The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 16

The mirror showed me a bad cut over my right eye. I staunched the flow of blood as best I could. It was so humorous an incident--like one of the famous adventures of Frank Merriwell!

I played it out, though. I did not go out of my room the whole day. In the afternoon I telephoned Fred, the cla.s.s president, about it. He came over to see me--and he didn't treat it as lightly as I did. He wanted me to have a doctor, for one thing. I promised I would see one, as soon as the meeting was over, that night.

"You'd better," he said. "That cut is mighty close to some of the most important nerves of the eye."

It was evening when I ventured out. Over in the big a.s.sembly hall the meeting of the senior cla.s.s had already begun. I stole across the campus with my coat collar turned up and my hat far down to hide my face. I did not want to be recognized until I was ready. I hung about outside the ruddy windows of the hall, watching the crowded groups that sat within.

They were listening intently to someone on the platform that I could not see--but I knew that it was Fred, presiding. Fred--and he was explaining it all to them, perhaps, in that deep-voiced way of his.

Then, as I watched, I saw how the heads of all who sat within the scope of my spying craned suddenly towards the side of the room. I knew what that meant, too. It meant that either Sayer or Braley had risen from his seat to make reply to the president's accusation.

Then, amazed, I heard applause and laughter. The m.u.f.fled clapping of hands went on for minutes. So they approved these things that the two editors had done, did they? So they could laugh and clap to hear how Sayer and Braley had crushed the spirit out of two young Jews in front of fifty other freshmen?

I grew too angry to wait. I was not going to dawdle idly in the background, waiting for a foolish, theatrical entrance cue--I wasn't going to "stand aside" a moment longer!

I hurried into the building, up stairs and around corners until I was at the very threshold of the hall. The big ma.s.s of men there, the lights, the noise of their clapping, ten times louder from within--all of it gave a tightening to my throat. My knees began to tremble violently.

It was Braley who was speaking. He was waving his hand with his usual sense of the grandiloquence of his remarks. I heard, I suppose, only the last of them--but that was enough:

"I regret, of course, that I should have had to give pain to these two poor little kike freshmen. I regret that I have thereby offended no less a person than the president of the cla.s.s. But there is the broader way of looking at this thing: that of the interest of the whole community.

And I believe, as every man in this room believes, that it would be ten times better that all Jews be debarred from our college. If not that, then certainly from all our college activities, in order that real Anglo-Saxon fair play may prevail! If any man, including the Jew who has instigated this protest against Sayer and myself, wishes to refute this, let him step forward now or be forever silent."

He sat down grandly, amid huzzas.

I do not know whether he or Sayer actually meant me to be incarcerated during all that day and night, while the meeting went forward so famously. Probably they had had it in mind when they played the vindictive little prank, and had been ashamed, when in better senses, to come back and release me. Certainly Sayer, who sat close to the door, turned pale when he saw me now.

I went slowly to the front of the room. My eyes pained me and I was nauseated. But I had ceased to tremble and was calm with a fury that checked all nervousness.

"The Jew who instigated this protest is here to back it up," I said slowly. "He is here to appeal to the 'real Anglo-Saxon fair play.'"

I could feel in the air the antagonism which I must down. I knew, as never before, how bitter and insensate was the prejudice which I must conquer by fifteen minutes of quiet words.

What I said doesn't count: I hardly remember most of it, anyhow. Before me, as I talked, the faces swam away into a dim and meaningless strip. I was not talking to these raw, sw.a.n.kering college boys. I was talking to something beyond--to something that was infinitely brighter and more glorious than I had ever known before. I was talking to something beyond all earth--to Someone....

And I was appealing, was summoning, calling Him down to my aid. I was speaking His words, in the spirit of His ancient fighting prophets. I was fighting His fight. The calm frenzy in my heart was of His instillation. For years I had sought Him. For years I had shunned Him, knowing my need of Him. For all the days of my life I had borne the fierce justice of His words as a lonely burden--and now, now....

