Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 58

"She is not dead?" the visitor whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

"She is dying, I fear--she cannot rouse herself." Zussmann's voice broke in a sob.

"But she must not die--I bring great news--_The Flag of Judah_ has read your book--it will translate it into English--it will print it in its own paper--and then it will make a book of it for you. See, here is the beginning!"

"Into Englis.h.!.+" breathed Zussmann, taking the little journalist's scrawl. His whole face grew crimson, his eye shone as with madness.

"Hulda! Hulda!" he cried, "the Idea works! G.o.d be thanked! Englis.h.!.+

Through the world! Hulda! Hulda!" He was bending over her, raising her head.

She opened her eyes.

"Hulda! the Idea wins. The book is coming out in English. The great English paper will print it. In that day G.o.d shall be One and His name One. Do you understand?" Her lips twitched faintly, but only her eyes spoke with the light of love and joy. His own look met hers, and for a moment husband and wife were one in a spiritual ecstasy.

Then the light in Hulda's eyes went out, and the two men were left in darkness.

The Red Beadle turned away and left Zussmann to his dead, and, with scalding tears running down his cheek, pulled up the cotton window blind and gazed out unseeing into the night.

Presently his vision cleared: he found himself watching the milk-cart drive off, and, following it towards the frowsy avenue of Brick Lane, he beheld what seemed to be a drunken fight in progress. He saw a policeman, gesticulating females, the nondescript nocturnal crowd of the sleepless city. The old dull hopelessness came over him. "Nature makes herself," he murmured in despairing resignation.

Suddenly he became aware that Zussmann was beside him, looking up at the stars.

THE JOYOUS COMRADE

"Well, what are you gaping at? Why the devil don't you say something?"

And all the impatience of the rapt artist at being interrupted by anything but praise was in the outburst.

"Holy Moses!" I gasped. "Give a man a chance to get his breath. I fall through a dark antechamber over a bicycle, stumble round a screen, and--smack! a glare of Oriental sunlight from a gigantic canvas, the vibration and glow of a group of joyous figures, reeking with life and sweat! You the Idealist, the seeker after Nature's beautiful moods and Art's beautiful patterns!"

"Beautiful moods!" he echoed angrily. "And why isn't this a beautiful mood? And what more beautiful pattern than this--look! this line, this sweep, this group here, this clinging of the children round this ma.s.s--all in a glow--balanced by this ma.s.s of cool shadow. The meaning doesn't interfere with the pattern, you chump!"

"Oh, so there _is_ a meaning! You've become an anecdotal painter."

"Adjectives be hanged! I can't talk theory in the precious daylight.

If you can't see--!"

"I can see that you are painting something _you_ haven't seen. You haven't been in the East, have you?"

"If I had, I haven't got time to jaw about it now. Come and have an absinthe at the Cafe Victor--in memory of old Paris days--Sixth Avenue--any of the boys will tell you. Let me see, daylight till six--half-past six. _Au 'voir, au 'voir._"

As I went down the steep, dark stairs, "Same old Dan," I thought. "Who would imagine I was a stranger in New York looking up an old fellow-struggler on his native heath? If I didn't know better, I might fancy his tremendous success had given him the same opinion of himself that America has of him. But no, nothing will change him; the same furious devotion to his canvas once he has quietly planned his picture, the same obstinate conviction that he is seeing something in the only right way. And yet something _has_ changed him. Why has his brush suddenly gone East? Why this new kind of composition crowded with figures--ancient Jews, too? Has he been taken with piety, and is he going henceforward ostentatiously to proclaim his race? And who is the cheerful central figure with the fine, open face? I don't recollect any such scene in Jewish history, or anything so joyous.

Perhaps it's a study of modern Jerusalem Jews, to show their life is not all Wailing Wall and Jeremiah. Or perhaps it's only decorative.

America is great on decoration just now. No; he said the picture had a meaning. Well, I shall know all about it to-night. Anyhow, it's a beautiful thing."

"Same old Dan!" I thought even more decisively as, when I opened the door of the little cafe, a burly, black-bearded figure with audacious eyes came at me with a grip and a slap and a roar of welcome, and dragged me to the quiet corner behind the billiard tables.

"I've just been opalizing your absinthe for you," he laughed, as we sat down. "But what's the matter? You look kind o' scared."

"It's your Inferno of a city. As I turned the corner of Sixth Avenue, an elevated train came shrieking and rumbling, and a swirl of wind swept screeching round and round, enveloping me in a whirlpool of smoke and steam, until, dazed and choked in what seemed the scalding effervescence of a collision, I had given up all hope of ever learning what your confounded picture meant."

"Aha!" He took a complacent sip. "It stayed with you, did it?" And the light of triumph, flus.h.i.+ng for an instant his rugged features, showed when it waned how pale and drawn they were by the feverish tension of his long day's work.

"Yes it did, old fellow," I said affectionately. "The joy and the glow of it, and yet also some strange antique simplicity and restfulness you have got into it, I know not how, have been with me all day, comforting me in the midst of the tearing, grinding life of this closing nineteenth century after Christ."

A curious smile flitted across Dan's face. He tilted his chair back, and rested his head against the wall.

