Chapter XVII: Part II: Uriel Acosta (12)

Lassalle felt that the test-moment of his life had come, and the man of action must rise to it. He scribbled three telegrams--one to his mother, one to his sister, Frau Friedland, and one to the Countess, asking all to come at once.

"You must have a chaperon," he interjected. "And till one of the three arrives, who is there here?"

She sobbed out the address of Madame Rognon. Lassalle opened the door to hand over the telegrams, and saw the woman who had brought Helene's letter lingering uneasily, and he had the unhappiest yet not least characteristic inspiration of his life. "These to the telegraph office," he said aloud, and in a whisper: "Tell the Baroness von Dönniges that we shall be at Madame Rognon's."

For, with lightning rapidity, his brain had worked out a subtle piece of heroic comedy. He would restore Helene to her mother, he would play the grand seigneur, the spotless Bayard, he, the Jew, the thief, the demagogue, the Don Juan; his chivalry would shame this little diplomatist. In no case could they refuse him the girl, she was too hopelessly compromised. All the Pension had seen her--the mother would be shrewd enough to understand that. She must allow the renunciation to remain merely verbal, but the words would sound how magnificent!

The scene was duly played. The bewildered Helene, whom he left in the dark, confused by the unexpected appearance of her mother, was thrown into the last stage of dazed distress by being recklessly restored to the maternal bosom. He kissed her good-bye, and she vanished from his sight for ever.

XIV

For he had reckoned without his Janko, always at hand to cover up a scandal. The Will he had breathed into Helene had been exhausted in the one supreme effort of her life. Sucked up again into the family egotism, kept for weeks under a _régime_ of terror and intercepted letters, hurried away from Geneva; chagrined and outraged, too, by her lover's incomprehensible repudiation of her, which only success could have excused, and which therefore became more unpardonable as day followed day without rescue from a giant, proved merely windbag; she fell back with compunction into the tender keeping of the ever-waiting Janko. The one letter her father permitted her to send formally announced her eternal love and devotion for her former _fiancé_. Profitless to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence of the Working-Men's Union alone was neglected. He pressed everybody and anybody into his feverish service--musicians, artists, soldiers, antiquarians, aristocrats. Would not Wagner induce the King of Bavaria to speak to von Dönniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help him?--he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it certain. The "No"--her first word to him at their first meeting--resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise, hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get an interview with her face to face. Then they would see if she was resisting him of her own free will or under pressure illegal for an adult. It was impossible his will-power over her should fail.

Helene evidently thought so too. By fair means and foul, by spies and lawyers and friendly agents, Lassalle's frenzied energy had penetrated through every defence to the inmost entrenchment where she sat cowering. He had exacted the father's consent to an interview. Only Helene's own consent was wanting. His friend Colonel Rustow brought the sick Hercules the account of her refusal--a refusal which made ridiculous his moving of mountains.

"But surely you owe Lassalle some satisfaction," he had protested.

"To what? To his wounded vanity?"

It was the last straw.

"Harlot!" cried Lassalle, and as in a volcanic jet, hurled her from his burning heart.

A terrible calm settled upon him. It was as if fire should become ice. Yes, he understood at last what Destiny had always been trying to tell him--that love and happiness were not for him. He was consecrate to great causes: His Will, entangled with that of others, grew feeble, fruitless. Women were truly _enfants du diable_. He had been within an ace of abandoning his historical mission. Now he would arise, strong, sublime: a mighty weapon forged by the gods, and tempered by fire and tears.

Only, one thing must first be done. The past must be wiped off. He must recommence with a clean sheet. True, he had always refused duels. But now he saw the fineness, the necessity of them. In a world of chicanery and treachery the sword alone cut clean.

He sent a challenge to the father, a message of goodwill to the lover. But it was Janko who took up the challenge.

The weapon chosen was the pistol.

Lassalle's friends begged him to practise.

"Useless! I know what is destined."

Never had he been so colossal, so assured. His nerves seemed to have regained their tone. The night before the duel he slept like a tranquil child.

In the early morn, on the way to the field outside Geneva, he begged his second to arrange the duel on the French side of the frontier, so that he might remain in Geneva and settle his account with the father. At the word of command, "One!" Janko's shot rang out. Lassalle's was not a second later, but he had already received his death-wound.

He lay three days, dying in terrible agony, relieved only by copious opium. Between the spasms, surprise possessed his mind that his Will should have counted for nothing before the imperturbable march of the universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters." But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand; the daughters of Judæa were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover table, with its picturesque ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And then he felt a cold wind, remembering how Riekchen had hidden her face to laugh at these mediæval mummeries, and to spit out the bitter herbs, so meaningless to her.

O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils--religion, race, sex, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as gods, knowing good and evil.

Only one thing was left--to die unbroken.

He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People--the Germans--should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey.

