SSS Se Se eS OTA Ry UTI i 7 z HINIVERCITS ta ; coi Ned ¥ ;% : 3 ILLINOIS: LIBRARY INV. sae bd EE ; ; , T UREANACHAMPAIGN ; r f OF * The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN APR 12 1983 aia > 0.2006 FEB 2 # FEB 06 om | DE! Z200G FO= Stil a uel) SEP 1.2 199 TED 15 1f%S JAN 1 4 1996 NOV f ee B05 2000 JUL 31 2902 L161—O-1096 WORKS OF ISRAEL ZANGWILL THE MELTING-POT CHOSEN PEOPLES THE AMERICAN JEWISH BOOK COMPANY NEW YORK 1921 THE MELTING-POT CoryRIGHT, 1909, 1914, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. CHOSEN PEOPLES ‘ COPYRIGHT, I9I9Q, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Printed by Tue Lorp BaLtTiMoRE PREss Baltimore, Md. ae Se ee oa Pees bE 4 ‘ ih: ALAS Wi TO. THEODORE ROOSEVELT IN RESPECTFUL RECOGNITION OF HIS STRENUOUS STRUGGLE AGAINST THE FORCES THAT THREATEN TO SHIPWRECK THE GREAT REPUBLIC WHICH CARRIES MANKIND AND ITS FORTUNES, THIS PLAY IS, BY HIS KIND PERMISSION, CORDIALLY DEDICATED , atae nN ne t 7 eS — THE CAST [As first produced at the Columbia Theatre, Washington, on the fifth of October 1908] David Quixano Mendel Quixano Baron Revendal Quincy Davenport, Jr. Herr Pappelmeister Vera Revendal Baroness Revendal Frau Quixano Kathleen O'Reilly Settlement Servant Waker WHITESIDE Henry BercMan Joun Brair GRANT STEWART Henry VocEL CurysTAaL HERNE Leonora Von OTTINGER LovuisE MuLpENER Mo tte REVEL Annie Harris Produced by Hucu Forp [As first produced by the Play Actors at the Court Theatre, London, on the twenty-fifth of January 1914] David Quixano Mendel Quixano Baron Revendal Quincy Davenport, Jr. Herr Pappelmeister Vera Revendal Baroness Revendal Frau Quixano Kathleen O’Reilly Settlement Servant Haroip Cuapin Hucu TaBBERER H. Lawrence Leyton P. PeErcEvAL CLARK Cuiirtron ALDERSON Puy iis ReLPH GILLIAN SCAIFE Inez BENsUSAN E. Notan O’Connor Rutu Parrotr Produced by Norman Pacer 1 j , oa ——. es ee ‘Act I The scene 1s laid in the living-room of the small home of the quixanos in the Richmond or non-Fewish borough of New York, about five o'clock of a Feb- ruary afternoon. At centre back 1s a double street- door giving on a columned veranda in the Colonial style. Natled on the right-hand door-post gleams a Mezuzah, a tiny metal case, containing a Biblical passage. On the right of the door 1s a small hat- stand holding MENDEL’s overcoat, umbrella, ete. There are two windows, one on either side of the door, and three exits, one down-stage on the left leading to the stairs and family bedrooms, and two on the right, the upper leading to KATHLEEN’S bedroom and the lower to the kitchen. Over the street door 1s pinned the Stars-and-Siripes. On the left wall, in the upper corner of which 1s a music- stand, are bookshelves of large mouldering Hebrew books, and over them 1s hung a Mizrach, or Hebrew picture, to show 1t 15 the East Wall. Other pictures round the room include Wagner, Columbus, Lincoln, and “ ‘fews at the Wailing place.” Down-stage, about a yard from the left wall, stands vavip’s roll-desk, open and displaying a medley of music, a quill pen, etc. On the wall behind the desk hangs a book-rack with brightly bound English books. A grand piano stands at left centre back, holding a pile of music and one huge Hebrew tome. There 1s a table 1n the middle of the room covered with a red cloth and a litter of objects, music, and newspapers. The fireplace, in which a fire 1s burning, occupies A the centre of the right wall, and by it stands an armchair on which les another heavy mouldy Hebrew tome. The mantel holds a clock, two silver candlesticks, etc. A chiffonier stands against the back wall on the right. There are a few cheap chairs. The whole effect 15 a curious blend of shabbiness, Americanism, ‘fewishness, and music, all four being combined in the figure of MENDEL QUIXANO, who, in a black skull-cap, a seedy velvet jacket, ana red carpet-slippers, 15 discovered standing at the open street-door. He 1s an elderly music master with a fine Fewish face, pathetically furrowed by misfortunes, and a short grizzled beard. MENDEL Good-bye, Johnny! . . . And don’t forget to practise your scales. [Shutting door, shivers.| Ugh! It’ll snow again, I guess. [He yawns, heaves a great sigh of relief, walks toward the table, and perceives a mustc-roll. | The chump! He’s forgotten his music ! [He picks 1t up and runs toward the window on the left, muttering furiously | Brainless, earless, thumb-fingered Gentile ! [Throwing open the window] Here, Johnny! You can’t practise your scales if you leave ’em here ! [He throws out the music-roll and shivers again at the cold as he shuts the window.| Ugh! And I must go out to that miserable dancing class to scrape the rent together. [He goes to the fire and warms his hands.| 2 Ach Gott! What a life! What a life! [He drops dejectedly into the armchair. Finding himself sitting uncomfortably on the big book, he half rises and pushes it to the side of the seat. After an instant an irate Irish voice is heard from behind the kitchen door.| KATHLEEN [Without] Divil take the butther! I wouldn’t put up with ye, not for a hundred dollars a week. MENDEL [Razsing himself to listen, heaves great sigh] Ach! Mother and Kathleen again! KATHLEEN [Stzll louder] Pots and pans and plates and knives! Sure ’tis enough to make a saint chrazy. FRAU QUIXANO [Equally loudly from kitchen| Wos schreist du? Gott in Himmel, dieses Amertka ! KATHLEEN [Opening door of kitchen toward the end of FRAU QUIXANO’Ss speech, but turning back, with her hand visible on the door| What’s that ye’re afther jabberin’ about America? If ye don’t like God’s own counthry, sure ye can go back to your own Jerusalem, so ye can. MENDEL One’s very servants are anti-Semites. KATHLEEN [Bangs her door as she enters excitedly, carrying a folded white table-cloth. She 1s a young and pretty Irish matd-of-all-work | 3 Bad luck to me, if iver I take sarvice again with haythen Jews. [She perceives MENDEL huddled up in the armchatr, gives a little scream, and drops the cloth.| Och, I thought ye was out ! MENDEL [Rising] And so you dared to be rude to my mother. KATHLEEN [Angrily, as she picks up the cloth| She said I put mate on a butther-plate. MENDEL Well, you know that’s against her religion. KATHLEEN But I didn’t do nothing of the soort. I ounly put butther on a mate-plate. MENDEL That’s just as bad. What the Bible forbids—— KATHLEEN [Lays the cloth on a chair and vigorously clears off the litter of things on the table.| Sure, the Pope himself couldn’t remimber it all, Why don’t ye have a sinsible religion ? MENDEL You are impertinent. Attend to your work. [He seats himself at the piano.| 4 KATHLEEN And isn’t it laying the Sabbath cloth I am ? [She bangs down articles from the table into thet right places. | MENDEL Don’t answer me back. [He begins to play softly.| KATHLEEN Faith, | must answer somebody back—and sorra a word of English she understands. I might as well talk to a tree. MENDEL You are not paid to talk, but to work. [Playing on softly.] KATHLEEN And who can work wid an ould woman nagglin’ and grizzlin’ and faultin’ me ? [She removes the red table-cloth.| Mate-plates, butther-plates, kosher, trepha, sure I’ve smashed up folks’ crockery and they makin’ less fuss ouver It. MENDEL [Stops playing. | Breaking crockery is one thing, and breaking a religion another. Didn’t you tell me when I engaged you that you had lived in other Jewish families ? KATHLEEN [Azgrily] And is it a liar ye’d make me out now? I’ve lived 5 wid clothiers and pawnbrokers and Vaudeville actors, but I niver shtruck a house where mate and butther couldn’t be as paceable on the same plate as eggs and bacon—the most was that some wouldn’t ate the bacon onless ’twas killed kosher. MENDEL [Tickled] Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! KATHLEEN [Furious, pauses with the white table- cloth half on| And who’s ye laughin’ at? I give ye a week’s notice. I won’t be the joke of Jews, no, begorra, that I won’t. [She pulls the cloth on viciously. | MENDEL [Sobered, rising from the piano] Don’t talk nonsense, Kathleen. Nobody is making a joke of you. Have a little patience—you’ll soon learn our ways. KATHLEEN [More mildly] Whose ways, yours or the ould lady’s or Mr. David’s ? To-night being yer Sabbath, youll be blowing out yer bedroom candle, though ye won’t light it; Mr. David’ll light his and blow it out too; and the mis- thress won’t even touch the candleshtick. ‘There’s three religions in this house, not wan. MENDEL [Coughs uneasily. | Hem! Well, you learn the mistress’s ways—that will be enough. | 6 KATHLEEN [Going to mantelpiece | But what way can I understand her jabberin’ and jibberin’ ?