McClure's Magazine/Volume 2/Number 2/The Sabbath-Breaker

HE moment came near for the Polish centenarian grandmother to die. From the doctor’s statement it appeared she had only a bad quarter of an hour to live. Her attack had been sudden, and the grandchildren she loved to scold could not be present.

She had already battled through the great wave of pain, and was drifting beyond the boundaries of her earthly refuge. The nurses, forgetting the trouble her querulousness and overweening dietary scruples had cost them, hung over the bed on which the shrivelled entity lay. They did not know that she was living again through the one great episode of her life.

Nearly forty years back, when (though already hard upon seventy, and a widow) a Polish village was all her horizon, she received a letter. It arrived on the eve of Sabbath, on a day of rainy summer. It was from her little boy—her only boy—who kept a country inn thirty-seven miles away, and had a family. She opened the letter with feverish anxiety. Her son—her kaddish—was the apple of her eye. The grandmother eagerly perused the Hebrew script, from right to left. Then weakness overcame her, and she nearly fell.

Embedded casually enough in the four pages was a passage that stood out for her in letters of blood. “I am not feeling very well lately; the weather is so oppressive, and the nights are misty. But it is nothing serious; my digestion is a little out of order, that’s all.” There were rubles for her in the letter, but she let them fall to the floor unheeded. Panic, fear, travelling quicker than the tardy post of those days, had brought rumor of a sudden outbreak of cholera in her son’s district. Already alarm for her boy had surged about her heart all day; the letter confirmed her worst apprehensions. Even if the first touch of the cholera-fiend was not actually on him when he wrote, still he was, by his own confession, in that condition in which the disease takes easiest grip. By this time he was on a bed of sickness—nay, perhaps on his death-bed, if not dead. Even in those days the little grandmother had lived beyond the common span; she had seen many people die, and knew that the Angel of Death does not go about his work leisurely. In an epidemic his hands are too full to enable him to devote much attention to each case. Maternal instinct tugged at her heart-strings, drawing her towards her boy. The end of the letter seemed impregnated with special omen: “Come and see me soon, dear little mother; I shall be unable to get to you for some time.” Yes, she must go at once; who knew but that it would be the last time she would look upon his face?

But then came a terrible thought to give her pause. The Sabbath was just “in” a moment ago. Driving, riding, or any manner of journeying was prohibited during the next twenty-four hours. Frantically she reviewed the situation. Religion permitted the violation of the Sabbath on one condition—if life was to be saved. By no stretch of logic could she delude herself into the belief that her son’s recovery hinged upon her presence; nay, analyzing the case with the cruel remorselessness of a scrupulous conscience, she saw his very illness was only a plausible hypothesis. No; to go to him now were, beyond question, to profane the Sabbath.

And yet, beneath all the reasoning, her conviction that he was sick unto death, her resolve to set out at once, never wavered. After an agonizing struggle she compromised. She could not go by cart; that would be to make others work, into the bargain, and would, moreover, involve a financial transaction. She must walk! Sinful as it was to transgress the limit of two thousand yards beyond her village, the distance fixed by rabbinical law, there was no help for it. And of all the forms of travelling, walking was surely the least sinful. The Holy One, blessed be he, would know she did not mean to work; perhaps in his mercy he would make allowance for an old woman who had never profaned his rest-day before.

And so, that very evening, having made a hasty meal, and lodged the precious letter in her bosom, the little grandmother girded up her loins to walk the seven and thirty miles. No staff took she with her, for to carry such came under the Talmudical definition of “work.” Neither could she carry an umbrella, though it was a season of rain. Mile after mile she strode briskly towards the pallid face which lay so far beyond the horizon, and yet ever shone before her eyes like a guiding star. “I am coming, my lamb,” she muttered. “The little mother is on the way.”

It was a muggy night. The sky, flushed with a weird hectic glamour, seemed to hang over the earth like a pall. The trees that lined the roadway were shrouded in a draggling vapor. At midnight the mist blotted out the stars. But the little grandmother knew the road ran straight. All night she walked through the forest, fearless as Una, meeting neither man nor beast, though the wolf and the bear haunted its recesses, and snakes lurked in the bushes. But only the innocent squirrels darted across her path. The morning found her spent and almost lame. But she walked on. Almost half the journey was yet to do.