"There's nothing that takes me so much out of the nineteenth century after Christ," he said dreamily, "as this little French cafe. It wafts me back to my early student days, that lie somewhere amid the enchanted mists of the youth of the world; to the zestful toil of the studios, to the careless trips in quaint, gray Holland or flaming, devil-may-care Spain. Ah! what scenes s.h.i.+ft and shuffle in the twinkle of the gas-jet in this opalescent liquid; the hot s.h.i.+mmer of the arena at the Seville bull-fight, with its swirl of color and movement; the torchlight procession of pilgrims round the church at Lourdes, with the one black nun praying by herself in a shadowy corner; the lovely valley of the Tauba, where the tinkle of the sheep-bells mingles with the Lutheran hymn blown to the four winds from the old church tower; wines that were red--suns.h.i.+ne that was warm--mandolines--!" His voice died away as in exquisite reverie.

"And the East?" I said slily.

A good-natured smile dissipated his delicious dream.

"Ah, yes," he said. "My East was the Tyrol."

"The Tyrol? How do you mean?"

"I see you won't let me out of that story."

"Oh, there's a story, is there?"

"Oh, well, perhaps not what you literary chaps would call a story! No love-making in it, you know."

"Then it can wait. Tell me about your picture."

"But that's mixed up with the story."

"Didn't I say you had become an anecdotal artist?"

"It's no laughing matter," he said gravely. "You remember when we parted at Munich, a year ago last spring, you to go on to Vienna and I to go back to America. Well, I had a sudden fancy to take one last European trip all by myself, and started south through the Tyrol, with a pack on my back. The third day out I fell and bruised my thigh severely, and could not make my little mountain town till moonlight.

And I tell you I was mighty glad when I limped across the bridge over the rus.h.i.+ng river and dropped on the hotel sofa. Next morning I was stiff as a poker, but I struggled up the four rickety flights to the local physician, and being a.s.sured I only wanted rest, I resolved to take it with book and pipe and mug in a shady beer-garden on the river. I had been reading for about an hour when five or six Tyrolese, old men and young, in their gray and green costumes and their little hats, trooped in and occupied the large table near the inn-door.

Presently I was startled by the sound of the zither; they began to sing songs; the pretty daughter of the house came and joined in the singing. I put down my book.

"The old lady who served me with my _Maa.s.s_ of beer, seeing my interest, came over and chatted about her guests. Oh no, they were not villagers; they came from four hours away. The slim one was a school-teacher, and the _d.i.c.ker_ was a tenor, and sang in the chorus of the _Pa.s.sion-Spiel_; the good-looking young man was to be the St.

John. Pa.s.sion play! I p.r.i.c.ked up my ears. When? Where? In their own village, three days hence; only given once every ten years--for hundreds and hundreds of years. Could strangers see it? What should strangers want to see it for? But _could_ they see it? _Gewiss_. This was indeed a stroke of luck. I had always rather wanted to see the Pa.s.sion play, but the thought of the fas.h.i.+onable Ober-Ammergau made me sick. Would I like to be _vorgestellt_? Rather! It was not ten minutes after this introduction before I had settled to stay with St. John, and clouds of good American tobacco were rising from six Tyrolese pipes, and many an "Auf Ihr Wohl" was busying the pretty _Kellnerin_.

They trotted out all their repertory of quaint local songs for my benefit. It sounded bully, I tell you, out there with the sunlight, and the green leaves, and the rush of the river; and in this aroma of beer and brotherhood I blessed my damaged thigh. Three days hence!

Just time for it to heal. A providential world, after all.

"And it was indeed with a buoyant step and a gay heart that I set out over the hills at sunrise on that memorable morning. The play was to begin at ten, and I should just be on time. What a walk! Imagine it!

Clear coolness of dawn, fresh green, sparkling dew, the road winding up and down, round hills, up cliffs, along valleys, through woods, where the green branches swayed in the morning wind and dappled the gra.s.s fantastically with dancing sunlight. And as fresh as the morning, was, I felt, the artistic sensation awaiting me. I swung round the last hill-shoulder; saw the quaint gables of the first house peeping through the trees, and the church spire rising beyond, then groups of Tyrolese converging from all the roads; dipped down the valley, past the quiet lake, up the hills beyond; found myself caught in a stream of peasants, and, presto! was sucked from the radiant day into the deep gloom of the barn-like theatre.

"I don't know how it is done in Ober-Ammergau, but this Tyrolese thing was a strange jumble of art and _navete_, of talent and stupidity.

There was a full-fledged stage and footlights, and the scenery, some one said, was painted by a man from Munich. But the players were badly made up; the costumes, if correct, were ill-fitting; the stage was badly lighted, and the flats didn't 'jine.' Some of the actors had gleams of artistic perception. St. Mark was beautiful to look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by _tableaux vivants_ of Old Testament scenes, from Adam and Eve onwards.

There was much, you see, that was puerile, even ridiculous; and every now and then some one would open the door of the dusky auditorium, and a shaft of suns.h.i.+ne would fly in from the outside world to remind me further how unreal was all this gloomy make-believe. Nay, during the _entr'acte_ I went out, like everybody else, and lunched off sausages and beer.

"And yet, beneath all this critical consciousness, beneath even the artistic consciousness that could not resist jotting down a face or a scene in my sketch-book, something curious was happening in the depths of my being. The play exercised from the very first a strange magnetic effect on me; despite all the primitive humors of the players, the simple, sublime tragedy that disengaged itself from their uncouth but earnest goings-on, began to move and even oppress my soul.