—I’m not a monkey ! [She takes up a silver candlestick. | Why doesn’t she talk English like a Christian ? MENDEL [Irritated] If you are going on like that, perhaps you had better not remain here. KATHLEEN [Blazing up, forgetting to take the second candlestick | , And who’s axin’ ye to remain here? Faith, Pll quit off this blissid minit ! MENDEL [Taken aback| No, you can’t do that. KATHLEEN And why can’t I? Ye can keep yer dirthy wages. [She dumps down the candlestick violently on the table, and exit hysterically into her bedroom.| MENDEL [Szghing heavily| She might have put on the other candlestick. [He goes to mantel and takes 1t. A rat-tat-tat ar street-door. | Who can that be? [Running to KATHLEEN’S door, holding candlestick forgetfully low. | Kathleen! ‘There’s a visitor ! 7 KATHLEEN [Angrily from within] I’m not here ! MENDEL So long as you’re in this house, you must do your work. [KATHLEEN’s head emerges sulktly.| KATHLEEN I tould ye I was lavin’ at wanst. Let you open the door yerself. MENDEL I’m not dressed to receive visitors—it may be a new pupil. [He goes toward staircase, datamaiiee carrying off the candlestick which KATHLEEN has not caught sight of. Exit on the left.| KATHLEEN [Moving toward the street-door]| The divil fly away wid me if ivir from this our I set foot again among haythen furriners [She throws open the door angrily and then the outer door. VERA REVENDAL, @ beautiful girl in furs and muff, with a touch of the exotic im her appearance, steps into the little vestibule. | VERA Is Mr. Quixano at home? KATHLEEN [Sulkily] Which Mr. Quixano ? 8 VERA [Surprised] Are there two Mr. Quixanos ? KATHLEEN [Tariély] Didn’t I say there was ? VERA Then I want the one who plays. KATHLEEN There isn’t a one who plays. VERA Oh, surely ! KATHLEEN Ye’re wrong entirely. They both plays. VERA [Smiling] Oh, dear! And I suppose they both play the violin. KATHLEEN | Ye’re wrong again. One plays the piano—ounly the young ginthleman plays the fiddle—Mr. David ! VERA [Eagerly | Ah, Mr. David—that’s the one I want to see. KATHLEEN He’s out. [She abruptly shuts the door.| VERA [Stopping its closing] Don’t shut the door ! KATHLEEN [Suappily] More chanst of seeing him out there than in here ! VERA But I want to leave a message. KATHLEEN Then why don’t ye come inside? It’s freezin’? me to the bone. [She sneezes. | Atchoo ! VERA I’m sorry. [She comes 1n and closes the door.| Will you please say Miss Revendal called from the Settlement, and we are anxiously awaiting his answer to the letter asking him to play for us on KATHLEEN What way will I be tellin’ him all that? I’m not here. VERA Eh ? KATHLEEN I’m lavin’—just as soon as I’ve me thrunk packed. fe) VERA Then I must write the message—can I write at this desk ? KATHLEEN If the ould woman don’t come in and shpy you. VERA What old woman ? KATHLEEN | Ould Mr. Quixano’s mother—she wears a black wig, she’s that houly. VERA [Bewildered] What? ... But why should she mind my writing? KATHLEEN Look at the clock. [vera looks at the clock, more puzzled than ever.| If ye’re not quick, it'll be Shabbos. VERA Be what ? KATHLEEN [Holds up hands of horror| Ye don’t know what Shabbos is! A Jewess not know her own Sunday ! VERA [Outraged] I, a Jewess! How dare you? II KATHLEEN [Flustered] Axin’ your pardon, miss, but ye looked a bit furrin and I VERA [Frozen] I am a Russian. [Slowly and dazedly| Do I understand that Mr. Quixano is a Jew? KATHLEEN Two Jews, miss. Both of ’em. VERA Oh, but it is impossible. [Dazedly to herself | He had such charming manners. [Aloud again] You seem to think everybody Jewish. Are yousure Mr. Quixano is not Spanish f—the name sounds Spanish. KATHLEEN Shpanish ! [She picks up the old Hebrew book on the armchair. | Look at the ould lady’s book. Is that Shpanish ? [She points to the Mizrach.| And that houly picture the ould lady says her pater- noster to! Isthat Shpanish ? And that houly table- cloth with the houly silver candle [Cry of sudden astonishment| Why, I’ve ounly put [She looks toward mantel and utters a great cry of alarm as she drops the Hebrew book on the floor.| 12 Why, where’s the other candleshtick! Mother in hivin, they'll say I shtole the candleshtick ! [Percerving that vrRa 1s dazedly moving toward door| Beggin’ your pardon, miss [She 15 about to move a chair toward the desk.]| VERA Thank you, I’ve changed my mind. . KATHLEEN That’s more than I’ll do. VERA [Hand on door] Don’t say I called at all. KATHLEEN Plaze yerself. What name did ye say ? [Mernvet enters hastily from his bedroom, completely transmogrified, minus the skull-cap, with a Prince Albert coat, and boots instead of slippers, so that hts appearance 1s gentlemanly. KATHLEEN begins to search quietly and unostentatiously in the table- drawers, the chiffonier, etc., etc., for the candlestick. MENDEL I am sorry if I have kept you waiting—— (He rubs his hands 1mportantly.] You see I have so many pupils already. Won’t you sit down ? [He indicates a chair.| 13 VERA [Flushing, embarrassed, releasing her hold of the door handle | Thank you—I—I—I didn’t come about pianoforte lessons. MENDEL [Sighing in disappointment] Ach! VERA In fact I—er—it wasn’t you I wanted at all—I was just going. MENDEL [Politely] Perhaps I can direct you to the house you are looking for. VERA Thank you, I won’t trouble you. [She turns toward the door again.| MENDEL Allow me ! [He opens the door for her.| VERA [Hesitating, struck by his manners, struggling with her anti-Fewish prejudice] It—it—was your son I wanted. MENDEL [Ais face lighting “p) You mean my nephew, David. Yes, he gives violin lessons. [He closes the door. | 14 VERA Oh, is he your nephew ? MENDEL I am sorry he is out—he, too, has so many pupils, though at the moment he is only at the Crippled Children’s Home—playing to them. VERA | How lovely of him ! [Touched and deciding to conquer her prejudice| But that’s just what J came about—I mean we’d like him to play again at our Settlement. Please ask him why he hasn’t answered Miss Andrews’s letter. MENDEL [Astonished] He hasn’t answered your letter ? VERA Oh, I’m not Miss Andrews ; I’m only her assistant. MENDEL I see—Kathleen, whatever are you doing under the table ? [KATHLEEN, in her hunting around for the candle- stick, 1s now stooping and lifting up the table- cloth. | KATHLEEN Sure the fiend’s after witching away the candle- shtick. 15 MENDEL [Embarrassed] The candlestick ? Oh—I—I think you'll find it in my bedroom. KATHLEEN Wisha, now! [She goes into his bedroom. MENDEL [Turning apologetically to vera] I beg your pardon, Miss Andrews, I mean Miss—er—— VERA Revendal. MENDEL [Slightly more interested] Revendal ? Then you must be the Miss Revendal David told me about ! VERA [Blushing] Why, he has only seen me once—the time he played at our Roof-Garden Concert. MENDEL Yes, but he was so impressed by the way you handled those new immigrants—the Spirit of the Settlement, he called you. VERA [Modestly] Ah, no—Miss Andrews is that. And you will tell him to answer her letter at once, won’t you, because there’s only a week now to our Concert. [A gust of wind shakes the windows. She smiles.] aa it will mot be on the Roof Garden. I MENDEL [Half to himself] Fancy David not saying a word about it tome! Are you sure the letter was mailed ? VERA | I mailed it myself—a week ago. And even in New York [She smiles. Re-enter KATHLEEN with the recovered candlestick. | KATHLEEN Bedad, ye’re as great a shleep-walker as Mr. David! [She places the candlestick on the table and moves toward her bedroom. | MENDEL Kathleen ! KATHLEEN [Pursuing her walk without turning] I’m not here ! MENDEL Did you take ina letter for Mr. David about a week ago? [Smiling at Miss REVENDAL| He doesn’t get many, you see. KATHLEEN [Turning] A letter? Sure, I took in ounly a postcard from Miss Johnson, an’ that ounly sayin’ VERA And you don’t remember a letter—a large letter— last Saturday—with the seal of our Settlement ? ioey B KATHLEEN Last Saturday wid a seal, is it? Sure, how could 1] forgit it? MENDEL Then you did take it in? KATHLEEN Ye’re wrong entirely. ”“I'was the misthress took it in. MENDEL [To vera] I am sorry the boy has been so rude. KATHLEEN But the misthress didn’t give it him at wanst—she hid it away bekaz it was Shabbos. MENDEL Oh, dear—and she has forgotten to give it to him. Excuse me [He makes a hurried exit to the kitchen.