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Dreamers of the Ghetto, a fiction by Israel Zangwill |
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Chad Gadya |
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_ "And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I redeem."--EXODUS xiii. 14, 15.
At last the Passover family service was drawing to an end. His father had started on the curious Chaldaic recitative that wound it up: _One only kid, one only kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ The young man smiled faintly at the quaintness of an old gentleman in a frock-coat, a director of the steamboat company in modern Venice, talking Chaldaic, wholly unconscious of the incongruity, rolling out the sonorous syllables with unction, propped up on the prescribed pillows. _And a cat came and devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ He wondered vaguely what his father would say to him when the service was over. He had only come in during the second part, arriving from Vienna with his usual unquestioned unexpectedness, and was quite startled to find it was Passover night, and that the immemorial service was going on just as when he was a boy. The rarity of his visits to the old folks made it a strange coincidence to have stumbled upon them at this juncture, and, as he took his seat silently in the family circle without interrupting the prayers by greetings, he had a vivid artistic perception of the possibilities of existence--the witty French novel that had so amused him in the train, making him feel that, in providing raw matter for _esprit_, human life had its joyous justification; the red-gold sunset over the mountains; the floating homewards down the Grand Canal in the moonlight, the well-known palaces as dreamful and mysterious to him as if he had not been born in the city of the sea; the gay reminiscences of Goldmark's new opera last night at the Operntheater that had haunted his ear as he ascended the great staircase; and then this abrupt transition to the East, and the dead centuries, and Jehovah bringing out His chosen people from Egypt, and bidding them celebrate with unleavened bread throughout the generations their hurried journey to the desert. Probably his father was distressed at this glaring instance of his son's indifference to the traditions he himself held so dear; though indeed the old man had realized long ago the bitter truth that his ways were not his son's ways, nor his son's thoughts his thoughts. He had long since known that his first-born was a sinner in Israel, an "Epikouros," a scoffer, a selfish sensualist, a lover of bachelor quarters and the feverish life of the European capitals, a scorner of the dietary laws and tabus, an adept in the forbidden. The son thought of himself through his father's spectacles, and the faint smile playing about the sensitive lips became bitterer. His long white fingers worked nervously. And yet he thought kindly enough of his father; admired the perseverance that had brought him wealth, the generosity with which he expended it, the fidelity that resisted its temptations and made this _Seder_ service, this family reunion, as homely and as piously simple as in the past when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the Grand Canal, had meant home. The beaker of wine for the prophet Elijah stood as naively expectant as ever. His mother's face, too, shone with love and goodwill. Brothers and sisters--shafts from a full quiver--sat around the table variously happy and content with existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety pervaded the table. _And a dog came and bit the cat which had devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled with salt tears. _He_ would never sit at the head of his own table, carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their little hands in his; he would pass through existence like a wraith, gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping on--the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered--he, modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems! _Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas!_ Modern of the moderns? But it was an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences:
"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. "That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. "For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
_And a staff came and smote the dog which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ Yes, he was a Jew at heart. The childhood in the Ghetto, the long heredity, had bound him in emotions and impulses as with phylacteries. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! The very melody awakened associations innumerable. He saw in a swift panorama the intense inner life of a curly-headed child roaming in the narrow cincture of the Ghetto, amid the picturesque high houses. A reflex of the child's old joy in the Festivals glowed in his soul. How charming this quaint sequence of Passover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles; this survival of the ancient Orient in modern Europe, this living in the souls of one's ancestors, even as on Tabernacles one lived in their booths. A sudden craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic passion of prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo, bordered with a colonnade of shops, the black-bearded Hebrew merchants in their long robes, the iron gates barred at midnight, the keepers rowing round and round the open canal-sides in their barca. The yellow cap? The yellow O on their breasts? Badges of honor; since to be persecuted is nobler than to persecute. Why had they wished for emancipation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. But no; they were restless, doomed to wander. He saw the earliest streams pouring into Venice at the commencement of the thirteenth century, German merchants, then Levantines, helping to build up the commercial capital of the fifteenth century. He saw the later accession of Peninsular refugees from the Inquisition, their shelter beneath the lion's wing negotiated through their fellow-Jew, Daniel Rodrigues, Consul of the Republic in Dalmatia. His mind halted a moment on this Daniel Rodrigues, an important skeleton. He thought of the endless shifts of the Jews to evade the harsher prescriptions, their subtle, passive refusal to live at Mestre, their final relegation to the Ghetto. What well-springs of energy, seething in those paradoxical progenitors of his, who united the calm of the East with the fever of the West; those idealists dealing always with the practical, those lovers of ideas, those princes of combination, mastering their environment because they never dealt in ideas except as embodied in real concrete things. Reality! Reality! That was the note of Jewish genius, which had this affinity at least with the Greek. And he, though to him his father's real world was a shadow, had yet this instinctive hatred of the cloud-spinners, the word-jugglers, his idealisms needed solid substance to play around. Perhaps if he had been persecuted, or even poor, if his father had not smoothed his passage to a not unprosperous career in letters, he might have escaped this haunting sense of the emptiness and futility of existence. He, too, would have found a joy in outwitting the Christian persecutor, in piling ducat on ducat. Ay, even now he chuckled to think how these _strazzaroli_--these forced vendors of second-hand wares--had lived to purchase the faded purple wrappings of Venetian glory. He remembered reading in the results of an ancient census: Men, women, children, monks, nuns--and Jews! Well, the Doges were done with, Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jew--the Jew lived sumptuously in the palaces of her proud nobles. He looked round the magnificent long-stretching dining-room, with its rugs, oil-paintings, frescoed ceiling, palms; remembered the ancient scutcheon over the stone portal--a lion rampant with an angel volant--and thought of the old Latin statute forbidding the Jews to keep schools of any kind in Venice, or to teach anything in the city, under penalty of fifty ducats' fine and six months' imprisonment. Well, the Jews had taught the Venetians something after all--that the only abiding wealth is human energy. All other nations had had their flowering time and had faded out. But Israel went on with unabated strength and courage. It was very wonderful. Nay, was it not miraculous? Perhaps there was, indeed, "a mission of Israel," perhaps they were indeed God's "chosen people." The Venetians had built and painted marvellous things and died out and left them for tourists to gaze at. The Jews had created nothing for ages, save a few poems and a few yearning synagogue melodies; yet here they were, strong and solid, a creation in flesh and blood more miraculous and enduring than anything in stone and bronze. And what was the secret of this persistence and strength? What but a spiritual? What but their inner certainty of God, their unquestioning trust in Him, that He would send His Messiah to rebuild the Temple, to raise them to the sovereignty of the peoples? How typical his own father--thus serenely singing Chaldaic--a modern of moderns without, a student and saint at home! Ah, would that he, too, could lay hold on this solid faith! Yes, his soul was in sympathy with the brooding immovable East; even with the mysticisms of the Cabalists, with the trance of the ascetic, nay, with the fantastic frenzy-begotten ecstasy of the Dervishes he had seen dancing in Turkish mosques,--that intoxicating sense of a satisfying meaning in things, of a unity with the essence of existence, which men had doubtless sought in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, which the Mahatmas of India had perhaps found, the tradition of which ran down through the ages, misconceived by the Western races, and for lack of which he could often have battered his head against a wall, as in literal beating against the baffling mystery of existence. Ah! there was the hell of it! His soul was of the Orient, but his brain was of the Occident. His intellect had been nourished at the breast of Science, that classified everything and explained nothing. But explanation! The very word was futile! Things were. To explain things was to state A in terms of B, and B in terms of A. Who should explain the explanation? Perhaps only by ecstasy could one understand what lay behind the phenomena. But even so the essence had to be judged by its manifestations, and the manifestations were often absurd, unrighteous, and meaningless. No, he could not believe. His intellect was remorseless. What if Israel was preserved? Why should