not suspected. I will make you forget. I will take you where oblivion
is deepest. I will prove that I am worthy. You shall never leave me.
What care I for law--for right! I will take you where there is no law,
no right, except my will. I will isolate you with myself so far beyond
the boundaries of the real that thought cannot return. We will go
beyond the farthest edge of dreams. Come to the window where you can
see the exterior of the palace. Now watch.”
She saw the crystal walls glow as if a flame dwelled within them,
while from tower to basement fell a silver veil bordered with diamond
sound-crystals, which floated gracefully. Then the veil rose and
vanished; the flame dimmed and faded until the palace became as frail
as if made of ashes. From this ashen palace rose a diaphanous, white
gauze, pearl-encrusted palace, mirroring itself in a lake of ice. The
man beside her, too, had changed. He became well-nigh transparent. He
looked like a spirit made visible. His hand was frailer and whiter
than the gauze upon which it rested. His eyes were terrible in their
concentrated power.
“Now, see where I have taken you! Now do you think that there is any
return? See that avenue of white ferns there, from which the frost
particles fall like rain. Can you leave me now? Do you want to? Look at
that frozen sea to the north, encrusted with opaque crystals. Note its
greenish pallor. You are wondering what is flying across it, are you
not? I can see it in your eyes. You are saying to yourself: ‘What are
those creatures which have no form and yet have every form?’ Watch them
awhile--watch them! My love, those changeful and indeterminate contours
are the unembodied stuff melodic dreams are made of. They are the world
of my soul made visible--the soul of a creator. Now do you guess where
you are? If you do, you know that there is no return. They who come
here cannot go back.
“Watch the far horizon for a moment! There--that light. There, every
once in a while, bright caravans swing to sight, remain visible for
a time, like ships upon the desert, flooding the sea with a regretful
splendor, then disappear. But you can never reach them, my love, never
signal them and go away from me. Do you hear that sound? But you do not
know what it is, Sweet, else you would not listen so calmly.
“High above that frozen sea (in whose heart sleep a million
terrors--that frozen sea, which is genius), so high that your eye
cannot see it, a brilliant-winged bird hovers and flings down the
fragment of a song. The bird is love. When its song reaches the surface
of that frozen sea, it is shivered and broken like a crystal, and the
fragments roll on and on until they reach my gauze-built palace and
make it tremble pitifully. Am I not the first of kings, the wonder
king! Who can resist me! Not you!” he answered, kissing her impetuously.
“Do you never tire of mad improbabilities?”
“Tire of them! Does God tire of his Heaven? The madder they are, the
more they please me. I, too, am a god. I have made a heaven of my own.
I can love only a self-created world where nothing bears the mark of
materiality, of other people’s commonplaceness. In my world matter
takes the form of my slightest wish. I am the center about which change
revolves. I am the force which projects form.” He clapped his hands.
“Let the palace be lighted!”
Across the floor crept the wan shimmer of the will-o’-the-wisp, and
down the walls the green phosphoric glow of fireflies. Then, at a
motion of his hand, the gauze palace faded to a cold ethereal splendor
until it seemed to the Lady Melodia, in her fear and wonder, that it
was little more than a vague radiance against the snow-lit water.
Above, three moons poised, swinging melodiously into place, streaking
it with opalescent light.
“Will you deign to accept my arm?” he asked mockingly. As he bent
before her, she saw that he had become as ethereal as his house of
gauze. His face had an unearthly beauty, and his eyes were awful in
their concentrated splendor.
They left the chamber and entered a hall, in whose center a staircase
descended for two stories. Upon this staircase came and went an endless
procession of pale and regal women, dull gems upon their breasts and
brows.
With a gesture of offended dignity, the Lady Melodia turned as if to
leave the hall.
“There is no cause for anger,” he exclaimed. “I love them, of course.
Are they not made for love? But in loving them, I have dreamed only of
you.”
“Your love, evidently, has not made them happy,” she retorted
scornfully. “Why are their eyes so full of grief and regret? And why
are they silent? Do they never speak?”
“They are not real, any more than I am. They are prisoned in the
crystal prison of a melody. They are the women who rise from the
whirlpools of music. Like the Russalka, they flutter over the abyss. I
created them to live on the boundary line of sound and silence.”