| KATHLEEN And excuse me—lI’ve me thrunk to pack. [She goes toward her bedroom, pauses at the door.| And ye’ll witness I don’t pack the candleshtick. [Emphatic exit.] VERA [Still dazed] A Jew! That wonderful boy a Jew! ... But then 18 so was David the shepherd youth with his harp and his psalms, the sweet singer in Israel. ts She surveys the room and its contents with interest. The windows rattle once or twice in the rising wind. The light gets gradually less. She picks up the huge Hebrew tome on the piano and puts 1t down with a slight smile as tf overwhelmed by the weight of alien antiquity. Then she goes over to the desk and picks up the printed music.| Mendelssohn’s Concerto, Tartini’s Sondta in G Minor, Bach’s Chaconne... [She looks up at the book-rack. | *“‘ History of the American Commonwealth, nie eye clopedia of History,” “ History of the Jews ”—he seems very fond of history. Ah, there’s Seales and ‘Tennyson. [With surprise| Nietzsche next to the Bible? No Russian books apparently [Re-enter MENDEL triumphantly with a large sealed letter. | MENDEL Here it is! As it came on Saturday, a mother was afraid David would open it ! VERA [Smiling] But what can you do with a letter except open it? Any more than with an oyster ? MENDEL [Smiling as he puts the letter on Daviv’s desk | 9 To a pious Jew letters and oysters are alike forbidden— at least letters may not be opened on our day of rest. VERA I’m sure I couldn’t rest till ’d opened mine. [Enter from the kitchen FRAU QUIXANO, defending herself with excited gesticulation. She 1s an old lady with a black wig, but her appearance 15 digni- fied, venerable even, in no way comic. She speaks Yiddish exclusively, that being largely the language of the Russian Pale. | FRAU QUIXANO Obber ich hob gesogt zu Kathleen MENDEL [Turning and going to her| Yes, yes, mother, that’s all right now. FRAU QUIXANO [In horror, perceiving her Hebrew book on the floor, where KATHLEEN has dropped 1t| Mein Buch ! [She picks it up and kisses it prously. | MENDEL [Presses her into her fireside chair] Rubig, rubig, Mutter / [To vera] She understands barely a word of English—she won’t disturb us. VERA Oh, but I must be going—I was so long finding the house, and look! it has begun to snow! [They both turn their heads and look at the falling snow. | 20 MENDEL All the more reason to wait for David—it may leave off. He can’t be long now. Do sit down. [He offers a chair. | FRAU QUIXANO [Looking round suspiciously ] Wos will die Shikseh ? VERA | What does your mother say ? & MENDEL [Half-smiling| Oh, only asking what your heathen ladyship desires. VERA Tell her I hope she is well. MENDEL Das Fraulein hofft dass es geht gut FRAU QUIXANO [Shrugging her shoulders in despatr- ing astonishment | Gut? Uw wie soll es gut gehen—in Amertka ! [She takes out her spectacles, and begins slowly polishing and adjusting them.| | VERA [Smiling] I understood that last word. MENDEL She asks how can anything possibly go well in America ! 21 VERA Ah, she doesn’t like America. MENDEL [Half-smiling] Her favourite exclamation is “ 4 Klog zu Columbes- SOA VERA What does that mean ? MENDEL Cursed be Columbus ! VERA [Laughingly] Poor Columbus! I suppose she’s just come over. MENDEL Oh, no, it must be ten years since I sent for her. VERA Really! But your nephew was born here ? MENDEL No, he’s Russian too. But please sit down, you had better get his answer at once. [VERA szts. | 3 VERA I suppose you taught him music. MENDEL I? I can’t play the violin. He is self-taught. In 22 the Russian Pale he was a wonder-child. Poor David! He always looked forward to coming to America; he imagined I was a famous musician over here. He found me conductor in a cheap theatre—a converted beer-hall. VERA Was he very disappointed ? MENDEL | Disappointed ? He was enchanted! He is crazy about America. VERA [Smiling] Ah, 4e doesn’t curse Columbus. MENDEL My mother came with her life behind her: David with his life before him. Poor boy! VERA Why do you say poor boy ? MENDEL What is there before him here but a terrible struggle for life? If he doesn’t curse Columbus, he’ll curse fate. Music-lessons and dance-halls, beer-halls and weddings—every hope and ambition will be ground out of him, and he will die obscure and unknown. [His head sinks on his breast. FRAU QUIXANO 15 heard faintly sobbing over her book. The sobbing continues throughout the scene. | 23 VERA [Half rising] You have made your mother cry. MENDEL Oh, no—she understood nothing. She always cries on the eve of the Sabbath. VERA [Mystified, Re back into her chair] Always cries? Why? MENDEL [Embarrassed] Oh, well, a Christian wouldn’t understand VERA Yes I could—do tell me! MENDEL She knows that in this great grinding America, David and I must go out to earn our bread on Sabbath as on week-days. She never says a word to us, but her heart is full of tears. VERA Poor old woman. It was wrong of us to ask your nephew to play at the Settlement for nothing. MENDEL [Rising fiercely] If you offer him a fee, he shall not play. Did you think I was begging of you ? VERA I beg your pardon [She smiles. ] There, J am begging of you. Sit down, please. 24 MENDEL [Walking away to piano] I ought not to have burdened you with our troubles —you are too young. VERA [Pathetically] I young? If you only knew how old I am! MENDEL Your VERA : . Lleft my youth in Russia—eternities ago. MENDEL You know our Russia ! [He goes over to her and sits down. | VERA Can’t you see I’m a Russian, too? [With a faint tremulous smile] I might even have been a Siberian had I stayed. But I escaped from my gaolers. MENDEL You were a Revolutionist ! VERA Who can live in Russia and not be? So you see trouble and I are not such strangers. MENDEL Who would have thought it to look at you? Siberia, gaolers, revolutions ! [ Rising | What terrible things life holds ! 25 VERA Yes, even in free America. [FRAU QuIxANO’s sobbing grows slightly louder.| MENDEL That Settlement work must be full of tragedies. VERA Sometimes one sees nothing but the tragedy of things. [Looking toward the window| The snow is getting thicker. How pitilessly it falls— like fate. MENDEL [Following her gaze] Yes, icy and inexorable. [The faint sobbing of FRAU QUIXANO over her book, which has been heard throughout the scene as a sort of musical accompaniment, has combined to work it up to a mood of intense sadness, intensified by the growing dusk, so that as the two now gaze at the falling snow, the atmosphere seems overbrooded with melancholy. There 1s a moment or two without dialogue, given over to the sobbing of FRAU QUIXANO, the roar of the wind shaking the windows, the quick falling of the snow. Suddenly a happy voice singing “ My Country ’tis of Thee” 1s heard from without. ] FRAU QUIXANO [Pricking up her ears, joyously] Do 1st Dovidel ! MENDEL That’s David ! [He springs up.