A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi--a month after his glad shout, "By all the gods of Greece, 'tis she!"--he was a corpse, the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned for her was to become a great power in the State, under the ever-growing glamour of his memory.

The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in her grief. He belonged to her--to her and the People. Yes, she would bear the body of her _cher enfant_ through the provinces of the Rhine--he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah.

And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a right to share her grief, nay, to call him--in no figurative sense--"_enfant_"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting strength, of his superb fore-visionings.

THE PRIMROSE SPHINX

I

In the choir of the old-fashioned church of Hughenden, that broods amid the beautiful peace of English meadows, there stands, on the left hand of the aisle, a black high-backed stall of polished oak, overhung by the picturesque insignia of the Order of the Garter.

In the pavement behind it gleams a square slab, dedicated by "his grateful sovereign and friend" to her great Prime Minister, and heaped in the spring with primroses.

And on this white memorial is sculptured in bas-relief the profile of the head of a Semitic Sphinx, round whose mute lips flickers in a faint sardonic smile the wisdom of the ages.

II

I see him, methinks, in life, Premier of England, Lord Privy Seal, Earl Beaconsfield of Beaconsfield, Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden, sitting in his knightly stall, listening impassibly to the country parson's sermon. His head droops on his breast, but his coal-black inscrutable eyes are open.

It is the hour of his star.

He is just back from the Berlin Congress, bringing "Peace with Honor." The Continent has stood a-tiptoe to see the wonderful English Earl pass and repass. He has been the lion of a congress that included Bismarck. The laurels and the Oriental palm placed by his landlord on the hotel-balcony have but faintly typified the feeling of Europe. His feverous reception in England, from Dover pier onwards, has recalled an earlier, a more romantic world. Fathers have brought their little ones to imprint upon their memories the mortal features of this immortal figure, who passes through a rain of flowers to his throne in Downing Street. The London press, with scarce an exception, is in the dust at his feet--with the proud English nobles and all that has ever flouted or assailed him.

The sunshine comes floridly through the stained-glass windows, and lies upon the austere crucifix.

III

By what devious ways has he wandered hither--from that warm old Portuguese synagogue in Bevis Marks, whence his father withdrew under the smart of a fine from "the gentlemen of the Mahamad?"

But hark! The parson--as paradoxically--is reading a Jewish psalm.

"'_The Lord said unto my lord: Sit thou on my right hand,
until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion: be
thou ruler in the midst of thine enemies.
In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee freewill
offerings with a holy worship: the dew of thy birth is of
the womb of the morning._'"

The Earl remains impassive.

"Half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew."

Whom does he worship?

"Sensible men never tell."

IV

Yet in that facial mask I seem to read all the tale of the long years of desperate waiting, only half sweetened by premature triumphs of pen and person; all the rancorous energies of political strife.

And as I gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner of the lips.

I think of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages, monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his braggart assertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic perseverance to be more English than the English; of his naïve delight in fine clothes and fine dishes and fine company; of his nice conduct of a morning and evening cane; of his morbid self-consciousness of his gifts and his genius; of his unscrupulous chase of personal success and of Fame--that shadow which great souls cast, and little souls pursue as substance; of his scrupulous personal rejection of Love--Love, the one touch of true romance in his novels--and his pecuniary marriage for his career's sake, after the manner of his tribe; of his romanesque conception of the British aristocracy, which he yet dominates, because he is not really rooted in the social conceptions which give it its prestige, and so is able to manoeuvre it artistically from without, intellect detached from emotion: to play English politics like a game of chess, moving proud peers like pawns, with especial skill in handling his Queen; his very imperturbability under attack, only the mediæval Jew's self-mastery before the grosser-brained persecutor.

I think these things and the Sphinx yields up his secret--the open secret of the Ghetto parvenu.

V

But as I look again upon his strange Eastern face, so deep-lined, so haggard, something subtler and finer calls to me from the ruins of its melancholy beauty.

Into this heavy English atmosphere he brings not only the shimmer of ideas and wit, but--a Heine of action--the fantasy of personal adventure, and--when audacity has been crowned by empery--of dramatic surprises of policy. A successful Lassalle, he flutters the stagnant castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of the individual Will.

To a country that lumbers on from precedent to precedent, and owes its very constitution to the pinch of practical exigencies, he brings the Jew's unifying sweep of idea. First, he is the encourager of the Young England party, for, conceiving himself child of a race of aristocrats whose mission is to civilize the world, he feels the duty of guidance to which these young English squires and nobles are born. The bourgeois he hates--only the pomp of sovereignty and the pathos of poverty move his soul; his lifelong dream is of a Tory democracy, wherein the nobles shall make happy the People that is exploited by the middle classes. Product of a theocratic state, where the rich and the poor are united in God, he is shocked by "the Two Nations" into which, by the gradual break-up of the feudal world, this England is split. The cry of the Chartists does not leave him cold. He is one in revolt with Byron and Shelley against a Philistine world. And later, to a mighty empire that has grown fortuitously, piecemeal, by the individual struggles of independent pioneers or isolated filibusters, he gives a unifying soul, a spirit, a mission. He perceives with Heine that as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and its State Church only the guardian of the Semitic principle, popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined executant of the ideals of Zion; that it is planting the Law like a great shady tree in the tropic deserts and arid wastes of barbarism. That grandeur and romance of their empire, of which the English of his day are only dimly aware, because like their constitution it has evolved without a conscious principle, he, the outsider, sees. He is caught by the fascination of its vastness, of its magnificent possibilities. And in very deed he binds England closer to her colonies, and restores her dwindled prestige in the Parliament of Nations. He even proclaims her an Asiatic power.

