I had married, and was even a grandfather; for after my return to America the world of Bethulah had grown fantastic, stupidly superstitious, and, finally, shadowy and almost unreal. Years and years of happiness had dissipated and obliterated the delicate fragrant dream of spiritual love.
But that strange long-forgotten name stirred instantly the sleeping past to life. I adjusted my spectacles and read the column eagerly. It was sensational enough, though not more so than a hundred columns of calamities in unknown places that one skips or reads with the mildest of thrills.
The long-threatened avalanche had fallen, and Nature had once more rudely reminded man of his puny place in creation. Rare conditions had at last come together. First a slight fall of snow, covering the mountain—how vividly I pictured it!—then a sharp frost which had frozen this deposit; after that a measureless, blinding snow-storm and a cyclonic wind. When all seemed calm again, the second mass of snow had begun to slide down the frozen surface of the first, quickening to a terrific pace, tearing down the leafless trunks and shooting them at the village like giant arrows of the angry gods. One of these arrows penetrated the trunk of a great cedar on the plain and stuck out on both sides, making a sort of cross, which the curious came from far and near to see. But, alas! the avalanche had not contented itself with such freakish manifestations; it had annihilated the new portion of the village which had dared crawl nearer the mountain when the railroad—a railroad in Zloczszol!—had found it cheaper to pass near the base than to make a circuit round the congested portion!
Alas! the cheapness was illusory. The dépôt with its crowd had been wiped out as by the offended Fury of the mountain; though by another freakish incident, illustrating the Titanic forces at work, yet the one redeeming detail of the appalling catastrophe, a small train of three carriages that had just moved off was lifted up bodily by the terrible wind that raced ahead of the monstrous sliding snowball, and was clapped down in a field out of its reach, as if by a protecting hand. Not a creature on it was injured.
I had passed the years allotted to man by the Psalmist, and my memory of the things of yesterday had begun to be faint and elusive, but the images of my Zloczszol adventure returned with a vividness that grew daily more possessive. What had become of Bethulah? Was she alive? Was she dead? And which were the sadder alternative—to have felt the darkness of early death closing round the great hope, or to have survived its possibility, and old, bent, bitter, and deserted by her followers, to await the lesser disenchantment of the grave?
An irresistible instinct impelled me—aged as I was myself—to revisit alone these scenes of my youth, to see how fate had rounded or broken off its grim ironic story.
I pass over the stages of the journey, at the conclusion of which I found myself again in the mountain village. Alas! The changes on the route had prepared me for the change in Zloczszol. Railroads threw their bridges over the gorges I had climbed, telegraph poles tamed the erst savage forest ways. And Zloczszol itself had now, by the line passing through it, expanded into a trading centre, with vitality enough to recuperate quickly from the avalanche. The hotel was clean and commodious, but I could better have endured that ancient sitting-room in which the squalling baby was rocked. Strange, I could see its red wrinkled face, catch the very timbre of its piping cries! Only the mountain was unchanged, and the pines and firs that had whispered dreams to my youth whispered sleep to my age. Ah, how frail and futile is the life of man! He passes like a shadow, and the green sunlit earth he trod on closes over him and takes the tread of the new generations. What had I to say to these new, smart people in Zloczszol? No, the dead were my gossips and neighbours. For me more than the avalanche had desolated Zloczszol. I repaired to the cemetery. There I should find Yarchi. It was no use looking for him under the porch of the pine cottage. And there, too, I should in all likelihood find Bethulah!
But Ben David's tomb was the first I found, carved with the intersecting triangles. The date showed he had died very soon after my departure; perhaps, I thought remorsefully, my importunities had agitated him too much. Ah! there at last was Yarchi. Under a high white stone he slept as soundly as any straight corpse. His sneering mouth had crumbled to dust, but I would have given much to hear it once more abuse the Chassidim. Propped on my stick and poring over the faded gilt letters, I recalled "the handsome stranger" whom the years had marred. But of Bethulah I saw no sign. I wandered back and found the turreted house, but it had been converted into a large store, and from Bethulah's turret window hung a great advertising sky-sign.
I returned cheerlessly to the hotel, but as the sun began to pierce auspiciously through the bleakness of early March, I was about to sally forth again in the direction of Yarchi's ancient cottage, when the porter directed me—as if I were a mere tourist—to go to see the giant cedar of Lebanon with its Titanic arrow. However, I followed his instructions, and pretty soon I espied the broad-girthed tree towering over its field, with the foreign transpiercing trunk about fifteen feet from the ground, making indeed a vast cross. Leaning against the sunlit cedar was a white-robed figure, and as I hobbled nearer I saw by the shroud and the crown of flowers that I had found Bethulah.
At my approach she drew herself up in statuesque dignity, upright as Ben David of yore, and looked at me with keen unclouded eyes. There was a wondrous beauty of old age in her face and bearing. The silver hair banded on the temples glistened picturesquely against the reds and greens and golds of her crown.