rolled like fiery wheels.
"What do you want?" he cried harshly.