Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 23

And in his sleepless brain and racked soul went on, through that unending night, the terrible tragedy of doubt, tempered by spells of spasmodic prayer. A G.o.d, or a Man? A Messiah undergoing his Father's last temptation; or a martyr on the eve of horrible death? And if the victim of a monstrous self-delusion, what mattered whether one lived out one's years of shame as Jew or Mussulman? n.o.bler, perhaps, to die, and live as an heroic memory--but then to leave Melisselda! To leave her warm breast and the sunlight and the green earth, and all that beauty of the world and of human life to which his eyes had only been unsealed after a lifetime of self-torturing blindness?

"O G.o.d! O G.o.d!" he cried, "wherefore hast Thou mocked and abandoned me?"

XXIV

Early in the forenoon the light touch of a loved hand upon his shoulder roused him from deeps of reverie.

He uplifted a white, haggard face. Melisselda stood before him in all her dazzling freshness, like a radiant spirit come to chase the demons of the night. The ancient Spanish song came into his mind, and the sweet, sad melody vibrated in his soul.

From her bath she arose, Pure and white as the snows, Melisselda.

Coral only at lips And at sweet finger-tips, Melisselda.

His eyes filled with tears--the divine dreams of youth stirred faintly within him.

"Is it Peace with thee?" she asked.

His head drooped again on his breast.

"From the cas.e.m.e.nt I saw the sun rise over the Maritza," he said, "kindling the sullen waters, but my faith is still gray and dead. Nay, rather there came into my mind the sublime poem of Moses Ibn Ezra of Granada: 'Thy days are delusive dreams and thy life as yon cloud of morning: whilst it tarries over thy tabernacle thou may'st remain therein, but at its ascent thou art dissolved and removed unto a place unknown to thee,' This is the end, Melisselda, the end of my great delusion. What am I but a man, with a man's pains and errors and self-deceptions, a man's life that blooms but once as a rose and fades while the thorn endures?" The ineffable melancholy of his accents subdued her to silence: for the moment the music of his voice, his sad brooding eyes, the infinite despair of his att.i.tude swayed her to a mood akin to his own. "Verily it was for me," he went on, "that the Sephardic poet sang--

"'Reflect on the labor thou didst undergo under the sun, night and day, without intermission; labor which thou knowest well to be without profit; for, verily in these many years thou hast walked after vanity and become vain. Thou wast a keeper of vineyards, but thine own vineyard thou hast not kept; whilst the Eyes of the Eternal run to and fro to see if the vine hath flourished, whether the tender grapes appear, and, lo! all was grown over with thorns; nettles had covered the face thereof. Thou hast grown old and gray, thou hast strayed but not returned.' Yea, I have strayed, but is the gate closed for return?

To be a man--only a man--how great that is!" His voice died away, and with it the sweet, soothing spell. Fire glowed in Melisselda's breast, heaving her bosom, shooting sparks from her eyes.

"Nay, if thou art only a man, thou art not even a man. My love is dead."

As he shrank beneath her contempt, another stanza of his ancient song sang itself involuntarily in his brain. Never had he seen her thus.

In the pride of her race, As a sword shone her face, Melisselda.

And her lids were steel bows, But her mouth was a rose, Melisselda.

_But her mouth was a rose._ Ah, G.o.d, the pity of it, to leave the rose for the crown of thorns!

"Melisselda!" he cried, with a sob. "Have pity on me."

The door opened; two of the Imperial Guards appeared.

"Thou slayest me," he said in Hebrew.

"I wors.h.i.+p thee," she answered him, in the same sacred tongue. Her face took on its old confident smile.

"But I am a man."

Once again her lids were steel bows.

"Then die like a man! Thinkst thou I would share thy humiliation? If I am to be a Moslem's bride, let me be the Sultan's. If I am not to share the Messiah's throne, let me share an Emperor's. Thy Spanish song made me an Emperor's daughter--I will be an Emperor's consort."

And she laughed wantonly.

The guards advanced timidly with visible awe. Melisselda's swiftly flas.h.i.+ng face changed suddenly. She drew him to her breast.

"My King!" she murmured. "'Twas cruel to tempt my faith thus." Then releasing him, she cried, "Go to thy Kingdom."

