He was a penniless beggar. In grandfather"s picturesque language, "he had no money; instead of which he bore the reproach of Christ. He found other men"s charity....
"All his life he wandered towards Bethlehem. He used to say he pilgrimaged not towards Calvary, but towards Bethlehem. The thought that the Roman officials had treated Christ as a thief was too much for him to bear.
"He who possessed all things they treated as one who had stolen a little thing...."
The old man paused at this digression, and stared around him with an expression of terror and stupefaction.
There was a silence.
"Go on, Jeremy," said some one impatiently.
Jeremy proceeded.
"He always journeyed towards Bethlehem, and whenever he saw a little child, a little baby, he would say to the mother that it foretold him what it would be like for him at the Holy Land. And of the cradles he would always say they were just the shape of the manger where the baby Christ was laid.
"He was very dear to mothers, you may be sure, and he never lacked their blessing.
"He travelled very slowly, for in Moscow a motor-car ran over his foot, and he always needed a strong staff. He was ill-treated sometimes in the towns, where the dogs bit him and the street children aimed stones. But he never took offence. He smiled, and thought how little his sufferings had been compared with those of the saints.
"So he grew old.
""You are old, grandfather; you will never reach Jerusalem," the peasant women told him. But he always smiled and said, "As G.o.d wills.
Perhaps if I die I shall see it sooner."
"And he died, poor, wretched, uncared for, in the streets of a little village near Odessa, and children came and beat off the hungry dogs from his body with sticks.
""What is this?" said one policeman to another.
""A _Bogo-moletz_ (G.o.d-prayer) dead, that"s all," was the reply.
""No money?"
""None. If he had any his pockets have been picked."
"By his pa.s.sport he belonged to Petchora province, far away. No one knew him. No one claimed him.
""It means he must be buried at the public expense," said the head man of the village, and spat upon the ground.
"In the whole village only the coffin maker rejoiced, and he had small cause, since a pauper"s coffin costs but a shilling.
""He must be buried on the common," said the head man. "There"s no room in the churchyard."
""But a pilgrim," said an objector. "You must bury him in consecrated ground; you can"t shut him out of the Heavenly Kingdom."
""No matter. Ask the priest. If the dead man can pay for a plot of ground for a grave, well and good; or if the villagers will subscribe...."
"The head man looked at the little crowd a.s.sembled. They were a poor and needy crowd. No one answered him. Then, without doing any more, the head man walked away, and the dead body remained in the street.
"It seemed no one would pay for the grave, but in the afternoon a woman who lived on the outskirts came and claimed the pilgrim as a distant relative. He could scarcely have been a relative, except inasmuch as we are all descended from Adam.
"The head man and the village priest rejoiced, and the woman took the dead body home and washed it, and clothed it in white linen, and she ordered a three-rouble coffin covered with purple cloth.
"But she was a very poor woman, and when she had paid for the grave she had no money to pay for singers and for prayers.
""G.o.d will have mercy," she said. "And belike he was a good man, a pilgrim."
"And that woman was a virgin," added Jeremy abruptly and, as I thought, irrelevantly. But the chambers of that old man"s mind were strangely furnished.
"She was a virgin. What remains to be said? She hired a man to dig a grave, and another to wheel the barrow with the coffin. She had no friends who would follow the coffin with her, but in the main street she found a cripple whom she had once befriended, and two little boys who liked to sing the funeral chant.
"Thus the old pilgrim was taken to the grave, and in his honour a simple woman, two street children, and a cripple followed his corse."
There was a long pause.
"You think he died," old Jeremy went on. "Oh, no; he did not die, he only went on more quickly. When he fell down dead in the street his soul suddenly began a new life, a life like a dream. Whilst the dogs were barking and snapping at his old legs he suddenly saw in front of him in the darkness a great bright star beckoning him, and in his new life he got up from the road and rushed towards that star--rushed, for he felt young again, younger than any boy, and all the lameness and tiredness were pa.s.sed away.
"Suddenly, in front of him, and coming to meet him, he saw a horse, draped all in silk, and attendants. A man came up to him and saluted him, offered him a crown, and bade him rise up upon the horse. He sat upon the horse, and, looking at himself, saw that he was dressed in cloth of gold. Behind him was a great train of attendants, carrying gifts. And they all journeyed forward, towards the star.
"Eh, brothers," said Jeremy, looking round, "what a change in the estate of our poor friend! He has now become one of the first, because on earth he was one of the last. He is a king."
The listeners were all silent, and the narrator enjoyed a triumph.
Jeremy"s cracked old voice went on, and now again somewhat irrelevantly. "And the woman, who was a virgin, conceived and bore a child, and she was so poor that the child was laid in a manger. And three kings arrived, bearing precious gifts, and they did homage unto the child. It was at Bethlehem. One of these kings was the poor pilgrim who died on his way to the Holy Land."
"What woman was this?" said the visitor contemptuously. "Your wits are wandering, old man. Do you mean it was the same woman who buried him?"
"The same," said Jeremy huskily, "only in a different world. There are other worlds, you know. But it is very true. He came as one of the kings. And the woman now has a beautiful child. She knows.... So we shan"t be very sad about Mikhail. I think he also to-day is following that star, and will be at Bethlehem to-night."
"Only it doesn"t happen to be Christmas Eve," said the sceptical visitor.
"Eh, hey," said another pilgrim, breaking in, "there"s a man--he doesn"t know that it is Christmas every day in the year at Bethlehem."
IV
THE WANDERER"S STORY
I. MY COMPANION
When star pa.s.ses star once in a thousand years, or perhaps once in the forever, and does not meet again, what a tale has each to tell! So with tramps and wanderers when two meet upon the road, what a tale of life is due from one to the other. Many tramps have I met in the world. Far from the West I have met those who came far from the East, and men have pa.s.sed me coming from the South, and men from the North.
And sometimes men have suddenly appeared on my way as if they had fallen from the sky, or as if they had started up out of the earth.