A few afternoons later the Red Beadle, his patched garments pathetically spruced up, came to see his friends, goaded by the news of Hulda's illness. There was no ruddiness in his face, the lips of which were pressed together in defiance of a cruel and credulous world. ThatNature in making herself should have produced creatures who attributed their creation elsewhere, and who refused to allow her one acknowledger to make boots, was indeed a proof, albeit vexatious, of her blind workings.
When he saw what she had done to Hulda and to Zussmann, his lips were pressed tighter, but as much to keep back a sob as to express extra resentment.
But on parting he could not help saying to Zussmann, who accompanied him to the dark spider-webbed landing, "Your God has forgotten you."
"Do you mean that men have forgotten Him?" replied Zussmann. "If I am come to poverty, my suffering is in the scheme of things. Do you not remember what the Almighty says to Eleazar ben Pedos, in the Talmud, when the Rabbi complains of poverty? 'Wilt thou be satisfied if I overthrow the universe, so that perhaps thou mayest be created again in a time of plenty?' No, no, my friend, we must trust the scheme."
"But the fools enjoy prosperity," said the Red Beadle.
"It is only a fool whowouldenjoy prosperity," replied Zussmann. "If the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes flourish, that is just the very condition of virtue. What! would you have righteousness always pay and wickedness always fail! Where then would be the virtue in virtue? It would be a mere branch of commerce. Do you forget what the Chassid said of the man who foreknew in his lifetime that for him there was to be no heaven? 'What a unique and enviable chance that man had of doing right without fear of reward!'"
The Red Beadle, as usual, acquiesced in the idea that he had forgotten these quotations from the Hebrew, but to acquiesce in their teachings was another matter. "A man who had no hope of heaven would be a fool not to enjoy himself," he said doggedly, and went downstairs, hisheart almost bursting. He went straight to his old synagogue, where he knew aHespedor funeral service on a famousMaggid(preacher) was to be held. He could scarcely get in, so dense was the throng. Not a few eyes, wet with tears, were turned angrily on him as on a mocker come to gloat, but he hastened to weep too, which was easy when he thought of Hulda coughing in her bed in the garret. So violently did he weep that theGabbaior treasurer—one of the most pious master-bootmakers—gave him the "Peace" salutation after the service.
"I did not expect to see you weeping," said he.
"Alas!" answered the Red Beadle. "It is not only the fallen Prince in Israel that I weep; it is my own transgressions that are brought home to me by his sudden end. How often have I heard him thunder and lighten from this very pulpit!" He heaved a deep sigh at his own hypocrisy, and theGabbaisighed in response. "Even from the grave theTsaddik(saint) works good," said the pious master-bootmaker. "May my latter end be like his!"
"Mine, too!" suspired the Red Beadle. "How blessed am I not to have been cut off in my sin, denying the Maker of Nature!" They walked along the street together.
The next morning, at the luncheon-hour, a breathless Beadle, with a red beard and a very red face, knocked joyously at the door of the Herz garret.
"I am in work again," he explained.
"Mazzeltov!" Zussmann gave him the Hebrew congratulation, but softly, with finger on lip, to indicate Hulda was asleep. "With whom?"
"Harris theGabbai."
"Harris! What, despite your opinions?"
The Red Beadle looked away.
"So it seems!"
"Thank God!" said Hulda. "The Idea works."
Both men turned to the bed, startled to see her sitting up with a rapt smile.
"How so?" said the Red Beadle uneasily. "I am not aGoy(Christian) befriended by aGabbai."
"No, but it is the brotherhood of humanity."
"Bother the brotherhood of humanity, Frau Herz!" said the Red Beadle gruffly. He glanced round the denuded room. "The important thing is that you will now be able to have a few delicacies."
"I?" Hulda opened her eyes wide.
"Who else? What I earn is for all of us."
"God bless you!" said Zussmann; "but you have enough to do to keep yourself."
"Indeed he has!" said Hulda. "We couldn't dream of taking a farthing!" But her eyes were wet.
"I insist!" said the Red Beadle.
She thanked him sweetly, but held firm.
"I will advance the money on loan till Zussmann gets work."
Zussmann wavered, his eyes beseeching her, but she was inflexible.
