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Holy Wedlock
by
‘There is no reason why you should take my money,’ he said with an artistic inspiration, ‘but there is every reason why I should buy to myself the Mitzvah (good deed) of sending you to Jerusalem. You see, I have so few good deeds to my credit.’
‘So I have heard,’ replied Yossel placidly. ‘A very wicked life it is said you lead at Rome.’
‘Most true,’ said the artist cheerfully.
‘It is said also that you break the Second Commandment by making representations of things that are on sea and land.’
‘I would the critics admitted as much,’ murmured the artist.
‘Your grandmother does not understand. She thinks you paint houses–which is not forbidden. But I don’t undeceive her–it would pain her too much.’ The lover-like sentiment brought back the artist’s alarm.
‘When will you be ready to start?’ he said.
Yossel pondered. ‘But to die in Palestine one must live in Palestine,’ he said. ‘I cannot be certain that God would take my soul the moment I set foot on the holy soil.’
The artist reflected a moment, but scarcely felt rich enough to guarantee that Yossel should live in Palestine, especially if he were an unconscionably long time a-dying. A happy thought came to him. ‘But there is the Chalukah,’ he reminded Yossel.
‘But that is charity.’
‘No–it is not charity, it is a sort of university endowment. It is just to support such old students as you that these sums are sent from all the world over. The prayers and studies of our old men in Jerusalem are a redemption to all Israel. And yours would be to me in particular.’
‘True, true,’ said Yossel eagerly; ‘and life is very cheap there, I have always heard.’
‘Then it is a bargain,’ slipped unwarily from the artist’s tongue. But Yossel replied simply:
‘May the blessings of the Eternal be upon you for ever and for ever, and by the merit of my prayers in Jerusalem may your sins be forgiven.’
The artist was moved. Surely, he thought, struggling between tears and laughter, no undesirable lover had ever thus been got rid of by the head of the family. Not to speak of an undesirable grandfather.
IV
The news that Yossel was leaving the village bound for the Holy Land, produced a sensation which quite obscured his former notoriety as an aspirant to wedlock. Indeed, those who discussed the new situation most avidly forgot how convinced they had been that marriage and not death was the hunchback’s goal. How Yossel had found money for the great adventure was not the least interesting ingredient in the cup of gossip. It was even whispered that the grandmother herself had been tapped. Her skittish advances had been taken seriously by Yossel. He had boldly proposed to lead her under the Canopy, but at this point, it was said, the old lady had drawn back–she who had led him so far was not to be thus led. Women are changeable, it is known, and even when they are old they do not change. But Yossel had stood up for his rights; he had demanded compensation. And his fare to Palestine was a concession for his injured affections. It was not many days before the artist met persons who had actually overheard the bargaining between the Bube and the hunchback.
Meantime Yossel’s departure was drawing nigh, and all those who had relatives in Palestine besieged him from miles around, plying him with messages, benedictions, and even packages for their kinsfolk. And conversely, there was scarcely a Jewish inhabitant who had not begged for clods of Palestine earth or bottles of Jordan water. So great indeed were the demands that their supply would have constituted a distinct invasion of the sovereign rights of the Sultan, and dried up the Jordan.
With his grandmother’s future thus off his mind, the artist had settled down to making a picture of the ruined castle which he commanded from his bedroom window. But when the through ticket for Jerusalem came from the agent at Vienna, and he had brazenly endured Yossel’s blessings for the same, his artistic instinct demanded to see how the Bube was taking her hero’s desertion. As he lifted the latch he heard her voice giving orders, and the door opened, not on the peaceful scene he expected of the spinster at her ingle nook, but of a bustling and apparently rejuvenated old lady supervising a packing menial. The greatest shock of all was that this menial proved to be Yossel himself squatted on the floor, his crutches beside him. Almost as in guilty confusion the hunchback hastily closed the sheet containing a huddle of articles, and tied it into a bundle before the artist’s chaotic sense of its contents could change into clarity. But instantly a flash of explanation came to him.