For his heart is always with his own people--its past glories, its persistent ubiquitous potency, despite ubiquitous persecution. He sees himself the appointed scion of a Chosen Race, the only race to which God has ever spoken, and perhaps the charm of acquired Cyprus is its propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ever deigned to reveal Himself.

And, like his race, he has links with all the human panorama.

He is in touch with the humors and graces of European courts and cities, has rapport with the rich-dyed, unchanging, double-dealing East, enjoys the picaresque life of the Spanish mountains: he feels the tragedy of vanished Rome, the marble appeal of ancient Athens, the mystery of the Pyramids, the futility of life; his books palpitate with world-problems.

And, as I think these things, his face is transfigured and he becomes--beneath all his dazzle of deed--a Dreamer of the Ghetto.

VI

So think I. But what--as the country parson's sermon drones on--thinks the Sphinx?

Who shall tell?

DREAMERS IN CONGRESS

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." By the river of Bâle we sit down, resolved to weep no more. Not the German Rhine, but the Rhine ere it leaves the land of liberty; where, sunning itself in a glory of blue sky and white cloud, and overbrooded by the eternal mountains; it swirls its fresh green waves and hurries its laden rafts betwixt the quaint old houses and dreaming spires, and under the busy bridges of the Golden Gate of Switzerland.

In the shady courtyard of the Town Hall are sundry frescoes testifying to the predominant impress on the minds of its citizens of the life and thoughts of a little people that flourished between two and three thousand years ago in the highlands of Asia Minor. But, amid these suggestive illustrations of ancient Jewish history, the strangest surely is that of Moses with a Table of the Law, on which are written the words: "Who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."

For here, after all this travail of the centuries, a very modern Moses--in the abstract-concrete form of a Congress--is again meditating the deliverance of Israel from the house of bondage.

Not in the Town Hall, however, but in the Casino the Congress meets, and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance, are debated the tragic issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform, over which rise the heads and festal shirt-fronts of the leaders.

A strangely assorted set of leaders, but all with that ink-mark on the brow which is as much on the Continent the badge of action, as it is in England the symbol of sterility; all believing more or less naïvely that the pen is mightier than the millionaire's gold.

Only one of them hitherto has really stirred the world with his pen-point--a prophet of the modern, preaching "Woe, woe" by psycho-physiology; in himself a breezy, burly undegenerate, with a great gray head marvellously crammed with facts and languages; now to prove himself golden-hearted and golden-mouthed, an orator touching equally to tears or laughter. In striking contrast with this quasi-Teutonic figure shows the leonine head, with its tossing black mane and shoulders, of the Russian leader, Apollo turned Berserker, beautiful, overpowering, from whose resplendent mouth roll in mountain thunder the barbarous Russian syllables.

And even as no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank and file fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions--types that once sought to slough their Jewish skins, and mimic, on Darwinian principles, the colors of the environment, but that now, with some tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood in Zion--they are come from many places; from far lands and from near, from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from the great European capitals; thickliest from the pales of persecution, in rare units from the free realms of England and America--a strange phantasmagoria of faces. A small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones; a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark, Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian, tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped, curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, with proud duel-slashes across his cheek; a Viennese student, first fighter in the University, with a colored band across his shirt-front; a dandy, smelling of the best St. Petersburg circles; and one solitary caftan-Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah.

Who speaks of the Jewish type? One can only say negatively that these faces are not Christian. Is it the stamp of a longer, more complex heredity? Is it the brand of suffering? Certainly a stern Congress, the speeches little lightened by humor, the atmosphere of historic tragedy too overbrooding for intellectual dalliance. Even the presence of the gayer sex--for there are a few ladies among the delegates, and more peep down from the crowded spectators' gallery that runs sideways along the hall--only makes a few shots of visual brightness in the sober scene. Seriousness is stamped everywhere; on the broad-bulging temples of the Russian oculist, on the egg-shaped skull and lank white hair of the Heidelberg professor, on the open countenance of the Hungarian architect, on the weak, narrow lineaments of the neurotic Hebrew poet; it gives dignity to red hair and freckles, tones down the grossness of too-fleshy cheeks, and lends an added beauty to finely-cut features.