The Red Beadle lost his temper. "And this is what you call the brotherhood of humanity!"
"He is right, Hulda. Why should we not take from one another? Pride perverts brotherhood."
"Dear husband," said Hulda, "it is not pride to refuse to rob the poor. Besides, what delicacies do I need? Is not this a land flowing with milk?"
"You take Cohen's milk and refuse my honey!" shouted the Red Beadle unappeased.
"Give me of the honey of your tongue and I shall not refuse it," said Hulda, with that wonderful smile of hers which showed the white teeth Nature had made; the smile which, as always, melted the Beadle's mood. That smilecould repair all the ravages of disease and give back her memoried face.
After the Beadle had been at work a day or two in theGabbai'sworkshop, he broached the matter of a fellow-penitent, one Zussmann Herz, with no work and a bedridden wife.
"ThatMeshummad!" (apostate) cried theGabbai." He deserves all that God has sent him."
Undaunted, the Red Beadle demonstrated that the man could not be of the missionary camp, else had he not been left to starve, one converted Jew being worth a thousand pounds of fresh subscriptions. Moreover he, the Red Beadle, had now convinced the man of his spiritual errors, andThe Brotherhood of the Peopleswas no longer on sale. Also, being unable to leave his wife's bedside, Zussmann would do the work at home below the Union rates prevalent in public. So, trade being brisk, theGabbairelented and bargained, and the Red Beadle sped to his friend's abode and flew up the four flights of stairs.
"Good news!" he cried. "TheGabbaiwants another hand, and he is ready to take you."
"Me?" Zussmann was paralyzed with joy and surprise.
"Now will you deny that the Idea works?" cried Hulda, her face flushed and her eyes glittering. And she fell a-coughing.
"You are right, Hulda; you are always right," cried Zussmann, in responsive radiance. "Thank God! Thank God!"
"God forgive me," muttered the Red Beadle.
"Go at once, Zussmann," said Hulda. "I shall do very well here—this has given me strength. I shall be up in a day or two."
"No, no, Zussmann," said the Beadle hurriedly. "There is no need to leave your wife. I have arranged it all. TheGabbaidoes not want you to come there or to speak to him, because, though the Idea works in him, the other 'hands' are not yet so large-minded: I am to bring you the orders, and I shall come here to fetch them."
The set of tools to which Zussmann clung in desperate hope made the plan both feasible and pleasant.
And so the Red Beadle's visits resumed their ancient frequency even as his Sabbath clothes resumed their ancient gloss, and every week's-end he paid over Zussmann's wages to him—full Union rate.
But Hulda, although she now accepted illogically the Red Beadle's honey in various shapes, did not appear to progress as much as the Idea, or as the new book which she stimulated Zussmann to start for its further propagation.
One Friday evening of December, when miry snow underfoot and grayish fog all around combined to make Spitalfields a malarious marsh, the Red Beadle, coming in with the week's wages, found to his horror a doctor hovering over Hulda's bed like the shadow of death.
From the look that Zussmann gave him he saw a sudden change for the worse had set in. The cold of the weather seemed to strike right to his heart. He took the sufferer's limp chill hand.
"How goes it?" he said cheerily.
"A trifle weak. But I shall be better soon."
He turned away. Zussmann whispered to him that the doctor who had been called in that morning had found the crisis so threatening that he was come again in the evening.
The Red Beadle, grown very white, accompanied thedoctor downstairs, and learned that with care the patient might pull through.
The Beadle felt like tearing out his red beard. "And to think that I have not yet arranged the matter!" he thought distractedly.
He ran through the gray bleak night to the office ofThe Flag of Judah; but as he was crossing the threshold he remembered that it was the eve of the Sabbath, and that neither little Sampson nor anybody else would be there. But little Sampsonwasthere, working busily.
"Hullo! Come in," he said, astonished.
The Red Beadle had already struck up a drinking acquaintanceship with the little journalist, in view of the great negotiation he was plotting. Not in vain did the proverbial wisdom of the Ghetto bid one beware of the red-haired.
"I won't keep you five minutes," apologized little Sampson. "But, you see, Christmas comes next week, and the compositors won't work. So I have to invent the news in advance."
