Ghetto Tragedies Part 48

To-morrow will be a hard day.

_Sunday Night._--I have just read over my last entry. How cold, how tame the words seem, compared with the tempest with which I am shaken.

And yet it _is_ a relief to have uttered them; to have given vent to my pa.s.sion and pain. Already this scrawl of mine has become sacred to me; already this study in which I write has become a sanctuary to which my soul turns with longing. All day long my diary was in my thoughts. All my turbulent emotions were softened by the knowledge that I should come here and survey them with calm; by the hope that the tranquil reflectiveness which writing induces would lead me into some haven of rest. And first let me confess that I am glad Paul goes back to St. Petersburg on Tuesday. It is a comfort to have him here for a few days, and yet, oh, how I dread to meet his clear gaze! How irksome this close contact, with the rough rubs it gives to all my sore places! How I abhorred myself to-day as I went through the ghastly mimicries of prayer, and crossing myself, and genuflexion, in our little church. How I hate the sight of its sky-blue dome and its gilt minarets! When the pope brought me the Gospel to kiss, fiery shame coursed through my veins. And then when I saw the look of humble reverence on Paul's face as he pressed his lips to the silver-bound volume, my blood was frozen to ice. Strange, dead memories seemed to float about the incense-laden air; shadowy scenes; old, far-away cadences. And when the deacon walked past me with his _bougie_, there seemed to flash upon me some childish recollection of a joyous candle-bearing procession, whereat my eyes grew filled with sudden tears. The marble altar, the silver candlesticks, the glittering jewelled scene faded into mist. And then the choir sang, and under the music I grew calm again. After all, religions were made for men. And this one was just fitted for the simple muzhiks who dotted the benches with their stupid, good natured figures. They must have their gold-bedecked G.o.ds in painting and image; and their saints in gold brocade to kneel before at all hours to solace themselves with visions of a brocaded Paradise.

And yet what had I to do with these childish superst.i.tions?--I whose race preached the great doctrine of the Unity to a world sunk in vice and superst.i.tion; whose childish lips were taught to utter the _Shemang_ as soon as they could form the syllables; who _know_ that the Christian creed is a monstrous delusion! To think that I have lent the sanction of my manhood to these grotesque beliefs. Grotesque, say I? when to Paul they are the essence of all lofty feeling and aspiration! And yet I know that he is blind, or sees things with that strange perversion of vision of which I have heard him accuse the Jews--my brethren. He believes what he has been taught. And who taught him? _Bozhe moi!_ was it not I who have brought him up in these degrading beliefs, which he imagines I share? G.o.d! is this my punishment, that he is faithful to the creed taught him by a father who was faithless to his own? And yet there were excuses enough for me, Thou knowest. Why did these forms and ceremonies, which now loom beautiful to me through a mist of tears, seem hideous chains on the free limbs of childhood? Was it my father's fault or my own that the stereotyped routine of the day; that the being dragged out of bed in the gray dawn to go to synagogue, or to intone in monotonous sing-song the weary casuistries of the rabbis; that the endless precepts or prohibitions, made me conceive religion as the most hateful of tyrannies? Through the cloud of forty years I can but dimly recall the violence of the repulsion with which things Jewish inspired me--of how it galled me to feel that I was one of that detested race, that I was that mockery and byword, a _Zhit_; that, with little sympathy with my people, I was yet destined to partake of its burdens and its disabilities. Bitter as my soul is within me to-day, I can yet understand, can yet half excuse, that fatal mistake of ignorant and ambitious youth.

