Against the Current Part 10

Everybody cried; even our servants and the neighbouring peasants, and indeed it must have been a pathetic sight, to see a lonely little boy, packed in among all sorts of people, venturing out into the far world by way of the omnibus.

It was very difficult, this going away to school. All our relatives had to be convinced that it was not a terrible tempting of providence. Many remained unconvinced, and their prophecies of dire consequences were not rea.s.suring.

The fitting out was upon a generous scale. Seamstresses were busy and the tailor, a deaf mute, measured me in his rough way, making notches upon long, paper tape; for he couldn't read even figures. Fortunately, clothes, so long as they were generously large, were regarded as satisfactory. What did not fit me then, might, another year.

Feather-beds and pillows whose contents had been contributed by many generations of Sabbath geese, were packed, sewed into linen sheets; but what appealed to me most was a basketful of goodies. Poppy-seed cakes, cheese cakes, twisted Sabbath bread, a generous portion of roast goose, and with it all, many admonitions not to eat everything at once.

How hard it was for me to cry, how glad I was when it was all over, and what a sense of freedom possessed me--in spite of the fact that I was packed into the omnibus like a sardine, and that my fellow pa.s.sengers had no special regard for a little Jewish boy.

I doubt that were I now to fly in an air-s.h.i.+p, I should feel such exaltation, and were I to be chief among the distinguished citizens who ride on some patriotic errand, would I feel anything akin to the pride which then filled me. The higher emotions wipe out the lower differences, and my racial and other enemies seemed like brothers during those last, fast fleeting moments of my boyhood's life.

Good-bye, my brother by vaccination, now a shoemaker's apprentice, pa.s.sing the omnibus whistling. He stood there with puckered lips, silent for a second; then a smile pa.s.sed over his dirty face, his brotherly instinct overcame all barriers, he jumped on to the step of the vehicle and shook my hand, saying: "_Z'Boghem_"--"with G.o.d."

Good-bye, you son of the _Pany_; you tried to humiliate me when I was king. I knew he, too, would have shaken hands with me; but one of his cla.s.s has to be careful, and a French governess and social proprieties are higher barriers than old scores. He nodded his head and smiled, and I thanked him for the smile.

Good-bye, you miller's sons, looking like two huge, penny rolls, leaning against the walls of the mill.

True sons of their Teutonic father, they grasped my hands, leaving huge flour spots on my new suit.

My neighbour in the omnibus scolded, for she, too, had to brush her coat; but what are flour spots compared with warm, fraternal handshakes?

"Aufwiedersehn!" the miller's sons called after me. That was what they carved on their sister's tombstone, "Aufwiedersehn."

Ah, Martha! My first, pure love! I shall never forget your kiss or your brother's warm hand-shake.

Good-bye, all ye goose girls, geese and goslings. The earth seemed covered by them.

Good-bye, you Lutheran pastor, who once gave me a glimpse of a Christian's heart and a Christian's vision. He was tightly b.u.t.toned, and scarcely nodded his head. I understand it now; it was ministerial dignity.

Good-bye, St. Florian, guarding your huts and stables against fire. You looked neglected, your halo was tarnished and the damp had spotted your saintly robes. Was it because a fire engine had been brought to town?

Good-bye, St. Peter, keeper of the gate of Heaven, with a smile upon your face as if it were all a joke, this locking and unlocking of the abode of bliss. You didn't look as if you would keep a poor Jewish lad out of Heaven.

Good-bye, blessed Virgin Mary, standing upon a crescent moon and a pillar of cloud. You beautiful Jewish mother of the Son of G.o.d!

The women in the omnibus said: "Oh! Virgin Mary, intercede for us!" For some reason, the Virgin never appealed to me until in riper years I saw the Sistine in the Dresden gallery. I think I now understand why the women adore her.

Good-bye, faithful old priest; you always looked like a Sphinx to me.

Your face was like that of a Caesar and not of the Christ. You were a Roman and not a Jew. Yet they loved you and you were on your way to make some one's dying easier. I never liked your acolytes--they were always cruel to me, and I ran whenever I saw one. They told me once when they were piled on top of me, that I crucified the Christ and that they beat me "for the love of G.o.d."