| 26 VERA [Murmurs in relief | Ah ! [The whole atmosphere is changed to one of joyous expectation. DAVID 15 seen and heard passing the left window, still singing the national hymn, but tt breaks off abruptly as he throws open the door and appears on the threshold, a buoyant snow-covered figure in a cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, carrying a violin case. He 15 a sunny, handsome ‘youth of the finest Russo-fewish type. He speaks with a slight German accent. | DAVID Isn’t it a beautiful world, uncle? [He closes the inner door. | Snow, the divine white snow [Perceiving the visitor with amaze] Miss Revendal here ! [He removes his hat and looks at her with boyish reverence and wonder. | VERA [Smiling] Don’t look so surprised—I haven’t fallen from heaven like the snow. ‘Take off your wet things. DAVID Oh, it’s nothing ; it’s dry snow. [He lays down his violin case and brushes off the snow from his cloak, which MENDEL takes from him and hangs on the rack, all without interrupting the dialogue. | If I had only known you were waiting—— 27 VERA I am glad you didn’t—I wouldn’t have had those © poor little cripples cheated out of a moment of your music. DAVID Uncle has told you? Ah,it was bully! Youshould have seen the cripples waltzing with their crutches ! [He has moved toward the old woman, and while he holds one hand to the blaze now pats her cheek with the other in greeting, to which she responds with a loving smile ere she settles contentedly to slumber over her book. | Es war grossartig, Granny. Even the paralysed danced. MENDEL Don’t exaggerate, David. DAVID Exaggerate, uncle! Why, if they hadn’t the use of their legs, their arms danced on the counterpane ; if their arms couldn’t dance, their hands danced from the wrist ; and if their hands couldn’t dance, they danced with their fingers; and if their fingers couldn’t dance, their heads danced; and if their heads were paralysed, why, their eyes danced—God never curses so utterly but you’ve something left to dance with ! [He moves toward his desk. | VERA [Jnfected with his gatety| You'll tell us next the beds danced. 28 i if DAVID So they did—they shook their legs like mad ! VERA Oh, why wasn’t I there ? [His eyes meet hers at the thought of her presence.| DAVID Dear little cripples, I felt as if I could play them all straight again with the love and joy jumping out of this old fiddle. [He lays his hand caressingly on the violin.] MENDEL [Gloomily] But in reality you left them as crooked as ever. DAVID No, I didn’t. [He caresses the back of his uncle’s head in affec- tionate rebuke. | I couldn’t play their bones straight, but I played their brains straight. And hunch-brains are worse than hunch-backs. . . . [Suddenly perceiving his letter on the desk| A letter for me / [He takes it with boyish eagerness, then hesitates to open 1t. | VERA [Smiling] Oh, you may open it! DAVID [W cKiee May I? 29 VERA [Smiling] Yes, and quick—or it’ll be Shabbos ! [pavip looks up at her in wonder. | MENDEL [Smiling] You read your letter ! DAVID [Opens it eagerly, then smiles broadly with pleasure. | Oh, Miss Revendal! Isn’t that great! To play again at your Settlement. I am getting famous. VERA But we can’t offer you a fee. MENDEL [Quickly sotto voce to vERA] Thank you! DAVID A fee! Id pay a fee to see all those happy immigrants you gather together—Dutchmen and Greeks, Poles and Norwegians, Welsh and Armenians. If you only had Jews,it would be as good as going to Ellis Island. VERA [Smiling] What a strange taste! Who on earth wants to go to Ellis Island ? DAVID Oh, I love going to Ellis Island to watch the ships coming in from Europe, and to think that all those weary, sea-tossed wanderers are feeling what J felt 30 when America first stretched out her great mother- hand to me / VERA [Softly] Were you very happy ? DAVID It was heaven. You must remember that all my life I had heard of America—everybody in our town had friends there or was going there or got money orders from there. ‘The earliest game I played at was selling off my toy furniture and setting up in America. All my life America was waiting, beckoning, shining—the place where God would wipe away tears from off all faces. [He ends in a half-sob.| MENDEL [Rises, as in terror| Now, now, David, don’t get excited. [Approaches him.| DAVID To think that the same great torch of liberty which threw its light across all the broad seas and lands into my little garret in Russia, is shining also for all those other weeping millions of Europe, shining wherever men hunger and are oppressed MENDEL [Soozhingly | Yes, yes, David. [Laying hand on his shoulder| Now sit down and 31 DAVID [Unbeeding| Shining over the starving villages of Italy and Ireland, over the swarming stony cities of Poland and Galicia, over the ruined farms of Roumania, over the shambles of Russia MENDEL [Pleadingly| David ! DAVID Oh, Miss Revendal, when I look at our Statue of Liberty, i just seem to hear the voice of America crying: ‘‘ Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest—trest uh [He 15 now almost sobbing. | MENDEL Don’t talk any more—you know it is bad for you. DAVID But Miss Revendal asked—and I want to explain to her what America means to me. MENDEL You can explain it in your American symphony. VERA [Eagerly—to pavip] You compose ? DAVID [Embarrassed | Oh, uncle, why did you talk of—? Uncle always— my music is so thin and tinkling. When I am writing 32 my American symphony, it seems like thunder crashing through a forest full of bird songs. But next day— oh, next day ! [He laughs dolefully and turns away.| VERA So your music finds inspiration in America? DAVID Yes—in the seething of the Crucible. VERA The Crucible? I don’t understand ! DAVID Not understand! You, the Spirit of the Settlement ! [He rises and crosses to her and leans over the table, facing her.| Not understand that America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand [Graphically illustrating it on the table] in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas ! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. 33 , MENDEL I should have thought the American was made already —eighty millions of him. DAVID Eighty millions ! [He smiles toward vERA in good-humoured derision. | Eighty millions! Over a continent! Why, that cockleshell of a Britain has forty millions! No, uncle, the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman. Ah, what a glorious Finale for my symphony—if I can only Write 10. VERA But you have written some of it already! May I not see it? DAVID [Relapsing into boyish shyness| No, if you please, don’t ask [He moves over to his desk amd nervously shuts tt down and turns the keys of drawers as though protecting bis MS.| VERA Won’t you give a bit of it at our Concert ? DAVID Oh, it needs an orchestra. VERA But you at the violin and I at the piano 34 MENDEL You didn’t tell me you played, Miss Revendal ! VERA I told you less commonplace things. DAVID Miss Revendal plays quite like a professional. VERA [Smiling] I don’t feel so complimented as you expect. You see I did have a professional training. MENDEL [Smiling] And I thought you came to me for lessons ! [pavip laughs. | VERA [Smiling] No, I went to Petersburg DAVID [Dazed] To Petersburg VERA [Smiling] Naturally. To the Conservatoire. There wasn’t much music to be had at Kishineff, a town where DAVID Kishineff ! [He begins to tremble. | VERA [Still smiling | My birthplace. 35 MENDEL [Coming toward him, protectingly| Calm yourself, David. DAVID Yes, yes—so you are a Russian ! [He shudders violently, staggers. | VERA [ Alarmed | You are ill! DAVID | It is nothing, I—not much music at Kishineff! No, only the Death-March! ... Mother! Father! Ah—cowards, murderers! And you! [He shakes bis fist at the atr.