Superficially, then, they have little in common, and if almost all speak German--the language of the Congress--it is only because they are all masters of three or four tongues. Yet some subtle instinct links them each to each; presage, perhaps, of some brotherhood of mankind, of which ingathered Israel--or even ubiquitous Israel--may present the type.

Through the closed red-curtained windows comes ever and anon the sharp ting of the bell of an electric car, and the President, anxiously steering the course of debate through difficult international cross-roads, rings his bell almost as frequently.

A majestic Oriental figure, the President's--not so tall as it appears when he draws himself up and stands dominating the assembly with eyes that brood and glow--you would say one of the Assyrian Kings, whose sculptured heads adorn our Museums, the very profile of Tiglath-Pileser. In sooth, the beautiful sombre face of a kingly dreamer, but of a Jewish dreamer who faces the fact that flowers are grown in dung. A Shelley "beats in the air his luminous wings in vain"; our Jewish dreamer dreams along the lines of life; his dream but discounts the future, his prophecy is merely fore-speaking, his vision prevision. He talks agriculture, viticulture, subvention of the Ottoman Empire, both by direct tribute and indirect enrichment; stocks and shares, railroads, internal and to India; natural development under expansion--all the jargon of our iron age. Let not his movement be confounded with those petty projects for helping Jewish agriculturists into Palestine. What! Improve the Sultan's land without any political equivalent guaranteed in advance! Difficulty about the holy places of Christianity and Islam? Pooh! extra-territorial.

A practised publicist, a trained lawyer, a not unsuccessful comedy writer, converted to racial self-consciousness by the "Hep, Hep" of Vienna, and hurried into unforeseen action by his own paper-scheme of a Jewish State, he has, perhaps, at last--and not unreluctantly--found himself as a leader of men.

In a Congress of impassioned rhetoricians he remains serene, moderate; his voice is for the more part subdued; in its most emotional abandonments there is a dry undertone, almost harsh. He quells disorder with a look, with a word, with a sharp touch of the bell. The cloven hoof of the Socialist peeps out from a little group. At once "The Congress shall be captured by no party!" And the Congress is in roars of satisfaction.

'Tis the happy faculty of all idealists to overlook the visible--the price they pay for seeing the unseen. Even our open-eyed Jewish idealist has been blest with ignorance of the actual. But, in his very ignorance of the people he would lead and the country he would lead them to, lies his strength, just as in his admission that his Zionist fervor is only that second-rate species produced by local anti-Semitism, lies a powerful answer to the dangerous libel of local unpatriotism. Of the real political and agricultural conditions of Palestine he knows only by hearsay. Of Jews he knows still less. Not for him the paralyzing sense of the humors of his race, the petty feud of Dutchman and Pole, the mutual superiorities of Sephardi and Ashkenazi, the grotesque incompatibility of Western and Eastern Jew, the cynicism and snobbery of the prosperous, the materialism of the uneducated adventurers in unexploited regions. He stands so high and aloof that all specific colorings and markings are blurred for him into the common brotherhood, and, if he is cynic enough to suspect them, he is philosopher enough to recognize that all nations are compact of incongruites, vitalized by warring elements. Nor has he any sympathetic perception of the mystic religious hopes of generations of zealots, of the great swirling spiritual currents of Ghetto life. But in a national movement--which appears at first sight hopeless, because it lacks the great magnetizer, religion--lies a chance denied to one who should boldly proclaim himself the evangel of a modern Judaism, the last of the Prophets. Political Zionism alone can transcend and unite: any religious formula would disturb and dissever. Along this line may all travel to Jerusalem. And, as the locomotive from Jaffa draws all alike to the sacred city, and leaves them there to their several matters, so may the pious concern themselves not at all with the religion of the engineer.

Not this the visionary figure created by the tear-dimmed yearning of the Ghetto; no second Sabbataï Zevi, master of celestial secrets, divine reincarnation, come with signs and wonders to lead back Israel to the Promised Land. Still less the prophet prefigured by Christian visionaries, some of whom, fevered nevertheless, press upon the Congress itself complex collations of texts, or little cards with the sign of the cross. Palestine, indeed, but an afterthought: an aspiration of unsuspected strength, to be utilized--like all human forces--by the maker of history. States are the expression of souls; in any land the Jewish soul could express itself in characteristic institutions, could shake off the long oppression of the ages, and renew its youth in touch with the soil. Yet since there is this longing for Palestine, let us make capital of it--capital that will return its safe percentage. A rush to Palestine will mean all that seething medley of human wants and activities out of which profits are snatched by the shrewd--gold-rush and God-rush, they are both one in their economic working. May not the Jews themselves take shares in so promising a project? May not even their great bankers put their names to such a prospectus? The shareholders incur no liability beyond the extent of their shares; there shall be no call upon them to come to Palestine--let them remain in their snug nests; the Jewish Company, Limited, seeks a home only for the desolate dove that finds no rest for the sole of her feet.

