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Promised Land, The

<h3>CHAPTER V</h3> <h4>I REMEMBER</h4> My father and mother could tell me much more that I have forgotten, or that I never was aware of; but I want to reconstruct my childhood from those broken recollections only which, recurring to me in after years, filled me with the pain and wonder of remembrance. I want to string together those glimpses of my earliest days that dangle in my mind, like little lanterns in the crooked alleys of the past, and show me an elusive little figure that is myself, and yet so much a stranger to me, that I often ask, Can this be I? I have not much faith in the reality of my first recollection, but as I can never go back over the past without bringing up at last at this sombre little scene, as at a door beyond which I cannot pass, I must put it down for what it is worth in the scheme of my memories. I see, then, an empty, darkened room. In the middle, on the floor, lies a long Shape, covered with some black stuff. There are candles at the head of the Shape. Dim figures are seated low, against the walls, swaying to and fro. No sound is in the room, except a moan or a sigh from the shadowy figures; but a child is walking softly around and around the Shape on the floor, in quiet curiosity. The Shape is the body of my grandfather laid out for burial. The child is myself—myself asking questions of Death. I was four years old when my mother's father died. Do I really remember the little scene? Perhaps I heard it described by some fond relative, as I heard other anecdotes of my infancy, and unconsciously incorporated it with my genuine recollections. It is so suitable a scene for a beginning: the darkness, the mystery, the impenetrability. My share in it, too, is characteristic enough, if I really studied that Shape by the lighted candles, as I have always pretended to myself. So often afterwards I find myself forgetting the conventional meanings of things, in some search for a meaning of my own. It is more likely, however, that I took no intellectual interest in my grandfather's remains at the time, but later on, when I sought for a First Recollection, perhaps, elaborated the scene, and my part in it, to something that satisfied my sense of dramatic fitness. If I really committed such a fraud, I am now well punished, by being obliged, at the very start, to discredit the authenticity of my memoirs. The abode of our childhood, if not revisited in later years, is apt to loom in our imagination as a vast edifice with immense chambers in which our little self seems lost. Somehow I have failed of this illusion. My grandfather's house, where I was born, stands, in my memory, a small, one-story wooden building, whose chimneys touch the sky at the same level as its neighbors' chimneys. Such as it was, the house stood even with the sidewalk, but the yard was screened from the street by a board fence, outside which I am sure there was a bench. The gate into the yard swung so high from the ground that four-footed visitors did not have to wait till it was opened. Pigs found their way in, and were shown the way out, under the gate; grunting on their arrival, but squealing on their departure. <div class="fig">> <ANTIMG border="0" src="images/imagep080.jpg" width-obs="95%" alt="My Grandfather's House, Where I Was Born" /> MY GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE, WHERE I WAS BORNToList </div> Of the interior of the house I remember only one room, and not so much the room as the window, which had a blue sash curtain, and beyond the curtain a view of a narrow, walled garden, where deep-red dahlias grew. The garden belonged to the house adjoining my grandfather's, where lived the Gentile girl who was kind to me. Concerning my dahlias I have been told that they were not dahlias at all, but poppies. As a conscientious historian I am bound to record every rumor, but I retain the right to cling to my own impression. Indeed, I must insist on my dahlias, if I am to preserve the garden at all. I have so long believed in them, that if I try to see poppies in those red masses over the wall, the whole garden crumbles away, and leaves me a gray blank. I have nothing against poppies. It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth. Ours was a quiet neighborhood. Across the narrow street was the orderly front of the Korpus, or military academy, with straight rows of unshuttered windows. It was an imposing edifice in the eyes of us all, because it was built of brick, and was several stories high. At one of the windows I pretend I remember seeing a tailor mending the uniforms of the cadets. I knew the uniforms, and I knew, in later years, the man who had been the tailor; but I am not sure that he did not emigrate to America, there to seek his fortune in a candy shop, and his happiness in a family of triplets, twins, and even odds, long before I was old enough to toddle as far as the gate. Behind my grandfather's house was a low hill, which I do not remember as a mountain. Perhaps it was only a hump in the ground. This eminence, of whatever stature, was a part of the Vall, a longer and higher ridge on the top of which was a promenade, and which was said to be the burying-ground of Napoleonic soldiers. This historic rumor meant very little to me, for I never knew what Napoleon was. It was not my way to accept unchallenged every superstition that came to my ears. Among the wild flowers that grew on the grassy slopes of the Vall, there was a small daisy, popularly called "blind flower," because it was supposed to cause blindness in rash children who picked it. I was rash, if I was awake; and I picked "blind flowers" behind the house, handfuls of them, and enjoyed my eyesight unimpaired. If my faith in nursery lore was shaken by this experience, I kept my discovery to myself, and did not undertake to enlighten my playmates. I find other instances, later on, of the curious fact that I was content with finding out for myself. It is curious to me because I am not so reticent now. When I discover anything, if only a new tint in the red sunset, I must publish the fact to all my friends. Is it possible that in my childish reflections I recognized the fact that ours was a secretive atmosphere, where knowledge was for the few, and wisdom was sometimes a capital offence? In the summer-time I lived outdoors considerably. I found many occasions to visit my mother in the store, which gave me a long walk. If my errand was not pressing—or perhaps even if it was—I made a long stop on the Platz, especially if I had a companion with me. The Platz was a rectangular space in the centre of a roomy square, with a shady promenade around its level lawn. The Korpus faced on the Platz, which was its drill ground. Around