the empire of Venice be destroyed? _And a fire came and burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ He thought of the energy that had gone to build this wonderful city; the deep sea-soaked wooden piles hidden beneath; the exhaustless art treasures--churches, pictures, sculptures--no less built on obscure human labor, though a few of the innumerable dead hands had signed names. What measureless energy petrified in these palaces! Carpaccio's pictures floated before him, and Tintoretto's--record of dead generations; and then, by the link of size, those even vaster paintings--in gouache--of Vermayen in Vienna: old land-fights with crossbow, spear, and arquebus, old sea-fights with inter-grappling galleys. He thought of galley-slaves chained to their oar--the sweat, the blood that had stained history. "So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter." And then he thought of a modern picture with a beautiful nude female figure that had cost the happiness of a family; the artist now dead and immortal, the woman, once rich and fashionable, on the streets. The futility of things--love, fame, immortality! All roads lead nowhere! What profit shall a man have from all his labor which he hath done under the sun? No; it was all a flux--there was nothing but flux. +Panta rhei+. The wisest had always seen that. The cat which devoured the kid, and the dog which bit the cat, and the staff which smote the dog, and the fire which burnt the staff, and so on endlessly. Did not the commentators say that that was the meaning of this very parable--the passing of the ancient empires, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome? Commentators! what curious people! What a making of books to which there was no end! What a wilderness of waste logic the Jewish intellect had wandered in for ages! The endless volumes of the Talmud and its parasites! The countless codes, now obsolescent, over which dead eyes had grown dim! As great a patience and industry as had gone to build Venetian art, and with less result. The chosen people, indeed! And were they so strong and sane? A fine thought in his brain, forsooth! He, worn out by the great stress of the centuries, such long in-breeding, so many ages of persecution, so many manners and languages adopted, so many nationalities taken on! His soul must be like a palimpsest with the record of nation on nation. It was uncanny, this clinging to life; a race should be content to die out. And in him it had perhaps grown thus content. He foreshadowed its despair. He stood for latter-day Israel, the race that always ran to extremes, which, having been first in faith, was also first in scepticism, keenest to pierce to the empty heart of things; like an orphan wind, homeless, wailing about the lost places of the universe. To know all to be illusion, cheat--itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper--not a divine hope--it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all--the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall, willing to die. Perhaps it was this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on his spirit. Tourgenieff was right; only the young should come here, not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he recalled the lines of Catullus--the sad, stately plaint of the classic world, like the suppressed sob of a strong man:
_And a water came and extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ But the glow faded, and he drew back sad and hopeless. For he knew now what he wanted. Paganism would not suffice. He wanted--he hungered after--God. The God of his fathers. The three thousand years of belief could not be shaken off. It was atavism that gave him those sudden strange intuitions of God at the scent of a rose, the sound of a child's laughter, the sight of a sleeping city; that sent a warmth to his heart and tears to his eyes, and a sense of the infinite beauty and sacredness of life. But he could not have the God of his fathers. And his own God was distant and dubious, and nothing that modern science had taught him was yet registered in his organism. Could he even transmit it to descendants? What was it Weismann said about acquired characteristics? No, certain races put forth certain beliefs, and till you killed off the races, you could never kill off the beliefs. Oh, it was a cruel tragedy, this Western culture grafted on an Eastern stock, untuning the chords of life, setting heart and brain asunder. But then Nature _was_ cruel. He thought of last year's grape-harvest ruined by a thunderstorm, the frightful poverty of the peasants under the thumb of the padrones. And then the vision came up of a captured cuttle-fish he had seen gasping, almost with a human cough, on the sands of the Lido. It had spoilt the sublimity of that barren stretch of sand and sea, and the curious charm of the white sails that seemed to glide along the very stones of the great breakwater. His soul demanded justice for the uncouth cuttle-fish. He did not understand how people could live in a self-centred spiritual world that shut out the larger part of creation. If suffering purified, what purification did overdriven horses undergo, or starved cats? The miracle of creation--why was it wrought for puppies doomed to drown? No; man had imposed morality on a non-moral universe, anthropomorphizing everything, transferring into the