Presently little Sampson, lighting an unhallowed cigarette by way of Sabbath lamp, and slinging on his shabby cloak, repaired with the Red Beadle to a restaurant, where he ordered "forbidden" food for himself and drinks for both.
The Red Beadle felt his way so cautiously and cunningly that the negotiation was unduly prolonged. After an hour or two, however, all was settled. For five pounds, paid in five monthly instalments, little Sampson would translateThe Brotherhood of the Peoplesinto English, provided the Beadle would tell him what the Hebrew meant. This the Beadle, from his loving study of Hulda's manuscript, was now prepared for. Little Sampson also promised to run the translation throughThe Flag of Judah, andthus the Beadle could buy the plates cheap for book purposes, with only the extra cost of printing such passages, if any, as were too dangerous forThe Flag of Judah. This unexpected generosity, coupled with the new audience it offered the Idea, enchanted the Red Beadle. He did not see that the journalist was getting gratuitous "copy," he saw only the bliss of Hulda and Zussmann, and in some strange exaltation, compact of whisky and affection, he shared in their vision of the miraculous spread of the Idea, once it had got into the dominant language of the world.
In his gratitude to little Sampson he plied him with fresh whisky; in his excitement he drew the paper-covered book from his pocket, and insisted that the journalist must translate the first page then and there, as a hansel. By the time it was done it was near eleven o'clock. Vaguely the Red Beadle felt that it was too late to return to Zussmann's to-night. Besides, he was liking little Sampson very much. They did not separate till the restaurant closed at midnight.
Quite drunk, the Red Beadle staggered towards Zussmann's house. He held the page of the translation tightly in his hand. The Hebrew original he had forgotten on the restaurant table, but he knew in some troubled nightmare way that Zussmann and Hulda must see that paper at once, that he had been charged to deliver it safely, and must die sooner than disobey.
The fog had lifted, but the heaps of snow were a terrible hindrance to his erratic progression. The cold air and the shock of a fall lessened his inebriety, but the imperative impulse of his imaginary mission still hypnotized him. It was past one before he reached the tall house. He did not think it at all curious that the great outer portals should be open; nor, though he saw the milk-cart at the door, and noted Cohen's uncomfortable look, did he rememberthat he had discovered the milk-purveyor nocturnally infringing the Sabbath. He stumbled up the stairs and knocked at the garret door, through the chinks of which light streamed. The thought of Hulda smote him almost sober. Zussmann's face, when the door opened, restored him completely to his senses. It was years older.
"She is not dead?" the visitor whispered hoarsely.
"She is dying, I fear—she cannot rouse herself." Zussmann's voice broke in a sob.
"But she must not die—I bring great news—The Flag of Judahhas read your book—it will translate it into English—it will print it in its own paper—and then it will make a book of it for you. See, here is the beginning!"
"Into English!" breathed Zussmann, taking the little journalist's scrawl. His whole face grew crimson, his eye shone as with madness. "Hulda! Hulda!" he cried, "the Idea works! God be thanked! English! Through the world! Hulda! Hulda!" He was bending over her, raising her head.
She opened her eyes.
"Hulda! the Idea wins. The book is coming out in English. The great English paper will print it. In that day God shall be One and His name One. Do you understand?" Her lips twitched faintly, but only her eyes spoke with the light of love and joy. His own look met hers, and for a moment husband and wife were one in a spiritual ecstasy.
Then the light in Hulda's eyes went out, and the two men were left in darkness.
The Red Beadle turned away and left Zussmann to his dead, and, with scalding tears running down his cheek, pulled up the cotton window blind and gazed out unseeing into the night.
Presently his vision cleared: he found himself watchingthe milk-cart drive off, and, following it towards the frowsy avenue of Brick Lane, he beheld what seemed to be a drunken fight in progress. He saw a policeman, gesticulating females, the nondescript nocturnal crowd of the sleepless city. The old dull hopelessness came over him. "Nature makes herself," he murmured in despairing resignation.
Suddenly he became aware that Zussmann was beside him, looking up at the stars.
"Well, what are you gaping at? Why the devil don't you say something?" And all the impatience of the rapt artist at being interrupted by anything but praise was in the outburst.