the square were grouped the fine residences of the officers of the Korpus, with a great white church occupying one side. These buildings had a fearful interest for me, especially the church, as the dwellings and sanctuary of the enemy; but on the Platz I was not afraid to play and seek adventures. I loved to watch the cadets drill and play ball, or pass them close as they promenaded, two and two, looking so perfect in white trousers and jackets and visored caps. I loved to run with my playmates and lay out all sorts of geometric figures on the four straight sides of the promenade; patterns of infinite variety, traceable only by a pair of tireless feet. If one got so wild with play as to forget all fear, one could swing, until chased away by the guard, on the heavy chain festoons that encircled the monument at one side of the square. This was the only monument in Polotzk, dedicated I never knew to whom or what. It was the monument, as the sky was the sky, and the earth, earth: the only phenomenon of its kind, mysterious, unquestionable. It was not far from the limits of Polotzk to the fields and woods. My father was fond of taking us children for a long walk on a Sabbath afternoon. I have little pictures in my mind of places where we went, though I doubt if they could be found from my descriptions. I try in vain to conjure up a panoramic view of the neighborhood. Even when I stood on the apex of the Vall, and saw the level country spread in all directions, my inexperienced eyes failed to give me the picture of the whole. I saw the houses in the streets below, all going to market. The highroads wandered out into the country, and disappeared in the sunny distance, where the edge of the earth and the edge of the sky fitted together, like a jewel box with the lid ajar. In these things I saw what a child always sees: the unrelated fragments of a vast, mysterious world. But although my geography may be vague, and the scenes I remember as the pieces of a paper puzzle, still my breath catches as I replace this bit or that, and coax the edges to fit together. I am obstinately positive of some points, and for the rest, you may amend the puzzle if you can. You may make a survey of Polotzk ever so accurate, and show me where I was wrong; still I am the better guide. You may show that my adventureful road led nowhere, but I can prove, by the quickening of my pulse and the throbbing of my rapid recollections, that things happened to me there or here; and I shall be believed, not you. And so over the vague canvas of scenes half remembered, half imagined, I draw the brush of recollection, and pick out here a landmark, there a figure, and set my own feet back in the old ways, and live over the old events. It is real enough, as by my beating heart you might know. Sometimes my father took us out by the Long Road. There is no road in the neighborhood of Polotzk by that name, but I know very well that the way was long to my little feet; and long are the backward thoughts that creep along it, like a sunbeam travelling with the day. The first landmark on the sunny, dusty road is the house of a peasant acquaintance where we stopped for rest and a drink. I remember a cool gray interior, a woman with her bosom uncovered pattering barefoot to hand us the hospitable dipper, and a baby smothered in a deep cradle which hung by ropes from the ceiling. Farther on, the empty road gave us shadows of trees and rustlings of long grass. This, at least, is what I imagine over the spaces where no certain object is. Then, I know, we ran and played, and it was father himself who hid in the corn, and we made havoc following after. Laughing, we ramble on, till we hear the long, far whistle of a locomotive. The railroad track is just visible over the field on the left of the road; the cornfield, I say, is on the right. We stand on tiptoe and wave our hands and shout as the long train rushes by at a terrific speed, leaving its pennon of smoke behind. The passing of the train thrilled me wonderfully. Where did it come from, and whither did it fly, and how did it feel to be one of the faces at the windows? If ever I dreamed of a world beyond Polotzk, it must have been at those times, though I do not honestly remember. Somewhere out on that same Long Road is the place where we once attended a wedding. I do not know who were married, or whether they lived happily ever after; but I remember that when the dancers were wearied, and we were all sated with goodies, day was dawning, and several of the young people went out for a stroll in a grove near by. They took me with them—who were they?—and they lost me. At any rate, when they saw me again, I was a stranger. For I had sojourned, for an immeasurable moment, in a world apart from theirs. I had witnessed my first sunrise; I had watched the rosy morning tiptoe in among the silver birches. And that grove stands on the left side of the road. We had another stopping-place out in that direction. It was the place where my mother sent her hundred and more house plants to be cared for one season, because for some reason they could not fare well at home. We children went to visit them once; and the memory of that is red and white and purple. The Long Road went ever on and on; I remember no turns. But we turned at last, when the sun was set and the breeze of evening blew; and sometimes the first star came in and the Sabbath went out before we reached home and supper. Another way out of town was by the bridge across the Polota. I recall more than one excursion in that direction. Sometimes we made a large party, annexing a few cousins and aunts for the day. At this moment I feel a movement of affection for these relations who shared our country adventures. I had forgotten what virtue there was in our family; I do like people who can walk. In those days, it is likely enough, I did not always walk on my own legs, for I was very little, and not strong. I do not remember being carried, but if any of my big uncles gave me a lift, I am sure I like them all the more for it. The Dvina River swallowed the Polota many times a day, yet the lesser stream flooded the universe on one occasion. On the hither bank of that stream, as you go from Polotzk, I should plant a flowering bush, a lilac or a rose, in memory of the life that bloomed in me one day that I was there. Leisurely we had strolled out of the peaceful town. It was early spring, and the sky and the earth were two warm palms in which all live things nestled. Little green leaves trembled on the trees, and the green, green grass sparkled. We sat us down to rest a little above the bridge; and life flowed in and out of us fully, freely, as the river flowed and parted about the bridge piles. A market garden lay on the opposite slope, yellow-green with first growth. In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his plow. I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the bank for every turn. Suddenly he began to sing, a rude plowman's song. Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to fit it—a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. I sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention. I felt myself discovering things. Something in me gasped for life, and lay still. I was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me. For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat I knew, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me. We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. Our souls are scarred with the struggles of successive births, and the process is recorded also by the wrinkles in our brains, by the lines in our faces. Look at me and you will see that I have been born many times. And my first self-birth happened, as I have told, that spring day of my early springs. Therefore would I plant a rose on the green bank of the Polota, there to bloom in token of eternal life. Eternal, divine life. This is a tale of immortal life. Should I be sitting here, chattering of my infantile adventures, if I did not know that I was speaking for thousands? Should you be sitting there, attending to my chatter, while the world's work waits, if you did not know that I spoke also for you? I might say "you" or "he" instead of "I." Or I might be silent, while you spoke for me and the rest, but for the accident that I was born with a pen in my hand, and you without. We love to read the lives of the great, yet what a broken history of mankind they give, unless supplemented by the lives of the humble. But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and die unheard. It is well that now and then one is born among the simple with a taste for self-revelation. The man or woman thus endowed must speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale. <hr style='width: 15%;' /> It is fun to run over the bridge, with a clatter of stout little shoes on resounding timbers. We pass a walled orchard on the right, and remind each other of the fruit we enjoyed here last summer. Our next stopping-place is farther on, beyond the wayside inn where lives the idiot boy who gave me such a scare last time. It is a poor enough place, where we stop, but there is an ice house, the only one I know. We are allowed to go in and see the greenish masses of ice gleaming in the half-light, and bring out jars of sweet, black "lager beer," which we drink in the sunny doorway. I shall always remember the flavor of the stuff, and the smell, and the wonder and chill of the ice house. I vaguely remember something about a convent out in that direction, but I was tired and sleepy after my long walk, and glad to be returning home. I hope they carried me a bit of the way, for I was very tired. There were stars out before we reached home, and the men stopped in the middle of the street to bless the new moon. It is pleasant to recall how we went bathing in the Polota. On Friday afternoons in summer, when the week's work was done, and the houses of the good housewives stood shining with cleanliness, ready for the Sabbath, parties of women and girls went chattering and laughing down to the river bank. There was a particular spot which belonged to the women. I do not know where the men bathed, but our part of the river was just above Bonderoff's gristmill. I can see the green bank sloping to the water, and the still water sliding down to the sudden swirl and spray of the mill race. The woods on the bank screened the bathers. Bathing costumes were simply absent, which caused the mermaids no embarrassment, for they were accustomed to see each other naked in the public hot baths. They had little fear of intrusion, for the spot was sacred to them. They splashed about and laughed and played tricks, with streaming hair and free gestures. I do not know when I saw the girls play as they did in the water. It was a pretty picture, but the bathers would have been shocked beyond your understanding if you had suggested that naked women might be put into a picture. If it ever happened, as it happened at least once for me to remember, that their privacy was outraged, the bathers were thrown into a panic as if their very lives were threatened. Screaming, they huddled together, low in the water, some hiding their eyes in their hands, with the instinct of the ostrich. Some ran for their clothes on the bank, and stood shrinking behind some inadequate rag. The more spirited of the naiads threw pebbles at the cowardly intruders, who, safe behind the leafy cover that was meant to shield modesty, threw jeers and mockery in return. But the Gentile boys ran away soon, or ran away punished. A chemise and a petticoat turn a frightened woman into an Amazon in such circumstances; and woe to the impudent wretch who lingered after the avengers plunged into the thicket. Slaps and cuffs at close range were his portion, and curses pursued him in retreat. Among the liveliest of my memories are those of eating and drinking; and I would sooner give up some of my delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. I make no apology to the spiritually minded, to whom this statement must be a revelation of grossness. I am content to tell the truth as well as I am able. I do not even need to console myself with the reflection that what is dross to the dreamy ascetic may be gold to the psychologist. The fact is that I ate, even as a delicate child, with considerable relish; and I remember eating with a relish still keener. Why, I can dream away a half-hour on the immortal flavor of those thick cheese cakes we used to have on Saturday night. I am no cook, so I cannot tell you how to make such cake. I might borrow the recipe from my mother, but I would rather you should take my word for the excellence of Polotzk cheese cakes. If you should attempt that pastry, I am certain, be you ever so clever a cook, you would be disappointed by the result; and hence you might be led to mistrust my reflections and conclusions. You have nothing in your kitchen cupboard to give the pastry its notable flavor. It takes history to make such a cake. First, you must eat it as a ravenous child, in memorable twilights, before the lighting of the week-day lamp. Then you must have yourself removed from the house of your simple feast, across the oceans, to a land where your cherished pastry is unknown even by name; and where daylight and twilight, work day and fête day, for years rush by you in the unbroken tide of a strange, new, overfull life. You must abstain from the inimitable morsel for a period of years,—I think fifteen is the magic number,—and then