Part 13

One day, after many weeks of practice, when her childish fingers had acquired considerable skill, she found a fresh sheet of brown paper which she pinned smoothly upon a board, with the intention of making a picture of _Grossmutter_ Jackobsky, the pickle dealer across the way.

All day the little, fat old woman stood and waved and beckoned with her dirty, brass-ringed fingers and called: “_Pick-les!! Pick-les!!_” About her neck was a rope, from which was suspended a flat board, piled breast-high with green, shining pickles.

She wore a curly, faded wig which was always askew, and many-branched coral earrings which reached her shoulders, the rings being tied about her ears with coarse yarn, which made two wriggling black bows on either side.

She was touching the figure up for the last time one night several days later, when Gaon came in unexpectedly and caught her at the work.

“What’s this?” he thundered, snatching the picture from her hands. “God of Israel! that one of my own blood should keep me from the vision! Have I not told you that we may not make pictures, that it is expressly forbidden by the Torah? Have I not told you that it is a violation of the Law? “_Thou shall not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God._...””

The last words ended in a shriek of rage. His face was streaked with lines of ashen white. Purple veins knotted up ominously upon his forehead. Madness trembled in his voice. She could see its unsteady light in his eyes.

Scarce knowing what he did, in his fear and horror of the crime that had been committed beneath his roof, he fell upon the frightened child. When his anger had expended itself, Rahel’s right hip was dislocated and her back injured. After many weeks, when she was able to be up and about again, she was a hopeless cripple, and a distortion of the body had set in.

At sight of the result of his anger, Gaon quoted Samuel: “Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked,” and sought to prepare himself anew for the vision.

During the years that followed, no answer had been granted him until the opening of the gate on the day for which he had petitioned. He ascribed the barrenness of the intervening years to Rahel’s transgression of the Torah law. Now he felt that God had forgiven him and restored him to favor. If he could win thus much by personal intercession, was it not reasonable to believe that he could win more and perhaps avert the future persecution of his people?

For this reason he had made up his mind that Rahel must go into the city and look after the living. She was old enough. She was fifteen, although she was hardly larger than a child of twelve. During the seven years since the injury she had steadily grown out of shape, until she was a one-sided hunchback with a huge, misshapen hip. Her face, too, had taken on the pinched, pitiful look of cripples.

Gaon’s decision that she must go to the city was like sentence of death. She had never been outside the gate. She was afraid of the great world which stoned grown people as the children used to stone her. And to go all alone! Her soul sickened.

“Yes, you must go on the morrow, Rahel, if the others are not molested to-day. I am too old. Besides, I have a greater duty here. There will be no danger for you, because you do not look like our people. You are a cripple, and they will give to you richly.”

It was a pitiable figure, clad in the sober, earth-colored livery of the poor, that limped down the long street from the Ghetto gate the next morning. She looked like a little, shivering partridge with a broken wing. Slung over her back and trailing along behind in the dirt, was a coarse bag for old clothes. Hidden carefully in the bottom of that bag, however, were brown paper and two pencils, in case she had a minute in which to rest.

The spring air was warm and sweet. Iridescent flecks of morning mist hovered over distances and disengaged themselves from grass and trees. What a wonderful world outside the gate! The houses were clean and white. The windows sparkled. In front of each house was a little green grass plot with flowers in it. She had never seen flowers growing before. There was no room in the Ghetto, which was a fixed space for an increasing number. To be sure, there were flowers in the Synagogue for the Feast of Weeks, and the _succah_ were frequently roofed with green leaves and trailing vines for Tabernacles. But here were flowers of all colors--growing right out of the ground.

She forgot her fears. Her cramped lungs expanded in the purer air. Her cramped soul expanded, too, with joy at realization of the beauty of the world.

There is a Fatherland of the spirit which has nothing to do with country, race, or language, where the heart is happy, and over which beams warmly the smiling sun of genius. She had found it in the heart of an alien city; but the artist’s gift was hers, and that makes beggars kings.

In each yard grew some flower that she had not seen in the one before, and she wandered on and on, forgetful of time, weariness, the errand upon which she had come. Color affected her sensitive nerves pleasurably, exquisitely, as does melody the sensitive ears of a musician.

There were trees, too. In the Ghetto only thin, starved poplars grew. Here were all kinds, and the tender young leaves upon them shone like an aura of green, sweet light.

She walked on and on, until she dropped from weariness, and the chilling thought came that Gaon would be very angry if she went back empty-handed.