It were easy for me now to acknowledge myself a Jew, even with the risk of Siberia before me. I am rich, I have some of the education for which I longed, above all, I have _lived_. Ah, how differently the world, with its hopes and its fears, and its praise and censure, looks to the youth who is climbing slowly up the hill, and the man who is swiftly descending to the valley! But the knowledge of the vanity of all things comes too late; this, too, is vanity. Enough that I sacrificed the sincerity and reality of life for unrealities, which then seemed to me the only things worth having. There was none to counsel, and none to listen. I fled my home; I was baptized into the Church. At once all that hampered me was washed away. Before me stretched the free, open road of culture and well-being. I was no longer the slave of wanton laws, the laughing-stock of every Muscovite infant, liable to be kicked and cuffed and spat at by every true Russian. What mattered a lip-profession of Christianity, when I cared as little for Judaism as for it? I never looked back; my prior life faded quickly from my memory. Alone I fought the battle of life--alone, unaided by man or hope in G.o.d. A few lucky speculations on the Bourse, starting from the risking of the few kopecks ama.s.sed by tuition, rescued me from the need of pursuing my law-studies. I fell in love and married. Caterina, your lovely face came effectively between me and what vague visions of my past, what dim uneasiness of remorse, yet haunted me. You never knew--your family never knew--that I was not a Slav to the backbone. The new life lay fold on fold over the old; the primitive writing of the palimpsest was so thickly written over, that no thought of what I had once been troubled me during all those years of wedded life, made happier by your birth and growth, my Paul, my darling Paul; no voice came from those forgotten sh.o.r.es, save once, when--who knows through what impalpable medium?--I learnt or divined my father's death, and all the air was filled with hollow echoes of reproach. During those years I avoided contact with Jews as much as I could; when it was inevitable, I made the contact brief. The thought of the men, of their gabardines and their pious ringlets, of their studious dronings and their devout quiverings and wailings, of the women with their coa.r.s.e figures and their unsightly wigs; the remembrance of their vulgar dialect, and their shuffling ways, and their accommodating morality, filled me with repulsion. As if to justify myself to myself, my mind conceived of them only in their meanest and tawdriest aspects. The black points alone caught my eye, and linked themselves into a perfect-seeming picture.

_Da_, I have been a good Russian, a good Christian. I have not stirred my little finger to help the Jews in their many and grievous afflictions. They were nothing to me. Over the vodka and the champagne I have joined in the laugh against them, without even feeling I was of them. Why, then, these strange sympathies that agitate me now; these feelings, shadowy, but strong and resistless as the shadow of death?

Am I sane, or is this but incipient madness? Am I sinking into a literal second childhood, in which all the terrors and the sanct.i.ties that once froze or stirred my soul have come to possess me once more?

Am I dying? I have heard that the scene of half a century ago may be more vivid to dying eyes than the chamber of death itself. Has Caterina's death left a blank which these primitive beloved memories rush in to fill up? Was it the light of her face that blinded me to the dear homely faces of my father and mother? If I had not met her, how would things have been? Should I have repented earlier of my hollow existence? Was it the genuineness of her faith in her heathen creed that made me acquiesce in its daily profession and its dominance in our household life? And are the old currents flowing so strongly now, only because they were so long artificially dammed up? Of what avail to ask myself these questions? I asked them yesterday and I shall be no wiser to-morrow. No man can a.n.a.lyze his own emotions, least of all I, unskilled to sound the depths of my soul, content if the surface be unruffled. Perhaps, after all, it is Paul who is the cause of the troubling of the waters, which yet I am glad have not been left in their putrid stagnation. For since Caterina's clay-cold form was laid in the Moscow churchyard, and Paul and I have been brought the nearer together for the void, my son has opened my eyes to my baseness. The light that radiates from his own terrible n.o.bleness has shown me how black and polluted a soul is mine. My whole life has been shuffled through under false colours. Even if I shared few of the Jew's beliefs, it should have been my duty--and my proud duty--to proclaim myself of the race. If, as I fondly believed, I was superior to my people, then it behoved me to allow that superiority to be counted to their credit and to the honour of the Jewish flag. My poor brethren, sore indeed has been your travail, and your cry of pain pierces the centuries. Perhaps--who knows?--I could have helped a little if I had been faithful, as faithful as Paul will be to his own ideals. Ah, if Paul had been a Jew--! My G.o.d! _is_ Paul a Jew? Have I upon my shoulders the guilt of this loss to Judaism, too?

a.n.a.lyze myself, reproach myself, doubt my own sanity how I may, one thing is clear. From the bottom of my heart I long, I yearn, I burn to return to the religion of my childhood. I long to say and to sing the Hebrew words that come scantily and with effort to my lips. I long to join my brethren at prayer, to sit with them in the synagogue, in the study, at the table; to join them in their worship and at their meals; to share with them their joys and sorrows, their wrongs and their inner delights. Laugh at myself how I will, I long to bind my arm and brow with the phylacteries of old and to wrap myself in my fringed shawl, and to abase myself in the dust before the G.o.d of Israel; nay, to don the greasy gabardine at which I have mocked, and to let my hair grow even as theirs. As yet this is all but a troubled aspiration, but it is irresistible and must work itself out in deeds. It cannot be argued with. The wind bloweth as it listeth; who shall say why I am tempest-tossed?