suddenly, one day, rub the Aladdin's lamp of memory, and have the renowned tidbit whisked upon your platter, garnished with a hundred sweet herbs of past association. Do you think all your imported spices, all your scientific blending and manipulating, could produce so fragrant a morsel as that which I have on my tongue as I write? Glad am I that my mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, has forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery. At any rate, she does not practise it, and I am the richer in memories for her omissions. Polotzk cheese cake, as I now know it, has in it the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the Vall; the sweetness of Dvina water; the richness of newly turned earth which I moulded with bare feet and hands; the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place; the fragrance of all my childhood's summers. Abstinence, as I have mentioned, is one of the essential ingredients in the phantom dish. I discovered this through a recent experience. It was cherry time in the country, and the sight of the scarlet fruit suddenly reminded me of a cherry season in Polotzk, I could not say how many years ago. On that earlier occasion my Cousin Shimke, who, like everybody else, was a storekeeper, had set a boy to watch her store, and me to watch the boy, while she went home to make cherry preserves. She gave us a basket of cherries for our trouble, and the boy offered to eat them with the stones if I would give him my share. But I was equal to that feat myself, so we sat down to a cherry-stone contest. Who ate the most stones I could not remember as I stood under the laden trees not long ago, but the transcendent flavor of the historical cherries came back to me, and I needs must enjoy it once more. I climbed into the lowest boughs and hung there, eating cherries with the stones, my whole mind concentrated on the sense of taste. Alas! the fruit had no such flavor to yield as I sought. Excellent American cherries were these, but not so fragrantly sweet as my cousin's cherries. And if I should return to Polotzk, and buy me a measure of cherries at a market stall, and pay for it with a Russian groschen, would the market woman be generous enough to throw in that haunting flavor? I fear I should find that the old species of cherry is extinct in Polotzk. Sometimes, when I am not trying to remember at all, I am more fortunate in extracting the flavors of past feasts from my plain American viands. I was eating strawberries the other day, ripe, red American strawberries. Suddenly I experienced the very flavor and aroma of some strawberries I ate perhaps twenty years ago. I started as from a shock, and then sat still for I do not know how long, breathless with amazement. In the brief interval of a gustatory perception I became a child again, and I positively ached with the pain of being so suddenly compressed to that small being. I wandered about Polotzk once more, with large, questioning eyes; I rode the Atlantic in an emigrant ship; I took possession of the New World, my ears growing accustomed to a new language; I sat at the feet of renowned professors, till my eyes contracted in dreaming over what they taught; and there I was again, an American among Americans, suddenly made aware of all that I had been, all that I had become—suddenly illuminated, inspired by a complete vision of myself, a daughter of Israel and a child of the universe, that taught me more of the history of my race than ever my learned teachers could understand. All this came to me in that instant of tasting, all from the flavor of ripe strawberries on my tongue. Why, then, should I not treasure my memories of childhood feasts? This experience gives me a great respect for my bread and meat. I want to taste of as many viands as possible; for when I sit down to a dish of porridge I am certain of rising again a better animal, and I may rise a wiser man. I want to eat and drink and be instructed. Some day I expect to extract from my pudding the flavor of manna which I ate in the desert, and then I shall write you a contemporaneous commentary on the Exodus. Nor do I despair of remembering yet, over a dish of corn, the time when I fed on worms; and then I may be able to recall how it felt to be made at last into a man. Give me to eat and drink, for I crave wisdom. <hr style='width: 15%;' /> My winters, while I was a very little girl, were passed in comparative confinement. On account of my delicate health, my grandmother and aunts deemed it wise to keep me indoors; or if I went out, I was so heavily coated and mittened and shawled that the frost scarcely got a chance at the tip of my nose. I never skated or coasted or built snow houses. If I had any experience of snowballs, it was with those thrown at me by the Gentile boys. The way I dodge a snowball to this day makes me certain that I learned the act in my fearful childhood days, when I learned so many cowardly tricks of bending to a blow. I know that I was proud of myself when, not many years ago, I found I was not afraid to stand up and catch a flying baseball; but the fear of the snowball I have not conquered. When I turn a corner in snowball days, the boys with bulging pockets see a head held high and a step unquickened, but I know that I cringe inwardly; and this private mortification I set down against old Polotzk, in my long score of grievances and shames. Fear is a devil hard to cast out. Let me make the most of the winter adventures that I recall. First, there was sleighing. We never kept horses of our own, but the horses of our customer-guests were always at our disposal, and many a jolly ride they gave us, with the dvornik at the reins, while their owners haggled with my mother in the store about the price of soap. We had no luxurious sleigh, with cushions and fur robes, no silver bells on our harness. Ours was a bare sledge used for hauling wood, with a padding of straw and burlap, and the reins, as likely as not, were a knotted rope. But the horses did fly, over the river and up the opposite bank if we chose; and whether we had bells or not, the merry, foolish heart of Yakub would sing, and the whip would crack, and we children would laugh; and the sport was as good as when, occasionally, we did ride in a more splendid sleigh, loaned us by one of our prouder guests. We were wholesome as apples to look at when we returned for bread and tea in the dusk; at least I remember my sister, with cheeks as red as a painted doll's under her close-clipped curls; and my little brother, rosy, too, and aristocratic-looking enough, in his little greatcoat tied with a red sash, and little fur cap with earlaps. For myself, I suppose my nose was purple and my cheeks pinched, just as they are now in the cold weather; but