"Holy Moses!" I gasped. "Give a man a chance to get his breath. I fall through a dark antechamber over a bicycle, stumble round a screen, and—smack! a glare of Oriental sunlight from a gigantic canvas, the vibration and glow of a group of joyous figures, reeking with life and sweat! You the Idealist, the seeker after Nature's beautiful moods and Art's beautiful patterns!"
"Beautiful moods!" he echoed angrily. "And why isn't this a beautiful mood? And what more beautiful pattern than this—look! this line, this sweep, this group here, this clinging of the children round this mass—all in a glow—balanced by this mass of cool shadow. The meaning doesn't interfere with the pattern, you chump!"
"Oh, so thereisa meaning! You've become an anecdotal painter."
"Adjectives be hanged! I can't talk theory in the precious daylight. If you can't see—!"
"I can see that you are painting somethingyouhaven't seen. You haven't been in the East, have you?"
"If I had, I haven't got time to jaw about it now. Comeand have an absinthe at the Café Victor—in memory of old Paris days—Sixth Avenue—any of the boys will tell you. Let me see, daylight till six—half-past six.Au 'voir, au 'voir."
As I went down the steep, dark stairs, "Same old Dan," I thought. "Who would imagine I was a stranger in New York looking up an old fellow-struggler on his native heath? If I didn't know better, I might fancy his tremendous success had given him the same opinion of himself that America has of him. But no, nothing will change him; the same furious devotion to his canvas once he has quietly planned his picture, the same obstinate conviction that he is seeing something in the only right way. And yet somethinghaschanged him. Why has his brush suddenly gone East? Why this new kind of composition crowded with figures—ancient Jews, too? Has he been taken with piety, and is he going henceforward ostentatiously to proclaim his race? And who is the cheerful central figure with the fine, open face? I don't recollect any such scene in Jewish history, or anything so joyous. Perhaps it's a study of modern Jerusalem Jews, to show their life is not all Wailing Wall and Jeremiah. Or perhaps it's only decorative. America is great on decoration just now. No; he said the picture had a meaning. Well, I shall know all about it to-night. Anyhow, it's a beautiful thing."
"Same old Dan!" I thought even more decisively as, when I opened the door of the little café, a burly, black-bearded figure with audacious eyes came at me with a grip and a slap and a roar of welcome, and dragged me to the quiet corner behind the billiard tables.
"I've just been opalizing your absinthe for you," he laughed, as we sat down. "But what's the matter? You look kind o' scared."
"It's your Inferno of a city. As I turned the corner ofSixth Avenue, an elevated train came shrieking and rumbling, and a swirl of wind swept screeching round and round, enveloping me in a whirlpool of smoke and steam, until, dazed and choked in what seemed the scalding effervescence of a collision, I had given up all hope of ever learning what your confounded picture meant."
"Aha!" He took a complacent sip. "It stayed with you, did it?" And the light of triumph, flushing for an instant his rugged features, showed when it waned how pale and drawn they were by the feverish tension of his long day's work.
"Yes it did, old fellow," I said affectionately. "The joy and the glow of it, and yet also some strange antique simplicity and restfulness you have got into it, I know not how, have been with me all day, comforting me in the midst of the tearing, grinding life of this closing nineteenth century after Christ."
A curious smile flitted across Dan's face. He tilted his chair back, and rested his head against the wall.
"There's nothing that takes me so much out of the nineteenth century after Christ," he said dreamily, "as this little French café. It wafts me back to my early student days, that lie somewhere amid the enchanted mists of the youth of the world; to the zestful toil of the studios, to the careless trips in quaint, gray Holland or flaming, devil-may-care Spain. Ah! what scenes shift and shuffle in the twinkle of the gas-jet in this opalescent liquid; the hot shimmer of the arena at the Seville bull-fight, with its swirl of color and movement; the torchlight procession of pilgrims round the church at Lourdes, with the one black nun praying by herself in a shadowy corner; the lovely valley of the Tauba, where the tinkle of the sheep-bells mingles with the Lutheran hymn blown to the four winds from the old church tower; wines that were red—sunshinethat was warm—mandolines—!" His voice died away as in exquisite reverie.
"And the East?" I said slily.