“That is cruel. Give them life. I command you!”
“In every artist, my love, there is the soul of a Nero who longs for
the burning of Rome. They who love beauty are always cruel.”
“But this is monstrous. I will not permit it.”
“I am no crueler to them than life has been to me. Like them, I have
always lived on the boundary line of two worlds. In neither have I been
at home. I, too, am not real. Why do you not pity me? Am I not dearer
to you than they?”
“What are they begging for so piteously? See their outstretched hands!”
“For life, to break the melody in which they are encased and give them
life.”
“And you can refuse?”
“Is not that just what life has refused me? Besides, I love them best
as they are. Can you not see what they are to me? They are my soul’s
life. They are the myriad lives that my brain lives. Look! As they
strain earthward with bitter yearning, thirsting for life, for the
substantiality of joy, of love, can you not understand how they inspire
me, how they make me what I am? Their futile frenzy touches my brain to
fire. It pours a fury into my soul and strings my nerves to mastery and
to creative power.
“Ah, you do not know--no one will ever know--what they have been to
me, what stories, what caprices they have breathed into me. Their mute
eloquence has told me tales of wild longing, of unspeakable desires,
of unknown loves--I cannot tell you how I love them. They set a-tingle
in my brain the centers of creative fancy. They swing me into the
harmonies of the silences. They project upon the canvas of my soul
melodic visions. I live with the unexpanded vigor of their prisoned
lives. Their desires are realized in me.
“Ah!” he continued, becoming reminiscent and talking as if to himself,
“I have had strange, strange loves indeed, which not even tone-magic
can picture, beyond the limits of time and space. I have always been
the king of _bons viveurs_. I have been a pagan exquisite, a Lucullian
epicure! How I have despised those who had only money to enjoy with!
What miserable beggars are they! What has gold to do with the brain? It
is the brain that enjoys.
“But to-night is the crowning night. To-night I have you. To-night I
have for a love her whom no mortal has dared to love before. In your
eyes I shall not read the memory of other lovers. Their ghosts cannot
come between us. Upon your lips I shall not taste the savor of their
kisses. Your sweetness has been reserved for me. What matters it that I
have made a bonfire of my soul to buy you! If I had ten lives, I would
do the same. This way! This way! There is another room. This room was
made for you. No other woman has entered it. It is a strange room. It
is lighted only by the stars, those discreet stars which have shone
upon the amorous sleep of lovers.”
No sooner had they crossed the threshold, however, than the Lord of
Mozart began to tremble violently. Beads of sweat dotted his brow. He
put out his hands gropingly, as do they who cannot see.
“_The dream! Again the dream!_ Oh, keep it from me! Banish it with your
kisses! Banish it with your mouth and the clasp of your arms. How is it
possible that I suffer from a horror like this in the splendid palace
of my genius? I cannot see you, but I know that you are here. I see
only the dream. In the dream I am dying, dying miserably, in a shabby
rooming-house in old Vienna. Through a little window I can see that it
is misty and gray outside, and that a cold rain drizzles down. In the
room where I lie are poverty and the weeping of little children.
“Oh, fling it from me with your love! Let me bury my face in your
breast and forget. Keep it away from me! Keep it away from me! Why
can I not reason! Why can I not know that the world would not permit
one gifted as I am to die in want--one who bears within his blood the
genius of his race!
“Yet I do die there. I know it. I see it. Unaccompanied by a single
one who mourns, my shabby coffin is borne along in the rain--to the
potter’s field where the beggars lie, and the red earth covers my
mouth.”
* * * * *
The Lady Melodia bent her head and wept. She knew that the dream was
true, and that the king of the world had died.
THE KING
In a low doorway, beneath a sign which advertised his saloon in three
languages, Hebrew, German, and wretched phonetic Mauschel, stood the
Polish keeper, bawling out for the benefit of his countrymen the
arrival of fresh vodka from the Vistula.
Since the “_hep hep_” riots and the _Judenkrawall_, the Hamburg Ghetto
gates had been closed and the quarter shut off from supplies. This
morning they were open again, and noise and excitement followed.
The news kindled the inhabitants’ volubility. Men and women rushed
into the street to discuss it. Their minds were divided between love
of money and need of supplies and the world-old fear of bodily injury.