I had a good time. At certain—I mean uncertain—intervals we were bundled up and marched to the public baths. This was so great an undertaking, consuming half a day or so, and involving, in winter, such risk of catching cold, that it is no wonder the ceremony was not practised oftener. The public baths were situated on the river bank. I always stopped awhile outside, to visit the poor patient horse in the treadmill, by means of which the water was pumped into the baths. I was not sentimental about animals then. I had not read of "Black Beauty" or any other personified monsters; I had not heard of any societies for the prevention of cruelty to anything. But my pity stirred of its own accord at the sight of that miserable brute in the treadmill. I was used to seeing horses hard-worked and abused. This horse had no load to make him sweat, and I never saw him whipped. Yet I pitied this creature. Round and round his little circle he trod, with head hanging and eyes void of expectation; round and round all day, unthrilled by any touch of rein or bridle, interpreters of a living will; round and round, all solitary, never driven, never checked, never addressed; round and round and round, a walking machine, with eyes that did not flash, with teeth that did not threaten, with hoofs that did not strike; round and round the dull day long. I knew what a horse's life should be, entangled with the life of a master: adventurous, troubled, thrilled; petted and opposed, loved and abused; to-day the ringing city pavement underfoot, and the buzz of beasts and men in the market place; to-morrow the yielding turf under tickled flanks, and the lone whinny of scattered mates. How empty the existence of the treadmill horse beside this! As empty and endless and dull as the life of almost any woman in Polotzk, had I had eyes to see the likeness. But to my ablutions! We undress in a room leading directly from the entry, and furnished only with benches around the walls. There is no screen or other protection against the drafts rushing in every time the door is opened. When we enter the bathing-room we are confused by a babel of sounds—shrill voices of women, hoarse voices of attendants, wailing and yelping of children, and rushing of water. At the same time we are smitten by the heat of the room and nearly suffocated by clouds of steam. We find at last an empty bench, and surround ourselves with a semicircle of wooden pails, collected from all around the room. Sometimes two women in search of pails lay hold of the same pail at the same moment, and a wrangle ensues, in the course of which each disputant reminds the other of all her failings, nicknames, and undesirable connections, living, dead, and unborn; until an attendant interferes, with more muscle than argument, punctuating the sentence of justice with newly coined expletives suggested by the occasion. The centre of the room, where the bathers fill their pails at the faucets, is a field of endless battle, especially on a crowded day. The peaceful women seated within earshot stop their violent scrubbing, to the relief of unwilling children, while they attend to the liveliest of the quarrels. I like to watch the poll, that place of torture and heroic endurance. It is a series of steps rising to the ceiling, affording a gradually mounting temperature. The bather who wants to enjoy a violent sweating rests full length for a few minutes on each step, while an attendant administers several hearty strokes of a stinging besom. Sometimes a woman climbs too far, and is brought down in a faint. On the poll, also, the cupping is done. The back of the patient, with the cups in even rows, looks to me like a muffin pan. Of course I never go on the poll: I am not robust enough. My spankings I take at home. Another centre of interest is the mikweh, the name of which it is indelicate to mention in the hearing of men. It is a large pool of standing water, its depth graded by means of a flight of steps. Every married woman must perform here certain ceremonious ablutions at regular intervals. Cleanliness is as strictly enjoined as godliness, and the manner of attaining it is carefully prescribed. The women are prepared by the attendants for entering the pool, the curious children looking on. In the pool they are ducked over their heads the correct number of times. The water in the pool has been standing for days; it does not look nor smell fresh. But we had no germs in Polotzk, so no harm came of it, any more than of the pails used promiscuously by feminine Polotzk. If any were so dainty as to have second thoughts about the use of the common bath, they could enjoy, for a fee of twenty-five kopecks, a private bathtub in another part of the building. For the rich there were luxuries even in Polotzk. Cleansed, red-skinned, and steaming, we return at last to the dressing-room, to shiver, as we dress, in the cold drafts from the entry door; and then, muffled up to the eyes, we plunge into the refreshing outer air, and hurry home, looking like so many big bundles running away with smaller bundles. If we meet acquaintances on the way we are greeted with "zu refueh" ("to your good health"). If the first man we meet is a Gentile, the women who have been to the mikweh have to return and repeat the ceremony of purification. To prevent such a calamity, the kerchief is worn hooded over the eyes, so as to exclude unholy sights. At home we are indulged with extra pieces of cake for tea, and otherwise treated like heroes returned from victory. We narrate anecdotes of our expedition, and my mother complains that my little brother is getting too old to be taken to the women's bath. He will go hereafter with the men. <div class="fig">> <ANTIMG border="0" src="images/imagep098.jpg" width-obs="95%" alt="The Meat Market, Polotzk" /> THE MEAT MARKET, POLOTZKToList </div> My winter confinement was not shared by my older sister, who otherwise was my constant companion. She went out more than I, not being so afraid of the cold. She used to fret so when my mother was away in the store that it became a custom for her to accompany my mother from the time she was a mere baby. Muffled and rosy and frost-bitten, the tears of cold rolling unnoticed down her plump cheeks, she ran after my busy mother all day long, or tumbled about behind the counter, or nestled for a nap among the bulging sacks of oats and barley. She warmed her little hands over my mother's pot of glowing charcoal—there was no stove in the store—and even learned to stand astride of it, for further comfort, without setting her clothes on fire. Fetchke was like a young colt inseparable from the mare. I make this comparison not in disrespectful jest, but in deepest pity. Fetchke kept close to my mother at first for love and protection, but the petting she got became a blind for discipline. She learned early, from my mother's example, that hands and feet and brains were made for labor. She learned to bow to the yoke, to lift burdens, to do more for others than she could ever hope to have done for her in turn. She learned to see sugar plums lie around without asking for her share. When she was only fit to nurse her dolls, she learned how to comfort a weary heart. And all this while I sat warm and watched over at home, untouched by any discipline save such as I directly incurred by my own sins. I differed from Fetchke a little in age, considerably in health, and enormously in luck. It was my good luck, in the first place, to be born after her, instead of before; in the second place, to inherit, from the family stock, that particular assortment of gifts which was sure to mark me for special attentions, exemptions, and privileges; and as fortune always smiles on good fortune, it has ever been my luck, in the third place, to find something good in my idle hand—whether a sunbeam, or a loving heart, or a congenial task—whenever, on turning a corner, I put out my hand to see what my new world was like; while my sister, dear, devoted creature, had her hands so full of work that the sunbeam slipped, and the loving comrade passed out of hearing before she could straighten from her task, and all she had of the better world was a scented zephyr fanned in her face by the irresistible closing of a door. Perhaps Esau has been too severely blamed for selling his birthright for a mess of pottage. The lot of the firstborn is not necessarily to be envied. The firstborn of a well-to-do patriarch, like Isaac, or of a Rothschild of to-day, inherits, with his father's flocks and slaves and coffers, a troop of cares and responsibilities; unless he be a man without a sense of duty, in which case we are not supposed to envy him. The firstborn of an indigent father inherits a double measure of the disadvantages of poverty,—a joyless childhood, a guideless youth, and perhaps a mateless manhood, his own life being drained to feed the young of his father's begetting. If we cannot do away with poverty entirely, we ought at least to abolish the institution of primogeniture. Nature invented the individual, and promised him, as a reward for lusty being, comfort and immortality. Comes man with his patented brains and copyrighted notions, and levies a tax on the individual, in the form of enforced coöperation, for the maintenance of his pet institution, the family. Our comfort, in the grip of this tyranny, must lie in the hope that man, who is no bastard child of Mother Nature, may be approaching a more perfect resemblance to her majestic features; that his fitful development will culminate in a spiritual constitution capable of absolute justice. <hr style='width: 15%;' /> I think I was telling how I stayed at home in the winter, while my sister helped or hindered my mother in her store-keeping. The days drew themselves out too long sometimes, so that I sat at the window thinking what should happen next. No dolls, no books, no games, and at times no companions. My grandmother taught me knitting, but I never got to the heel of my stocking, because if I discovered a dropped stitch I insisted on unravelling all my work till I picked it up; and grandmother, instead of encouraging me in my love for perfection, lost patience and took away my knitting needles. I still maintain that she was in the wrong, but I have forgiven her, since I have worn many pairs of stockings with dropped stitches, and been grateful for them. And speaking of such everyday things reminds me of my friends, among whom also I find an impressive number with a stitch dropped somewhere in the pattern of their souls. I love these friends so dearly that I begin to think I am at last shedding my intolerance; for I remember the day when I could not love less than perfection. I and my imperfect friends together aspire to cast our blemishes, and I am happier so. There was not much to see from my window, yet adventures beckoned to me from the empty street. Sometimes the adventure was real, and I went out to act in it, instead of dreaming on my stool. Once, I remember, it was early spring, and the winter's ice, just chopped up by the street cleaners, lay muddy and ragged and high in the streets from curb to curb. So it must lie till there was time to cart it to the Dvina, which had all it could do at this season to carry tons, and heavy tons, of ice and snow and every sort of city rubbish, accumulated during the long closed months. Polotzk had no underground communication with the sea, save such as water naturally makes for itself. The poor old Dvina was hard-worked, serving both as drinking-fountain and sewer, as a bridge in winter, a highway in summer, and a playground at all times. So it served us right if we had to wait weeks and weeks in thawing time for our streets to be cleared; and we deserved all the sprains and bruises we suffered from clambering over the broken ice in the streets while going about our business. Leah the Short, little and straight and neat, with a basket on one arm and a bundle under the other, stood hesitating on the edge of the curb opposite my window. Her poor old face, framed in its calico kerchief, had a wrinkle of anxiety in it. The tumbled ice heap in the street looked to her like an impassable barrier. Tiny as she was, and loaded, she had reason to hesitate. Perhaps she had eggs in her basket,—I thought of that as I looked at her across the street; and I thought of my old ambition to measure myself, shoulder to shoulder, with Leah, reputedly short. I was small myself, and was constantly reminded of it by a variety of nicknames, lovingly or vengefully invented by my friends and enemies. I was called Mouse and Crumb and Poppy Seed. Should I live to be called, in my old age, Mashke the Short? I longed to measure my stature by Leah's, and here was my chance. I ran out into the street, my grandmother scolding me for going without a shawl, and I calling back to her to be sure and watch me. I skipped over the ice blocks like a goat, and offered my assistance to Leah the Short. With admirable skill and solicitude I guided her timid steps across the street, at the same time winking to my grandmother at the window, and pointing to my shoulder close to Leah's. Once on the safe sidewalk, the tiny woman thanked me and blessed me and praised me for a thoughtful child; and I watched her toddle away without the least stir of shame at my hypocrisy. She had convinced me that I was a good little girl, and I had convinced myself that I was not so very short. My chin was almost on a level with Leah's shoulder, and I had years ahead in which to elevate it. Grandma at the window