"I'm not sure there's much in the Bible about it, eh? And one can't believe everything in the Bible. There's the Almighty of course, well, who can say? He may exist, he may not—I say I don't know. But a life hereafter, I don't believe in it. One don't have to believe everything now: it was different when I was young. You had to believe everything then; you had to believe everything they told you in Schul. Now you may think for yourself. And mind you, it don't do to think too much: if you think too much about those things, you go mad, raving mad. What I say is, lead a pure clean life here, and you'll get your reward here. I've seen it in my own case: I wasn't always in a job like this. I had a business once, things went wrong through no fault of mine, and I lost everything—everything sold up except an old wooden bed. Ah, those were hard times, I can tell you! Then I got offered this job—it ain't very good, but I thought to myself: well, there'll be a comfortable home for my wife and my two boys as long as I live. I've tried to live a clean life, and I shall have better times now, eh?
I thought of my own wife and my motherless children: my sadness increased. And I thought of our race, its traditions and its faith, how they are vanishing in the life that surrounds us. The old spirit, the old faith, they had kept alive hot and vigorous—for how many centuries?—when we were spat upon, outcasts. But now they are cold and feeble, vanishing in the universal disbelief. I looked at the man under the shadow of the dirty yellow London fog and the squalid yellow London houses. "This man," I thought to myself, "a mere keeper of graves is touched by it as much as I am. He isn't a Jew now any more than I am. We're Jews only externally now, in our black hair and our large noses, in the way we stand and the way we walk. But inside we're Jews no longer. Even he doesn't believe, the keeper of Jewish graves! The old spirit, the ancient faith has gone out of him."
I was wrong; I know now, and I'll tell you how I came to see it. The spirit's still there all right; it comes out under the apple-blossom, eh?, and it came out among the tombs too.
The next time I saw him was another November day, an English, a London day; O Lord, his nose showed in it very white and florid under the straight houses and the chimney-pots and the heavy, melancholy dripping sky. I had married in the meantime, and my wife—like the good soul that she is—had come with me to put flowers on my poor Rebecca's grave—another anniversary you see. Yes, I was happy—I don't mind telling you so—even at my poor Rebecca's graveside.
He was standing there in the same place, in a black top-hat and a great black overcoat, looking at the tombstones over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses. All the cares of the world seemed to be weighing down his sloping shoulders.
"Good day", he said to me, just touching the brim of his hat.
"Well", I said, "and how's the world going with you?"
He fixed me with his hard grey eyes that had a look of pain in them, and said in a tone which had neither reverence nor irony in it, nor indeed any feeling at all:
"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. I buried my poor wife last Thursday".
There was an awkward silence.