A good-natured smile dissipated his delicious dream.
"Ah, yes," he said. "My East was the Tyrol."
"The Tyrol? How do you mean?"
"I see you won't let me out of that story."
"Oh, there's a story, is there?"
"Oh, well, perhaps not what you literary chaps would call a story! No love-making in it, you know."
"Then it can wait. Tell me about your picture."
"But that's mixed up with the story."
"Didn't I say you had become an anecdotal artist?"
"It's no laughing matter," he said gravely. "You remember when we parted at Munich, a year ago last spring, you to go on to Vienna and I to go back to America. Well, I had a sudden fancy to take one last European trip all by myself, and started south through the Tyrol, with a pack on my back. The third day out I fell and bruised my thigh severely, and could not make my little mountain town till moonlight. And I tell you I was mighty glad when I limped across the bridge over the rushing river and dropped on the hotel sofa. Next morning I was stiff as a poker, but I struggled up the four rickety flights to the local physician, and being assured I only wanted rest, I resolved to take it with book and pipe and mug in a shady beer-garden on the river. I had been reading for about an hour when five or six Tyrolese, old men and young, in their gray and green costumes and their little hats, trooped in and occupied the large table near the inn-door. Presently I was startled by the sound of the zither; they began to sing songs; the pretty daughter of the house came and joined in the singing. I put down my book.
"The old lady who served me with myMaassof beer,seeing my interest, came over and chatted about her guests. Oh no, they were not villagers; they came from four hours away. The slim one was a school-teacher, and thedickerwas a tenor, and sang in the chorus of thePassion-Spiel; the good-looking young man was to be the St. John. Passion play! I pricked up my ears. When? Where? In their own village, three days hence; only given once every ten years—for hundreds and hundreds of years. Could strangers see it? What should strangers want to see it for? Butcouldthey see it?Gewiss. This was indeed a stroke of luck. I had always rather wanted to see the Passion play, but the thought of the fashionable Ober-Ammergau made me sick. Would I like to bevorgestellt? Rather! It was not ten minutes after this introduction before I had settled to stay with St. John, and clouds of good American tobacco were rising from six Tyrolese pipes, and many an "Auf Ihr Wohl" was busying the prettyKellnerin. They trotted out all their repertory of quaint local songs for my benefit. It sounded bully, I tell you, out there with the sunlight, and the green leaves, and the rush of the river; and in this aroma of beer and brotherhood I blessed my damaged thigh. Three days hence! Just time for it to heal. A providential world, after all.
"And it was indeed with a buoyant step and a gay heart that I set out over the hills at sunrise on that memorable morning. The play was to begin at ten, and I should just be on time. What a walk! Imagine it! Clear coolness of dawn, fresh green, sparkling dew, the road winding up and down, round hills, up cliffs, along valleys, through woods, where the green branches swayed in the morning wind and dappled the grass fantastically with dancing sunlight. And as fresh as the morning, was, I felt, the artistic sensation awaiting me. I swung round the last hill-shoulder; saw the quaint gables of the first house peepingthrough the trees, and the church spire rising beyond, then groups of Tyrolese converging from all the roads; dipped down the valley, past the quiet lake, up the hills beyond; found myself caught in a stream of peasants, and, presto! was sucked from the radiant day into the deep gloom of the barn-like theatre.
"I don't know how it is done in Ober-Ammergau, but this Tyrolese thing was a strange jumble of art andnaïveté, of talent and stupidity. There was a full-fledged stage and footlights, and the scenery, some one said, was painted by a man from Munich. But the players were badly made up; the costumes, if correct, were ill-fitting; the stage was badly lighted, and the flats didn't 'jine.' Some of the actors had gleams of artistic perception. St. Mark was beautiful to look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted bytableaux vivantsof Old Testament scenes, from Adam and Eve onwards. There was much, you see, that was puerile, even ridiculous; and every now and then some one would open the door of the dusky auditorium, and a shaft of sunshine would fly in from the outside world to remind me further how unreal was all this gloomy make-believe. Nay, during theentr'acteI went out, like everybody else, and lunched off sausages and beer.
