Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 42

The old woman brought him some folio sheets covered with great pathetically sprawling letters, and when she had retired, he began--

"Wie langsam kriechet sie dahin, Die Zeit, die schauderhafte Schnecke...?"

His voice went on, but after the first lines the listener's brain was too troubled to attend. It was agitated with whirling memories of those earlier outcries throbbing with the pa.s.sion of life, flaming records of the days when every instant held not an eternity of _ennui_, but of sensibility. "Red life boils in my veins.... Every woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.... Life is the greatest of blessings, and death the worst of evils...." But the poet was still reading--she forced herself to listen.

"'Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded G.o.ds, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull.'"

He broke off suddenly. "No, it is too sad. A cry in the night from a man buried alive; a new note in German poetry--_was sage ich?_--in the poetry of the world. No poet ever had such a lucky chance before--_voyez-vous_--to survive his own death, though many a one has survived his own immortality. Dici _miser_ ante obitum nemo debet--call no man wretched till he's dead. 'Tis not till the journey is over that one can see the perspective truthfully and the tombstones of one's hopes and illusions marking the weary miles. 'Tis not till one is dead that the day of judgment can dawn; and when one is dead one cannot see or judge at all. An exquisite irony. _Nicht Wahr?_ The wrecks in the Morgue, what tales they could tell! But dead men tell no tales. While there's life there's hope; and so the worst cynicisms have never been spoken. But I--I alone--have dodged the Fates. I am the dead-alive, the living dead. I hover over my racked body like a ghost, and exist in an interregnum. And so I am the first mortal in a position to demand an explanation. Don't tell me I have sinned, and am in h.e.l.l. Most sins are sins of cla.s.sification by bigots and poor thinkers. Who can live without sinning, or sin without living? All very well for Kant to say: 'Act so that your conduct may be a law for all men under similar conditions.' But Kant overlooked that _you_ are part of the conditions. And when you are a Heine, you may very well concede that future Heines should act just so. It is easy enough to be virtuous when you are a professor of pure reason, a regular, punctual mechanism, a thing for the citizens of Konigsberg to set their watches by. But if you happen to be one of those fellows to whom all the roses nod and all the stars wink ... I am for Sch.e.l.ling's principle: the highest spirits are above the law. No, no, the parson's explanation won't do. Perhaps heaven holds different explanations, graduated to rising intellects, from parsons upwards. Moses Lump will be satisfied with a gold chair, and the cherubim singing, 'holy! holy! holy!' in Hebrew, and ask no further questions. Abdullah Ben Osman's mouth will be closed by the kisses of houris. Surely Christ will not disappoint the poor old grandmother's vision of Jerusalem the Golden seen through tear-dimmed spectacles as she pores over the family Bible. He will meet her at the gates of death with a wonderful smile of love; and, as she walks upon the heavenly Jordan's s.h.i.+ning waters, hand in hand with Him, she will see her erst-wrinkled face reflected from them in angelic beauty. Ah, but to tackle a Johann Wolfgang Goethe or a Gotthold Ephraim Lessing--what an ordeal for the celestial Professor of Apologetics! Perhaps that's what the Gospel means--only by becoming little children can we enter the kingdom of heaven. I told my little G.o.d-daughter yesterday that heaven is so pure and magnificent that they eat cakes there all day--it is only what the parson says, translated into child-language--and that the little cherubs wipe their mouths with their white wings. 'That's very dirty,' said the child. I fear that unless I become a child myself I shall have severer criticisms to bring against the cherubs. O G.o.d," he broke off suddenly, letting fall the sheets of ma.n.u.script and stretching out his hands in prayer, "make me a child again, even before I die; give me back the simple faith, the clear vision of the child that holds its father's hand. Oh, little Lucy, it takes me like that sometimes, and I have to cry for mercy. I dreamt I _was_ a child the other night, and saw my dear father again. He was putting on his wig, and I saw him as through a cloud of powder. I rushed joyfully to embrace him; but, as I approached him, everything seemed changing in the mist. I wished to kiss his hands, but I recoiled with mortal cold. The fingers were withered branches, my father himself a leafless tree, which the winter had covered with h.o.a.r-frost. Ah, Lucy, Lucy, my brain is full of madness and my heart of sorrow. Sing me the ballad of the lady who took only one spoonful of gruel, 'with sugar and spices so rich.'"

Astonished at his memory, she repeated the song of Ladye Alice and Giles Collins, the poet laughing immoderately till at the end,

"The parson licked up the rest,"

in his effort to repeat the line that so tickled him, he fell into a fearful spasm, which tore and twisted him till his child's body lay curved like a bow. Her tears fell at the sight.

