Then I went joyfully to the door, but lo! it was bolted. So I
knocked and knocked, and at last a woman came from above, and told me
he lived in that road in Hove, where I found indeed my redeemer, but
not my _Landsmann_. It was a great house, with steps up and steps
down. I went down to a great door, and there came out a beautiful
heathen female with a shining white cap on her head and a shining
white apron, and she drove me away.

'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