Ghetto Comedies Part 52

Wilhammer shocked his Semitic instinct. Wilhammer disappeared within--the relation was obviously intimate--but the girl still stood at the door, a brooding magical figure.

Almost a sense of brotherhood moved him to speak to her, but he conquered the abnormal and incorrect impulse, contenting himself to walk past her with a side-glance, while at the end of the deck-promenade, instead of returning on his footsteps, he even arched his path round to the windy side. After some minutes of buffeting he returned chilled to his prior pacing ground. She was still there, but had moved under the same electric light which had illuminated Wilhammer's face, and she was reading a letter. As his walk carried him past her, he was startled to see tears rolling down those radiant cheeks. A slight exclamation came involuntarily from him; the girl, even more startled to be caught thus, relaxed her grip of the letter--a puff of wind hastened to whirl it aloft. Rozenoffski grasped at it desperately, but it eluded him, and then descending sailed sternwards. He gave chase, stumbling over belated chairs and deck-quoits, but at last it was safe in his clutch, and as he handed it to the agitated owner whom he found at his elbow, he noted with a thrill that the characters were cursive Hebrew.

'How can I zank you, sir!' Her Teutonic-touched American gave him the courage to reply gallantly in German:

'By letting me help you more seriously.'

'_Ach, mein Herr_'--she jumped responsively into German--'it was for joy I was crying, not sorrow.' As her American was Germanic, so was her German like the Yiddish of his remote youth, and this, adding to the sweetness of her voice, dissolved the musician's heart within his breast. He noted now with satisfaction that her fingers were bare of rings.

'Then I am rejoiced too,' he ventured to reply.

She smiled pathetically, and began to walk back towards her cabin.

'With us Jews,' she said, 'tears and laughter are very close.'

'Us Jews!' He winced a little. It was so long since he had been thus cla.s.sed to his face by a stranger. But perhaps he had misinterpreted her phrase; it was her way of referring to _her_ race, not necessarily to _his_.

'It is a beautiful night,' he murmured uneasily. But he only opened wider the flood-gates of race-feeling.

'Yes,' she replied simply, 'and such a heaven of stars is beginning to arise over the night of Israel. Is it not wonderful--the transformation of our people? When I left Russia as a girl--so young,'

she interpolated with a sad smile, 'that I had not even been married--I left a priest-ridden, paralysed people, a cringing, cowering, contorted people--I shall never forget the panic in our synagogue when a troop of Cossacks rode in with a bogus blood-accusation. Now it is a people alive with ideas and volitions; the young generation dreams n.o.ble dreams, and, what is stranger, dies to execute them. Our _Bund_ is the soul of the Russian revolution; our self-defence bands are bringing back the days of Judas Maccabaeus. In the olden times of ma.s.sacre our people fled to the synagogues to pray; now they march to the fight like men.'

They had arrived at her door, and she ended suddenly. The musician, fascinated, feared she was about to fade away within.

'But Jews can't fight!' he cried, half-incredulous, half to arrest her.

'Not fight!' She held up the Hebrew letter. 'They have scouts, ambulance corps, orderlies, surgeons, everything--my cousin David Ben Amram, who is little more than a boy, was told off to defend a large three-story house inhabited by the families of factory-labourers who were at work when the _pogrom_ broke out. The poor frenzied women and children had barricaded themselves within at the first rumour, and hidden themselves in cellars and attics. My cousin had to climb to their defence over the neighbouring tiles and through a window in the roof. Soon the house was besieged by police, troops, and hooligans in devilish league. With his one Browning revolver David held them all at bay, firing from every window of the house in turn, so as to give the besiegers an impression of a large defensive force. At last his cartridges were exhausted--to procure cartridges is the greatest difficulty of our self-defence corps--they began battering in the big front-door. David, seeing further resistance was useless, calmly drew back the bolts, to the mob's amaze, and, as it poured in, he cried: 'Back! back! They have bombs!' and rushed into the street, as if to escape the explosion. The others followed wildly, and in the panic David ran down a dark alley, and disappeared in search of a new post of defence. Though the door stood open, and the cowering inhabitants were at their mercy, the a.s.sailants, afraid to enter, remained for over an hour at a safe distance firing at the house, till it was riddled with bullets. They counted nearly two hundred the next day, embedded in the walls or strewn about the rooms. And not a thing had been stolen--not a hooligan had dared enter. But David is only a type of the young generation--there are hundreds of Davids equally ready to take the field against Goliath. And shall I not rejoice, shall I not exult even unto tears?' Her eyes glowed, and the musician was kindled to equal fire. It seemed to him less a girl who was speaking than Truth and Purity and some dead muse of his own. 'The Pale that I left,' she went on, 'was truly a prison. But now--now it will be the forging-place of a regenerated people! Oh, I am counting the days till I can be back!'