"Don't pity me too much," he gasped, trying to smile with his eyes; "I bend, but I do not break."

But she, terrified, rang the bell for aid. A jovial-looking woman--tall and well-shaped--came in, holding a s.h.i.+rt she was sewing.

Her eyes and hair were black, and her oval face had the rude coloring of health. She brought into the death-chamber at once a whiff of ozone, and a suggestion of tragic incongruity. Nodding pleasantly at the visitor, she advanced quickly to the bedside, and laid her hand upon the forehead, sweating with agony.

"Mathilde," he said, when the spasm abated, "this is little Lucy of whom I have never spoken to you, and to whom I wrote a poem about her dark-brown eyes which you have never read."

Mathilde smiled amiably at the Roman matron.

"No, I have never read it," she said archly. "They tell me that Heine is a very clever man, and writes very fine books; but I know nothing about it, and must content myself with trusting to their word."

"Isn't she adorable?" cried Heine delightedly. "I have only two consolations that sit at my bedside, my French wife and my German muse, and they are not on speaking terms. But it has its compensations, for she is unable also to read what my enemies in Germany say about me, and so she continues to love me."

"How can he have enemies?" said Mathilde, smoothing his hair. "He is so good to everybody. He has only two thoughts--to hide his illness from his mother, and to earn enough for my future. And as for having enemies in Germany, how can that be, when he is so kind to every poor German that pa.s.ses through Paris?"

It moved the hearer to tears--this wifely faith. Surely the saint that lay behind the Mephistopheles in his face must have as real an existence, if the woman who knew him only as man, undazzled by the glitter of his fame, unwearied by his long sickness, found him thus without flaw or stain.

"Delicious creature," said Heine fondly. "Not only thinks me good, but thinks that goodness keeps off enemies. What ignorance of life she crams into a dozen words. As for those poor countrymen of mine, they are just the people that carry back to Germany all the awful tales of my goings-on. Do you know, there was once a poor devil of a musician who had set my _Zwei Grenadiere_, and to whom I gave no end of help and advice, when he wanted to make an opera on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which I had treated in one of my books. Now he curses me and all the Jews together, and his name is Richard Wagner."

Mathilde smiled on vaguely. "You would eat those cutlets," she said reprovingly.

"Well, I was weary of the chopped gra.s.s cook calls spinach. I don't want seven years of Nebuchadnezzardom."

"Cook is angry when you don't eat her things, _cheri_. I find it difficult to get on with her, since you praised her dainty style. One would think she was the mistress and I the servant."

"Ah, Nonotte, you don't understand the artistic temperament." Then a twitch pa.s.sed over his face. "You must give me a double dose of morphia to-night, darling."

"No, no; the doctor forbids."

"One would think he were the employer and I the employee," he grumbled smilingly. "But I daresay he is right. Already I spend 500 francs a year on morphia, I must really retrench. So run away, dearest, I have a good friend here to cheer me up."

She stooped down and kissed him.

"Ah, madame," she said, "it is very good of you to come and cheer him up. It is as good as a new dress to me, to see a new face coming in, for the old ones begin to drop off. Not the dresses, the friends," she added gaily, as she disappeared.

"Isn't she divine?" cried Heine enthusiastically.

"I am glad you love her," his visitor replied simply.

"You mean you are astonished. Love? What is love? I have never loved."

"You!" And all those stories those countrymen of his had spread abroad, all his own love-poems were in that exclamation.

"No--never mortal woman. Only statues and the beautiful dead dream-women, vanished with the _neiges d'antan_. What did it matter whom I married? Perhaps you would have had me aspire higher than a _grisette_? To a tradesman's daughter? Or a demoiselle in society?

'Explain my position?'--a poor exile's position--to some double-chinned _bourgeois_ papa who can only see that my immortal books are worth exactly two thousand marks _banco_; yes, that's the most I can wring out of those scoundrels in wicked Hamburg. And to think that if I had only done my writing in ledgers, the 'prentice millionaire might have become the master millionaire, ungalled by avuncular advice and chary cheques. Ah, dearest Lucy, you can never understand what we others suffer--you into whose mouths the larks drop roasted. Should I marry fas.h.i.+on and be stifled? Or money and be patronized? And lose the exquisite pleasure of toiling to buy my wife new dresses and knick-knacks? _Apres tout_, Mathilde is quite as intelligent as any other daughter of Eve, whose first thought when she came to reflective consciousness was a new dress. All great men are mateless, 'tis only their own ribs they fall in love with. A more cultured woman would only have misunderstood me more pretentiously.

