Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 51

A terrible calm settled upon him. It was as if fire should become ice.

Yes, he understood at last what Destiny had always been trying to tell him--that love and happiness were not for him. He was consecrate to great causes: His Will, entangled with that of others, grew feeble, fruitless. Women were truly _enfants du diable_. He had been within an ace of abandoning his historical mission. Now he would arise, strong, sublime: a mighty weapon forged by the G.o.ds, and tempered by fire and tears.

Only, one thing must first be done. The past must be wiped off. He must recommence with a clean sheet. True, he had always refused duels.

But now he saw the fineness, the necessity of them. In a world of chicanery and treachery the sword alone cut clean.

He sent a challenge to the father, a message of goodwill to the lover.

But it was Janko who took up the challenge.

The weapon chosen was the pistol.

La.s.salle's friends begged him to practise.

"Useless! I know what is destined."

Never had he been so colossal, so a.s.sured. His nerves seemed to have regained their tone. The night before the duel he slept like a tranquil child.

In the early morn, on the way to the field outside Geneva, he begged his second to arrange the duel on the French side of the frontier, so that he might remain in Geneva and settle his account with the father.

At the word of command, "One!" Janko's shot rang out. La.s.salle's was not a second later, but he had already received his death-wound.

He lay three days, dying in terrible agony, relieved only by copious opium. Between the spasms, surprise possessed his mind that his Will should have counted for nothing before the imperturbable march of the universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters."

But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, s.h.i.+fting as sand; the daughters of Judaea were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Pa.s.sover table, with its picturesque ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And then he felt a cold wind, remembering how Riekchen had hidden her face to laugh at these mediaeval mummeries, and to spit out the bitter herbs, so meaningless to her.

O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils--religion, race, s.e.x, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as G.o.ds, knowing good and evil.

Only one thing was left--to die unbroken.

He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People--the Germans--should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey.

A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi--a month after his glad shout, "By all the G.o.ds of Greece, 'tis she!"--he was a corpse, the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned for her was to become a great power in the State, under the ever-growing glamour of his memory.

The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in her grief. He belonged to her--to her and the People. Yes, she would bear the body of her _cher enfant_ through the provinces of the Rhine--he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah.

And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a right to share her grief, nay, to call him--in no figurative sense--"_enfant_"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting strength, of his superb fore-visionings.

THE PRIMROSE SPHINX

I

In the choir of the old-fas.h.i.+oned church of Hughenden, that broods amid the beautiful peace of English meadows, there stands, on the left hand of the aisle, a black high-backed stall of polished oak, overhung by the picturesque insignia of the Order of the Garter.

In the pavement behind it gleams a square slab, dedicated by "his grateful sovereign and friend" to her great Prime Minister, and heaped in the spring with primroses.

And on this white memorial is sculptured in bas-relief the profile of the head of a Semitic Sphinx, round whose mute lips flickers in a faint sardonic smile the wisdom of the ages.

II

I see him, methinks, in life, Premier of England, Lord Privy Seal, Earl Beaconsfield of Beaconsfield, Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden, sitting in his knightly stall, listening impa.s.sibly to the country parson's sermon. His head droops on his breast, but his coal-black inscrutable eyes are open.

It is the hour of his star.

He is just back from the Berlin Congress, bringing "Peace with Honor." The Continent has stood a-tiptoe to see the wonderful English Earl pa.s.s and repa.s.s. He has been the lion of a congress that included Bismarck. The laurels and the Oriental palm placed by his landlord on the hotel-balcony have but faintly typified the feeling of Europe. His feverous reception in England, from Dover pier onwards, has recalled an earlier, a more romantic world. Fathers have brought their little ones to imprint upon their memories the mortal features of this immortal figure, who pa.s.ses through a rain of flowers to his throne in Downing Street. The London press, with scarce an exception, is in the dust at his feet--with the proud English n.o.bles and all that has ever flouted or a.s.sailed him.

The suns.h.i.+ne comes floridly through the stained-gla.s.s windows, and lies upon the austere crucifix.

