"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 there _is_ a 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 something _you_ haven't seen. You
haven't been in the East, have you?"
"If I had, I haven't got time to jaw about it now. Come and 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 something _has_ changed 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 of Sixth 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--sunshine that 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 my _Maass_ of 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 the _dicker_ was a tenor, and sang in the chorus
of the _Passion-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? But _could_ they 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 be _vorgestellt_? 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 pretty _Kellnerin_.
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
peeping through 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 and _naïveté_, 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 by
_tableaux vivants_ of 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 the
_entr'acte_ I 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 throbbed and
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
the _Gasthaus_ where 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 endless uphill 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 have whitewashed 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 and flashed 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.