"And yet, beneath all this critical consciousness, beneath even the artistic consciousness that could not resist jotting down a face or a scene in my sketch-book,something curious was happening in the depths of my being. The play exercised from the very first a strange magnetic effect on me; despite all the primitive humors of the players, the simple, sublime tragedy that disengaged itself from their uncouth but earnest goings-on, began to move and even oppress my soul. Christ had been to me merely a theme for artists; my studies and travels had familiarized me with every possible conception of the Man of Sorrows. I had seen myriads of Madonnas nursing Him, miles of Magdalens bewailing Him. Yet the sorrows I had never felt. Perhaps it was my Jewish training, perhaps it was that none of the Christians I lived with had ever believed in Him. At any rate, here for the first time the Christ story came home to me as a real, living fact—something that had actually happened. I saw this simple son of the people—made more simple by my knowledge that His representative was a baker—moving amid the ancient peasant and fisher life of Galilee; I saw Him draw men and women, saints and sinners, by the magic of His love, the simple sweetness of His inner sunshine; I saw the sunshine change to lightning as He drove the money-changers from the Temple; I watched the clouds deepen as the tragedy drew on; I saw Him bid farewell to His mother; I heard suppressed sobs all around me. Then the heavens were overcast, and it seemed as if earth held its breath waiting for the supreme moment. They dragged Him before Pilate; they clothed Him in scarlet robe, and plaited His crown of thorns, and spat on Him; they gave Him vinegar to drink mixed with gall; and He so divinely sweet and forgiving through all. A horrible oppression hung over the world. I felt choking; my ribs pressed inwards, my heart seemed contracted. He was dying for the sins of the world, He summed up the whole world's woe and pitifulness—the two ideas throbbedand fused in my troubled soul. And I, a Jew, had hitherto ignored Him. What would they say, these simple peasants sobbing all around, if they knew that I was of that hated race? Then something broke in me, and I sobbed too—sobbed with bitter tears that soon turned sweet in strange relief and glad sympathy with my rough brothers and sisters." He paused a moment, and sipped silently at his absinthe. I did not break the silence. I was moved and interested, though what all this had to do with his glowing, joyous picture I could only dimly surmise. He went on—
"When it was all over, and I went out into the open air, I did not see the sunlight. I carried the dusk of the theatre with me, and the gloom of Golgotha brooded over the sunny afternoon. I heard the nails driven in; I saw the blood spurting from the wounds—there was realism in the thing, I tell you. The peasants, accustomed to the painful story, had quickly recovered their gaiety, and were pouring boisterously down the hill-side, like a glad, turbulent mountain stream, unloosed from the dead hand of frost. But I was still ice-bound and fog-wrapped. Outside theGasthauswhere I went to dine, gay groups assembled, an organ played, some strolling Italian girls danced gracefully, and my artistic self was aware of a warmth and a rush. But the inmost Me was neck-deep in gloom, with which the terribly pounded steak they gave me, fraudulently overlaid with two showy fried eggs, seemed only in keeping. St. John came in, and Christ and the schoolmaster—who had conducted the choir—and the thick tenor and some supers, and I congratulated them one and all with a gloomy sense of dishonesty. When, as evening fell, I walked home with St. John, I was gloomily glad to find the valley shrouded in mist and a starless heaven sagging over a blank earth. It seemed an endlessuphill drag to my lodging, and though my bedroom was unexpectedly dainty, and a dear old woman—St. John's mother—metaphorically tucked me in, I slept ill that night. Formless dreams tortured me with impalpable tragedies and apprehensions of horror. In the morning—after a cold sponging—the oppression lifted a little from my spirit, though the weather still seemed rather gray. St. John had already gone off to his field-work, his mother told me. She was so lovely, and the room in which I ate breakfast so neat and demure with its whitewashed walls—pure and stainless like country snow—that I managed to swallow everything but the coffee. O that coffee! I had to nibble at a bit of chocolate I carried to get the taste of it out of my mouth. I tried hard not to let the blues get the upper hand again. I filled my pipe and pulled out my sketch-book. My notes of yesterday seemed so faint, and the morning to be growing so dark, that I could scarcely see them. I thought I would go and sit on the little bench outside. As I was sauntering through the doorway, my head bending broodingly over the sketch-book, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of a little white match-stand fixed up on the wall. Mechanically I put out my left hand to take a light for my pipe. A queer, cold wetness in my fingers and a little splash woke me to the sense of some odd mistake, and in another instant I realized with horror that I had dipped my fingers into holy water and splashed it over that neat, demure, spotless, whitewashed wall."