And yet beneath all this statesmanlike prose, touched with the special dryness of the jurist, lurk the romance of the poet and the purposeful vagueness of the modern evolutionist; the fantasy of the Hungarian, the dramatic self-consciousness of the literary artist, the heart of the Jew.

Is one less a poet because he regards the laws of reality, less religious because he accepts them, less a Jew because he will live in his own century? Our dreamer will have none of the Mediæval, is enamoured of the Modern; has lurking admiration of the "over-man" of Nietzsche, even to be overpassed by the coming Jerusalem Jew; the psychical Eurasian, the link and interpreter between East and West--nay, between antiquity and the modern spirit; the synthesis of mankind, saturated with the culture of the nations, and now at last turning home again, laden with the spiritual spoils of the world--for the world's benefit. He shall found an ideal modern state, catholic in creed, righteous in law, a centre of conscience--even geographically--in a world relapsing to Pagan chaos. And its flag shall be a "shield of David," with the Lion of Judah rampant, and twelve stars for the Tribes. No more of the cringing and the whispering in dark corners; no surreptitious invasion of Palestine. The Jew shall demand right, not tolerance. Israel shall walk erect. And he, Israel's spokesman, will not juggle with diplomatic combinations--he will play cards on table. He has nothing to say to the mob, Christian or Jewish, he will not intrigue with political underlings. He is no demagogue; he will speak with kings in their palaces, with prime ministers in their cabinets. There is a touch of the +hubris+ of Lassalle, of the magnificence of Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo Da Costa, King of the question-beggars.

Do you object that the poor will be the only ones to immigrate to Palestine? Why, it is just those that we want. Prithee, how else shall we make our roads and plant our trees? No mention now of the Eurasian exemplar, the synthetic "over-man." Perhaps he is only to evolve. Do you suggest that an inner ennobling of scattered Israel might be the finer goal, the truer antidote to anti-Semitism? Simple heart, do you not see it is just for our good--not our bad--qualities that we are persecuted? A jugglery--specious enough for the moment--with the word "good"; forceful "struggle-for-life" qualities substituted for spiritual, for ethical. And yet to doubt that the world would--and does--respond sympathetically to the finer elements so abundantly in Israel, is it not to despair of the world, of humanity? In such a world, what guarantee against the pillage of the Third Temple? And in such a world were life worth living at all? And, even with Palestine for ultimate goal, do you counsel delay, a nursing of the Zionist flame, a gradual education and preparation of the race for a great conscious historic rôle in the world's future, a forty years' wandering in the wilderness to organize or kill off the miscellaneous rabble--then will you, dreamer, turn a deaf ear to the cry of millions oppressed to-day? Would you ignore the appeals of these hundreds of telegrams, of these thousands of petitions with myriads of signatures, for the sake of some visionary perfection of to-morrow? Nay, nay, the cartoon of the Congress shall bring itself to pass. Against the picturesque wailers at the ruins of the Temple wall shall be set the no less picturesque peasants sowing the seed, whose harvest is at once waving grain and a regenerated Israel. The stains of sordid traffic shall be cleansed by the dews and the rains. In the Jewish peasant behold the ideal plebeian of the future; a son of the soil, yet also a son of the spirit. And what fair floriage of art and literature may not the world gain from this great purified nation, carrying in its bosom the experience of the ages?

Not all his own ideas, these; some perhaps only half-consciously present to him, so that even in this very Congress the note of jealousy is heard, the claim of an earlier prophet insisted on fiercely. For a moment the dignified assembly, becomes a prey to atavism, reproduces the sordid squabbles of the _Kahal_. As if every movement was not fed by subterranean fires, heralded by obscure rumblings, though 'tis only the earthquake or the volcanic jet which leaps into history!

But the President is finely impersonal. Not he, but the Congress. The Bulgarians have a tradition that the Messiah will be born on August 29. He shares this belief. To-day the Messiah has been born--the Congress. "In this Congress we procure for the Jewish people an organ which till now it did not possess, and of which it was so sadly in want. Our cause is too great for the ambition and wilfulness of a single person. It must be lifted up to something impersonal if it is to succeed. And our Congress shall be lasting, not only until we are redeemed from the old state, but still more so afterwards ... serious and lofty, a blessing for the unfortunate, noxious to none, to the honor of all Jews, and worthy of a past, the glory of which is far off, but everlasting."

And, as he steps from the tribune, amid the roar of "Hochs," and the thunder of hands and feet and sticks, and the flutter of handkerchiefs, with men precipitating themselves to kiss his hand, and others weeping and embracing, be sure that no private ambition possesses him, be sure that his heart swells only with the presentiment of great events and with uplifting thoughts of the millions who will thrill to the distant echo of this sublime moment.