| You, looking on with your cold butcher’s face! O God! OGod! [He bursts into hysterical sobs and runs, shame- facedly, through the door to his room. | VERA [Wildly] What have I said? What have I done? MENDEL Oh, I was afraid of this, I was afraid of this. FRAU QUIXANO [Who has fallen asleep over her book, wakes as if with a sense of the horror and gazes dazedly around, adding to the thrillingness of the moment | Dovidel! Wu is? Dovidel! Mir dacht sach 36 MENDEL [Pressing her back to her slumbers| Du traumst, Mutter! Schlaf ! [She sinks back to sleep. | VERA [Jn hoarse whisper] His father and mother were massacred ? MENDEL [J same tense tone| Before his eyes—father, mother, sisters, down to the youngest’ babe, whose skull was battered in by a hooligan’s heel. VERA How did he escape ? MENDEL He was shot in the shoulder, and fell unconscious. As he wasn’t a girl, the hooligans left him for dead and hurried to fresh sport. VERA Terrible! Terrible! | Almost in tears. | MENDEL [Shrugging shoulders, hopelessly] It is only Jewish history! . . . David belongs to the species of pogrom orphan—they arrive in the States by almost every ship. VERA Poor boy! Poor boy! And he looked so happy! [She half sobs. | 37 MENDEL So he is, most of the time—a sunbeam took human shape when he was born. But naturally that dreadful scene left a scar on his brain, as the bullet left a scar on his shoulder, and he is always liable to see red when Kishineff is mentioned. VERA I will never mention my miserable birthplace to him again. MENDEL But you see every few months the newspapers tell us of another pogrom, and then he screams out against what he calls that butcher’s face, so that I tremble for his reason. I tremble even when I see him writing that crazy music about America, for it only means he is brooding over the difference between America and Russia. VERA But perhaps—perhaps—all the terrible memory will pass peacefully away in his music. MENDEL There will always be the scar on his shoulder to remind him—whenever the wound twinges, it brings up these terrible faces and visions. VERA Is it on his right shoulder ? 38 MENDEL No—on his left. For a violinist that is even worse. VERA Ah, of course—the weight and the fingering. [Subconsciously placing and fingering an imaginary violin. | MENDEL That is why I fear so for his future—he will never be strong enough for the feats of bravura that the public demands. VERA The wild beasts! I feel more ashamed of my country than ever. But there’s his symphony. MENDEL And who will look at that amateurish stuff? He knows so little of harmony and counterpoint—he breaks all the rules. I’ve tried to give him a few pointers—but he ought to have gone to Germany. VERA Perhaps it’s not too late. MENDEL [Passionately] Ah, if you and your friends could help him! See— I’m begging after all. But it’s not for myself. VERA My father loves music. Perhaps he—but no! he 39 lives in Kishineff. But I will think—there are people here—I will write to you. MENDEL [Fervently]| Thank you! Thank you! VERA Now you must go to him. Good-bye. Tell him I count upon him for the Concert. ! MENDEL How good you are! [He follows her to the street-door.| VERA [4t door| Say good-bye for me to your mother—she seems asleep. MENDEL [Opening outer door] I am sorry it 1s snowing so. VERA We Russians are used to it. [Smiling, at exit] Good-bye—let us hope your David will turn out a Rubinstein. MENDEL [Closing the doors softly] I never thought a Russian Christian could be so human. [He looks at the clock. | 40 Gott in Himmel—my dancing class ! [He hurries into the overcoat hanging on the hat- rack. Re-enter vavib, having composed himself, but still somewhat dazed. | DAVID She is gone? Oh, but I have driven her away by my craziness- Is she very angry? MENDEL Quite the contrary—she expects you at the Concert, and what is more DAVID [Eestazically | And she understood! She understood my Crucible of God! Oh, uncle, you don’t know what it means to me to have somebody who understands me. Even you have never understood MENDEL [Wounded i Nonsense! How can Miss Revendal understand you better than your own uncle ? DAVID [Mystically exalted] I can’t explain—I feel it. MENDEL Of course she’s interested in your music, thank Heaven. But what true understanding can there be between a Russian Jew and a Russian Christian ? 4t DAVID What understanding ? Aren’t we both Americans ? MENDEL Well, I haven’t time to discuss it now. [He winds his muffler round his throat.] DAVID Why, where are you going? MENDEL [Ironically] Where should I be going—in the snow—on the eve of the Sabbath? Suppose we say to synagogue ! DAVID Oh, uncle—how you always seem to hanker after those old things ! MENDEL [Tarily] Nonsense ! [He takes his umbrella from the stand.| I don’t like to see our people going to pieces, that’s all. DAVID Then why did you come to America? Why didn’t you work for a Jewish land? Yow’re not even a Zionist. MENDEL I can’t argue now. ‘There’s a pack of giggling school- girls waiting to waltz. 42 DAVID The fresh romping young things! Think of their happiness! I should love to play for them. MENDEL [Sarcastically] I can see you are yourself again. [He opens the street-door—turns back.| What about your own lesson? Can’t we go to- gether ? DAVID I must first write down what is singing in my soul— oh, uncle, it seems as if I knew suddenly what was wanting in my music ! MENDEL [Drily] Well, don’t forget what is wanting in the house! The rent isn’t paid yet. [Exit through street-door. As he goes out, he touches and kisses the Mezuzah on the door-post, with a subconsciously antagonistic revival of religious impulse. DAvID opens his desk, takes out a pile of musical manuscript, sprawls over his chair and, humming to himself, scribbles feverishly with the quill. After a few moments FRAU QUIXANO yawns, wakes, and stretches herself. Then she looks at the clock.| FRAU QUIXANO Shabbos ! [She rises and goes to the table and sees there are 43 no candles, walks to the chiffonier and gets them and places them in the candlesticks, then lights the candles, muttering a ceremonial Hebrew bene- diction. | Boruch atto haddoshem elloheinu melech hoélam assher kiddishonu bemitzvdsov vettzivonu lehadlik neir shel shabbos. [She pulls down the blinds of the two windows, then she goes to the rapt composer and touches him, remindingly, on the shoulder. He does not move, but continues writing. | Dovidel ! [He looks up dazedly. She points to the candles.| Shabbos ! [4 sweet smile comes over his face, he throws the quill restgnedly away and submits his head to ber hands and her muttered Hebrew blessing. | Yesimcho elohim ke-efrayim vechimnasseh—yevorechecho haddoshem veytshmerecho, yoer hadoshem ponov eilecho vechunecho, yisso hadoshem ponov eilecho veyosem lecho sholom. [Then she goes toward the kitchen. As she turns at the door, he is again writing. She shakes her finger at him, repeating| Gut Shabbos ! DAVID Gut Shabbos f [Puts down the pen and smiles after her till the door closes, then with a deep sigh takes his cape from the peg and his violin-case, pauses, still humming, to take up his pen and write down a fresh phrase, 44 finally puts on his hat and 1s just about to open the street-door when KATHLEEN enters from her bedroom fully dressed to go, and laden with a large brown paper parcel and an umbrella. He turns at the sound of her footsteps and remains at the door, holding his wiolin-case during the ensuing dialogue. | DAVID You’re not going out this bitter weather ? KATHLEEN [Sharply Sending him off with her umbrella | And who’s to shtay me? DAVID Oh, but you mustn’t—J’ll do your errand—what is it? KATHLEEN [Jndignantly] Errand, is it, indeed! I’m not here! DAVID Not here? KATHLEEN I’m lavin’, they’ll come for me thrunk—and _ ye’ll witness I don’t take the candleshtick. DAVID But who’s sending you away ? 45 KATHLEEN It’s sending meself away I am—yer houly grand. mother has me disthroyed intirely. DAVID Why, what has the poor old la ? KATHLEEN I don’t be saltin’ the mate and I do be mixin’ the crockery and——_! DAVID [Gently] I know, I know—but, Kathleen, remember she was brought up to these things from childhood. And her father was a Rabbi. KATHLEEN What’s that ? A priest ? DAVID | A sort of priest. In Russia he was a great man. Her husband, too, was a mighty scholar, and to give him time to study the holy books she had to do chores all day for him and the children. KATHLEEN Oh, those priests ! DAVID [Smiling] No, he wasn’t a priest. But he took sick and died 46 and the children left her—went to America or heaven or other far-off places—and she was left all penniless and alone. KATHLEEN Poor ould lady. DAVID Not so old yet, for she was married at fifteen. KATHLEEN Poor young crathur ! DAVID But she was still the good angel of the congregation— sat up with the sick and watched over the dead. KATHLEEN Saints alive! And not scared ? DAVID No, nothing scared her—except me. I got a broken- down fiddle and used to play it even on Shabbos—I was very naughty. But she was so lovely to me. I still remember the heavenly taste of a piece of Motso she gave me dipped in raisin wine! Passover cake, you know. KATHLEEN [Proudly] Oh, J know Motso. DAVID [Smacks his lips, repeats| Heavenly ! 