I could not help smiling. "Ah, I know; one of those porcelain things with a crucified Saviour over a little font. Fancy taking heaven for brimstone!"
"It didn't seem the least bit funny at the time. I just felt awful. What would the dear old woman say to this profanation? Why the dickens did people havewhitewashed walls on which sacrilegious stains were luridly visible? I looked up and down the hall like Moses when he slew that Egyptian, trembling lest the old woman should come in. How could I make her understand I was so ignorant of Christian custom as to mistake a font for a matchbox? And if I said I was a Jew, good heavens! she might think I had done it of fell design. What a wound to the gentle old creature who had been so sweet to me! I could not stay in sight of that accusing streak, I must walk off my uneasiness. I threw open the outer door; then I stood still, paralyzed. Monstrous evil-looking gray mists were clumped at the very threshold. Sinister formless vapors blotted out the mountain; everywhere vague, drifting hulks of malarious mist. I sought to pierce them, to find the landscape, the cheerful village, the warm human life nesting under God's heaven, but saw only—way below—as through a tunnel cut betwixt mist and mountain, a dead, inverted world of houses and trees in a chill, gray lake. I shuddered. An indefinable apprehension possessed me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if this were divine chastisement? what if all the outer and inner dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were really holy, and my sacrilege had brought some grisly Nemesis?"
"You believed that?"
"Not really, of course. But you, as an artist, must understand how one dallies with an idea, plays with a mood, works oneself up imaginatively into a dramatic situation. I let it grow upon me till, like a man alone in the dark, afraid of the ghosts he doesn't believe in, I grew horribly nervous."
"I daresay you hadn't wholly recovered from your fall, and your nerves were unstrung by the blood and the nails, and that steak had disagreed with you, and you had had a bad night, and you were morbidly uneasy about annoying the old woman, and all those chunks of mist got into your spirits. You are a child of the sun!"
"Of course I knew all that, down in the cellars of my being, but upstairs, all the same, I had this sense of guilt and expiation, this anxious doubt that perhaps all that great, gloomy, mediæval business of saints and nuns, and bones, and relics, and miracles, and icons, and calvaries, and cells, and celibacy, and horsehair shirts, and blood, and dirt, and tears, was true after all! What if the world of beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the wall announcing the wrath and visitation of heaven. I went outside again and smoked miserably on the little bench. Gradually I began to feel warmer, the mists seemed clearing. I rose and stretched myself with an ache of luxurious languor. Encouraged, I stole within again to peep at the streak. It was dry—a virgin wall, innocently white, met my delighted gaze. I opened the window; the draggling vapors were still rising, rising, the bleakness was merging in a mild warmth. I refilled my pipe, and plunged down the yet gray hill. I strode past the old saw-mill, skirted the swampy border of the lake, came out on the firm green, when bing! zim! br-r-r! a heavenly bolt of sunshine smashed through the raw mists, scattering them like a bomb to the horizon's rim; then with sovereign calm the sun came out full, flooding hill and dale with luminous joy; the lake shimmered andflashed into radiant life, and gave back a great white cloud-island on a stretch of glorious blue, and all that golden warmth stole into my veins like wine. A little goat came skipping along with tinkling bell, a horse at grass threw up its heels in ecstasy, an ox lowed, a dog barked. Tears of exquisite emotion came into my eyes; the beautiful soft warm light that lay over all the happy valley seemed to get into them and melt something. How unlike those tears of yesterday, wrung out of me as by some serpent coiled round my ribs! Now my ribs seemed expanding—to hold my heart—and all the divine joy of existence thrilled me to a religious rapture. And with the lifting of the mists all that ghastly mediæval nightmare was lifted from my soul; in that sacred moment all the lurid tragedy of the crucified Christ vanished, and only Christ was left, the simple fellowship with man and beast and nature, the love of life, the love of love, the love of God. And in that yearning ecstasy my picture came to me—The Joyous Comrade. Christ—not the tortured God, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all simple souls; the joyous comrade, with the children clinging to him, and peasants and fishers listening to his chat; not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, but the man of genius protesting against all forms and dogmas that would replace the direct vision and the living ecstasy; not the man of sorrows loving the blankness of underground cells and scourged backs and sexless skeletons, but the lover of warm life, and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh and simple and pure and beautiful."