What European parliament could glow with such a galaxy of intellect? Is not each man a born orator, master of arts or sciences? Has not the very caftan-Jew from the Carpathians published his poetry and his philosophy, gallantly championing "The Master of the Name" against a Darwinian world? Heine had figured the Jew as a dog, that at the advent of the Princess Sabbath is changed back to a man. More potent than the Princess, the Congress has shown the Jew's manhood to the world. That old painter, whose famous Dance of Death drew for centuries the curious to Bâle, could not picture the Jew save as the gaberdined miser, only dropping his money-bag at Death's touch. Well, here is another sight for him--could Death, that took him too, bring him back for a moment--these scholars, thinkers, poets, from all the lands of the Exile, who stand up in honor of the dead pioneers of Zionism, and, raising their right hands to heaven, cry, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning!" Yes, the dream still stirs at the heart of the mummied race, the fire quenched two thousand years ago sleeps yet in the ashes. And if our President forgets that the vast bulk of his brethren are unrepresented in his Congress, that they are content with the civic rights so painfully won, and have quite other conceptions of their creed's future, who will grudge him this moment of fine rapture?

Or, when at night, in the students' _Kommers_, with joyful weeping and with brotherly kisses, sages and gray-beards join in the _gaudeamus igitur_, who shall deny him grounds for his faith that _juvenes sumus_ yet, that the carking centuries have had no power over our immortal nation. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."

The world in which prophecies are uttered cannot be the world in which prophecies are fulfilled. And yet when--at the wind-up of this memorable meeting--the Rabbi of Bâle, in the black skull-cap of sanctity, ascending the tribune amid the deafening applause of a catholic Congress, expresses the fears of the faithful, lest in the new Jewish State the religious Jew be under a ban; and when the President gravely gives the assurance, amid enthusiasm as frantic, that Judaism has nothing to fear--Judaism, the one cause and consolation of the ages of isolation and martyrdom--does no sense of the irony of history intrude upon his exalted mood?

THE PALESTINE PILGRIM

A vast, motley crowd of poor Jews and Jewesses swayed outside the doors of the great Manchester synagogue, warmed against the winter afternoon by their desperate squeezing and pushing. They stretched from the broad-pillared portico down the steps and beyond the iron railings, far into the street. The wooden benches of the sacred building were already packed with a perspiring multitude, seated indiscriminately, women with men, and even men in the women's gallery, resentfully conscious--for the first time--of the grating. The hour of the address had already struck, but the body of police strove in vain to close the doors against the mighty human stream that pressed on and on, frenzied with the fear of disappointment and the long wait.

A policeman, worming his way in by the caretaker's entrance, bore to the hero of the afternoon the superintendent's message that unless he delayed his speech till the bulk of the disappointed could be got inside, a riot could not be staved off. And so the stream continued to force itself slowly forward, flowing into every nook and gangway, till it stood solid and immovable, heaped like the waters of the Red Sea. And when at last the doors were bolted, and thousands of swarthy faces, illumined faintly by clusters of pendent gas-globes, were turned towards the tall pulpit where the speaker stood, dominant, against the mystic background of the Ark-curtain, it seemed as if the whole Ghetto of Manchester--the entire population of Strange-ways and Redbank--had poured itself into this one synagogue in a great tidal wave, moved by one of those strange celestial influences which have throughout all history disturbed the torpor of the Jewries.

Of these poverty-stricken thousands, sucked hither by the fame of a soldier rumored to represent a Messianic millionaire bent on the restoration and redemption of Israel, Aaron the Pedlar was an atom--ugly, wan, and stooping, with pious ear-locks, and a long, fusty coat, little regarded even by those amid whom he surged and squeezed for hours in patience. Aaron counted for less than nothing in a world he helped to overcrowd, and of which he perceived very little. For, although he did not fail to make a profit on his gilded goods, and knew how to wheedle servants at side-doors, he was far behind his fellows in that misapprehension of the human hurly-burly which makes your ordinary Russian Jew a political oracle. Aaron's interest in politics was limited to the wars of the Kings of Israel and the misdeeds of Titus and Antiochus Epiphanes. To him the modern world was composed of Jews and heathen; and society had two simple sections--the rich and the poor.

"Don't you enjoy travelling?" one of the former section once asked him affably. "Even if it's disagreeable in winter you must pass through a good deal of beautiful scenery in summer."

"If I am on business," replied the pedlar, "how can I bother about the beautiful?"

And, flustered though he was by the condescension of the great person, his naïve counter-query expressed a truth. He lived, indeed, in a strange dream-world, and had no eyes for the real except in the shape of cheap trinkets. He was happier in the squalid streets of Strange-ways, where strips of Hebrew patched the windows of cook-shops, and where a synagogue was ever at hand, than when striding across the purple moors under an open blue sky, or resting with his pack by the side of purling brooks. Stupid his enemies would have called him, only he was too unimportant to have enemies, the roughs and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by impersonal malice. To his friends--if the few who were aware of his existence could be called friends--he was a _Schlemihl_ (a luckless fool).

