The Melting-Pot Part 36

VERA What can be simpler? I used to be jealous of your music, your prophetic visions. I wanted to come first--before them all! Now, dear David, I only pray that they may fill your life to the brim.

DAVID But they cannot.

VERA They will--have faith in yourself, in your mission--good-bye.

DAVID [_Dazed_]

You love me and you leave me?

VERA What else can I do? Shall the shadow of Kishineff hang over all your years to come? Shall I kiss you and leave blood upon your lips, cling to you and be pushed away by all those cold, dead hands?

DAVID [_Taking both her hands_]

Yes, cling to me, despite them all, cling to me till all these ghosts are exorcised, cling to me till our love triumphs over death. Kiss me, kiss me now.

VERA [_Resisting, drawing back_]

I dare not! It will make you remember.

DAVID It will make me forget. Kiss me.

[_There is a pause of hesitation, filled up by the Cathedral music from "Faust" surging up softly from below._]

VERA [_Slowly_]

I will kiss you as we Russians kiss at Easter--the three kisses of peace.

[_She kisses him three times on the mouth as in ritual solemnity._]

DAVID [_Very calmly_]

Easter was the date of the ma.s.sacre--see! I am at peace.

VERA G.o.d grant it endure!

[_They stand quietly hand in hand._]

Look! How beautiful the sunset is after the storm!

[_DAVID turns. The sunset, which has begun to grow beautiful just after VERA'S entrance, has now reached its most magnificent moment; below there are narrow lines of saffron and pale gold, but above the whole sky is one glory of burning flame._]

DAVID [_Prophetically exalted by the spectacle_]

It is the fires of G.o.d round His Crucible.

[_He drops her hand and points downward._]

There she lies, the great Melting Pot--listen! Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [_He points east_]

--the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,--black and yellow----

VERA [_Softly, nestling to him_]

Jew and Gentile----

DAVID Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross--how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of G.o.d. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!

[_He raises his hands in benediction over the shining city._]

Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent--the G.o.d of our _children_ give you Peace.

[_An instant's solemn pause. The sunset is swiftly fading, and the vast panorama is suffused with a more restful twilight, to which the many-gleaming lights of the town add the tender poetry of the night. Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twinkles over the darkening water the torch of the Statue of Liberty. From below comes up the softened sound of voices and instruments joining in "My Country, 'tis of Thee." The curtain falls slowly._]

APPENDIX A

THE MELTING POT IN ACTION

ALIENS ADMITTED TO THE UNITED STATES IN THE YEAR ENDED JUNE 30TH, 1913

African (black) 9,734 Armenian 9,554 Bohemian and Moravian 11,852 Bulgarian, Servian, Montenegrin 10,083 Chinese 3,487 Croatian and Slavonian 44,754 Cuban 6,121 Dalmatian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian 4,775 Dutch and Flemish 18,746 East Indian 233 English 100,062 Finnish 14,920 French 26,509 German 101,764 Greek 40,933 Hebrew 105,826 Irish 48,103 Italian (north) 54,171 Italian (south) 264,348 j.a.panese 11,672 Korean 74 Lithuanian 25,529 Magyar 33,561 Mexican 15,495 Pacific Islander 27 Polish 185,207 Portuguese 14,631 Roumanian 14,780 Russian 58,380 Ruthenian (Russniak) 39,405 Scandinavian 51,650 Scotch 31,434 Slovak 29,094 Spanish 15,017 Spanish-American 3,409 Syrian 10,019 Turkish 2,132 Welsh 3,922 West Indian (except Cuban) 2,302 Other peoples 3,512 -------- Total 1,427,227

APPENDIX B

THE POGROM

(I) A RUSSIAN ON ITS REASONS

[From _The Nation_, November 15, 1913]

It is now over thirty years since the crew of the sinking ship of Russian absolutism first tried this unworthy weapon to save their failing cause. This was when Plehve organised an anti-Semitic agitation and Jewish pogroms in 1883 in South Russia, where the Jews formed almost the only merchant cla.s.s in the villages, and where the ignorant peasants, together with some crafty Russian tradesmen, had a natural grudge against them.

The result was that the prevailing discontent of the ma.s.ses was diverted against the Jews. A large public meeting of protest was organised at that time in the London Mansion House, the Lord Mayor taking the chair. English public opinion rightly appreciated the value of this criminal method of using Jews as scapegoats for political purposes. Now we see merely a further, and let us hope a final, development of the same tactics. They have been used on many occasions since 1883. One of the largest Jewish pogroms of the latest series in Kishineff in 1903 has been clearly traced to the same experienced hand of Plehve, when the pa.s.sive att.i.tude of the local administration and the military was explained by the presence in the town of a mysterious colonel of the Imperial Gendarmerie who arrived with secret orders and a large supply of pogrom literature from St. Petersburg, and who organised the sc.u.m of the town population for the purpose of looting and killing Jews.