She had nothing with her to eat; food, too, was an illegal burden, nor could she buy any on the holy day. She said her Sabbath-morning prayer walking, hoping God would forgive the disrespect. The recital gave her partial oblivion of her pains. As she passed through a village the dreadful rumor of cholera was confirmed. It gave wings to her feet for ten minutes; then bodily weakness was stronger than everything else, and she had to lean against the bushes on the outskirts of the village. It was nearly noon. A passing beggar gave her a piece of bread. Fortunately it was unbuttered, so she could eat it with only minor qualms, lest it had touched any unclean thing. She resumed her journey, but the rest had only made her feet move painfully and reluctantly. She would have liked to bathe them in a brook, but that, too, was forbidden. She took the letter from her bosom and reperused it, and whipped up her flagging strength with a cry of “Courage, my lamb, the little mother is on the way.” Then the leaden clouds melted into sharp lines of rain, which beat into her face, refreshing her for the first few minutes, but soon wetting her to the skin, making her sopped garments a heavier burden, and reducing the pathway to mud that clogged still further her feeble footsteps. In the teeth of the wind and the driving shower she limped on. <A fresh anxiety consumed her now—would she have strength to hold out? Every moment her pace lessened; she was moving like a snail. And the slower she went, the more vivid grew her prescience of what awaited her at the journey’s end. Would she even hear his dying word? Perhaps—terrible thought—she would only be in time to look upon his dead face! Perhaps that was how God would punish her for her desecration of the holy day. “Take heart, my lamb,” she wailed, “do not die yet. The little mother comes.”

The rain stopped. The sun came out, hot and fierce, and dried her hands and face, then made them stream again with perspiration. Every inch won was torture now, but the brave feet toiled on. Bruised and swollen and crippled, they toiled on. There was a dying voice—very far off yet, alas—that called to her; and, as she dragged herself along, she cried: “I am coming,my lamb. Take heart! The little mother is on the way. Courage! I shall look upon thy face. I shall find thee alive.”

Once a wagoner observed her plight and offered her a lift, but she shook her head steadfastly. The endless afternoon wore on: she crawled along the forest way, stumbling every now and then from sheer faintness, and tearing her hands and face in the brambles of the roadside. At last the cruel sun waned, and reeking mists rose from the forest pools. And still the long miles stretched away, and still she plodded on, torpid from over-exertion, scarcely conscious, taking each step only because she had taken the preceding. From time to time her lips mumbled: “Take heart, my lamb, I am coming.” The Sabbath was “out” ere, broken and bleeding, and all but swooning, the little grandmother crawled up to her son’s inn, on the border of the forest. Her heart was cold with fatal foreboding. There was none of the usual Saturday night litter of Polish peasantry about the door. The sound of many voices, weirdly intonating [sic] a Hebrew hymn, floated out into the night. A man in a caftan opened the door, and mysteriously raised his forefinger to bid her enter without noise. The little grandmother saw into the room behind. Her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren were seated on the floor—the seat of mourners.

“Blessed be the true judge,” she said, and rent the skirt of her dress. “When did he die?”

“Yesterday. We had to bury him hastily ere the Sabbath came in.”

The little grandmother lifted up her quavering voice and joined the hymn: “I will sing a new song unto thee, O God! Upon a harp of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee.”

The nurses could not understand what sudden inflow of strength and impulse raised the mummified figure into a sitting posture. The little grandmother thrust a shrivelled claw into her peaked, shrunken bosom, and drew out a paper, crumpled and yellow as herself, covered with strange, crabbed hieroglyphics, whose hue had long since faded. She held it close to her bleared eyes; a beautiful light came into them and illumined the million-puckered face. The lips moved faintly: “I am coming, my lamb,” she mumbled. “Courage! The little mother is on the way. I shall look on thy face. I shall find thee alive.”