_Monday Night._--Paul has retired to rest to rise early to-morrow for the journey to Moscow. For something has happened to alter his plans, and he goes thither instead of to the capital. He is sleeping the sleep of the young, the hopeful, and the joyous. _Ach_, that what gives him joy should be to me--; but let me write down all. This morning at breakfast Paul received a letter, which he read with a cry of astonishment and joy. "Look, little father, look," he exclaimed, handing it to me. I read, trying to disguise my own feelings and to sympathize with his gladness. It was a letter from a firm of well-known publishers in Moscow, offering to publish a work on the Greek Church, the MS. of which he had submitted to them.

"_Nu vot, batiushka_," said he, "I will tell you that this book _donnera a penser_ to the theologians of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d forms of Christianity."

The ribald remark that rose to my lips did not pa.s.s them. "But why did you not tell me of this before?" I asked instead, endeavouring to infuse a note of reproach into my indifference.

"Ah, father, I did not want you to distress yourself. I knew your affection for me was so great that you might want to stint yourself, and put yourself to trouble to help me to pay the expenses of publication myself. You would have shared my disappointments. I wanted you to share my triumph--as now. It is two years that I have been trying to get it published. I wrote it in the year before mother, whose soul is with the saints, left us. But, _eka!_ I am recompensed at last." And his pale face beamed and his dark eyes flashed with excitement.

Yes, Paul was right. As Paul always is. Brought up, I think wisely, to believe in my comparative poverty, he has become manlier for not having a crutch to lean upon. Was it not enough that he was devoid from the start of the dull, dead weight of Judaism which clogged my own early years? Up to the present, though, he has not done so well as I. Russian provincial journalism scatters few luxuries to its votaries. Paul is so stupidly contented with everything that he is not likely to write anything to make a sensation. He has not invented gunpowder.

Paul's voice broke in curiously on my reflections. "It ought to make some sensation. I have collected a whole series of new arguments, partly textual, partly historical, to show the absolute want of _locus standi_ of any other than the Orthodox Church."

"Indeed," I murmured, "and what _is_ the Orthodox Church?" Paul stared at me.

"I mean," I added hastily, "your conception of the Orthodox Church."

"My conception?" said Paul. "I suppose you mean how do I defend the conception which is embodied in our ceremonies and ritual?" And before I could stop him, he had given me a summary of his arguments under which I would not have kept awake if I had not been thinking of other things. My poor boy! So this wire-drawn stuff about the Sacrament and the Lord's Supper is what has cost you toilsome days and sleepless nights, while to me the thought that I had embraced one variety of Christianity rather than another had never before occurred. All forms were the same to me, from Catholicism to Calvinism; the baptismal water had glided from my back as from a duck's. True, I have lived with all the conventional surroundings of my Christian fellow-countrymen, as I have lived with the language of Russia on my lips, and subservient to Russian customs and manners. But all the while I was neither a Russian nor a Christian. I was a Jew.

Every now and again I roused myself to laudatory a.s.sent to one of Paul's arguments when I divined by his tone that it was due. But when he wound up with a panegyric on "our glorious Russian State," and "our little father, the Czar, G.o.d's Vicegerent on earth, who alone of European monarchs incarnates and unites in his person Church and State, so that loyalty and piety are one," I could not refrain from pointing out that it was a pure fluke that Russia was "orthodox" at all.

"Suppose," said I, "Wladimir, when he made his famous choice between the Creeds of the world, had picked Judaism? It all turned on a single man's whim."

"Father," Paul cried in a pained tone, "do not be blasphemous.

Wladimir was divinely inspired to dower his country with the true faith. Just therein lay the wisdom of Providence in achieving such great results through the medium of an individual. It is impossible that G.o.d should have permitted him to incline his ear to the infidel Israelite, who has survived to be at once a link with the past and a living proof of the sterility of the soul that refuses the living waters. The millions of holy Russia perpetuating the stubborn heresy of the Jews--adopting an unfaith as a faith! The very thought makes the blood run cold. Nay, then would every Russian deserve to be sunk in squalor, dishonesty, and rapacity, even as every Jew."

"Not every Jew, Paul," I remonstrated.

"No, not perhaps every Jew in squalor," he a.s.sented, with a sarcastic laugh; "for too many of the knaves have feathered their nests very comfortably. Even the Raskolnik is more tolerable. And many of them are not even Jews. The Russian Press is infested with these fellows, who take the bread out of the mouths of honest Christians, and will even write the leaders in the religious papers. Believe me, little father, these Jewish scribblers who have planted their flagstaffs everywhere have cost me many a heartache, many a disappointment."

