Hadassah in Palestine
REB YISROEL was glad to put up his three stout horses. He had been pitying them all through the long, hot, windy afternoon, as they ploughed through the deep sand in the Vale of Sharon. Not in words. Words might have pained his passengers. Horses are precious, but not precious enough for men to inflict pain on men on their account. And words are so troublesome, so hard to put together in sentences. The pity shone from his small, beady eyes, and through his thick yellow skin, and it lay in the heavy creases from nostril to mouth under his beard. He pitied his travellers too. How could he expect them to climb down every whip-stitch from the lumbering, high-wheeled wagon, only that he might drive easily through the soft bogs? So he made great detours around the marshy spots. And then he pitied his horses all the more for the lengthened way.
Toward himself he was relentless, the wiry little old Jew. No exertion was too great for him to please those he liked. From afar he espied the flowers coveted by the enthusiastic botanist behind him. He would swing himself down lightly from his lofty perch in front, run sideways through the heavy dunes, snatch up the flowers with both hands, and lay them gently in her lap. She was aged as years tell age, but she looked out upon that new-old world through wonderfully young, comprehending eyes, wonderfully serene, clear blue eyes.
There had been compensations for the troubles of the road. Reb Jehudah, the lithe young orange grower, knew all the new Hebrew ditties. He would break out into merry snatches of song. He would softly croon the cradle songs. He would trill and warble and jubilate to the amazement of the stolid burnoused Arab horsemen passing by. And Reb Yisroel’s eyes shone—there was the Young Palestine he loved! Blessed be God that He had let him survive to behold it. The other Reb Yisroel, the younger one, who sat behind, the swarthy captain of the Shomerim, the cicerone of the party, told tales, tales of to-day, of yesterday, of long ago—of outrages, of bravery, of endurance. He knew the chronicles of the colonists and the legends of the Bedouins. 116 told about the caravan drivers with long lines of untethered camels from far beyond the Jordan to the eastward, carrying their wares to the sea—how they even yet called the Jews the Bene Israel, and believed the Jews still had a king sitting on the throne in Jerusalem, For them no time had passed since Solomon’s argosies sailed into the port of Ezion-geber. And Reb Yisroel talked on, about the haughty Arab Jewish tribes, about the Te- manite scholars and poets, about the failures and fortunes of the Bilu. Reb Yisroel the elder, in front, chuckled by way of approval and grunted and delicately flicked his whip across his horses’ flanks. Sometimes he would fall into silence and inactivity. That meant dissent. Not in words. Words are sword thrusts. They hide one’s real meaning, too. As pity shone from his countenance, so scorn and anger oozed from his curved back. That was Reb Mendel’s signal. With a gleeful laugh he struck up a Hasidic song. Reb Yisroel rocked himself to the rhythm of the rollicking tune, and his bad humor had flown.
It is good to sit behind one’s horses with a fair company filling the wagon and let the eye rove from side to side and take in the dreamy haze of blue and pink and purple held in solution in the crystal-clear Palestinian atmosphere—a ravishing, opaline clearness. The young Palestinian farmers, peering out and scanning the horizon anxiously in the intervals of their swift-moving talk, would gladly have seen it marred in those Heshwan days by a cloud “as small as a man’s hand.”
Reb Yisroel in front was troubled by nothing but his horses’ needs, and he was content when he spied the first orange grove of the village beyond and its water works. They meant refreshment for his faithful horses. The passengers and their desire for food and rest were forgotten. The horses drank and drank and let the cool water drip voluptuously from their soft nozzles. Then, to make up for his disregard of the humans’ comfort, and incidentally to show off his beloved horses, Reb Yisroel dashed and jolted through the village to the inn at the far end. . .
After the hot dusty ride it was restful to stand in the doorway and look lazily out beyond the vine-clad veranda, toward the street, through the avenue of trimmed bushes. From down below the voices of children at play in the school yard came floating in. The workmen were returning leisurely from the fields, their implements slung across their shoulders. ..
Suddenly the air became thick, suffocating. <A heavy dull orange glow in the sky threw a pall of darkness on all the earth bore. The trees rose heavenward, solemn, black, forbiddingly distinct spires. The little houses back of the fenced gardens were dark blotches, the distant orange groves a huge blackness on the horizon. Blackness everywhere. Only the air was portentously light, light without brightness. There was nothing but dark and light, both awesome. Save for the menacing orange glow in the sky there was no color anywhere.
Within it was insufferably dark and quiet. The young tired workmen around the table spoke seldom, and only in brief, abrupt sentences—interjectional and unaccountably sad. Something oppressed them, something more than the evening’s fatigue. With an effort Reb Yisroel the younger started to tell of the new Shomerim organization. His speech was a lull in the silence. But even his fervor was quenched by the pervasive sadness. He fell silent, too.
It was insupportable. A turn in the trim garden might bring relief. Again the eye met only heavy darkness on leaf and hedge, and the ears a heavy silence, except for the sounds of a cornet, orange-colored sounds from the house at the head of the street. The children’s voices were hushed. The street was deserted. Were there sad and silent groups in all the houses?
No color anywhere except the orange in the sky and in the notes of the cornet, but in the thick black hedge that divided the garden from the fields stretching away to the orange groves against the horizon, something gleamed—a single still, pure, white myrtle blossom. Hadassah! Was it a belated blossom? Was it a precocious herald of spring? If only the tired workmen inside would come and look at it! Their unexplainable weariness and hopelessness would drop away from them. It would make Reb Mendel sing a merry Hasidic song, and they all would be happy again. . .