The repulsive stories of further pogroms all over the country immediately after the issue of the const.i.tutional manifesto of October 17, 1905, are fresh in the memory of the civilised world.

At that time anti-Semitic doctrine was openly preached, not only against Jews, but against the whole const.i.tutional and revolutionary upheaval. Pogroms against both were organised under the same pretext of saving the Tsar, the orthodoxy, and the Fatherland. Local police and military officials had secret orders to abstain from interference with the looting and murdering of Jews or "their hirelings." Processions of peaceful citizens and children were trampled down by the Cossack horses, and the Cossacks received formal thanks from high quarters for their excellent exploits....

N. W. TCHAYKOVSKY.

(II) A NURSE ON ITS RESULTS

[From _Public Health_, Nurses' Quarterly, Cleveland, Ohio, October 1913]

I was a Red Cross nurse on the battlefield.

The words of the chief doctor of the Jewish Hospital of Odessa still ring in my ears. When the telephone message came, he said, "Moldvanko is running in blood; send nurses and doctors." This meant that the Pogrom (ma.s.sacre) was going on.

Dr. P---- came into the wards with these words: "Sisters, there is no time for weeping. Those who have no one dependent upon them, come. Put on your white surgical gowns, and the red cross. Make ready to go on the battlefield at once. G.o.d knows how many of our sisters and brothers are already killed." Tears were just running down his cheeks as he spoke. In a minute twelve nurses and eight doctors had volunteered. There was one Red Cross nurse who was in bed waiting to be operated on. She got up and made ready too. n.o.body could keep her from going with us. "Where my sisters and brothers fall, there shall I fall," she said, and with these words, jumped into the ambulance and went on to the City Hospital with us. There they had better equipment, and they sent out three times as many nurses as the Jewish Hospital. At the City Hospital they hung silver crosses about our necks. We wore the silver crosses so that we would not be recognised as Jewish by the Holiganes (Hooligans).

Then we went to Molorosiskia Street in the Moldvanko (slums). We could not see, for the feathers were flying like snow. The blood was already up to our ankles on the pavement and in the yards. The uproar was deafening but we could hear the Holiganes' fierce cries of "Hooray, kill the Jews," on all sides. It was enough to hear such words. They could turn your hair grey, but we went on. We had no time to think. All our thoughts were to pick up wounded ones, and to try to rescue some uninjured ones. We succeeded in rescuing some uninjured who were in hiding. We put bandages on them to make it appear that they were wounded. We put them in the ambulance and carried them to the hospital, too. So at the Jewish Hospital we had five thousand injured and seven thousand uninjured to feed and protect for two weeks. Some were left without homes, without clothes, and children were even without parents.

My dear reader, I want to tell you one thing before I describe the scenes of the ma.s.sacre any further; do not think that you are reading a story which could not happen! No, I want you to know that everything you read is just exactly as it was. My hair is a little grey, but I am surprised it is not quite white after what I witnessed.

The procession of the Pogrom was led by about ten Catholic (Greek) Sisters with about forty or fifty of their school children. They carried ikons or pictures of Jesus and sang "G.o.d Save the Tsar." They were followed by a crowd containing hundreds of men and women murderers yelling "Bey Zhida," which means "Kill the Jews." With these words they ran into the yards where there were fifty or a hundred tenants. They rushed in like tigers. Soon they began to throw children out of the windows of the second, third, and fourth stories. They would take a poor, innocent six-months-old baby, who could not possibly have done any harm in this world and throw it down on to the pavement. You can imagine it could not live after it struck the ground, but this did not satisfy the stony-hearted murderers. They then rushed up to the child, seized it and broke its little arm and leg bones into three or four pieces, then wrung its neck too. They laughed and yelled, so carried away with pleasure at their successful work.

I do wish a few Americans could have been there to see, and they would know what America is, and what it means to live in the United States. It was not enough for them to open up a woman's abdomen and take out the child which she carried, but they took time to stuff the abdomen with straw and fill it up. Can you imagine human beings able to do such things? I do not think anybody could, because I could not imagine it myself when a few years before I read the news of the ma.s.sacre in Kishineff, but now I have seen it with my own eyes. It was not enough for them to cut out an old man's tongue and cut off his nose, but they drove nails into the eyes also. You wonder how they had enough time to carry away everything of value--money, gold, silver, jewels--and still be able to do so much fancy killing, but oh, my friends, all the time for three days and three nights was theirs.

The last day and night it poured down rain, and you would think that might stop them, but no, they worked just as hard as ever. We could wear shoes no longer. Our feet were swollen, so we wore rubbers over our stockings, and in this way worked until some power was able to stop these horrors. They not only killed, but they had time to abuse young girls of twelve and fourteen years of age, who died immediately after being operated upon.