While she rested, she ate the bread she had brought, and began to look at the people. They were not like Ghetto people. For the most part they were well dressed. Some of the women had bright yellow hair, and, best of all, they looked down upon her kindly. As she sat staring up at them, with great, dark eyes in whose depths lay grief and an infinite longing, first one, then another, dropped a coin in her lap.

Down at the end of a distant street, ever and ever so far away, something sparkled, something blue as the sky, but of a changing blue, vibrantly bright, like light. It was the color of the turquoise in the rich Polish woman’s _Shabbes_ brooch. It must be the Sea of Galilee! Why had not her grandfather told her! It was probably a very large sea, she reflected, and the other side reached Palestine.

The desire came to reproduce the sea with the dancing splendor upon it, and indeed everything she saw; the flowers, the trees with their halos of young light. There followed speedily the discouraging thought that a pencil could not do it. For Ghetto scenes, where everything was gray or black or brown, a pencil was well enough, but for this something different was needed.

She jumped up, forgetful of weariness and her aching back, determined to beg enough clothes to fill the bag, so that she could keep the coins for herself. When she reached the Ghetto, she would talk it over with Joel. He would know if there were pencils of a different kind, which made color. If there were, she would give him the money and let him buy them.

The next morning she took advantage of Gaon’s good humor and left the Ghetto late, that she might see Joel alone and find out if he had made the purchases. Sure enough, he was waiting for her, his wizened face puckered into a smile. Carefully beckoning her to one side, he handed her a tin box. Lifting the lid, he showed her rows and rows of bright paint tubes, brushes, pieces of canvas, and some sheets of drawing paper.

“Didn’t it cost an awful lot, Joel, more than I gave you?”

“Just three times as much; but you’ll earn the money in a week to pay it back--see if you don’t! One of the artist fellows in the shop showed me how to use them. You stick your thumb through this thing--_so_! Then squeeze out the paint and mix it the color of what you want to make. That same artist fellow told me there was going to be a picture show in his shop window to-day. You be sure to see it. The pictures will be made out of just such stuff as you have here. Now don’t you miss seeing that picture show--on no account--Rahel!” he called out, as she hobbled away.

Her heart grew light as the distance increased between herself and the Ghetto. The bright world filled her with a pleasant sense of possession. Could she not make all the lovely things she saw her own? Could she not steal them and put them on the white paper in the bottom of the old bag?

“I’ll fill the bag first and get what money I can, and then I’ll go to the picture show.”

Few could withstand the appealing, misshapen figure, with the ragged dress and piteous face. As noon approached, there was enough in the bag to satisfy Gaon, and she turned her steps toward the shop, in the direction Joel had given.

It was not hard to find. Some distance away she caught the gold gleam of a frame, and saw a crowd upon the walk. When she reached the edge of the crowd, she was obliged to put her burden down and pause for breath. Noon was at hand and the people were beginning to leave. Soon she dared to creep forward and look up.

Oh, never-to-be-forgotten moment! Wondrous vision! The gold frame filled the window from side to side. Within it, floating downward across a well-nigh endless vista of clouds and radiant mists, tenderly up-curling and fleecily white, yet which seemed to be just on the point of bursting into the brilliancy of sunlight, or into some more delicate, multi-colored efflorescence of light, was a figure--a figure of a man of divinest beauty. His blue robe edged with gold floated gently on the roseate air. About his head was a circle of light, as if there an immortal sun was about to rise, and his hands were outstretched in the blessing of prayer.

“It is strange,” thought Rahel, “that his hands are held right out toward me.” She looked about for verification. “Yes, they are held right out toward me and not toward any of the others. And his eyes, too, are looking down into mine.”

As she stood and looked up at the sweet, sad eyes, and they looked back tenderly into hers, a feeling of grief cramped her heart,--grief for the mother-love she had never known, for the careless merriment of childhood lost and gone, for the stonings, the taunts, the jeers, the insults; for the cruel beatings, the enforced fasts, the insufficient food; the cold, damp room where she slept on a pile of rags and wept herself to sleep, and where, in her timid childhood, she had suffered agonies of fear of the dark and the storms and the wind. She felt that the pictured One above was sorry; that He pitied her and suffered too; that He knew it all, understood it all; and tears came to her eyes and fell down, one by one, like crystals, on the walk. She felt as the child feels who runs to its mother’s skirts, sure of protection and comfort.