They recalled the horrors of the weeks preceding the ban, and shivered
to think that there was no way of escape. They must expose themselves
to fresh injuries or starve.
In one of the most wretched rooms of the quarter this subject had been
under discussion since sunrise. Here lived Gaon Zunz, his aged wife,
Deborah, and his fifteen-year old granddaughter, Rahel.
Since the exile, Gaon had increased his hours of prayer and fasting,
and he felt convinced that restoration to liberty had been brought
about by his prayerful intercession. Therefore he decided that in the
future Rahel must go to the city and beg, that he might devote himself
to prayer and study.
Gaon Zunz was born in southern Russia, where he became a follower of
the Chassidim. In his early manhood he journeyed westward to preach
to the less devout Jews of central Europe that fond fanaticism of the
East. In Hamburg he married and settled, with the hope of raising
sons to the glory of Israel. Disappointed in this and feeling it to
be God’s justice for weakness lurking in the flesh, he gave himself
over to prayer and fasting, to month-long meditation upon the mystic
Cabbala, and to interpreting the Torah and the Talmud after the manner
of the chosen. Thus he earned the prouder name of Father of the Faith.
Late in life, a daughter was born to Deborah and Gaon, but there was
no rejoicing in the house of Zunz. Then, indeed, Gaon felt that the
hand of God was heavy upon him. And when, at the age of seventeen,
Rahel, his daughter, after persistently refusing to enter into his
arrangements for marriage, ran away with a French artist who had become
enamored of her rare Oriental beauty, and had painted her as “_La Belle
Juive_,” he felt that there was no sinner so great as he, for was he
not responsible for his household?
Misery and sorrow fell upon him. The roots of his faith were shaken.
Surely there must be sin in his heart, else he could not so grievously
err.
The intervening years had served somewhat to lighten this burden of
grief, along with the self-justifying thought that when the ban had
been pronounced against his daughter he had been the first to join in
the curse. Likewise he remembered, and with a thrill of pleasure, that
the next day he had celebrated, in tolerable serenity of soul, the
ceremony in honor of the dead.
Two years later the artist husband died, and one winter morning, Rahel,
with a ten-days’-old child, came back to the old East Ghetto gate to
beg admittance. Kind-hearted Joel, the keeper, took her petition to the
chief rabbi and interceded for her.
All day she waited in the cold by the gate, while the rabbis, after
having summoned her father, deliberated. Gaon said nothing in her
favor. He had buried her, and she no longer existed. He would abide by
the will of the majority. Toward sunset it was agreed that she should
be taken back.
The chill of the day of waiting in the snow by the windy gate was more
than her weakened condition could bear, and she died shortly, leaving
baby Rahel to the stern up-bringing of her aged grandparents.
At the thought that his daughter had died in the faith of her fathers,
a great peace settled down upon Gaon, and with it the blessed
realization that she could sin no more. “The Lord killeth and maketh
alive: He bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up,” he repeated with
fervor. He had at last received substantial proof of the answering
of prayer. He had received his reward as a faithful “Son of the
Commandment,” who places reverence for the Law before love of family.
In return for this favor of the Most High, he determined so to bring
up the little Rahel that there might be no repetition of her mother’s
waywardness.
A sad childhood was hers. The playtimes with little neighbors were
embittered by scornful treatment and the nicknames “Gentile” and
“Christian dog.” They had been told that she was not of the ancient
blood. She learned to feel that she was an outcast. When she told these
things to her grandfather, he explained, as best he could, that her
father had belonged to the wicked world outside the gate, and that the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.
She meditated long and deeply upon this, but she could not understand.
As a result there remained with her an unspeakable fear of that stern
Hebrew God to whom her grandfather prayed, and whose dwelling was
the round-topped prayer house. After feast days she lay awake far
into the night, tormented by visions of ghostly, white-clad figures
with up-stretched arms weaving to and fro for hours in the ecstasy
of prayer, or intoning the ancient desert songs of Judea. She had
watched them ever since she could remember from her seat beside her
grandmother in the long gallery behind the grating.
Despite the regular attendance at the synagogue, Gaon was unable to
impress upon the child the sacredness of the ancient ceremonial.