47 KATHLEEN Sure, I must tashte it. DAVID [Shaking his head, mysteriously| Only little boys get that tashte. KATHLEEN That’s quare. DAVID [Smiling] Very quare. And then one day my uncle sent the old lady a ticket to come to America. But it is not so happy for her here because you see my uncle has to be near his theatre and can’t live in the Jewish quarter, and so nobody understands her, and she sits all the livelong day alone—alone with her book and her religion and her memories KATHLEEN [Breaking down| Oh, Mr. David ! DAVID And now all this long, cold, snowy evening she'll sit by the fire alone, thinking of her dead, and the fire will sink lower and lower, and she won’t be able to touch it, because it’s the holy Sabbath, and there’ll be no kind Kathleen to brighten up the grey ashes, and then at last, sad and shivering, she’ll creep up to her room without a candlestick, and there in the dark and the cold 48 KATHLEEN [Hysterically bursting into tears, dropping her parcel, and untying her bonnet-strings| Oh, Mr. David, I won’t mix the crockery, | won’t-—— DAVID [Heartily] Of course you won’t. Good night. [He slips out hurriedly through the street-door as KATHLEEN throws off her bonnet, and the curtain falls quickly. As wt rises again, she 15 seen strenu- ously poking the fire, illumined by its red glow.| 49 Act II The same scene on an afternoon a month later. pDavip 1s discovered at his desk, scribbling music 1n a fever of enthusiasm. MENDEL, dressed in his best, 1s playing softly on the piano, watching Davip. After an instant or two of indecision, he puts down the piano-lid with a bang and rises decisively. MENDEL David! — DAVID [Putting up hts left hand] Please, please —— [He writes feverishly. | MENDEL But I want to talk to you seriously—at once. DAVID I’m just re-writing the Finale. Oh, such a splendid inspiration ! [He writes on.] MENDEL [Shrugs his shoulders and reseats himself at piano. He plays a bar or two. Looks at watch impatiently. Resolutely] David, I’ve got wonderful news for you. Miss Revendal is bringing somebody to see you, and we have hopes of getting you sent to Germany to study composition. [Davip does not reply, but writes rapidly on.| 51 Why, he hasn’t heard a word ! [He shouts. ] David ! DAVID [Writing on] I can’t, uncle. I must put it down while that glorious impression is fresh. MENDEL What impression? You only went to the People’s Alliance. DAVID Yes, and there I saw the Jewish children—a thousand of ’em—saluting the Flag. [He writes on.| MENDEL Well, what of that ? DAVID What of that ? [He throws down his quill and jumps up.) But just fancy it, uncle. The Stars and Stripes unfurled, and a thousand childish voices, piping and foreign, fresh from the lands of oppression, hailing its fluttering folds. I cried like a baby. MENDEL I’m afraid you are one. 52 DAVID Ah, but if you had heard them — “ Flag of our Great Republic ” — the words have gone singing at my heart ever since — [He turns to the flag over the door.] “Flag of our Great Republic, guardian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand for Bravery, Purity, Truth, and Union, we salute thee. We, the natives of distant lands, who find : [Haif-sobbing] rest under thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, our sacred honour to love and protect thee, our Coun- try, and the liberty of the American people for ever.” [He ends almost hysterically] MENDEL [Soothingly] Quite right. But you needn’t get so excited over it. DAVID Not when one hears the roaring of the fires of God? Not when one sees the souls melting in the Crucible? Uncle, all those little Jews will grow up Americans ! MENDEL [Putting a pacifying hand on his shoulder and forcing him into a chair] Sit down. I want to talk to you about your affairs. DAVID [Sztting] : My affairs! But I’ve been talking about them all the time ! 53 MENDEL Nonsense, David. [He sits beside him.) Don’t you think it’s time you got into a wider world? DAVID Eh? This planet’s wide enough for me. MENDEL Do be serious. You don’t want to live all your life in this room. DAVID [Looks round] What’s the matter with this room? It’s princely. MENDEL [Ratsing his hands in caer Princely ! DAVID Imperial. Remember when I first saw it—after pigging a week in the rocking steerage, swinging in a berth as wide as my fiddle-case, hung near the cooking- engines; imagine the hot rancid smell of the food, the oil of the machinery, the odours of all that close- packed, sea-sick MENDEL [Putting his hand over paviv’s mouth] Don’t! You make me ill! How could you ever bear it ? 54 DAVID [Smiling] I was quite happy—lI only had to fancy I’d been shipwrecked, and that after clinging to a plank five days without food or water on the great lonely Atlantic, my frozen, sodden form had been picked up by this great safe steamer and given this delightful dry berht, regular meals, and the spectacle of all these friendly faces. . . . Do you know who was on board that boat ? Quincy Davenport. MENDEL The lord of corn and oil i DAVID [Smiling] Yes, even we wretches in the steerage felt safe to think the lord was up above, we believed the company would never dare drown /im. But could even Quincy Davenport command a cabin like this ? [Waving his arm round the room. | Why, uncle, we have a cabin worth a thousand dollars —a thousand dollars a week—and what’s more. it doesn’t wobble ! [He plants his feet voluptuously upon the floor.\ MENDEL Come, come, David, I asked you to be serious. Surely, some day you’d like your music produced ? DAVID [Fumps up] Wouldn’t it be glorious? To hear it all actualiy coming out of violins and ’cellos, drums and trumpets. 55 MENDEL And you'd like it to go all over the world ? DAVID All over the world and all down the ages. MENDEL But don’t you see that unless you go and study seriously in Germany ? [Enter KATHLEEN from kitchen, carrying a furnished tea-tray with ear-shaped cakes, bread and butter, etc., and wearing a grotesque false nose. MENDEL cries out in amaze. | Kathleen ! DAVID [Roaring with boyish laughter| Hal Ha Haih bad iiad KATHLEEN [Standing still with her tray] Sure, what’s the matter ? DAVID Look in the glass ! KATHLEEN [Going to the mantel] Houly Moses ! [She drops the tray, which MENDEL catches, and snatches off the nose.| Och, I forgot to take it off—twas the misthress gave it me- -I put it on to cheer her up. 56 DAVID Is she so miserable, then ? KATHLEEN Terrible low, Mr. David, to-day being Purim. MENDEL Purim! Is to-day Purim ? [Gives her the tea-tray back. KATHLEEN, to take it, drops her nose and forgets to pick it up.| DAVID But Purim is a merry time, Kathleen, like your Car- nival. Haven’t you read the book of Esther—how the Jews of Persia escaped massacre ? KATHLEEN That’s what the misthress is so miserable about. Ye don’t keep the Carnival. ‘There’s noses for both of ye in the kitchen—didn’t I go with her to Hester Street to buy ’em ?—but ye don’t be axin’ for ’em. And to see your noses layin’ around so solemn and neglected, faith, it nearly makes me chry meself. MENDEL [Bitterly to himself | Who can remember about Purim in America? DAVID [Half-smiling] Poor granny, tell her to come in and I'll play her Purim jig. 57 NENDEL [Hastily] Mo, no, David, not here—the visitors ! DAVID Visitors ? What visitors ? MENDEL [Jmpatiently] That’s just what I’ve been trying to explain. DAVID Well, I can play in the kitchen. [He takes his violin. Exit to kitchen. MENDEL sighs and shrugs his shoulders hopelessly at the boy’s perversity, then fingers the cups and saucers. | MENDEL [Anxiously] Is that the dest tea-set ? KATHLEEN Can’t you see it’s the Passover set ! [ Ruefully | And shpiled intirely it’ll be now for our Passover. . . . And the misthress thought the visitors saat! like to thry some of her Purim cakes. [Indicates ear-shaped cakes on tray.] MENDEL [Bitterly] Purim cakes ! [He turns his back on her and stares moodtly out of the window.