How it shall all be forgotten, the valley of the shadow, the centuries of gollus! Did our fathers lie on the rack of the Spaniards and were their thumbs torn from their hands? It shall be as a mist of ten years gone by. There were they crouched in cellars, old bobbies leaning against the damp walls, an old zadie reading by the little candle of the goodness of the God of Israel. The boys looked up listening with shining eyes. There was the sound of bursting doors, but the old voice did not falter. There was the clatter of iron boots down the stone stairway; but there was no ceasing in the praise of God. And though the old men, the women, yea, the children sucking still quietly at their mothers' breasts, were tied against stacks of wood, and the flame withheld if they but forswore Israel, still was the Law to them like a cool cavern full of the fragrance of God, even in the very centre of fire.
Pogrommen have there been in those lands whence we have come? Who shall remember them? Though the babies were torn from the wombs of mothers, and maidens violated in the streets at noon, all shall be, because the Law has been given to us, as dust in the roadway!
But hold! What do I say? If once more the children of Israel shall build them a Calf of Gold, if they shall turn to the heathen things, who shall keep back the lightnings of God, our God strong in love but terrible in jealousy? Shall not we be utterly swept away till there is no memory of our defeats and no trace of our victories? Shall it all be vain, the rack, the fire, the mother disembowelled in pregnancy?
I say to you, look at our children, for a bad spirit has come into these lands. I say not to you, our brothers and sisters, but to you, to you, our children, keep ye your goings within the fold of the Law! Have you need then of pogroms and swords that you shall remain with God? Because, in this place, He has withheld them, thank Him for that He loves you more. Behold, age behind age our sufferings and our triumph go. Bring it not all to naught. Make not the bloodshed to be useless as water. For the air is thick with the voices of the dead, saying: 'Hold, hold by the banner of Israel! Let it not fall from you! Proudly we held it though the blood dripped from our fingers!'
Lo, our children, you make us to you as strangers, you harden our hearts with anger. But we are ready with our love for you when you follow upon our ways, which are the ways of the countless dead. Let not for little things our heritage be squandered; let not the Maccabæan banner be smirched, nor false gods enter into our tabernacles which we build now upon a wandering thousandfold bitterer than the forty years. We lift out our arms to you. Join us in singing the Lord's song! May the next year see us in Zion!"
There were one or two looked with alarm upon the face of Philip staring from the wall against the Holy Ark. His face was bloodless, his eyes round as if in nightmare. Not a sound was heard when Reb Monash came weakly down from the pulpit. No one knew where to turn his eyes. As his father came nearer to resume his seat, Philip gave a sudden convulsive start, then fell jerkily towards the form where he had sat before the drosheh. A tiny whispering arose in the congregation, as of leaves after a windless noon when a first breeze shakes, or of still waters ruffled. The parnass uttered a deep oi! oi! absently clapping his hands three or four times; the weeping of the women decreased; the men bent towards each other and talked. Some one ascended the pulpit to begin the second part of the service.
Reb Monash had chosen well; for that preoccupation which had held his face all that morning now held his son's for the rest of that day. After dinner he lay down on the sofa thinking heavily; he neither spoke a word with his mother nor picked up a book. He had answered too easily all the questions life had offered him. Was it too late to begin thinking clearly now? Were his conclusions correct by accident or were all his conclusions mere self-flattery? No formula to help him through the mists of doubt which were swarming round him came his way. Late that night, when shool and the evening meyeriv service were over, he walked out towards Baxter's Hill, under the light of stars. It was not long that he moved onward like a sluggish water. A wind came from somewhere afar off and set into motion the mists in his head. More and more quickly they whirled within him, and then, swiftly, they were gone. He rose skywards from his feet. Without pain or pleasure, all that issue which had racked him this day became thin, remote. He moved on the shores of a sea where the sands were stars, and the sea was the great womb of the undefined, where all things were not, but God was. Trembling, aghast, he stood on the arch of the sweep of sands, hearing incoherent murmurings. Towards a blackness cool and clear he stood where foam and wind beat into his face. He turned from the voices of sea and bent down dabbling his fingers among the star-sands. He rose and walked stepping from rock to rock to the channel where the Milky Way flowed inward from the sea. On the bank of the Milky Way, he stopped once more and lifted in his hands a handful of grass. Beyond the slope, the dim waters of Mitchen moved through the night. He leaned for some minutes drowsing against a tree trunk, then turned towards the vague hulk of Baxter's Hill. "It's over!" he whispered. "I know!"
CHAPTER X
It was noon on the Day of Atonement which followed nine days after the Rosh Hashonah memorable to more than one by the oration of Reb Monash, noon in Cambridge Street, a thoroughfare in Doomington far removed from the region of the synagogues, which, for this day, were crowded from dawn to dusk by the day-long worshippers. The most pious did not move from within their precincts; the less pious withdrew occasionally to the immediate environs. All who were sacrilegious on all the other three hundred and sixty-four days, on this day rigidly fasted, and, having no regular pew in a regular synagogue, were devoutly glad to pay for the privilege of any pew in any synagogue. If they gainsaid or were indifferent to the precepts of their faith on other days, who could forswear the immemorial terror of this day? If they had been building all the year a palisade between Heaven and themselves, on this day, who knew, they might enter Heaven through a breach in the palisade. On the night concluding Yom Kippur many looked forward to the impieties of the morrow as if these had been annulled in anticipation. But most felt that if all else were démodé, Yom Kippur stood august beyond fashion. Even the great jewellery and general emporia of Doomington shut their doors, though they exhibited a note to the effect that cleaning operations were in progress, so that their credit with their more Nonconformist customers might remain unimpaired. Bob Cohen, who lived with a goyah, a Gentile lady, all the year round, became entirely oblivious of her existence for these twenty-four hours, in a synagogue several towns away from the scene of his amour. In shool his fervent contrition was only drowned by the self-reproaches of the penitents whose perpetual state was the strictest matrimonial chastity. Avowed atheists put in an appearance despite all their logic. There were few Jews in Doomington that day beyond the circumference of a circle whose radius was half a mile in any direction from the Polisher Shool.