The beam of love melted the hardened anguish of her heart and gave it voice, as sun melts silent snow-fields and makes way for the “green murmur” of summer. She stood and wept, and her heart was lightened. Her grief melted away and vanished in the mist of tears. Passers-by jostled her, but she did not feel them. The noon hour passed nor did hunger remind her of it, nor weariness warn that she had stood for a long time. The ineffable face which has smiled its peace adown the bitterness of the ages smiled into hers, and the miracle of love was wrought anew.

She could not drag herself away from the picture; she could not look enough. She drank in its meaning, its caressing sympathy, its all-pervading kindliness, greedily. It was for this that she had thirsted, as a traveler in a stony desert thirsts for water; for what is love but the thirst of the soul?

“I can make me a picture just like that!” she thought, with a thrill of pleasure.

Inspired by this resolve, she went around to a side street, took out the drawing-paper and pencils and, seating herself upon the old bag, went to work.

“I will make it just like that, only beneath I will paint the Sea of Galilee.”

When the picture was sketched in, she left the clothes-bag with a Jewish fruit-seller, and went back to compare her work with the original; changing and correcting until the pencil sketch was a perfect likeness in miniature.

On the way home, she meditated upon ways and means of executing the plan. How could she get a piece of canvas large enough, and when she got it, where could she put it? Gaon must not know, nor any one in the quarter.

As she neared the Ghetto and saw in the distance the complicated twisted gables of the old house, like a flash the problem solved itself. The two rooms occupied by Gaon and Deborah were on the first floor. Out of the rear of these rooms a rickety stairway, clinging to one wall, led to an upper, back room, which Rahel occupied. This room, whose two outer walls were of stone, belonged to an older house, which a wealthy rabbi had built for his own use several decades before. The front had fallen down and been replaced by the present wretched wooden structure.

The old rabbi’s room had been painted pale yellow, with the exception of one long, white panel reaching nearly to the ceiling, which was left unpainted--as was the custom with the pious--for a testimonial of the good rabbi’s grief at the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem.

“I will paint it in that panel. Grandmother is too feeble and too nearly blind to risk the stairs, and Gaon is too busy. He has not entered the room for years. It will be safe enough there. To-morrow is _Shabbes_, and the next day the Christian Sunday; I shall have two days in which to begin it.”

When Monday came and she went into the city again, it was with the happy consciousness that the great picture was begun. She went straight to the shop window in order to contemplate the original and take from it corrective ideas for her copy.

The picture was gone, but in its place there was another of the same man, almost, if not quite, as lovely. This time he was sitting in a field of lilies beside a sunny sea. She felt dimly, rather than thought, that his face was as pure and as beautiful as the flowers and did not cause the slightest discord in the scene’s serenity. In front of him children played. He was holding his arms out toward them invitingly, as if to embrace them all, and the world beside, as if he would say, “So wide is my love.” The same gentle, tender smile curved the lips, and the eyes were twin stars of love.

Beneath were some printed words she could not read. As she stood lost in contemplation, a woman came and stood beside her in whose face she recognized the old indelible marks of the Jewish race.

The woman was a baptized Jewess, whose early days had been passed in the Ghetto, and who retained a memory of its Mauschel dialect.

“Who is it?” ventured Rahel timidly, pointing to the picture.

Finding the name unintelligible to the strange child, the woman was searching in her mind for a circumlocution when--

“Is it a great king?” whispered Rahel, in an awed voice.

“Yes, the greatest King in the world.”

“Where does he live?”

“Everywhere.”

“Then he is here in Hamburg?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Now?”

“Yes, right here.”

“What is he doing there in the picture?”

“Blessing little children. He loves them. If they are blind, He touches their eyes and they see. If they are ill, He makes them well.”

“Does he love me?”

“Yes, dear.”

Again tears came to her eyes and fell upon the pavement.

“Do you think he would make me well--and--_straight_?”

“If you love Him, I know He will.”

When Rahel brushed the tears away from her eyes, so that she could look up, the kind woman was gone. She could not see her in any direction and she had forgotten to ask where he lived.

That day she thought of nothing but the King. Gaon and his displeasure if she returned with an empty bag vanished like mist before the sun. _The King! The King!_ Her soul was caught up and whirled along in an ecstasy of emotion that banished thought and fear.

The divine face which in ages past smiled down upon its martyrs’ insensibility to pain and anguish, upon its exiles for faith’s sake, forgetfulness of home and kindred, and upon the mortally injured, the blessed promise of a paradise beyond, wrought its old magic upon her. Nor weariness, nor hunger, nor fear could reach her through Love’s fever, sent of God.