great remorseless mechanism the ethical ideals that governed the conduct of man to man. Religion, like art, focussed the universe round man, an unimportant by-product: it was bad science turned into good art. And it was his own race that had started the delusion! "And Abraham said unto God: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the gods had meant might, but man's soul had come to crave for right. From the welter of human existence man had abstracted the idea of goodness and made a god of it, and then foolishly turned round and asked why it permitted the bad without which the idea of it could never have been formed. And because God was goodness, therefore He was oneness--he remembered the acute analysis of Kuenen. No, the moral law was no more the central secret of the universe than color or music. Religion was made for man, not man for religion. Even justice was a meaningless concept in the last analysis: What was, was. The artist's view of life was the only true one: the artist who believes in everything and in nothing. The religions unconsciously distorted everything. Life itself was simple enough: a biological phenomenon that had its growth, its maturity, its decay. Death was no mystery, pain no punishment, nor sin anything but the survival of lower attributes from a prior phase of evolution, or not infrequently the legitimate protest of the natural self against artificial social ethics. It was the creeds that tortured things out of their elemental simplicity. But for him the old craving persisted. That alone would do. God, God--he was God-intoxicated, without Spinoza's calm or Spinoza's certainty. Justice, Pity, Love--something that understood. He knew it was sheer blind heredity that spoilt his life for him--oh, the irony of it--and that, if he could forget his sense of futility, he could live beautifully unto himself. The wheels of chance had ground well for him. But his soul rejected all the solutions and self-equations of his friends--the all-sufficiency of science, of art, of pleasure, of the human spectacle; saw with inexorable insight through the phantasmal optimisms, refused to blind itself with Platonisms and Hegelisms, refused the positions of aesthetes and artists and self-satisfied German savants, equally with the positions of conventional preachers, demanded justice for the individual down to the sparrow, two of which were sold in the market-place for a farthing, and a significance and a purpose in the secular sweep of destiny; yet knew all the while that Purpose was as anthropomorphic a conception of the essence of things as justice or goodness. But the world without God was a beautiful, heartless woman--cold, irresponsive. He needed the flash of soul. He had experimented in Nature--as color, form, mystery--what had he not experimented in? But there was a want, a void. He had loved Nature, had come very near finding peace in the earth-passion, in the intoxicating smell of grass and flowers, in the scent and sound of the sea, in the rapture of striking through the cold, salt waves, tossing green and white-flecked; ill exchanged for any heaven. But the passion always faded and the old hunger for God came back. He had found temporary peace with Spinoza's God: the eternal infinite-sided Being, of whom all the starry infinities were but one poor expression, and to love whom did not imply being loved in return. 'Twas magnificent to be lifted up in worship of that supernal splendor. But the splendor froze, not scorched. He wanted the eternal Being to be conscious of his existence; nay, to send him a whisper that He was not a metaphysical figment. Otherwise he found himself saying what Voltaire has made Spinoza say: "Je crois, entre nous, que vous n'existez pas." Obedience? Worship? He could have prostrated himself for hours on the flags, worn out his knees in prayer. O Luther, O Galileo, enemies of the human race! How wise of the Church to burn infidels, who would burn down the spirit's home--the home warm with the love and treasures of the generations--and leave the poor human soul naked and shivering amid the cold countless worlds. O Napoleon, arch-fiend, who, opening the Ghettos, where the Jews crouched in narrow joy over the Sabbath fire, let in upon them the weight of the universe. _And an ox came and drank the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ In Vienna, whence he had come, an Israelite, on whom the modern universe pressed, yet dreamed the old dream of a Jewish State--a modern State, incarnation of all the great principles won by the travail of the ages. The chameleon of races should show a specific color: a Jewish art, a Jewish architecture would be born, who knew? But he, who had worked for Mazzini, who had seen his hero achieve that greatest of all defeats, victory, _he_ knew. He knew what would come of it, even if it came. He understood the fate of Christ and of all idealists, doomed to see themselves worshipped and their ideas rejected in a religion or a State founded like a national monument to perpetuate their defeat. But the Jewish State would not even come. He had met his Viennese brethren but yesterday; in the Leopoldstadt, frowsy with the gaberdines and side-curls of Galicia; in the Prater, arrogantly radiant in gleaming carriages with spick-and-span footmen--that strange race that could build up cities for others but never for itself; that professed to be both a religion and a nationality, and was often neither. The grotesquerie of history! Moses, Sinai, Palestine, Isaiah, Ezra, the Temple, Christ, the Exile, the Ghettos, the Martyrdoms--all this to give the Austrian comic papers jokes about stockbrokers with noses big enough to support unheld opera--glasses. And even supposing another miraculous link came to add itself to that wonderful chain, the happier Jews of the new State would be born into it as children to an enriched man, unconscious of the struggles, accepting the luxuries, growing big-bellied and narrow-souled. The Temple would be rebuilt. _Et apres?