Fruitless were his exhortations. She was neither willful nor perverse.
They made no impression upon her. They failed to penetrate the depths
of her being. She could not be brought to realize the wickedness of
eating butter after meat, nor of eating it from the same plate; nor
of touching the implements for making fire between Friday night and
Saturday night. Indeed, her very first whipping was for drinking the
cup of wine poured for Elijah.
Gaon looked upon these pranks as the outcome of childish dullness.
In addition, he was preparing himself by prayer for the favor of the
ecstatic vision. So bent was he upon self-examination that he did not
perceive that in the child-soul was being fought the ancient battle
of the Latin and the Hebrew, the worshippers of the flesh and the
worshippers of the spirit, the realists and the dreamers, which, in
ages past, had made the self-denying followers of the Hebrew Moses
repellant and unlovely to Judea’s pleasure-loving, pagan governors.
By the time little Rahel reached her eighth year, she had learned not
to play with other children. Cruelty had made her timid. She preferred
to stay within rather than subject herself to taunts. In the dingy
little front room, hung about with old clothes, and tawdry, half-worn
ornaments, she would sit for hours and watch the children through the
top half of the dirty window, which reached the street level. At first
this isolation was grief unspeakable, and rebellion filled her soul.
She watched them through blinding tears, while longing for love and
companionship gripped her heart.
Time eased this feeling and taught her to amuse herself. She found she
could make any number of playmates with a pencil. Soon the days were
not long enough to fix upon paper the swarming children of her fancy.
She reproduced everything she saw; the passers in the street, the women
who bought old clothes of her grandmother, and the furniture in the
room.
When her eyes and back ached from long bending, she would look up
through the broken pane of the dirty window at a scrap of blue sky ever
and ever so far away, and the color gave her pleasure. It reminded her
of one of her grandfather’s stories of the Holy Land of the Jews, where
there was a sea called Galilee, which was as blue as the turquoise in
the Polish saloon-keeper’s wife’s _Shabbes_ brooch.
One day, after many weeks of practice, when her childish fingers had
acquired considerable skill, she found a fresh sheet of brown paper
which she pinned smoothly upon a board, with the intention of making a
picture of _Grossmutter_ Jackobsky, the pickle dealer across the way.
All day the little, fat old woman stood and waved and beckoned with
her dirty, brass-ringed fingers and called: “_Pick-les!! Pick-les!!_”
About her neck was a rope, from which was suspended a flat board, piled
breast-high with green, shining pickles.
She wore a curly, faded wig which was always askew, and many-branched
coral earrings which reached her shoulders, the rings being tied about
her ears with coarse yarn, which made two wriggling black bows on
either side.
She was touching the figure up for the last time one night several days
later, when Gaon came in unexpectedly and caught her at the work.
“What’s this?” he thundered, snatching the picture from her hands.
“God of Israel! that one of my own blood should keep me from the
vision! Have I not told you that we may not make pictures, that it
is expressly forbidden by the Torah? Have I not told you that it is a
violation of the Law? “_Thou shall not make unto thee a graven image,
nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the
earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: for I, the Lord
thy God, am a jealous God._...””
The last words ended in a shriek of rage. His face was streaked with
lines of ashen white. Purple veins knotted up ominously upon his
forehead. Madness trembled in his voice. She could see its unsteady
light in his eyes.
Scarce knowing what he did, in his fear and horror of the crime that
had been committed beneath his roof, he fell upon the frightened child.
When his anger had expended itself, Rahel’s right hip was dislocated
and her back injured. After many weeks, when she was able to be up and
about again, she was a hopeless cripple, and a distortion of the body
had set in.
At sight of the result of his anger, Gaon quoted Samuel: “Wickedness
proceedeth from the wicked,” and sought to prepare himself anew for the
vision.
During the years that followed, no answer had been granted him until
the opening of the gate on the day for which he had petitioned.
He ascribed the barrenness of the intervening years to Rahel’s
transgression of the Torah law. Now he felt that God had forgiven
him and restored him to favor. If he could win thus much by personal
intercession, was it not reasonable to believe that he could win more
and perhaps avert the future persecution of his people?