He drew himself up; the fire in her eyes flashed into his own.

"The Sultan summons thee," said one of the guards reverently.

"I am ready," he said, calmly adjusting the folds of his black mantle.

Melisselda was left alone. The slow moments wore on, tense and terrible. Little by little the radiant faith died out of her face.

Half an hour went by, and cold serpents of doubt began to coil about her own heart.

What if Sabbata were only a man after all? With frenzied rapidity she reviewed the past; now she glowed with effulgent a.s.surances of his divinity, the homage of his people, the awe of Turk and Christian, Rabbis and sages at his feet, the rich and the great struggling to kiss his fan, the treasures poured into his unwilling palms; now she s.h.i.+vered with hideous suggestions and remembrances of frailty and mortal inept.i.tude. And as her faith faltered, as the exaltation, with which she had inspired him, ebbed away, alarm for his safety began to creep into her soul, till at last it was as a flood sweeping her in his traces. And the more her fears swelled the more she realized how much she had grown to love him, with his sad, dark, smooth-skinned beauty, the soft, almost magnetic touch of his hand. Messiah or man, she loved him: he was right. What if she had sent him to his death! A cold, sick horror crept about her limbs. Perhaps he had dared to put his divinity to the test, and the ribald Turk was even now gloating over the screams of the wretched self-deluded man. Oh, fool that she had been to drive him to the stake and the fiery scourge. If divine, then to turn Turk were part of the plan of Salvation; if human, he would at least be spared an agonized death. The b.l.o.o.d.y visions of her childhood came back to her, fire coursed in her fevered veins. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up a mantilla and threw it over her shoulders, then dashed from the chamber. Her houri-like beauty in that palace of hidden moon-faces, her breathless explanation that the Sultan had summoned her to join her husband, carried her past breathless guards, through door after door, past the black eunuchs of the seraglio and the white eunuchs of the royal apartment, till through the interstices of purple hangings she had a far-off glimpse of the despot in his great imperial turban, sitting on his high, narrow throne, his officers around him. A page stopped her rudely. Faintness overcame her.

"Mehmed Effendi," called the page.

Dizzy, her tongue scarcely under control, she tried to proffer to the tall door-keeper who parted the hangings her request for admission.

But he held out his arms to catch her swaying form, and then, as in some monstrous dream, something familiar seemed to her to waft from the figure, despite the white turban and the green mantle, and the next instant, as with the pain of a stab, she recognized Sabbata.

"What masquerade is this?" her white lips whispered in indignant revulsion as she struggled from his hold.

"My lord, the Sultan, hath made me his door-keeper--_Capigi Bas.h.i.+ Otorak_," he replied deprecatingly. "He is merciful and forgiving. May Allah exalt his dominion. The salary is large; he is a generous paymaster. I testify that there is no G.o.d but G.o.d. I testify that Mohammed is G.o.d's prophet." He caught the swooning Melisselda in his arms and covered her face with kisses.

XXV

News travelled slowly in those days. A week later, while Agi Mehmed Effendi and his wife Fauma Kadin (born Sarah and still called Melisselda by her adoring husband, the Sultan's door-keeper) were receiving instruction in the Moslem religion from the exultant Mufti Vanni, a great Synod of Jews, swept to Amsterdam by the mighty wave of faith and joy, Rabbis and scholars and presidents of colleges, were drawing up a letter of homage to the Messiah. And while the Grand Seignior was meditating the annihilation of all the Jews of the Ottoman Empire for their rebellious projects, with the forced conversion of the orphaned children to Islam, the Jews of the world were celebrating--for what they thought the last time--the Day of Atonement, and five times during that long fast-day did the weeping wors.h.i.+ppers, rocking to and fro in their grave-clothes, pa.s.sionately p.r.o.nounce the blessing over Sabbata Zevi, the Messiah of Israel.

Nor did the fame and memory of him perish for generations; nor the dreamers of the Jewry cease to cherish the faith in him, many following him in adopting the white turban of Islam.