What a black eye--the first black eye I ever had--I got for "the love of G.o.d"! It hurt, though, just as much as if I had got it because of their love for the devil.

Good-bye, you Jewish dead, who lie by the dusty road. My buoyant spirits flagged as I pa.s.sed the thorn hedge, beyond which they lay in dire confusion.

Good-bye, old teacher, whom they drew out of the muddy river. They put you closest to the gate and your grave is level with the roadway. It was terrible to lose the love of your wife and have her unfaithful to you. I know now why you despaired. I have read Hosea since, and I understand your grief. It was not because the child was "_Lo ami_"--not my people--that you despaired; but because the people were harlots and did not understand your "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." It isn't easy to have faith at such a time, old teacher, and yet Hosea, in his grief, said: "Come let us return unto the Lord. For He hath torn and He will heal us. He hath smitten and He will bind us up." Too bad we couldn't have read Hosea together.

Good-bye, Adele, whose grief I shared. Love--I understand it now. Love and not wrath is a consuming fire. All those who love, suffer, especially when love tries to break the barriers of cla.s.s or race.

Good-bye, old Jewish soldier, you three-quarters of a man, who showed me "Old Glory" and interpreted to me the riddle of the Stars and Stripes.

Thanks, many thanks for the patron saint under whose care you put me--"Honest Abe!" The church calendar may not mark his name; but what is a church calendar compared with the record made by those whose chains he broke, or in whose hearts he inspired the hope that chains _can be_ broken?

Good-bye, my father, whom my eyes never saw and my fingers never touched. I could not weep at your grave. How can we miss what we never had? Now, with children of my own, I understand how hard your dying was; how brave your life. Not because you fought for your country, most men are too cowardly to be cowards in time of war; but you went alone where "the pestilence walketh in darkness." You were not afraid of the "terror by night." You may even have been afraid of those guns--I fear them and my children after me. I do not believe you ever killed a Prussian. They may have called you coward, but you were not afraid of the cholera. You comforted the sick and buried the dead, when strong men fled and mere brute strength was unavailing.

I wonder whether you ever struggled as I struggled, whether you suffered just as I suffered. There is no picture of you. I often wished that I could see your features and read in them the story of your inner life.

Mother always looked more longingly into my face than into the faces of the other children. They said she spoiled me because I looked like you.

Sometimes I think I feel you in me--some one--not quite myself--sometimes many who are not myself--is it you? Is it you, father, and all the pa.s.sing generations? Is it a race? Is this the way we live on--in one another? Is this the way we bless or curse the world?

I am much I do not wish to be. I do more I do not wish to do. How much am I just myself? How much you? How much this strong, pathetic race to which I belong, against whose ill I have striven, whose good I have not always understood, whose ignominy I have had to share? I tried to run away from that inheritance, father; I did not understand when I rode past your grave that morning in the omnibus--a little boy, packed in among Magyar, Slav, Lutheran and Catholic, who hated me because I was your son.

I have travelled in many an omnibus since. I have seen greater griefs than mine. I now laugh at that pathetic little boy in the omnibus; others will do the same--but although I laugh at that little boy I do not understand. I cannot understand.

One thing you have not left me. One thing which neither you nor your father nor your race nor any one has left me--is hate. If it was ever in me--lurking somewhere--she loved it out of me--your wife, my mother.

XXII

A BACKWARD LOOK

From some ancestor, perhaps from my race, I inherited an abnormal sensitiveness. Even as a child I felt instinctively the att.i.tude of people towards me. Consequently, situated as I was in an atmosphere charged with race antagonism, I suffered constantly and often, of course, needlessly. Therefore my childhood seems blurred, as if I were looking at it through a dark cloud, or through eyes misty from tears.

Yet there was a bright side to it which should be recalled now, if only in justice to the racial group that composed my close environment.