“Such a very great king,” she reflected, “must live in one of those large houses at the edge of the city.”

Patiently she limped along the dusty roads, the old bag trailing behind, pausing at each house that presented a goodly appearance to inquire, in a language that no one could understand, if the King lived there. When they shook their heads, she was loth to go away, and tried again and again to explain. To make up for inability to answer her questions, and for the grief and disappointment that lay in her eyes, they gave her money. She took it mechanically, not knowing what she did.

For a week she was not seen in the Ghetto. The day’s long journeys to the outskirts of the city made it impossible to reach the gate at four, which was closing time. She slept in barns and by haystacks, and kind-hearted servants fed her.

No large house in the environs was left unvisited. As daily the quest became more futile, she stopped passers on the streets, and with trembling gestures and tearful words tried to explain what she wanted to know, pointing the while to her poor bent back and misshapen hip. She peered into the carriages of the rich and scanned each passing face.

Her feet were bruised and bleeding; her throat parched with the dust of the road; her eyes dim and blurred with the strain of looking. But of this she knew nothing, nor that the absorbing passion was wasting her body and burning up the frail tenement of the spirit.

People became accustomed to seeing the strange child with the wild, white face, and touched their foreheads significantly when they met her.

A week later, when she turned her steps toward the Ghetto, the only thought that came to console her for the bitterness of disappointment was that she must surely find him sometime, because he lived in Hamburg. And then, too, he might be away on a visit and that kind woman not know about it.

The silver coins served in some slight degree to mollify Gaon’s wrath, until she persistently refused to explain the cause of her absence. Then he would have beaten her as of old, had it not been for the nearness of the Passover, and the fact that he wished to preserve his serenity of soul, with the hope that at that season the vision might be vouchsafed him. He made peace with his conscience by commanding her to stay at home and fast and pray, preceding the feast.

During these days of punishment, when she was confined within her room, she utilized every moment of the light, from the first faint flush of dawn to the last pallid beam of evening, in working upon the picture. Like magic it grew beneath her fingers. Each stroke of the brush brought nearer to her the living figure. She thrilled with the artist’s incommunicable joy of creation. All her life, all her love, all her energy, all her longing, she put into the blessed face. She poured her soul into it. She robbed her frail body of life that it might beam the richer.

As the painted face took on life and beauty and color, and the pulsating glow of reality, the frail, gnome-like figure that worked upon it, standing upon an old chair placed on top of a table, became frailer and more spectral looking, and painted with a fiercer and a more demoniac energy. The brush flew with the fury of inspiration. Each drop of paint wrought a miracle and called matter into life. The artist’s body was wasted away until it looked as if a spirit caught up in a cobweb of rags was hovering against the old rabbi’s wall, and painting with the marvelous precision of a supernatural power. At the end of the two weeks the picture was completed and shone like a gem illuminating the dingy room.

When Gaon’s good humor returned sufficiently to send Rahel out of the Ghetto again, Passion-week had come and its tragic gloom hung over the German city. As she walked along slowly and feebly, feeling the effect of the fast, she caught sight, down the old familiar street, of the Sea of Galilee, and her heart leaped high with joy at the thought that beneath the feet of the King she had made it just so blue and sparkling.

She was too weak to beg. She was too weary to walk. She sat down and watched the blue water in that happy daze which exhaustion brings to the mind. She felt as if she were encased in a crystal sphere, against which beat vainly the tingling noises of life, but whose bright surface reflected, soap-bubble-wise, color and form with an added charm. The world floated off and away, and she watched it vaguely, her mind taking note of it as of something seen in a dream. She did not know how long she sat there. Hours were as minutes. The light began to slope to westward, warning her of closing time. She got up feebly, determined to go as far as the window to see the picture. On the morrow the Passover began, and she would not be permitted to leave the Ghetto for eight days. Feebly, dizzily, she dragged herself along, her mind a chaos of fragmentary thoughts.

She could see the window some distance away, but nothing gleamed in it. On approaching, what a vision of grief met her eyes! The shock brought order to her mind and summoned her strength by one mighty effort to a consuming realization of grief.

There, in the deep window recess, which was draped in black, just where the glowing picture had hung, was a huge cross of snowy marble, and upon it, dying, suffering, with pitiful wounds upon the hands and feet and breast, with a crown of cruel thorns upon the gentle brow--Oh! agony beyond expression--_The King_!!