"A man who earns a pound a week live without a wife!" complained the _Shadchan_ (marriage-broker) to a group of sympathetic cap-makers.

"I suppose he's such a _Schlemihl_ no father would ever look at him!" said a father, with a bunch of black-eyed daughters.

"Oh, but he _was_ married in Russia," said another; "but just as he sent his wife the money to come over, she died."

"And yet you call him a _Schlemihl_!" cried Moshelé, the cynic.

"Ah, but her family stuck to the money!" retorted the narrator, and captured the laugh.

It was true. After three years of terrible struggle and privation, Aaron had prepared an English home for his Yenta, but she slept instead in a Russian grave. Perhaps if his friends had known how he had thrown away the chance of sending for her earlier, they would have been still more convinced that he was a born _Schlemihl_. For within eighteen months of his landing in London docks, Aaron, through his rapid mastery of English and ciphering at the evening classes for Hebrew adults, had found a post as book-keeper to a clothes-store in Ratcliff Highway. But he soon discovered that he was expected to fake the invoices, especially when drunken sailors came to rig themselves up in mufti.

"Well, we'll throw the scarf in," the genial salesman would concede cheerily. "And the waistcoat? One-and-three--a good waistcoat, as clean as new, and dirt cheap, so 'elp me."

But when Aaron made out the bill he was nudged to put the one-and-three in the column for pounds and shillings respectively, and even, if the buyer were sufficiently in funds and liquor, to set down the date of the month in the same pecuniary partitions, and to add it up glibly with the rest, calendar and coin together. But Aaron, although he was not averse from honestly misrepresenting the value of goods, drew the line at trickery, and so he was kicked out. It took him a year of nondescript occupations to amass a little stock of mock jewellery wherewith to peddle, and Manchester he found a more profitable centre than the metropolis. Yenta dead, profit and holy learning divided his thoughts, and few of his fellows achieved less of the former or more of the latter than our itinerant idealist.

Such was one of the thousands of souls swarming that afternoon in the synagogue, such was one despised unit of a congregation itself accounted by the world a pitiable mass of superstitious poverty, and now tossing with emotion in the dim spaces of the sacred building.

The Oriental imagination of the hearers magnified the simple soldierly sentences of the orator, touched them with color and haloed them with mystery, till, as the deep gasps and sobs of the audience struck back like blows on the speaker's chest, the contagion of their passion thrilled him to responsive emotion. And, seen through tears, arose for him and them a picture of Israel again enthroned in Palestine, the land flowing once more with milk and honey, rustling with corn and vines planted by their own hands, and Zion--at peace with all the world--the recognized arbitrator of the nations, making true the word of the Prophet: "For from Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of God from Jerusalem."

To Aaron the vision came like a divine intoxication. He stamped his feet, clapped, cried, shouted. He felt tears streaming down his cheeks like the rivers that watered Paradise. What! This hope that had haunted him from boyhood, wafting from the pages of the holy books, was not then a shadowy splendor on the horizon's rim. It was a solidity, within sight, almost within touch. He himself might hope to sit in peace under his own fig-tree, no more the butt of the street boys. And the vague vision, though in becoming definite it had been transformed to earthliness, was none the less grand for that. He had always dimly expected Messianic miracles, but in that magic afternoon the plain words of the soldier unsealed his eyes, and suddenly he saw clearly that just as, in Israel, every man was his own priest, needing no mediator, so every man was his own Messiah.

And as he squeezed out of the synagogue, unconscious of the chattering, jostling crowd, he saw himself in Zion, worshipping at the Holy Temple, that rose spacious and splendid as the Manchester Exchange. Yes; the Jews must return to Palestine, there must be a great voluntary stream--great, if gradual. Slowly but surely the Jews must win back their country; they must cease trafficking with the heathen and return to the soil, sowing and reaping, so that the Feast of the Ingathering might become a reality instead of a prayer-service. Then should the atonement of Israel be accomplished, and the morning stars sing together as at the first day.

As he walked home along the squalid steeps of Fernie Street and Verdon Street, and gazed in at the uncurtained windows of the one-story houses, a new sense of their sordidness, as contrasted with that bright vision, was borne in upon him. Instead of large families in one ragged room, encumbered with steamy washing, he saw great farms and broad acres; and all that beauty of the face of earth, to which he had been half blind, began to appeal to him now that it was mixed up with religion. In this wise did Aaron become a politician and a modern.

Passing through the poulterer's on his way to his room--the poulterer and he divided the house between them, renting a room each--he paused to talk with the group of women who were plucking the fowls, and told them glad tidings of great fowl-rearing farms in Palestine. He sat down on the bed, which occupied half the tiny shop, and became almost eloquent upon the great colonization movement and the "Society of Lovers of Zion," which had begun to ramify throughout the world.

"Yes; but if all Israel has farms, who will buy my fowls?" said the poulterer's wife.

