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‘Goy-Fox was yesterday,’ she shouted with wrath and slammed the door on my heart; and I sat down on the pavement without, and I became a pillar of salt, all frozen tears. But when I looked up, I saw the Angel of the Lord.

CHAPTER III

THE PICTURE EVOLVES

Such was my model’s simple narrative, the homely realism of which appealed to me on my most imaginative side, for through all its sordid details stood revealed to me the tragedy of the Wandering Jew. Was it Heine or another who said ‘The people of Christ is the Christ of peoples’? At any rate, such was the idea that began to take possession of me as I painted away at the sorrow-haunted face of my much-tried model–to paint, not the Christ that I had started out to paint, but the Christ incarnated in a race, suffering–and who knew that He did not suffer over again?–in its Passion. Yes, Israel Quarriar could still be my model, but after another conception altogether.

It was an idea that called for no change in what I had already done. For I had worked mainly upon the head, and now that I purposed to clothe the figure in its native gaberdine, there would be little to re-draw. And so I fell to work with renewed intensity, feeling even safer now that I was painting and interpreting a real thing than when I was trying to reconstruct retrospectively the sacred figure that had walked in Galilee.

And no sooner had I fallen to work on this new conception than I found everywhere how old it was. It appeared even to have Scriptural warrant, for from a brief report of a historical-theological lecture by a Protestant German Professor I gleaned that many of the passages in the Prophets which had been interpreted as pointing to a coming Messiah, really applied to Israel, the people. Israel it was whom Isaiah, in that famous fifty-third chapter, had described as ‘despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows.’ Israel it was who bore the sins of the world. ‘He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.’ Yes, Israel was the Man of Sorrows. And in this view the German Professor, I found, was only re-echoing Rabbinic opinion. My model proved a mine of lore upon this as upon so many other points. Even the Jewish expectation of the Messiah, he had never shared, he said–that the Messhiach would come riding upon a white ass. Israel would be redeemed by itself, though his neighbours would have called the sentiment ‘epicurean.’

‘Whoever saves me is my Messhiach,’ he declared suddenly, and plucked at my hand to kiss it.

‘Now, you shock me,’ I said, pushing him away.

‘No, no,’ he said; ‘I agree with the word of the moujik: “the good people are God.”‘

‘Then I suppose you are what is called a Zionist,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he replied; ‘now that you have saved me, I see that God works only through men. As for the Messhiach on the white ass, they do not really believe it, but they won’t let another believe otherwise. For my own part, when I say the prayer, “Blessed be Thou who restorest the dead to life,” I always mean it of you.’

Such Oriental hyperbolic gratitude would have satisfied the greediest benefactor, and was infinitely in excess of what he owed me. He seemed unconscious that he was doing work, journeying punctually long miles to my studio in any and every weather. It is true that I early helped him to redeem his household gods, but could I do less for a man who had still no bed to sleep in?

My recovery of the Rotterdam bundle served to unveil further complications. The agents at the East End charged him three shillings and sixpence per letter, and conducted the business with a fine legal delay. But it was not till Kazelia was eulogized by one of these gentry as a very fine man that both the model and I grew suspicious that the long chain of roguery reached even unto London, and that the confederates on this side were playing for time, so that the option should expire, and the railway sell the unredeemed luggage, which they would doubtless buy in cheap, making another profit.