_ The architect would send in the bill. People would dine and dig one another in the ribs and tell the old smoking-room stories. There would be fashionable dressmakers. The synagogue would persecute those who were larger than it, the professional priests would prate of spiritualities to an applausive animal world, the press would be run in the interests of capitalists and politicians, the little writers would grow spiteful against those who did not call them great, the managers of the national theatre would advance their mistresses to leading parts. Yes, the ox would come and drink the water, and Jeshurun would wax fat and kick. "For that which is crooked cannot be made straight." Menander's comedies were fresh from the mint, the Book of Proverbs as new as the morning paper. No, he could not dream. Let the younger races dream; the oldest of races knew better. The race that was first to dream the beautiful dream of a Millennium was the first to discard it. Nay, was it even a beautiful dream? Every man under his own fig-tree, forsooth, obese and somnolent, the spirit disintegrated! _Omnia Vanitas_, this too was vanity. _And the slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! He had never thought of the meaning of the words, always connected them with the finish of the ceremony. "All over! All over!" they seemed to wail, and in the quaint music there seemed a sense of infinite disillusion, of infinite rest; a winding-up, a conclusion, things over and done with, a fever subsided, a toil completed, a clamor abated, a farewell knell, a little folding of the hands to sleep. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! It was a wail over the struggle for existence, the purposeless procession of the ages, the passing of the ancient empires--as the commentators had pointed out--and of the modern empires that would pass on to join them, till the earth itself--as the scientists had pointed out--passed away in cold and darkness. Flux and reflux, the fire and the water, the water and the fire! He thought of the imperturbable skeletons that still awaited exhumation in Pompeii, the swaddled mummies of the Pharaohs, the undiminished ashes of forgotten lovers in old Etruscan tombs. He had a flashing sense of the great pageant of the Mediaeval--popes, kings, crusaders, friars, beggars, peasants, flagellants, schoolmen; of the vast modern life in Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago; the brilliant life of the fashionable quarters, the babble of the Bohemias, the poor in their slums, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the prostitutes, the slaveys in lodging-houses, the criminals, the lunatics; the vast hordes of Russia, the life pullulating in the swarming boats on Chinese rivers, the merry butterfly life of Japan, the unknown savages of mid-Africa with their fetishes and war-dances, the tribes of the East sleeping in tents or turning uneasily on the hot terraces of their houses, the negro races growing into such a terrible problem in the United States, and each of all these peoples, nay, each unit of any people, thinking itself the centre of the universe, and of its love and care; the destiny of the races no clearer than the destiny of the individuals and no diviner than the life of insects, and all the vast sweep of history nothing but a spasm in the life of one of the meanest of an obscure group of worlds, in an infinity of vaster constellations. Oh, it was too great! He could not look on the face of his own God and live. Without the stereoscopic illusions which made his father's life solid, he could not continue to exist. His point of view was hopelessly cosmic. All was equally great and mysterious? Yes; but all was equally small and commonplace. Kant's _Starry Infinite Without?_ Bah! Mere lumps of mud going round in a tee-totum dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There were mountains and seas in a morsel of wet mud, picturesque enough for microscopic tourists. A billion billion morsels of wet mud were no more imposing than one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy--they were all in the splashes of mud from a passing carriage. Everywhere one law and one futility. The human race? Strange marine monsters crawling about in the bed of an air-ocean, unable to swim upwards, oddly tricked out in the stolen skins of other creatures. As absurd, impartially considered, as the strange creatures quaintly adapted to curious environments one saw in aquaria. Kant's _Moral Law Within!