| 58 KATHLEEN [Mutters contemptuously| Call yerself a Jew and you forgettin’ to keep Purim / [She is going back to the kitchen when a merry Slavic dance breaks out, softened by the door ; her feet unconsciously get more and more into dance step, and at last she jigs out. As she opens and passes through the door, the music sounds louder. | FRAU QUIXANO [Heard from kitchen] Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Kathleen!! [MENDEL’s feet, too, begin to take the swing of the music, and his feet dance as he stares out of the window. Suddenly the hoot of an automobile 1s heard, followed by the rattling up of the car.| MENDEL Ah, she has brought somebody swell ! [He throws open the doors and goes out eagerly to meet the visitors. The dance music goes on softly throughout the scene. | QUINCY DAVENPORT [Outside] Oh, thank you—I leave the coats in the car. - [Enter an instant later QUINCY DAVENPORT and VERA REVENDAL, MENDEL in the rear. VERA 15 dressed much as before, but with a motor veil, which she takes off during the scene. DAVENPORT 15 a dude, aping the air of a European sporting clubman. Aged about thirty-five and well set-up, he wears an orchid and an intermittent eyeglass, and gives the 1m- pression of a coarse-fibred and patronisingly facetious but not bad-hearted man, spoiled by prosperity. ] 59 MENDEL Won’t you be seated ? VERA First let me introduce my friend, who is good enough to interest himself in your nephew—Mr. Quincy Davenport. MENDEL [Struck of a heap| Mr. Quincy Davenport! How strange! VERA What is strange? MENDEL David just mentioned Mr. Davenport’s name—said they travelled to New York on the same boat. QUINCY Impossible! Always travel on my own yacht. Slow but select. Must have been another man of the same name—my dad. Ha! Ha! Ha! MENDEL Ah, of course. I thought you were too young. QUINCY My dad, Miss Revendal, is one of those antiquated Americans who are always in a hurry! VERA He burns coal and you burn time. 60 QUINCY Precisely! Ha! Ha! Ha! MENDEL Won’t you sit down—I’ll go and prepare David. VERA [Sztting] You’ve not prepared him yet ? MENDEL lve tried to more than once—but I never really got to [He smiles] to Germany. [quincy sits. | VERA Then prepare him for three visitors. MENDEL Three ? VERA You see Mr. Davenport himself is no judge of music. QUINCY [Fumps up| I beg your pardon. VERA In manuscript. 61 QUINCY Ah, of course not. Music should be heard, not seen— like that jolly jig. Is that your David? MENDEL Oh, you mustn’t judge him by that. He’s just fooling. QUINCY Oh, he’d better not fool with Poppy. Poppy’s awful Severe. MENDEL Poppy? QUINCY Pappelmeister—my private orchestra conductor. MENDEL Is it your orchestra Pappelmeister conducts ? QUINCY Well, J pay the piper—and the drummer too! [He chuckles. | MENDEL [Sadly] I wanted to play in it, but he turned me down. QUINCY I told you he was awful severe. [Zo vera] He only allows me comic opera once a week. My wife calls him the Bismarck of the baton. MENDEL [Reverently] A great conductor ! QUINCY Would he have a twenty-thousand-dollar job with me if he wasn’t? Not that he’d get half that in the open market—only I have to stick it on to keep him for my guests exclusively. [Looks at watch. | But he ought to be here, confound him. A conductor should keep time, eh, Miss Revendal ? [He sniggers. | MENDEL Pll bring David. Won’t you help yourselves to tea? [To vera] You see there’s lemon for you—as in Russia. [Exit to kitchen—a moment afterwards the merry music stops in the middle of a bar.| VERA Thank you. [Taking a cup.] Do you like lemon, Mr. Davenport ? QUINCY [Flirtatiously] That depends. The last I had was in Russia itseli—from the tair hands of your mother, the Baroness. 63 VERA [Pained] Please don’t say my mother, my mother is dead. QUINCY [Fatuously misunderstanding | Oh, you have no call to be ashamed of your step- mother—she’s a stunning creature; all the points of a tip-top Russian aristocrat, or Quincy Davenport’s no judge of breed! Doesn’t speak English like your father—but then the Baron is a wonder. VERA [Lakes up teapot] Father once hoped to be British Ambassador—that’s why J had an English governess. But you never told me you met him in Russza. QUINCY Surely! When I gave you all those love messages —— VERA [Pouring tea quickly] You said you met him at Wiesbaden. QUINCY Yes, but we grew such pals I motored him and the Baroness back to St. Petersburg. Jolly country, Russia—they know how to live. VERA [Coldly] I saw more of those who know how to die. . . . Milk and sugar ? QUINCY [Sentimentally] Oh, Miss Revendal! Have you forgotten ? 04 VERA [Politely snubbing] How should I remember ? QUINCY You don’t remember our first meeting? At the Settlement Bazaar? When I paid you a hundred dollars for every piece of sugar you put in? VERA | Did you? Then I hope you drank syrup. QUINCY | Ugh! I hate sugar—I sacrificed myself. VERA To the Settlement ? How heroic of you! QUINCY No, not to the Settlement. ‘Io you! VERA Then [ll only put milk in. QUINCY I hate milk. But from you VERA Then we must fall back on the lemon. QUINCY Tloathe lemon. But from—— 65 E VERA Then you shall have your tea neat. QUINCY I detest tea, and here it would be particularly cheap and nasty. But VERA Then you shall have a cake! [She offers plate. | QUINCY [Taking one] Would they be eatable ? [Tasting 1t.] Humph! Not bad. [ Sentimentally | A little cake was all you would eat the only time you came to one of my private concerts. Don’t you remember ? We went down to supper together. VERA [Taking his tea for herself and putting in lemon] I shall always remember the delicious music Herr Pappelmeister gave us. QUINCY How unkind of you! VERA Unkind ? [She sips the tea and puts down the cup.) te be grateful for the music ? QUINCY You know what I mean—to forget me / [He tries to take her hand. | VERA [Rising] Aren’t you forgetting yourself ? QUINCY You mean because I’m married to that patched-and- painted creature? She’s hankering for the stage again, the old witch. VERA Hush! Marriages with comic opera stars are not usually domestic idylls. QUINCY I fell a victim to my love of music. VERA [Murmurs, smiling] Music ! QUINCY And I hadn’t yet met the right breed—the true blue blood of Europe. T’ll get a divorce. [Approaching her| Vera ! VERA [Retreating]| You will make me sorry [ came to you. 67 QUINCY . No, don’t say that— promised the Baron I’d always do all I could for VERA You promised? You dared discuss my affairs ? QUINCY It was your father began it. When he found I knew you, he almost wept with emotion. He asked a hundred questions about your life in America. VERA His life and mine are for ever separate. He is a Reactionary, I a Radical. QUINCY But he loves you dreadfully—he can’t understand why you should go slaving away summer and winter in a Settlement—you a member of the Russian nobility ! VERA [With faint smile] I might say, noblesse oblige. But the truth is, I earn my living that way. It would do you good to slave there too ! QUINCY [Eagerly] Would they chain us together ? I’d come to-morrow. [He moves nearer her. There 1s a double knock at the door. | 68 VERA [Relieved] Here’s Pappelmeister ! QUINCY Bother Poppy—why 1s he so darned punctual ? [Enter KATHLEEN from the kitchen. | VERA [Smiling] Ah, you’re still here. KATHLEEN And why would I not be here? [She goes to open the door.] PAPPELMEISTER Mr. Quixano? KATHLEEN Yes, come in. [Enter HERR PAPPELMEISTER, @ burly German figure with a leonine head, spectacles, and a mane of white hair—a figure that makes his employer look even coarser. He carries an umbrella, which be never lets go. Hes at first grave and silent, which makes any burst of emotion the more striking. He and QUINCY DAVENPORT suggest a picture of “* Dignity and Impudence.” H1s English, as roughly indicated 1n the text, is extremely Teutonic.