But by what ingenious cabalistic sophistries, by what yearning fantasies--fit to make the angels weep--his unhappy followers, obstinate not to lose the great white hope that had come to illumine the gloom of the Jewries, explained away his defection; what sects and counter-sects his appostasy gave birth to, and what new prophets arose--a guitar-playing gallant of Madrid, a tobacco dealer of Pignerol, a blue-blooded Christian millionaire of Copenhagen--to nourish that great pathetic hope (which still lives on) long after Sabbata himself, after who knows what new spasms of self-mystification and hypocrisy, what renewed aspirations after his old greatness and his early righteousness, what fresh torment of soul and body, died on the Day of Atonement, a lonely white-haired exile in a little Albanian town, where no brother Jew dwelt to close his eyelids or breathe undying homage into his dying ears--is it not written in the chronicles of the Ghetto?

(_Here endeth the Third and Last Scroll._)

THE MAKER OF LENSES

As the lean, dark, somewhat stooping pa.s.senger, noticeable among the blonde Hollanders by his n.o.ble Spanish face with its black eyebrows and long curly locks, stepped off the _trekschuyt_ on to the ca.n.a.l-bank at s' Gravenhage, his abstracted gaze did not at first take in the scowling visages of the idlers, sunning themselves as the tow-boat came in. He was not a close observer of externals, and though he had greatly enjoyed the journey home from Utrecht along the quaint water-way between green walls of trees and hedges, with occasional glimpses of flat landscapes and windmills through rifts, his sense of the peace of Nature was wafted from the ma.s.s, from a pervasive background of greenness and flowing water; he was not keenly aware of specific trees, of linden, or elm, or willow, still less of the aquatic plants and flowers that carpeted richly the surface of the ca.n.a.l.

Even when, pursuing broodingly his homeward path through the handsome streets of the Hague, he became at last conscious of a certain ill-will in the faces he met, he did not at first connect it with himself, but with the general bellicose excitement of the populace.

Although the young Prince of Orange had rewarded their insurrectionary election of him to the Stadtholders.h.i.+p by redeeming them from the despair to which the French invasion and the English fleet had reduced them, although since his famous "I will die in the last ditch," Holland no longer strove to commit suicide by opening its own sluices, yet the unloosed floods of popular pa.s.sion were only partially abated. A stone that grazed his cheek and plumped against the little hand-bag that held his all of luggage, startled him to semi-comprehension.

They were for him, then, these sullen glances. Cries of "Traitor!"

"G.o.dless gallows-bird!" "Down with the d.a.m.ned renegade!" dispelled what doubt remained. A shade of melancholy deepened the expression of the sweet, thoughtful mouth; then, as by volition, the habitual look of pensive cheerfulness came back, and he walked on, unruffled.

So it had leaked out, even in his own town--where an anonymous prophet should be without dishonor--that _he_ was the author of the infamous _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, the "traitor to State and Church" of refuting pamphleteers, the bogey of popular theology. In vain, then, had his treatise been issued with "Hamburg" on the t.i.tle-page. In vain had he tried to combine personal peace with impersonal thought, to confine his body to a garret and to diffuse his soul through the world. The forger of such a thunderbolt could not remain hid from the eyes of Europe. Perhaps the ill.u.s.trious foreigners and the beautiful bluestockings who climbed his stairs--to the detriment of his day's work in grinding lenses--had set the Hague scenting sulphur. More probably the hot-headed young disciples to whom he had given oral or epistolary teaching had enthusiastically betrayed him into fame--or infamy. It had always been thus, he mused, even in those early half-forgotten days when he was emanc.i.p.ating himself from the Ghetto, and half-shocked admirers no less than heresy-hunters bore to the ears of the Beth-din his dreadful rejection of miracle and ceremony. Poor Saul Morteira! How his ancient master must have been pained to p.r.o.nounce the Great Ban, though nothing should have surprised him in a pupil so daring of question, even at fifteen. And now that he had shaken off the Ghetto, or rather been shaken off by it, he had scandalized no less shockingly that Christendom to which the Ghetto had imagined him apostatizing: he had fearlessly contradicted every system of the century, the ruling Cartesian philosophy no less than the creed of the Church, and his plea for freedom of thought had ill.u.s.trated it to the full. True, the Low Countries, when freed from the Spanish rack, had n.o.bly declared for religious freedom, but at a scientific treatment of the Bible as sacred literature even Dutch toleration must draw the line, unbeguiled by the appeal to the State to found itself on true religion and ignore the glossing theologians.