was witness, and I was entirely happy. If I caught cold from going bareheaded, so much the better; mother would give me rock candy for my cough. For the long winter evenings there was plenty of quiet occupation. I liked to sit with the women at the long bare table picking feathers for new featherbeds. It was pleasant to poke my hand into the soft-heaped mass and set it all in motion. I pretended that I could pick out the feathers of particular hens, formerly my pets. I reflected that they had fed me with eggs and broth, and now were going to make my bed so soft; while I had done nothing for them but throw them a handful of oats now and then, or chase them about, or spoil their nests. I was not ashamed of my part; I knew that if I were a hen I should do as a hen does. I just liked to think about things in my idle way. Itke, the housemaid, was always the one to break in upon my reflections. She was sure to have a fit of sneezing just when the heap on the table was highest, sending clouds of feathers into the air, like a homemade snowstorm. After that the evening was finished by our picking the feathers from each other's hair. Sometimes we played cards or checkers, munching frost-bitten apples between moves. Sometimes the women sewed, and we children wound yarn or worsted for grandmother's knitting. If somebody had a story to tell while the rest worked, the evening passed with a pleasant sense of semi-idleness for all. On a Saturday night, the Sabbath being just departed, ghost stories were particularly in favor. After two or three of the creepy legends we began to move closer together under the lamp. At the end of an hour or so we started and screamed if a spool fell, or a window rattled. At bedtime nobody was willing to make the round of doors and windows, and we were afraid to bring a candle into a dark room. I was just as much afraid as anybody. I am afraid now to be alone in the house at night. I certainly was afraid that Saturday night when somebody, in bravado, suggested fresh-baked buns, as a charm to dispel the ghosts. The baker who lived next door always baked on Saturday night. Who would go and fetch the buns? Nobody dared to venture outdoors. It had snowed all evening; the frosted windows prevented a preliminary survey of the silent night. Brr-rr! Nobody would take the dare. Nobody but me. Oh, how the creeps ran up and down my back! and oh! how I loved to distinguish myself! I let them bundle me up till I was nearly smothered. I paused with my mittened hand on the latch. I shivered, though I could have sat the night out with a Polar bear without another shawl. I opened the door, and then turned back, to make a speech. "I am not afraid," I said, in the noble accents of courage. "I am not afraid to go. God goes with me." Pride goeth before a fall. On the step outside I slid down into a drift, just on the eve of triumph. They picked me up; they brought me in. They found all of me inside my wrappings. They gave me a piece of sugar and sent me to bed. And I was very glad. I did hate to go all the way next door and all the way back, through the white snow, under the white stars, invisible company keeping step with me. <hr style='width: 15%;' /> And I remember my playmates. There was always a crowd of us girls. We were a mixed set,—rich little girls, well-to-do little girls, and poor little girls,—but not because we were so democratic. Rather it came about, if my sister and I are considered the centre of the ring, because we had suffered the several grades of fortune. In our best days no little girls had to stoop to us; in our humbler days we were not so proud that we had to condescend to our chance neighbors. The granddaughters of Raphael the Russian, in retaining their breeding and manners, retained a few of their more exalted friends, and became a link between them and those whom they later adopted through force of propinquity. We were human little girls, so our amusements mimicked the life about us. We played house, we played soldiers, we played Gentiles, we celebrated weddings and funerals. We copied the life about us literally. We had not been to a Froebel kindergarten, and learned to impersonate butterflies and stones. Our elders would have laughed at us for such nonsense. I remember once standing on the river bank with a little boy, when a quantity of lumber was floating down on its way to the distant sawmill. A log and a board crowded each other near where we stood. The board slipped by first, but presently it swerved and swung partly around. Then it righted itself with the stream and kept straight on, the lazy log following behind. Said Zalmen to me, interpreting: "The board looks back and says, 'Log, log, you will not go with me? Then I will go on by myself.'" That boy was called simple, on account of such speeches as this. I wonder in what language he is writing poetry now. We had very few toys. Neither Fetchke nor I cared much for dolls. A rag baby apiece contented us, and if we had a set of jackstones we were perfectly happy. Our jackstones, by the way, were not stones but bones. We used the knuckle bones of sheep, dried and scraped; every little girl cherished a set in her pocket. I did not care much for playing house. I liked soldiers better, but it was not much fun without boys. Boys and girls always played apart. I was very fond of playing Gentiles. I am afraid I liked everything that was a little risky. I particularly enjoyed being the corpse in a Gentile funeral. I was laid across two chairs, and my playmates, in borrowed shawls and long calicoes, with their hair loose and with candlesticks in their hands, marched around me, singing unearthly songs, and groaning till they scared themselves. As I lay there, covered over with a black cloth, I felt as dead as dead could be; and my playmates were the unholy priests in gorgeous robes of velvet and silk and gold. Their candlesticks were the crosiers that were carried in Christian funeral processions, and their chantings were hideous incantations to the arch enemy, the Christian God of horrible images. As I imagined the bareheaded crowds making way for my funeral to pass, my flesh crept, not because I was about to be buried, but because the people crossed themselves. But our procession stopped outside the church, because we did not dare to carry even our make-believe across that accursed threshold. Besides, none of us had ever been inside,—God forbid!