Not that I didn't, in a weak moment, try to give her a little polish.

I sent her to a boarding-school to learn to read and write; my child of nature among all the little school-girls--ha! ha! ha!--and I only visited her on Sundays, and she could rattle off the Egyptian Kings better than I, and once she told me with great excitement the story of Lucretia, which she had heard for the first time. Dear Nonotte! You should have seen her dancing at the school ball, as graceful and maidenly as the smallest shrimp of them all. What _gaiete de cur_!

What good humor! What mother-wit! And such a faithful chum. Ah, the French women are wonderful. We have been married fifteen years, and still, when I hear her laugh come through that door, my soul turns from the gates of death and remembers the sun. Oh, how I love to see her go off to Ma.s.s every morning with her toilette nicely adjusted and her dainty prayer-book in her neatly gloved hand, for she's adorably religious, is my little Nonotte. You look surprised; did you then think religious people shock me!"

She smiled a little. "But don't you shock her?"

"I wouldn't for worlds utter a blasphemy she could understand. Do you think Shakespeare explained himself to Ann Hathaway? But she doubtless served well enough as artist's model; raw material to be worked up into Imogens and Rosalinds. Enchanting creatures! How you foggy islanders could have begotten Shakespeare! The miracle of miracles.

And Sterne! _Mais non_, an Irishman like Swift, _ca s'explique._ Is Sterne read?"

"No; he is only a cla.s.sic."

"Barbarians! Have you read my book on Shakespeare's heroines? It is good; _nicht wahr?_"

"Admirable."

"Then, why shouldn't you translate it into English?"

"It is an idea."

"It is an inspiration. Nay, why shouldn't you translate all my books?

You shall; you must. You know how the French edition _fait fureur_.

French, that is the European hall-mark, for Paris is Athens. But English will mean fame _in ultima Thule_; the isles of the sea, as the Bible says. It isn't for the gold pieces, though, G.o.d knows, Mathilde needs more friends, as we call them--perhaps because they leave us so soon. I fear she doesn't treat them too considerately, the poor little featherhead. Heaven preserve you from the irony of having to earn your living on your death-bed! _Ach_, my publisher, Campe, has built himself a new establishment; what a monument to me! Why should not some English publisher build me a monument in London? The Jew's books, like the Jew, should be spread abroad, so that in them all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. For the Jew peddles, not only old clo', but new ideas. I began life--tell it not in Gath--as a commission agent for English goods; and I end it as an intermediary between France and Germany, trying to make two great nations understand each other. To that not unworthy aim has all my later work been devoted."

"So you really consider yourself a Jew still?"

"_Mein Gott!_ have I ever been anything else but an enemy of the Philistines?"

She smiled: "Yes; but religiously?"

"Religiously! What was my whole fight to rouse Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole? Why did I edit a newspaper, and plague myself with our time and its interests? Goethe has created glorious Greek statues, but statues cannot have children. My words should find issue in deeds. Put me rather with poor Lessing. I am no true h.e.l.lenist. I may have s.n.a.t.c.hed at pleasure, but self-sacrifice has always called to the depths of me. Like my ancestor, David, I have been not only a singer, I have slung my smooth little pebbles at the forehead of Goliath."

"Yes; but haven't you turned Catholic?"

"Catholic!" he roared like a roused lion, "they say that again! Has the myth of death-bed conversion already arisen about me? How they jump, the fools, at the idea of a man's coming round to their views when his brain grows weak!"

"No, not death-bed conversion. Quite an old history. I was a.s.sured you had married in a Catholic Church."

"To please Mathilde. Without that the poor creature wouldn't have thought herself married in a manner sufficiently pleasing to G.o.d. It is true we had been living together without any Church blessing at all, but _que voulez-vous_? Women are like that. But for a duel I had to fight, I should have been satisfied to go on as we were. I understand by a wife something n.o.bler than a married woman chained to me by money-brokers and parsons, and I deemed my _faux menage_ far firmer than many a "true" one. But since I _was_ to be married, I could not leave my beloved Nonotte a dubious widowhood. We even invited a number of Bohemian couples to the wedding-feast, and bade them follow our example in daring the last step of all. Ha! ha! there is nothing like a convert's zeal, you see. But convert to Catholicism, that's another pair of sleeves. If your right eye offends you, pluck it out; if your right arm offends you, cut it off. And if your reason offends you, become a Catholic. No, no, Lucy, I may have wors.h.i.+pped the Madonna in song, for how can a poet be insensible to the beauty of Catholic symbol and ritual? But a Jew I have always been."