'You are going back to Russia!' he gasped.

He had the sensation of cold steel pa.s.sing through his heart. The _pogroms_, which had been as remote to him as the squabbles of savages in Central Africa, became suddenly vivid and near. And even vivider and nearer that greater danger--the heroic Cousin David!

'How can I live away from Russia at such a moment?' she answered quietly. 'Who or what needs me in America?'

'But to be ma.s.sacred!' he cried incoherently.

She smiled radiantly. 'To live and die with my own people.'

The fire in his veins seemed upleaping in a sublime jet; he was like to crying, 'Thy people shall be my people,' but all he found himself saying was, 'You must not, you must not; what can a girl like you do?'

A bell rang sharply from the cabin.

'I must go to my mistress. _Gute Nacht, mein Herr!_'

His flame sank to sudden ashes. Only Mrs. Wilhammer's hireling!

III

The wind freshened towards the middle of the night, and Rozenoffski, rocking in his berth, cursed his encounter with the red-haired romanticist who had stirred up such a pother in his brain that he had not been able to fall asleep while the water was still calm. Not that he suffered physically from the sea; he was merely afraid of it. The shuddering and groaning of the ship found an echo in his soul. He could not shake off the conviction that he was doomed to drown. At intervals, during the tedious night, he found forgetfulness in translating into sound his sense of the mystic, masterless waste in which the continents swim like islands, but music was soon swallowed up in terror.

'No,' he sighed, with a touch of self-mockery. 'When I am safe on sh.o.r.e again, I shall weave my symphony of the sea.'

Sleep came at last, but only to perturb him with a Jewish Joan of Arc who--turned Admiral--recaptured Zion from her battleship, to the sound of Psalms droned by his dead grandfather. And, though he did not see her the next day, and was, indeed, rather glad not to meet a lady's maid in the unromantic daylight, the restlessness she had engendered remained, replacing the settled bitterness which was all he had brought back from America. In the afternoon this restlessness drove him to the piano in the deserted dining-hall, and his fever sought to work itself off in a fury of practice. But the inner turbulence persisted, and the new thoughts clung round the old music. He was playing Schumann's _Fantasiestucke_, but through the stormy pa.s.sion of _In der Nacht_ he saw the red hair of the heroic Jewess, and into the wistful, questioning _Warum_ insinuated itself not the world-question, but the Jewish question--the sad, unending Jewish question--surging up again and again in every part of the globe, as Schumann's theme in every part of the piano--the same haunting musical figure, never the same notes exactly, yet essentially always the same, the wistful, questioning _Warum_. Why all this ceaseless sorrow, this footsore wandering, this rootless life, this eternal curse?

Suddenly he became aware that he was no longer alone--forms were seated at the tables on the fixed dining-chairs, though there was no meal but his music; and as he played on, with swift side-peeps, other fellow-pa.s.sengers entered into his consciousness, some standing about, others hovering on the stairs, and still others stealing in on reverent tip-toe and taking favourable seats. His breast filled with bitter satisfaction.

So they had to come, the arrogant Americans; they had to swarm like rats to the pied piper. He could draw them at will, the haughty heathen--draw them by the magic of his finger-touch on pieces of ivory. Lo, they were coming, more and more of them! Through the corner of his eye he espied the figures drifting in from the corridors, peering in spellbound at the doors.

With a great crash on the keys, he shook off his morbid mood, and plunged into Scarlatti's Sonata in A, his fingers frolicking all over the board, bent on a dominating exhibition of technique. As he stopped, there was a storm of hand-clapping. Rozenoffski gave a masterly start of surprise, and turned his leonine head in dazed bewilderment. Was he not then alone? '_Gott im Himmel!_' he murmured, and, furiously banging down the piano-lid, stalked from these presumptuous mortals who had jarred the artist's soliloquy.