—so we did not know what did happen next. When I arose from my funeral I was indeed a ghost. I felt unreal and lost and hateful. I don't think we girls liked each other much after playing funeral. Anyway, we never played any more on the same day; or if we did, we soon quarrelled. Such was the hold which our hereditary terrors and hatreds had upon our childish minds that if we only mocked a Christian procession in our play, we suffered a mutual revulsion of feeling, as if we had led each other into sin. We gathered oftener at our house than anywhere else. On Sabbath days we refrained, of course, from soldiering and the like, but we had just as good a time, going off to promenade, two and two, in our very best dresses; whispering secrets and telling stories. We had a few stories in the circle—I do not know how they came to us—and these were told over and over. Gutke knew the best story of all. She told the story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, and she told it well. It was her story, and nobody else ever attempted it, though I, for one, soon had it by heart. Gutke's version of the famous tale was unlike any I have since read, but it was essentially the story of Aladdin, so that I was able to identify it later when I found it in a book. Names, incidents, and "local color" were slightly Hebraized, but the supernatural wonders of treasure caves, jewelled gardens, genii, princesses, and all, were not in the least marred or diminished. Gutke would spin the story out for a long afternoon, and we all listened entranced, even at the hundredth rehearsal. We had a few other fairy stories,—I later identified them with stories of Grimm's or of Andersen's,—but for the most part the tales we told were sombre and unimaginative; tales our nurses used to tell to frighten us into good behavior. Sometimes we spent a whole afternoon in dancing. We made our own music, singing as we danced, or somebody blew on a comb with a bit of paper over its teeth; and comb music is not to be despised when there is no other sort. We knew the polka and the waltz, the mazurka, the quadrille, and the lancers, and several fancy dances. We did not hesitate to invent new steps or figures, and we never stopped till we were out of breath. I was one of the most enthusiastic dancers. I danced till I felt as if I could fly. Sometimes we sat in a ring and sang all the songs we knew. None of us were trained,—we had never seen a sheet of music—but some of us could sing any tune that was ever heard in Polotzk, and the others followed half a bar behind. I enjoyed these singing-bees. We had Hebrew songs and Jewish and Russian; solemn songs, and jolly songs, and songs unfit for children, but harmless enough on our innocent lips. I enjoyed the play of moods in these songs—I liked to be harrowed one minute and tickled the next. I threw all my heart into the singing, which was only fair, as I had very little voice to throw in. Although I always joined the crowd when any fun was on foot, I think I had the best times by myself. My sister was fond of housework, but I—I was fond of idleness. While Fetchke pottered in the kitchen beside the maid or trotted all about the house after my grandmother, I wasted time in some window corner, or studied the habits of the cow and the chickens in the yard. I always found something to do that was of no use to anybody. I had no particular fondness for animals; I liked to see what they did, merely because they were curious. The red cow would go to meet my grandmother as she came out of the kitchen with a bucket of bran for her. She drank it up in no time, the greedy creature, in great loud gulps; and then she stood with dripping nostrils over the empty bucket, staring at me on the other side. I teased grandmother to give the cow more, because I enjoyed her enjoyment of it. I wondered, if I ate from a bucket instead of a plate, should I take so much more pleasure in my dinner? That red cow liked everything. She liked going to pasture, and she liked coming back, and she stood still to be milked, as if she liked that too. The chickens were not all alike. Some of them would not let me catch them, while others stood still till I took them up. There were two that were particularly tame, a white hen and a speckled one. In winter, when they were kept in the house, my sister and I had these two for our pets. They let us handle them by the hour, and stayed just where we put them. The white hen laid her eggs in a linen chest made of bark. We would take the warm egg to grandmother, who rolled it on our eyes, repeating this charm: "As this egg is fresh, so may your eyes be fresh. As this egg is sound, so may your eyes be sound." I still like to touch my eyelids with a fresh-laid egg, whenever I am so happy as to possess one. On the horses in the barn I bestowed the same calm attention as on the cow, speculative rather than affectionate. I was not a very tender-hearted infant. If I have been a true witness of my own growth, I was slower to love than I was to think. I do not know when the change was wrought, but to-day, if you ask my friends, they will tell you that I know how to love them better than to solve their problems. And if you will call one more witness, and ask me, I shall say that if you set me down before a noble landscape, I feel it long before I begin to see it. Idle child though I was, the day was not long enough sometimes for my idleness. More than once in the pleasant summer I stole out of bed when even the cow was still drowsing, and went barefoot through the dripping grass and stood at the gate, awaiting the morning. I found a sense of adventure in being conscious when all other people were asleep. There was not much of a prospect from the gateway, but in that early hour everything looked new and large to me, even the little houses that yesterday had been so familiar. The houses, when creatures went in and out of them, were merely conventional objects; in the soft gray morning they were themselves creatures. Some stood up straight, and some leaned, and some looked as if they saw me. And then over the dewy gardens rose the sun, and the light spread and grew over everything, till it shone on my bare feet. And in my heart grew a great wonder, and I was ready to cry, my world was so strange and sweet about me. In those moments, I think, I could have loved somebody as well as I loved later—somebody who cared to get up secretly, and stand and see the sun come up. Was there not somebody who got up before the sun? Was there not Mishka the shepherd? Aye, that was an early riser; but I knew he was no sun-worshipper. Before the chickens stirred, before the lazy maid let the cow out of the barn, I heard his rousing horn, its distant notes harmonious with the morning. Barn doors creaked in response to Mishka's call, and soft-eyed cattle went willingly out to meet him, and stood in groups in the empty square, licking and nosing each other; till Mishka's little drove was all assembled, and he tramped out of town behind them, in a cloud of dust. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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