Part 32 (2/2)
”I love my Rivkah,” said Guedalyah. ”A penny on each ginger-beer bottle.”
”Yes, but why haven't _I_ got a wife? Eh?” demanded the little poet fiercely, his black eyes glittering. ”I am a fine tall well-built good-looking man. In Palestine and on the Continent all the girls would go about sighing and casting sheep's eyes at me, for there the Jews love poetry and literature. But here! I can go into a room with a maiden in it and she makes herself unconscious of my presence. There is Reb Shemuel's daughter--a fine beautiful virgin. I kiss her hand--and it is ice to my lips. Ah, if I only had money! And money I should have, if these English Jews were not so stupid and if they elected me Chief Rabbi. Then I would marry--one, two, three maidens.”
”Talk not such foolishness,” said Guedalyah, laughing, for he thought the poet jested. Pinchas saw his enthusiasm had carried him too far, but his tongue was the most reckless of organs and often slipped into the truth. He was a real poet with an extraordinary faculty for language and a gift of unerring rhythm. He wrote after the mediaeval model--with a profusion of acrostics and double rhyming--not with the bald duplications of primitive Hebrew poetry. Intellectually he divined things like a woman--with marvellous rapidity, shrewdness and inaccuracy. He saw into people's souls through a dark refracting suspiciousness. The same bent of mind, the same individuality of distorted insight made him overflow with ingenious explanations of the Bible and the Talmud, with new views and new lights on history, philology, medicine--anything, everything. And he believed in his ideas because they were his and in himself because of his ideas. To himself his stature sometimes seemed to expand till his head touched the sun--but that was mostly after wine--and his brain retained a permanent glow from the contact.
”Well, peace be with you!” said Pinchas. ”I will leave you to your customers, who besiege you as I have been besieged by the maidens. But what you have just told me has gladdened my heart. I always had an affection for you, but now I love you like a woman. We will found this Holy Land League, you and I. You shall be President--I waive all claims in your favor--and I will be Treasurer. Hey?”
”We shall see; we shall see,” said Guedalyah the greengrocer.
”No, we cannot leave it to the mob, we must settle it beforehand. Shall we say done?”
He laid his finger cajolingly to the side of his nose.
”We shall see,” repeated Guedalyah the greengrocer, impatiently.
”No, say! I love you like a brother. Grant me this favor and I will never ask anything of you so long as I live.”
”Well, if the others--” began Guedalyah feebly.
”Ah! You are a Prince in Israel,” Pinchas cried enthusiastically. ”If I could only show you my heart, how it loves you.”
He capered off at a sprightly trot, his head haloed by huge volumes of smoke. Guedalyah the greengrocer bent over a bin of potatoes. Looking up suddenly he was startled to see the head fixed in the open front of the shop window. It was a narrow dark bearded face distorted with an insinuative smile. A dirty-nailed forefinger was laid on the right of the nose.
”You won't forget,” said the head coaxingly.
”Of course I won't forget,” cried the greengrocer querulously.
The meeting took place at ten that night at the Beth Hamidrash founded by Guedalyah, a large unswept room rudely fitted up as a synagogue and approached by reeking staircases, unsavory as the neighborhood. On one of the black benches a shabby youth with very long hair and lank fleshless limbs shook his body violently to and fro while he vociferated the sentences of the Mishnah in the traditional argumentative singsong.
Near the central raised platform was a group of enthusiasts, among whom Froom Karlkammer, with his thin ascetic body and the ma.s.s of red hair that crowned his head like the light of a pharos, was a conspicuous figure.
”Peace be to you, Karlkammer!” said Pinchas to him in Hebrew.
”To you be peace, Pinchas!” replied Karlkammer.
”Ah!” went on Pinchas. ”Sweeter than honey it is to me, yea than fine honey, to talk to a man in the Holy Tongue. Woe, the speakers are few in these latter days. I and thou, Karlkammer, are the only two people who can speak the Holy Tongue grammatically on this isle of the sea. Lo, it is a great thing we are met to do this night--I see Zion laughing on her mountains and her fig-trees skipping for joy. I will be the treasurer of the fund, Karlkammer--do thou vote for me, for so our society shall flourish as the green bay tree.”
Karlkammer grunted vaguely, not having humor enough to recall the usual a.s.sociations of the simile, and Pinchas pa.s.sed on to salute Hamburg. To Gabriel Hamburg, Pinchas was occasion for half-respectful amus.e.m.e.nt. He could not but reverence the poet's genius even while he laughed at his pretensions to omniscience, and at the daring and unscientific guesses which the poet offered as plain prose. For when in their arguments Pinchas came upon Jewish ground, he was in presence of a man who knew every inch of it.
”Blessed art thou who arrivest,” he said when he perceived Pinchas.
Then dropping into German he continued--”I did not know you would join in the rebuilding of Zion.”
”Why not?” inquired Pinchas.
”Because you have written so many poems thereupon.”
”Be not so foolish,” said Pinchas, annoyed. ”Did not King David fight the Philistines as well as write the Psalms?”
”Did he write the Psalms?” said Hamburg quietly, with a smile.
”No--not so loud! Of course he didn't! The Psalms were written by Judas Maccabaeus, as I proved in the last issue of the Stuttgard _Zeitschrift_. But that only makes my a.n.a.logy more forcible. You shall see how I will gird on sword and armor, and I shall yet see even you in the forefront of the battle. I will be treasurer, you shall vote for me, Hamburg, for I and you are the only two people who know the Holy Tongue grammatically, and we must work shoulder to shoulder and see that the balance sheets are drawn up in the language of our fathers.”
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