_ Dissoluble by a cholera germ, a curious blue network under the microscope, not unlike a map of Venice. Yes, the cosmic and the comic were one. Why be bullied into the Spinozistic awe? Perhaps Heine--that other Jew--saw more truly, and man's last word on the universe into which he had been projected unasked, might be a mockery of that which had mocked him, a laugh with tears in it. And he, he foreshadowed the future of all races, as well as of his own. They would all go on struggling, till they became self-conscious; then, like children grown to men, the scales falling from their eyes, they would suddenly ask themselves what it was all about, and, realizing that they were being driven along by blind forces to labor and struggle and strive, they too would pass away; the gross childish races would sweep them up, Nature pouring out new energies from her inexhaustible fount. For strength was in the unconscious, and when a nation paused to ask of itself its right to Empire, its Empire was already over. The old Palestine Hebrew, sacrificing his sheep to Yahweh, what a granite figure compared with himself, infinitely subtle and mobile! For a century or two the modern world would take pleasure in seeing itself reflected in literature and art by its most decadent spirits, in vibrating to the pathos and picturesqueness of all the periods of man's mysterious existence on this queer little planet; while the old geocentric ethics, oddly clinging on to the changed cosmogony, would keep life clean. But all that would pall--and then the deluge! There was a waft of merry music from without. He rose and went noiselessly to the window and looked out into the night. A full moon hung in the heavens, perpendicularly and low, so that it seemed a terrestrial object in comparison with the stars scattered above, glory beyond glory, and in that lucent Italian atmosphere making him feel himself of their shining company, whirling through the infinite void on one of the innumerable spheres. A broad silver green patch of moonlight lay on the dark water, dwindling into a string of dancing gold pieces. Adown the canal the black gondolas clustered round a barca lighted by gaily colored lanterns, whence the music came. _Funiculi, Funicula_--it seemed to dance with the very spirit of joyousness. He saw a young couple holding hands. He knew they were English, that strange, happy, solid, conquering race. Something vibrated in him. He thought of bridegrooms, youth, strength; but it was as the hollow echo of a far-off regret, some vague sunrise of gold over hills of dream. Then a beautiful tenor voice began to sing Schubert's Serenade. It was as the very voice of hopeless passion; the desire of the moth for the star, of man for God. Death, death, at any cost, death to end this long ghastly creeping about the purlieus of life. Life even for a single instant longer, life without God, seemed intolerable. He would find peace in the bosom of that black water. He would glide downstairs now, speaking no word. _And the Angel of Death came and slew the slaughterer, which had slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ When they should find him accidentally drowned, for how could the world understand, the world which yet had never been backward to judge him, that a man with youth, health, wealth, and a measure of fame should take his own life; his people would think, perhaps, that it was a ghost that had sat at the _Seder_ table so silent and noiseless. And, indeed, what but a ghost? One need not die to hover outside the warm circle of life, stretching vain arms. A ghost? He had always been a ghost. From childhood those strange solid people had come and talked and walked with him, and he had glided among them, an unreal spirit, to which they gave flesh-and-blood motives like their own. As a child death had seemed horrible to him; red worms crawling over white flesh. Now his thoughts always stopped at the glad moment of giving up the ghost. More lives beyond the grave? Why, the world was not large enough for one life. It had to repeat itself incessantly. Books, newspapers, what tedium! A few ideas deftly re-combined. For there was nothing new under the sun. Life like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing. Shakespeare had found the supreme expression for it as for everything in it. He stole out softly through the half-open door, went through the vast antechamber, full of tapestry and figures of old Venetians in armor, down the wide staircase, into the great courtyard that looked strange and sepulchral when he struck a match to find the water-portal, and saw his shadow curving monstrous along the ribbed roof, and leering at the spacious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black, with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its black shadow in the water. He walked to where the water-alley met the deeper Grand Canal, and let himself slide down with a soft, subdued splash. He found himself struggling, but he conquered the instinctive will to live. But as he sank for the last time, the mystery of the night and the stars and death mingled with a strange whirl of childish memories instinct with the wonder of life, and the immemorial Hebrew words of the dying Jew beat outwards to his gurgling throat: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Through the open doorway floated down the last words of the hymn and the service:-- _And the Holy One came, blessed be He, and slew the Angel of Death, who had slain the slaughterer, who had slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_ _ |
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