I could not help thinking this sentiment somewhat unworthy of my Paul, though it threw a flood of light on the struggle, whose details he had never troubled me with. I began to doubt my wisdom in sending so unpractical a youth out into the battle of life, to hew his way as best he might. But how was I to foresee that he would become a writing man, that he would be tripped up at every turn by some clever Hebrew, and that his aversion from the race would be intensified?

"But surely," I said, after a moment of silence, "our Slavic journalists are not all Christians, either."

"They are not," he admitted sadly. "The Universities have much to answer for. Instead of rigidly excluding every vicious book that unsettles the great social and religious ideals of which G.o.d designed Russia to be the exponent, the works of Spencer and Taine, and Karl Marx and Tourguenieff, and every literary Antichrist, are allowed to poison faith in the sap. The censor only bars the superficially anti-Russian books. But there will come a reaction. A reaction," he added solemnly, "to which this work of mine may, by the grace of G.o.d, be permitted to contribute."

I could have laughed at my son if I had not felt so inclined to weep.

Paul's pietism irritated me for the first time. Was it that _my_ reaction against my past had become stronger than ever, was it that Paul had never exposed his own narrowness so completely before? I know not. I only know I felt quite angry with him. "And how do you know there will ever be a reaction?" I asked.

"Christ never leaves himself without a witness long," he answered sententiously. "And already there are symptoms enough that the creed of the materialist does not satisfy the soul. Look at our Tolsto, who is coming back to Christianity after ranging at will through the gaudy pleasure-grounds of science and life; it is true his Christianity is cast after his own formula, and that he has still much intellectual pride to conquer, but he is on the right road to the fountain of life. But, little father, you are unlike yourself this morning," he went on, putting his hand to my hot forehead. "You are not well." He kissed me. "Let me give you another cup of tea," he said, and turned on the tap of the samovar with an air that disposed of the subject.

I sipped at my cup to please him, remarking in the interval between two sips as indifferently as I could, "But what makes you so bitter against the Jews?"

"And what makes you so suddenly their champion?" he retorted.

"When have I championed them?" I asked, backing.

"Your pardon," he said. "Of course I should have understood you are only putting in a word for them for argument's sake. But I confess I have no patience with any one who has any patience with these bloodsuckers of the State. Every true Russian must abhor them. They despise the true faith, and are indifferent to our ideals. They sneak out of the conscription. They live for themselves, and regard us as their natural prey. Our peasantry are corrupted by their brandy-shops, squeezed by their money-lenders, and roused to discontent by the insidious utterances of their peddlers, d----d wandering Jews, who hate the Government and the Tschinn and everything Russian. When did a Jew invest his money in Russian industries? They are a filthy, treacherous, swindling set. Believe me, _batiushka_, pity is wasted upon them."

"Pity is never spent upon them," I retorted. "They are what the Russians--what we Russians--have made them. Who has pent them into their foul cellars and reeking dens? They work with their brains, and you--we--abuse them for not working with their hands. They work with their hands, and the Czar issues a ukase that they are to be driven off the soil they have tilled. It is aesop's fable of the wolf and the lamb."

"In which the wolf is the Jew," said Paul coolly. "The Jew can always be trusted to take care of himself. His cunning is devilish. Till his heart is regenerate, the Jew remains the Ishmael of the modern world, his hand against every man's, every man's against his."

"'Love thy neighbour as thyself,'" I quoted bitterly.

"Even so," said Paul. "The Jew must be cut off, even as the Christian must pluck out his own eye if it offendeth him. Christ came among us to bring not peace but a sword. If the Kingdom of Christ is delayed by these vermin, they must be poisoned off for the sake of Russia and humanity at large."

"Vermin, indeed!" I cried hotly, for I could no longer restrain myself. "And what know you of these vermin of whom you speak with such a.s.surance? What know you of their inner lives, of their sanctified homes, of their patient sufferings? Have you penetrated to their hearths and seen the beautiful _navete_ of their lives, their simple faith in G.o.d's protection, though it may well seem illusion, their unselfish domesticity, their sublime scorn of temptation, their fidelity to the faith of their ancestors, their touching celebrations of fast and festival, their stanchness to one another, their humble living and their high respect for things intellectual, their unflinching toil from morn till eve for a few kopecks of gain, their heroic endurance of every form of torment, vilification, contempt--?"