"You will not need to sell fowls," Aaron tried to explain.

The poulterer shook his head. "The whole congregation is gone mad," he said. "For my part I believe that when the Holy One, blessed be He, brings us back to Palestine, it will be without any trouble of our own. As it is written, I will bear thee upon eagles' wings."

Aaron disputed this notion--which he had hitherto accepted as axiomatic--with all the ardor of the convert. It was galling to find, as he discussed the thing during the next few weeks, that many even of those present at the speech read miracle into the designs of Providence and the millionaire. But Aaron was able to get together a little band of brother souls bent on emigrating together to Palestine, there to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, literally as well as metaphorically. This enthusiasm, however, did not wear well. Gradually, as the memory of the magnetic meeting faded, the pilgrim brotherhood disintegrated, till at last only its nucleus--Aaron--was left in solitary determination.

"You have only yourself," pleaded the backsliders. "We have wife and children."

"I have more than myself," retorted Aaron bitterly. "I have faith."

And, indeed, his faith in the vision was unshakable. Every man being his own Messiah, he, at least, would not draw back from the prospective plough to which he had put his hand. He had been saving up for the great voyage and a little surplus wherewith to support him in Palestine while looking about him. Once established in the Holy Land, how forcibly he would preach by epistle to the men of little faith! They would come out and join him. He--the despised Aaron--the least of the House of Israel--would have played a part in the restoration of his people.

"You will come back," said the poulterer sceptically, when his fellow-tenant bade him good-bye; and parodying the sacred aspiration--"Next year in Manchester," he cried, in genial mockery. The fowl-plucking females laughed heartily, agitating the feathery fluff in the air.

"Not so," said Aaron. "I cannot come back. I have sold the goodwill of my round to Joseph Petowski, and have transferred to him all my customers."

Some of the recreant brotherhood, remorsefully admiring, cheered him up by appearing on the platform of the station to wish him God-speed.

"Next year in Jerusalem!" he prophesied for them, too, recouping himself for the poulterer's profane scepticism.

He went overland to Marseilles, thence by ship to Asia Minor. It was a terrible journey. Piety forebade him to eat or drink with the heathen, or from their vessels. His portmanteau held a little store of provisions and crockery, and dry bread was all he bought on the route.

Fleeced and bullied by touts and cabmen, he found himself at last on board a cheap Mediterranean steamer which pitched and rolled through a persistent spell of stormy weather. His berth was a snatched corner of the bare deck, where heaps of earth's failures, of all races and creeds and colors, grimily picturesque, slept in their clothes upon such bedding as they had brought with them. There was a spawn of babies, a litter of animals and fowls in coops, a swarm of human bundles, scarcely distinguishable from bales except for a protruding hand or foot. There were Bedouins, Armenians, Spaniards, a Turk with several wives in an improvised tent, some Greek women, a party of Syrians from Mount Lebanon. There were also several Jews of both sexes. But Aaron did not scrape acquaintance with these at first--they lay yards away, and he was half dead with sea-sickness and want of food. He had counted on making tea in his own cup with his own little kettle, but the cook would not trouble to supply him with hot water. Only the great vision drawing hourly nearer and nearer sustained him.

It was the attempt of a half-crazy Egyptian Jewess to leap overboard with her new-born child that brought him into relation with the other Jewish passengers. He learnt her story: the everyday story of a woman divorced in New York, after the fashion of its Ghetto, and sent back with scarcely a penny to her native Cairo, while still lightheaded after childbirth. He heard also the story of the buxom, kind-hearted Jewess who now shadowed her protectingly; the no less everyday story of the good-looking girl inveigled by a rascally Jew to a situation in Marseilles. They contributed with the men, a Russian Jew from Chicago, and a German from Brindisi, to give Aaron of Manchester a new objective sense of the tragedy of wandering Israel, interminably tossed betwixt persecution and poverty, perpetually tempted by both to be false to themselves: the tragedy that was now--thank God!--to have its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians, Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them--that which he, Aaron, was now accomplishing. To his joy one of his new acquaintances--the Russian--shared the dream of a Palestine flowing once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a "Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an old billy-cock and a dingy cotton shirt, but he combined all the lore of the old-fashioned, hard-shell Jew with a living realization of what his formulæ meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage--till the Russian landed at Alexandria--was softened and shortened by sitting worshipfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from Bachja's _Duties of the Heart_ or Saadja Gaon's _Book of the Faith_. There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity of the swarming deck, loved to pose as a man of common sense, free from superstition.

"The only reason men go to Palestine," he maintained, "is because they think, as the psalm says, the land forgives sin. And they believe, too, that those bodies which are not burned in Palestine, when the Messiah's last trump sounds, will have to roll under lands and seas to get to Jerusalem. So they go to die there, so as to escape the underground route. Besides, Maimonides says the Messianic period will only last forty years. So perhaps they are afraid all the fun will be over and the Leviathan eaten up before they arrive."