But the next afternoon found him again at the public piano, devoting all the magic of his genius to charming a contemptible Christendom. He gave them Beethoven and Bach, Paradies and Tschaikowski, unrolled to them the vast treasures of his art and memory. And very soon, lo! the Christian rats were pattering back again, only more wisely and cautiously. They came crawling from every part of the ship's compa.s.s.

Newcomers were warned whisperingly to keep from applause. In vain. An enraptured greenhorn shouted 'Encore!' The musician awoke from his trance, stared dreamily at the Philistines; then, as the presence of listeners registered itself upon his expressive countenance, he rose again--but this time as more in sorrow than in anger--and stalked sublimely up the swarming stairs.

It became a tradition to post guards at the doors to warn all comers as to the habits of the great unknown, who could only beat his music out if he imagined himself unheard. Scouts watched his afternoon advance upon the piano in an empty hall, and the word was pa.s.sed to the little army of music-lovers. Silently the rats gathered, scurrying in on noiseless paws, stealing into the chairs, swarming about the doorways, p.r.i.c.king up their ears in the corridors. And through the awful hush rose the master's silvery notes in rapturous self-oblivion till the day began to wane, and the stewards to appear with the tea-cups.

And the larger his audience grew, the fiercer grew his resentment against this complacent Christendom which took so much from the Jew and gave so little. 'Shylocks!' he would mutter between his clenched teeth as he played--'Shylocks all!'

IV

With no less punctuality did Rozenoffski pace the silent deck each night in the hope of again meeting the red-haired Jewess. He had soon recovered from her menial office; indeed, the paradox of her position in so anti-Semitic a household quickened his interest in her. He wondered if she ever listened to his playing, or had realized that she had entertained an angel unawares.

But three nights pa.s.sed without glimpse of her. Nor was her mistress more visible. The Wilhammers kept royally to themselves in their palatial suite, though the husband sometimes deigned to parade his fangs in the smoking-room, where with the luck of the rich he won heavily in the pools. It was not till the penultimate night of the voyage that Rozenoffski caught his second glimpse of his red-haired muse. He had started his nocturnal pacing much earlier than usual, for the inevitable concert on behalf of marine charities had sucked the loungers from their steamer-chairs. He had himself, of course, been approached by the programme-organizer, a bouncing actress from 'Frisco, with an irresistible air, but he had defeated her hopelessly with the mysterious sarcasm: 'To meet the Bright Lights?' And his reward was to have the deck and the heavens almost to himself, and presently to find the stars outgleamed by a girl's hair. Yes, there she was, gazing pensively forth from the cabin window. He guessed the mistress was out for once--presumably at the concert. His heart beat faster as he came to a standstill, yet the reminder that she was a lady's maid brought an involuntary note of condescension into his voice.

'I hope Mrs. Wilhammer hasn't been keeping you too imprisoned?' he said.

She smiled faintly. 'Not so close as Neptune has kept her.'

'Ill?' he said, with a shade of malicious satisfaction.

'It is curious and even consoling to see the limitations of Croesus,'

she replied. 'But she is lucky--she just recovered in time.'

'In time for what?'

'Can't you hear?'

Indeed, the shrill notes of an amateur soprano had been rending the air throughout, but they had scarcely penetrated through his exaltation. He now shuddered.

'Do you mean it is she singing?'

The girl laughed outright. 'She sing! No, no, she is a sensitive receiver. She receives; she gives out nothing. She exploits her soul as her husband exploits the globe. There isn't a sensation or an emotion she denies herself--unless it is painful. It was to escape the concert that she has left her couch--and sought refuge in a friend's cabin. You see, here sound travels straight from the dining-hall, and a false note, she says, gives her nerve-ache.'

'Then she can't return till the close of the concert,' he said eagerly. 'Won't you come outside and walk a bit under this beautiful moon?'

She came out without a word, with the simplicity of a comrade.

'Yes, it is a beautiful night,' she said, 'and very soon I shall be in Russia.'