I never suffered from hunger or cold or from lack of all the affection that my love-hungry nature demanded. If our home had no pictures, my mother's face was beautiful to look upon, and when her blue eyes sought mine I experienced emotions which I recalled vividly in later days, when looking into the face of Murillo's St. Elizabeth. My mother's was that type of maternal face, furrowed early by the pain of widowhood; the eyes were deeply set and overarched by heavy brows. She had a sensitive aquiline nose and such sweet, well-formed lips that even the loss of her teeth in later years could not disfigure them. She was not what we call an educated woman; for, in her day, girls were not taught anything outside the prayer-book; but she was so cultured that I often wondered where she got her wisdom. The two virtues which she constantly practiced were: contentment and charity. One of her favourite maxims which I remember was: "Never despise those beneath you and never envy those above you."

Although she was brought up in the atmosphere of the Ghetto, when even that was no safe abiding place, and her parents had to bribe officials from week to week to live in peace, her nature had nothing false in it and nothing narrow. While she was a faithful Jewess, she early differentiated between the form of religion and its spirit, discarding many of the ceremonials which seemed to her useless and unethical.

She abhorred the hypocrite but pitied the wayward. She was so pure-minded that I never heard a vulgar word spoken in our family circle, in spite of the fact that we lived in a most realistic atmosphere, surrounded by many immoral men and women. She was a Puritan at heart, never allowing a playing card in the home and very rarely permitting us the use of wine, although it was always in the cellar. Yet with the increasing luxuries of life as they came to her in later years, she learned to enjoy the beautiful in many forms and yielded to the social demands of the time. She never gossiped or made purely formal calls. She was so busy from morning until night that she could not enjoy leisure when it came, voluntarily a.s.suming the care of grandchildren.

When finally her sight failed and she could do nothing, she grieved so because of her enforced idleness that it hastened her death.

My brothers were much older than I, and I did not know them as children.

They never permitted me to forget that I was growing up without a father's care, and that they were willing and able to provide all the harsher elements which such care is supposed to afford. No doubt I deserved all they gave me although I am sure I never enjoyed it. I suppose little brothers were made to be tyrannized over by the older ones, especially when the father is not living.

When I say that my older sister was just like my mother I give her ample praise, and when I say that my younger sister was like my brothers, I mean that it took time and better judgment than I had as a child, to appreciate her. Neither she nor her brothers understood their oversensitive relative.

Of none of my kinsfolk and of few among the Jews I knew, had I cause to be ashamed. All my mother's relatives lived in Vienna, which was our legal home. They were intelligent, industrious people, gentle natures, most of them; too honest to grow very rich and too provident to grow poor. I have already spoken of my father's brother and my grandmother, and fear that I have done them scant justice. From my father's side comes the strong religious strain in us; an almost fanatical sense of righteousness, a great deal of hot, uncontrollable temper, and with it unusual fluency of expression.

The grandmother I referred to I knew only as a bedridden old woman, crippled by rheumatism. She outlived her husband, who left her with four sons, all but one of them dying before she was called to her well-earned rest. She favoured my uncle's children and bequeathed them all her earthly possessions. I have never felt envious; for after all, the things that are worth inheriting from our forefathers cannot be taken from us by will or testament.

Among all the Jews I knew, there were just three whom I should now regard as bad men--they were swindlers and usurers; they committed or were capable of committing perjuries; but every one of them, and their children also, have suffered the consequences. The vast majority were hard-working, honest and scarcely well-to-do people, with a small fringe of very poor and paupers at the social edge; enough to teach the rest the virtue of charity. Their children, my contemporaries, I meet all the way from Chicago to Constantinople. All of them are good citizens, and some of them occupy large places of usefulness.

As a whole I should say that the Jewish community stood, intellectually, far above the other racial and religious groups; that in the personal virtues, such as chast.i.ty and charity, they surpa.s.sed them, and that in striking a just balance they certainly were not morally inferior to them.

The unfortunate thing was and still is, that the Gentiles had no understanding of the fine qualities of the Jews and that the Jews never properly appraised the real value of their Gentile neighbours. From my present vantage ground I can see many sinners among all of them, and some saints in each group. Humanly, all of them are so much alike that I can see no difference.

This is what I suppose I felt in my race unconscious days, and when I woke to consciousness, I rebelled against the artificial barriers, suffering much and no doubt causing others to suffer. I was eager to leave home because I supposed that in the larger world there was a larger view of life, and when the driver told us all to get out and walk up the Oresco Hill, I climbed it with joy; for I thought it led to those heights.