III

By what devious ways has he wandered hither--from that warm old Portuguese synagogue in Bevis Marks, whence his father withdrew under the smart of a fine from "the gentlemen of the Mahamad?"

But hark! The parson--as paradoxically--is reading a Jewish psalm.

"'_The Lord said unto my lord: Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.

The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion: be thou ruler in the midst of thine enemies.

In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee freewill offerings with a holy wors.h.i.+p: the dew of thy birth is of the womb of the morning._'"

The Earl remains impa.s.sive.

"Half Christendom wors.h.i.+ps a Jewess, and the other half a Jew."

Whom does he wors.h.i.+p?

"Sensible men never tell."

IV

Yet in that facial mask I seem to read all the tale of the long years of desperate waiting, only half sweetened by premature triumphs of pen and person; all the rancorous energies of political strife.

And as I gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coa.r.s.ens the features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner of the lips.

I think of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank verse, leavings from his long c.o.xcombical strain to be a poet; of his false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages, monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his braggart a.s.sertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic perseverance to be more English than the English; of his nave delight in fine clothes and fine dishes and fine company; of his nice conduct of a morning and evening cane; of his morbid self-consciousness of his gifts and his genius; of his unscrupulous chase of personal success and of Fame--that shadow which great souls cast, and little souls pursue as substance; of his scrupulous personal rejection of Love--Love, the one touch of true romance in his novels--and his pecuniary marriage for his career's sake, after the manner of his tribe; of his romanesque conception of the British aristocracy, which he yet dominates, because he is not really rooted in the social conceptions which give it its prestige, and so is able to manuvre it artistically from without, intellect detached from emotion: to play English politics like a game of chess, moving proud peers like p.a.w.ns, with especial skill in handling his Queen; his very imperturbability under attack, only the mediaeval Jew's self-mastery before the grosser-brained persecutor.

I think these things and the Sphinx yields up his secret--the open secret of the Ghetto parvenu.

V

But as I look again upon his strange Eastern face, so deep-lined, so haggard, something subtler and finer calls to me from the ruins of its melancholy beauty.

Into this heavy English atmosphere he brings not only the s.h.i.+mmer of ideas and wit, but--a Heine of action--the fantasy of personal adventure, and--when audacity has been crowned by empery--of dramatic surprises of policy. A successful La.s.salle, he flutters the stagnant castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of the individual Will.

To a country that lumbers on from precedent to precedent, and owes its very const.i.tution to the pinch of practical exigencies, he brings the Jew's unifying sweep of idea. First, he is the encourager of the Young England party, for, conceiving himself child of a race of aristocrats whose mission is to civilize the world, he feels the duty of guidance to which these young English squires and n.o.bles are born. The bourgeois he hates--only the pomp of sovereignty and the pathos of poverty move his soul; his lifelong dream is of a Tory democracy, wherein the n.o.bles shall make happy the People that is exploited by the middle cla.s.ses. Product of a theocratic state, where the rich and the poor are united in G.o.d, he is shocked by "the Two Nations" into which, by the gradual break-up of the feudal world, this England is split. The cry of the Chartists does not leave him cold. He is one in revolt with Byron and Sh.e.l.ley against a Philistine world. And later, to a mighty empire that has grown fortuitously, piecemeal, by the individual struggles of independent pioneers or isolated filibusters, he gives a unifying soul, a spirit, a mission. He perceives with Heine that as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and its State Church only the guardian of the Semitic principle, popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined executant of the ideals of Zion; that it is planting the Law like a great shady tree in the tropic deserts and arid wastes of barbarism.

That grandeur and romance of their empire, of which the English of his day are only dimly aware, because like their const.i.tution it has evolved without a conscious principle, he, the outsider, sees. He is caught by the fascination of its vastness, of its magnificent possibilities. And in very deed he binds England closer to her colonies, and restores her dwindled prestige in the Parliament of Nations. He even proclaims her an Asiatic power.