“About myself? I don’t think I can do that. But I will tell you about some one to whom I felt very close. It was a sister; no bodily sister, for I haven’t one. The reason I said ‘strange’ just now was because this Angiolina Pratti seemed like a sister to me too. Suddenly there seemed to be three sisters: Angiolina and I and the one I shall tell you about. It is a rather sad story. At least, it is at first. Afterwards it is no longer quite so sad. Oh, life is so wonderful and so deeply moving and so rich and so full of power!”
“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.
Then she told her story. “There was a little girl, a child. She lived with her parents at Slonsk, far in the eastern part of the country. Five years have gone since it all happened. Her father was very poor; he was assistant bookkeeper in a cotton mill, but he was so poorly paid that he could hardly scrape together the rent of their wretched dwelling. His wife had been ailing for long. Sorrow over their failure and suffering had robbed her of strength, and in the winter she died. These people were the only Jews in Slonsk, and in order to bury the body they had to take it to the nearest Jewish cemetery at Inowraztlaw. Since no railroad connects the towns, they had to use a wagon. So at seven o’clock in the morning—it was toward the end of December—the wagon came, and the coffin with the mother’s body was lifted on it. The father and the brother and the little girl followed on foot. The girl was eleven years old and the boy eight and a half. Thick flakes of snow fell, and soon the road had disappeared, and you could tell it only from the line of trees on either hand.
“It was still dark when they started, and even when day came there was only a murky twilight. The girl was unbearably sad, and her sadness increased at every step. When day had fully come, a dim, misty day, the crows flew thither from all directions. It may be that the body in the coffin brought them. But the girl had never seen so many; they seemed to pour from the sky. On great black wings they flew back and forth, and croaked uncannily through the icy, murky silence. And the girl’s sadness became so great that she wished to die. She lagged behind a little, and neither her father nor her brother noticed it in the snow-flurries, nor yet the man who led the horses. So she crossed a field to a wood, and there she sat down and made up her mind to die. Soon her senses were numbed.
“But an old peasant, who had been gathering wood, came from among the trees, and when he saw her and perceived that she did not move and was asleep, he first looked at her a while, and then he started to strip her body of all she had, her cloak, her shoes, her dress, her stockings, and even her shift; for the peasants are very poor thereabouts. She could not resist. She felt what was happening only as from the depth of a dream. So the peasant made a little bundle of her things, and left her naked body there as dead and limped away. He marched along for a while, and came upon the wagon with the coffin and the two men and the boy. The wagon had stopped, for the child had been missed. On the edge of the road a crucifix had been set up, and that was the first thing that gave the peasant pause. It did not seem to him to be chance that Christ was standing there beside the wagon with the coffin. He confessed that later. Also he saw the hundreds of crows that croaked wildly and hungrily, and he was frightened. Then he saw how desperate the father was, and that he was preparing to turn back and gazed in all directions and tried to halloo through the mist.
“The peasant’s conscience began to burn. He fell on his knees before the cross and prayed. The father asked him whether he had seen the child. He pointed and wanted to run away, and he did run across the fields. But something within him forced him to run to the very spot where he had robbed and abandoned the girl. He lifted her in his arms, wrapped his coat about her, and held her to his breast. The father had followed and received the child, and did not ask why she was naked and bare. They rubbed her skin so long with snow till she was warm and opened her eyes. Then the peasant kissed her forehead, and made the sign of the cross over the Jewish child. The father rebuked him for that, but the peasant said: ‘Forgive me, brother,’ and he kissed his hand. From that time on no sadness of the old kind ever came to the girl again. She had only a very faint recollection of the moment when the peasant wrapped her in his coat and held her to his breast. But I believe that she was born again in that moment, born better and stronger than she had been before.”
“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.
“And perhaps Angiolina, that other sister of mine, also awakened to a happier life from that hour of dimness and of death.”
Christian did not answer. He felt as though a light were walking by his side.
At a corner of that desolate street they came upon a very brilliant show-window. They went up to it and stopped as by a common impulse. The shop had long been closed, but in the window was draped a magnificent coat of Russian sable, a symbol of wealth and warmth and adornment. Christian turned to Ruth, and saw the threadbare little cloak in which she shivered. And he saw that she was poor. Then it came into his mind that he too was poor, poor like her, and irrevocably so. He smiled, for the fact seemed significant to him, and he felt a joy that was secret and almost ecstatic.