"Every man makes his God in his own image," I thought, too touched to jar him by saying it aloud.
"And so—ever since—off and on—I have worked at this human picture of him—The Joyous Comrade—to restore the true Christ to the world."
"Which you hope to convert?"
"My business is with work, not with results. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with all thy might.' What can any single hand, even the mightiest, do in this great weltering world? Yet, without the hope and the dream, who would work at all? And so, not without hope, yet with no expectation of a miracle, I give the Jews a Christ they can now accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. I rebuild for my beloved America a type of simple manhood, unfretted by the feverish lust for wealth or power, a simple lover of the quiet moment, a sweet human soul never dispossessed of itself, always at one with the essence of existence. Who knows but I may suggest the great question: What shall it profit a nation to gain the whole world and lose its own soul?"
His voice died away solemnly, and I heard only the click of the billiard-balls and the rumble and roar of New York.
"And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I redeem."—Exodusxiii. 14, 15.
"And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I redeem."—Exodusxiii. 14, 15.
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! One only kid of the goat.
At last the Passover family service was drawing to an end. His father had started on the curious Chaldaic recitative that wound it up:
One only kid, one only kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
The young man smiled faintly at the quaintness of an old gentleman in a frock-coat, a director of the steamboat company in modern Venice, talking Chaldaic, wholly unconscious of the incongruity, rolling out the sonorous syllables with unction, propped up on the prescribed pillows.
And a cat came and devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
He wondered vaguely what his father would say to him when the service was over. He had only come in during the second part, arriving from Vienna with his usual unquestioned unexpectedness, and was quite startled to find it was Passover night, and that the immemorial service was going on just as when he was a boy. The rarity of hisvisits to the old folks made it a strange coincidence to have stumbled upon them at this juncture, and, as he took his seat silently in the family circle without interrupting the prayers by greetings, he had a vivid artistic perception of the possibilities of existence—the witty French novel that had so amused him in the train, making him feel that, in providing raw matter foresprit, human life had its joyous justification; the red-gold sunset over the mountains; the floating homewards down the Grand Canal in the moonlight, the well-known palaces as dreamful and mysterious to him as if he had not been born in the city of the sea; the gay reminiscences of Goldmark's new opera last night at the Operntheater that had haunted his ear as he ascended the great staircase; and then this abrupt transition to the East, and the dead centuries, and Jehovah bringing out His chosen people from Egypt, and bidding them celebrate with unleavened bread throughout the generations their hurried journey to the desert.
Probably his father was distressed at this glaring instance of his son's indifference to the traditions he himself held so dear; though indeed the old man had realized long ago the bitter truth that his ways were not his son's ways, nor his son's thoughts his thoughts. He had long since known that his first-born was a sinner in Israel, an "Epikouros," a scoffer, a selfish sensualist, a lover of bachelor quarters and the feverish life of the European capitals, a scorner of the dietary laws and tabus, an adept in the forbidden. The son thought of himself through his father's spectacles, and the faint smile playing about the sensitive lips became bitterer. His long white fingers worked nervously.
And yet he thought kindly enough of his father; admired the perseverance that had brought him wealth, the generosity with which he expended it, the fidelity thatresisted its temptations and made thisSederservice, this family reunion, as homely and as piously simple as in the past when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the Grand Canal, had meant home. The beaker of wine for the prophet Elijah stood as naïvely expectant as ever. His mother's face, too, shone with love and goodwill. Brothers and sisters—shafts from a full quiver—sat around the table variously happy and content with existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety pervaded the table.
And a dog came and bit the cat which had devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled with salt tears.Hewould never sit at the head of his own table, carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their little hands in his; he would pass through existence like a wraith, gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping on—the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered—he, modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems!Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas!Modern of the moderns? But it was an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences: