Chapter III

I cannot explain why, when Yarchi asked me sarcastically, over the Sabbath dinner, whether I was going to the "Supper of the Holy Queen," I knew at once that I should be found at this mysterious meal. Perhaps it was that I had nothing better to do; perhaps my sympathy was returning to those strange, good-humoured, musical loungers, so far removed from the New York ideal of life. Or perhaps I was vaguely troubled by the dream I had wrestled with more or less obscurely all night long--that I stood naked in a whirl of burning wheels that sang, as they turned, the melody of the _Chassidim_. Was I this nondescript soul, I wondered, half smilingly, fashioned of the Evil One to delay the Messianic era?

The sun was set, the three stars already in the sky, and my pious landlord had performed the Ceremony of Division ere I set out, declining the bread and fish Yarchi offered to make up in a package.

"Saturday nights every man must bring his own meal," he said.

I replied that I went not to eat, but to look on. However, I was so late in arriving that, as there were no lights, looking on was well-nigh reduced to listening. In the gray twilight the _Klaus_ seemed full of uncanny forms rocking in monotonous sing-song. Through the gathering gloom the old Wonder Rabbi's face loomed half ghostlike, half regal. As the mystic dusk grew deeper and darkness fell, the fascination of it all began to overcome me: the dim, tossing, crooning figures, divined rather than seen, washed round lappingly and swayingly by their own rhythmic melody, full of wistful sweetness. My soul too tossed in this circumlapping tide. The complex world of modern civilization fell away from me as garments fall from a bather. Even this primitive mountain village passed into nothingness, and in a timeless, spaceless universe I floated in a lulling, measureless music.

AEons might have elapsed ere the glare of light dazzled my eyes when the week-day candles were lit, and the supper to escort the departing Holy Queen--the Sabbath--began. Again I was invited to the upper table, despite Yarchi's warning. But I had no appetite for earthly things, was jarred by the prosaic gusto with which the mystics threw themselves upon the tureen of red _Borsch_ and the black pottle of brandy.

"Der Rabbi hat geheissen Branntwein trinken," hummed the sexton joyously. But little by little, as their stomachs grew satiate, the holy singing started afresh, and presently they leaped up, pulled aside the table, and made a whirling ring. I was caught up into the human cyclone, and round and round we flew, our hands upon one another's shoulders, with blind ecstatic faces, our legs kicking out madly, to repel, I understood, the embryonic demons outside the magic circle. And again methought I made a "soul-ascension," or at least hovered as near to the ineffable mysteries as the demoniacles to our magic circle.

Oh, what inexpressible religious raptures were mine! What no gorgeous temple, nor pealing organ, nor white-robed minister had ever wrought for me was wrought in this barracklike room with its rude benches and wooden ark. "Children of the Palace" we sang, and as I strove to pick up the words I thought we were indeed sons of our Father who is in Heaven.

CHILDREN OF THE PALACE

Children of the Palace, haste--
All who yearn the bliss to taste
Of the glorious Little-Faced,
Where, within the King's house placed,
Shines the sapphire throne enchased.
Come, in joyful dance enlaced,
Mock the cold and primly chaste.
See no sullen nor straitlaced
In our circle may be traced.
Here with th' Ancient One embraced
Inmost truth 'tis ours to taste,
Outer husks are shred to waste.
Children of the Palace, haste,
With the glory to be graced,
Come, behold the Little-Faced.

We broke up some hours earlier than the previous evening, but I hurried away from my sauntering fellow-worshippers, not now because I was disgusted, but because I feared to be. I needed solitude--communion with my own soul. The same crescent moon hung in the heavens, the same endless stars drew on the thoughts to a material infinity.

But now I felt there was another and a truer universe encompassing this painted vision--a spiritual universe of which I had hitherto known nothing, though I had glibly prated of it and listened well-satisfied to sermons about it.

The air was warm and pleasant, and, still thrilling with the sense of the Over-Soul, I had passed the outposts of the village almost unconsciously, and walked in the direction of the cemetery on the other slope of the mountain (for the dead feared neither floods nor avalanches). On my left ran the river, still turbulent and encumbered with wreckage and logs, but now at low tide some feet below the level of its steep banks. The road gradually narrowed till at last I was walking on a mere strip of path between the starlit water and the base of the mountain, which rose ineffably solemn with its desolate rock at my side and its dark pines higher up. And suddenly lifting my eyes, I saw before me a mystic moonlit figure that set my heart beating with terror and surprise.

It was the figure of a woman, or rather of a girl, tall, queenly, shining in a strange white robe, with a crown of roses and olive branches. For a moment she seemed like some spirit of moonlight. But though the eyes were misted with sadness and dream, the face was of the most beautiful Jewish oval, glowing with dark creamy flesh.

A wild idea rose to my mind, and, absurdly enough, stilled my beating heart. This was the Holy Queen Sabbath whose departure we had just been celebrating, and in this unfrequented haunt she abode till the twilight of the next Friday.

"Hail, Holy Queen!" I said, almost involuntarily.

I saw her large beautiful eyes grow larger as she woke with a start to my presence, but she only inclined her head with a sovereign air, as one used to adoration, and floated on--for so her gracious motion seemed to me.

And as she passed by, it flashed upon me that the strange white robe was nothing but a shroud. And again a great horror seized me. But struggling with my failing senses, I told myself that at worst it was some poor creature buried alive in the graveyard, who had forced the coffin lid, and now wandered half insanely homewards.

"May I not escort you, lady?" I cried after her. "The way is lonely."

She turned her face again upon me. I saw it had fire as well as mystery.

"Who dare molest the Holy Queen?" she said.

Again I was plunged into the wildest bewilderment. Was my first fancy true? Or had I stumbled upon some esoteric title she bore? Or had she but seized on my own phrase?

"But you go far?" I persisted.

"Unto my father's house."

"Pardon me. I am a stranger."

She turned round wholly now and looked at me. "Oh, are _you_ the _Stranger_?" she said. The question rippled like music from her lips and was as sweet to my ear, linking her to me by the suggestion that I was not new to her imagination.

"I am the Stranger," I answered, moving slowly toward her, "and therefore afraid for your sake, and startled by the shroud you wear."

"Since the dawn of my thirteenth year it has been my daily robe. It should be in lamentation for Zion laid waste. But me, I fear, it reminds more of my dead mother and sisters."

"You had sisters?"

"Two beautiful lives, blown out one after the other like candles, making our home dark, when I was but a child. They too wore shrouds in life and death, first the elder, then the younger; and when I draw mine over my dress, it is of them I think always. I feel we are truly sisters--sisters of the shroud."

I shivered as from some chill graveyard air, despite her sweet corporeality.

"But the crown--the crown of joy?" I murmured, regarding now with closer vision the intertangled weaving of roses and myrtle and olive branches, with gold and crimson threads wound about salt stones and the pale yellow of pyrites.

"I do not know what it signifies," she said simply.

"Are you not the Holy Queen?" I asked, beginning to scent some Cabalistic or _Chassidic_ mystery.

"Men worship me. But I know not of what I am queen." And a wistful smile played about the sweet mouth. "Peace and sweet dreams to you, sir." And she turned her face to the village.

She knew not of what she was queen. There, all in one sentence, was the charm, the wonder, the pathos, of her. Yet there was still much that she knew that would enlighten me. And it was not wholly curiosity that provoked me to hold the vision. I hated to see the enchantment of her presence dissolve, to be robbed of the liquid notes of her voice.

"You are queen of me at least," I said, following her, and throwing all my republican principles into the river among the other wreckage. "And your Majesty's liege cannot endure to see you walk unattended so late in the night."

"I have God's company," she answered quietly.

"True; He is always with us. Nevertheless, at night and in the mountains--"

"He may be perceived more clearly. My father makes soul-ascensions at any hour by force of prayer. But for me the divine ecstasy comes only under God's heaven, and most clearly at night and among the graves. By day God is invisible, like the stars."

"They may be perceived from a well," I said, mechanically, for my brain was busy with the intuition that she was Ben David's daughter, that her "queendom" was somehow bound up with his alleged royal descent.

"Even so is God visible from the deeps of the spirit," she answered. "But these depths are not mine, and day speaks to me less surely of Him."

"The day is divine too," I urged. "God speaks also through joy, through sunshine."

"It is but the gilding of sorrow."

"Nay, that is too hard a saying. How can you know that? You"--I made a bold guess, for my brain had continued to work feverishly--"who live cloistered in a turret, who are kept sequestered from man, who walk at night, and only among the dead. How can you know that life is so sad?"

"I feel it. Is not every stone in the graveyard hewn from the dead heart of the mourners?"

All the sadness of the world was in her eyes, yet somehow all the sweet solace. Again she bade me good-night, and I was so under the spell of her strange reply that I made no further effort to follow her, as she was swallowed up in the gloom of the firs where the path wound back round the mountain.