For this reason he had made up his mind that Rahel must go into the
city and look after the living. She was old enough. She was fifteen,
although she was hardly larger than a child of twelve. During the seven
years since the injury she had steadily grown out of shape, until she
was a one-sided hunchback with a huge, misshapen hip. Her face, too,
had taken on the pinched, pitiful look of cripples.
Gaon’s decision that she must go to the city was like sentence of
death. She had never been outside the gate. She was afraid of the great
world which stoned grown people as the children used to stone her. And
to go all alone! Her soul sickened.
“Yes, you must go on the morrow, Rahel, if the others are not molested
to-day. I am too old. Besides, I have a greater duty here. There will
be no danger for you, because you do not look like our people. You are
a cripple, and they will give to you richly.”
It was a pitiable figure, clad in the sober, earth-colored livery of
the poor, that limped down the long street from the Ghetto gate the
next morning. She looked like a little, shivering partridge with a
broken wing. Slung over her back and trailing along behind in the dirt,
was a coarse bag for old clothes. Hidden carefully in the bottom of
that bag, however, were brown paper and two pencils, in case she had a
minute in which to rest.
The spring air was warm and sweet. Iridescent flecks of morning mist
hovered over distances and disengaged themselves from grass and trees.
What a wonderful world outside the gate! The houses were clean and
white. The windows sparkled. In front of each house was a little green
grass plot with flowers in it. She had never seen flowers growing
before. There was no room in the Ghetto, which was a fixed space for an
increasing number. To be sure, there were flowers in the Synagogue for
the Feast of Weeks, and the _succah_ were frequently roofed with green
leaves and trailing vines for Tabernacles. But here were flowers of all
colors--growing right out of the ground.
She forgot her fears. Her cramped lungs expanded in the purer air. Her
cramped soul expanded, too, with joy at realization of the beauty of
the world.
There is a Fatherland of the spirit which has nothing to do with
country, race, or language, where the heart is happy, and over which
beams warmly the smiling sun of genius. She had found it in the heart
of an alien city; but the artist’s gift was hers, and that makes
beggars kings.
In each yard grew some flower that she had not seen in the one
before, and she wandered on and on, forgetful of time, weariness, the
errand upon which she had come. Color affected her sensitive nerves
pleasurably, exquisitely, as does melody the sensitive ears of a
musician.
There were trees, too. In the Ghetto only thin, starved poplars grew.
Here were all kinds, and the tender young leaves upon them shone like
an aura of green, sweet light.
She walked on and on, until she dropped from weariness, and the
chilling thought came that Gaon would be very angry if she went back
empty-handed.
While she rested, she ate the bread she had brought, and began to look
at the people. They were not like Ghetto people. For the most part they
were well dressed. Some of the women had bright yellow hair, and, best
of all, they looked down upon her kindly. As she sat staring up at
them, with great, dark eyes in whose depths lay grief and an infinite
longing, first one, then another, dropped a coin in her lap.
Down at the end of a distant street, ever and ever so far away,
something sparkled, something blue as the sky, but of a changing blue,
vibrantly bright, like light. It was the color of the turquoise in the
rich Polish woman’s _Shabbes_ brooch. It must be the Sea of Galilee!
Why had not her grandfather told her! It was probably a very large sea,
she reflected, and the other side reached Palestine.
The desire came to reproduce the sea with the dancing splendor upon it,
and indeed everything she saw; the flowers, the trees with their halos
of young light. There followed speedily the discouraging thought that
a pencil could not do it. For Ghetto scenes, where everything was gray
or black or brown, a pencil was well enough, but for this something
different was needed.
She jumped up, forgetful of weariness and her aching back, determined
to beg enough clothes to fill the bag, so that she could keep the coins
for herself. When she reached the Ghetto, she would talk it over with
Joel. He would know if there were pencils of a different kind, which
made color. If there were, she would give him the money and let him buy
them.
The next morning she took advantage of Gaon’s good humor and left the
Ghetto late, that she might see Joel alone and find out if he had made
the purchases. Sure enough, he was waiting for her, his wizened face
puckered into a smile. Carefully beckoning her to one side, he handed
her a tin box. Lifting the lid, he showed her rows and rows of bright
paint tubes, brushes, pieces of canvas, and some sheets of drawing
paper.
“Didn’t it cost an awful lot, Joel, more than I gave you?”