I felt myself bursting into tears and broke from the breakfast table.

Paul followed me to my room in amazement. In the midst of all my tempest of emotion I was no less amazed at my own indiscretion.

"What is the matter with you?" he said, clasping his arm around my neck. "Why make yourself so hot over this accursed race, for whom, from some strange whim or spirit of perverseness, you stand up to-day for the first time in my recollection?"

"It is true; why indeed?" I murmured, striving to master myself. After all, the picture I had drawn was as ideal in its beauty as Paul's in its ugliness. "_Nu_, I only wanted you to remember that they were human beings."

"_Ach_, there is the pity of it," persisted Paul; "that human beings should fall so low. And who has been telling you of all these angelic qualities you roll so glibly off your tongue?"

"No one," I answered.

"Then you have invented them. Ha! ha! ha!" And Paul went off into a fit of good-humoured laughter. That laughter was a sword between his life and mine, but I let a responsive smile play across my features, and Paul went to his own room in higher spirits than ever.

We met again at dinner, and again at our early supper, but Paul was too full of his book, and I of my own thoughts to permit of a renewal of the dispute. Even a saint, I perceive, has his touch of egotism, and behind all Paul's talk of Russia's ideals, of the misconceptions of their fatherland's function by feather-brained Nihilists and Democrats possessed of that devil, the modern spirit, there danced, I am convinced, a glorified vision of St. Paul floating down the vistas of the future, with a nimbus of Russian ideals around his head. If he has only put them as eloquently into his book as he talks of them he will at least be read.

But I have bred a bigot.

And the more bigoted he is, the more my heart faints within me for the simple, sublime faith of my people. Behind all the tangled network of ceremony and ritual, the larger mind of the man who has lived and loved sees the outlines of a creed grand in its simplicity, sublime in its persistence. The spirit has clothed itself on with flesh, as it must do for human eyes to gaze on it and live with it; and if, in addition, it has swaddled itself with fold on fold of garment, even so the music has not gone out of its voice, nor the love out of its eyes.

As soon as Paul is gone to-morrow, I must plan out my future life. His book will doubtless launch him on the road to fame and fortune. But what remains for me? To live on as I am doing would be intolerable. To do nothing for my people, either with voice or purse, to live alone in this sleepy hamlet, cut off from all human fellowship, alienated from everything that makes my neighbours' lives endurable--better death than such a death-in-life. And yet is it possible that I can get into touch again with my youth, that after a sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep, I can take up again and retwine the severed strands? How shall my people receive again a viper into its bosom? Well, come what may, there must be an end to this. Even at this moment reproachful voices haunt my ear; and in another moment, when I put down my pen to go to my sleepless bed, I shall take care to light my bed-room candle before extinguishing my lamp, for the momentary darkness would be filled with impalpable solemnity bordering on horror. Flashes and echoes from the ghostly world of my youth, the faces of my dead parents, strange fragments of sound and speech, the sough of the wind in the trees of the "House of the Living," the far-away voice of the Chazan singing some melancholy tune full of heart-break and weirdness, the little crowded Cheder where the rabbi intoned the monotonous lesson, the whizz of the stone little Ivanovitch flung at my forehead because I had "killed Christ"--. No, my nerves are not strong enough to bear these visions and voices.

All my life long I see now I have been reserved and solitary. Never has any one been admitted to my heart of hearts--not even Caterina.

But now I must unburden my soul to some one ere I die. And to another living soul. For this dead sheet of paper will not, I perceive, do after all.

_Sat.u.r.day Night._--Nearly a week has pa.s.sed since I wrote the above words, and I am driven to your pages again. I would have come to you last night, but suddenly I recollected that it was the Sabbath. I have kept the Sabbath. I have prayed a few broken fragments of prayer, recovered almost miraculously from the deeps of memory. I have rested from every toil. I stayed myself from stirring up the fire, though it was cold and I was shivering. And a new peace has come to me.

I have heard from Paul; he has completed the negotiations with the Moscow booksellers. The book is to have every chance. Of course, in a way I wish it success. It cannot do much harm, and I am proud of Paul, after all. What a rabbi he would have made! It seems these publishers are also the owners of a paper, and Paul is to have some work on it, which will give him enough to live upon. So he will stay in Moscow for a few months and see his book through the press. He fears the distance is too great for him to come to and fro, as he would have done had he been at the capital. Though I know I shall long for his presence sometimes in my strange reactions, yet on the whole I feel relieved.