"And I shall fight and fight," I cried, "in the name of G.o.d--the G.o.d that is over all of us, of whatever race, creed or color--for the things that are fair and right and just. I shall have justice for a little East Side Jewish freshman as you shall have it, too."

Then suddenly, as if blinded by the refulgence of what I saw, my eyes began to water and grow dim. I stood there, tense, and did not mind the pain that was in them. But I could speak no more.

And slowly the men rose and went out, quietly, strangely--looking back sometimes to where I stood--not comprehending everything, I suppose, but moved beyond all common approbation. They had been conquered.

Braley remained alone with me in the deserted hall. I looked at him across a row of seats and began to laugh.

"You didn't even say a word to them about that rotten trick we played on you," he said, shamefacedly, his glib manners gone.

"I didn't have to," I replied. "Besides, I forgot."

"Well--er--thanks! You could have had us expelled!"

But the pain and dizziness were beyond standing now. I tore off my hat, so that he had a glimpse of the long, sullen cut over my eye.

"Look out!" he cried, leaping up on the platform, to hold me--for I was falling to the floor.

I remember laughing again, long but weakly. "I didn't have to! I didn't have to!"

And after so much light, there came the darkness.

XX

THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED

When I rose from a hospital bed of fever and darkness, ten days later, it was with a feeling of rebirth--as if, in the dripping delirium of threatened blindness, the last doubts had sloughed away.

And when the bandage was taken from my eyes, and I had, for the first time in so long a while, a short and tempered bit of sunshine that came through the shaded windows and across the clean, white floors, it was as if I saw things, now, as I had never seen them--face to face.

I must not return immediately to college, the doctors said. There must be another fortnight of convalescence, with absolute rest for my eyes.

They gave me my choice as to where I wanted to go--and I chose the settlement. I should be among friends, down there; I should have the sunny roof-garden to loiter in--and Jewish faces everywhere about me.

It was good old Trevelyan, squinting and stuttering and strangely moved, who called for me in his car and took me away from the hospital. He had wanted me to go to his Adirondack lodge, instead, and resigned me into Mr. Richards' care at the settlement as if he were consigning me reluctantly to one of the Inferno's inner limbos.

It was then the second day of the Jewish New Year. The whole teeming neighborhood was in holiday garb and mood. From the roof that night Mr.

Richards and I stood watching the streets and their carnival crowds, swarming indistinctly under the lamps and about the corners.

"The little people," quoted Mr. Richards, "G.o.d and the little people...."

"They are not little when they have G.o.d," I answered.

He nodded. "I was wrong in what I said in that argument of ours. Do you remember? I said they didn't need their religion--that it was working more harm than good among the younger generation. I've learned, now....

There isn't a person on earth that doesn't need it--all that he can get of it--and these little people of the East Side most of all."

From below there rose to us the clang and clatter of traffic, the indescribable rustle of the crowd, the shriek of a demon fire engine, many streets away. But, above it all, we heard singing, on the floor below us, of a solemn chant in rehearsal. It was the settlement Choral Society, singing the plaintive "Kol Nidre"--and when the parts swelled into unison, all other sounds seemed suddenly engulfed in the rich, melancholy texture of the harmony.

Mr. Richards smiled. "There it is, you see: the grim, sad faith of the Jewish people. It is all they have had in all their wanderings--but it is everything."

The cut across my forehead healed quickly. Resting from all tasks, my eyes regained their strength without relapse.

I had visitors. Several of the men from college came down each day. I had not known there were so many persons who cared. Braley was among them, once--and he sat and twisted his hat and said nothing. Whether or not his friendship is worth anything to me, I have made a friend of him.

Once or twice, since then, he has tried to speak of the trick which he and Sayer attempted, but I have stopped him. There is no need of going over _that_.

Only, a few days after I went to the hospital, there was a long and flowery retraction published in the college newspaper, inviting all freshmen "of whatever race or creed to enter the editorial compet.i.tion, with the a.s.surance that the most democratic principles would prevail."

At any rate, when Frank Cohen ran in to see me, on his way home, a few days later, I advised him to re-enter the contest. Frank, with a freshman's capacity for hero worship, leaped to act on my advice.