| QUINCY You're late, Poppy ! [PAPPELMEISTER silently bows to VERA. | VERA [Smilingly goes and offers her hand.| Proud to meet you, Herr Pappelmeister ! QUINCY Excuse me [Introducing] Miss Revendal!—I forgot you and Poppy hadn’t been introduced—curiously enough it was at Wies- baden I picked him up too—he was conducting the opera—your folks were in my box. I don’t think I ever met anyone so mad on music as the Baron. And the Baroness told me he had retired from active service in the Army because of the torture of listening to the average military band. Ha! Ha! Ha! VERA Yes, my father once hoped my music would comfort him. [She smiles sadly. | Poor father! But a soldier must bear defeat. Herr Pappelmeister, may I not give you some tea ? [She sits again at the table.] QUINCY Tea! lLager’s more in Poppy’s line. [He chuckles. | PAPPELMEISTER [Gravely] Bitte. Tea. [She pours out, he sits.| 7O Lemon. Four lumps. ... Nun, five! ... Orsix! [She hands him the cup. | Danke. [ds he receives the cup, he utters an exclamation, for KATHLEEN after opening the door has lingered on, hunting around everywhere, and having finally crawled under the tau has now brushed against bis leg.| VERA What are you looking for ? KATHLEEN [Her head emerging] My nose ! [They are all startled and amused.) VERA Your nose? KATHLEEN I forgot me nose ! QUINCY Well, follow your nose—and you'll find it. Ha! Ha! Ha! KATHLEEN [Pouncing on 1t] Here it is! [Picks it up near the armchair.) OMNES Oh! 71 KATHLEEN Sure, it’s gotten all dirthy. [She takes out a handkerchief and wipes the nose carefully. | QUINCY But why do you want a nose like that ? KATHLEEN [Proudly] Bekaz we’re Hebrews ! QUINCY What ! VERA What do you mean ? KATHLEEN It’s our Carnival to-day! Purim. [She carries her nose carefully and piously toward the kitchen. | VERA Oh! I see. [katt KATHLEEN. | QUINCY [Jn borror] Miss Revendal, you don’t mean to say you’ve brought me to a Jew! VERA I’m afraid I have. I was thinking only of his genius, 72 not his race. And you see, so many musicians are Jews. QUINCY Not my musicians. No Jew’s harp in my orchestra, eh? [He sniggers.| I wouldn’t have a Jew if he paid me. VERA I daresay you have some, all the same. QUINCY Impossible. Poppy! Are there any Jews in my orchestra ? PAPPELMEISTER [Removing the cup from his mouth and speaking with sepulchral solemnity | Do you mean are dere any Christians ? QUINCY [J horror] Gee-rusalem! Perhaps you're a Jew! PAPPELMEISTER [Gravely] I haf not de honour. But, if you brefer, I will gut out from my brogrammes all de Chewish composers. Was ? QUINCY Why, of course. Fire ’em out, every mother’s son of ’em. 73 PAPPELMEISTER [Unsmiling] Also—no more comic operas ! QUINCY What!!! PAPPELMEISTER Dey write all de comic operas ! QUINCY Brute ! [PAPPELMEISTER’S chuckle 1s heard gurgling 1n hts cup. Re-enter MENDEL from kitchen. | MENDEL [To vera] I’m so sorry—I can’t get him to come in—he’s terrible shy. QUINCY Won’t face the music, eh ? [He sniggers.| VERA Did you tell him J was here? MENDEL Of course. VERA [Disappointed] Oh! MENDEL But I’ve persuaded him to let me show his MS. 74 VERA [With forced satisfaction] Oh, well, that’s all we want. [MENDEL goes to the desk, opens tt, and gets the MS. and offers 1t to QUINCY DAVENPORT. | QUINCY Not for me—Poppy ! [MENDEL offers 1t to PAPPELMEISTER, who takes 1t solemnly.) MENDEL [4nxiously to PAPPELMEISTER| Of course you must remember his youth and his lack of musical education PAPPELMEISTER Bitte, das Pult / [MENDEL moves DAVID’s music-stand from the corner to the centre of the room. PAPPELMEISTER puts MS. on 1t.] So / [All eyes centre on him eagerly, MENDEL’ standing uneasily, the others sitting. PAPPELMEISTER polishes his glasses with irritating elaborateness and weary “* achs,” then reads in absolute silence. A pause.| QUINCY [Bored by tne silence] But won’t you play it to us? PAPPELMEISTER Blay it? AmJanorchestra? I blay it in my brain. [He goes on reading, his brow gets wrinkled. He 75 ruffies his hatr Conse All watch him anxiously—he turns the page. So / VERA [Anxicusly| You don’t seem to like it! PAPPELMEISTER I do not comprehend it. MENDEL I knew it was crazy—it is supposed to be about America or a Crucible or something. And of course there are heaps of mistakes. VERA That is why I am suggesting to Mr. Davenport to send him to Germany. QUINCY Pll send as many Jews as you like to Germany. Ha! Ha! Ha! PAPPELMEISTER [Absorbed, turning pages] Ach !—ach !—So ! QUINCY I’d even lend my own yacht to take ’em back. Ha! Ha! Ha! VERA Sh! We’re disturbing Herr Pappelmeister. 76 | QUINCY Oh, Poppy’s all right. PAPPELMEISTER [Sublimely unconscious] Ach so—so—SO! Das 1st etwas neues ! [His umbrella begins to beat time, moving more and more vigorously, till at last he 1s conducting elaborately, stretching out his left palm for pranissimo passages, and raising 1t vigorously for forte, with every now and then an exclamation. | Wunderschon ! . . . pianissimo /—now the flutes ! Clarinets! Ach, ergotzlich . . . bassoons and drums! ... Fortissimo! ... Kolossal! Kolossal ! [Conducting in a fury of enthusiasm. | VERA [Clapping her hands] Bravo! Bravo! I’m so excited ! QUINCY [Yawning] Then it isn’t bad, Poppy ? PAPPELMEISTER [Not listening, never ceasing to conduct | Und de harp solo... ach, reizend!... Second violins ! QUINCY 7 But Poppy! We can’t be here all day. PAPPELMEISTER [Wot listening, continuing panto- mime action Sh! Sh! Prano. 17 QUINCY [Outraged] Sh to me / [Rises.1 VERA He doesn’t know it’s you. QUINCY But look here, Poppy [He seizes the wildly-moving umbrella. Blank staré of PAPPELMEISTER gradually returning to consciousness. | PAPPELMEISTER Was giebts ...? QUINCY We’ve had enough. PAPPELMEISTER [Jndignant] Enough? Enough? Ofsucha beaudiful symphony ? QUINCY It may be beautiful to you, but to us it’s damn dull. See here, Poppy, if you’re satisfied that the young fellow has sufficient talent to be sent to study in Germany PAPPELMEISTER In Germany! Germany has nodings to teach him, he has to teach Germany. 78 : VERA Bravo ! [She springs up.} MENDEL I always said he was a genius ! QUINCY Well, at that rate you aa put this stuff of his in one of my programmes. Sinfonia Americana, eh? VERA Oh, that zs good of you ~~ PAPPELMEISTER I should be broud to indroduce it to de vorld. VERA And will it be played in that wonderful marble music- room overlooking the Hudson ? QUINCY Sure. Before five hundred of the smartest folk in America. MENDEL Oh, thank you, thank you. That will mean fame! QUINCY And dollars. Don’t forget the dollars. 79 MENDEL Pll run and tell him. [He hastens into the kitchen, PAPPELMEISTER 15 re-absorbed in the MS., but no longer conducting. | QUINCY You see, I’ll help even a Jew for your sake. VERA Hush ! [Indicating PAPPELMEISTER. ] QUINCY Oh, Poppy’s in the moon. VERA You must help him for his own sake, for art’s sake. QUINCY And why not for heart’s aketoa my sake ? [He comes nearer. | VERA [Crossing to PAPPELMEISTER] Herr Pappelmeister! When do you think you can produce it? PAPPELMEISTER Wunderbar! ... [Becoming half-conscious of VERA] Four lumps. . . [Waking up] Bitte ? 80 VERA How soon can you produce it ? PAPPELMEISTER How soon can he finish it ? VERA Isn’t it finished ? PAPPELMEISTER I see von Finale scratched out and anoder not quite completed. But anyhow, ve couldn’t broduce it before Saturday fortnight. : QUINCY Saturday fortnight! Not time to get my crowd. PAPPELMEISTER Den ve say Saturday dree veeks. Yes ? QUINCY | Yes. Stop a minute! Did you say Saturday? That’s my comic opera night! You thief! PAPPELMEISTER Somedings must be sagrificed. MENDEL [Outside] But you must come, David. [The kitchen door opens, and MENDEL drags in the boyishly shrinking DAVID. PAPPELMEISTER thumps 81 F with his umbrella, vera claps her hands, Quincy | DAVENPORT produces his eyeglass and surveys DAVID curiously. | i VERA Oh, Mr. Quixano, I am so glad! Mr. Davenport is going to produce your symphony in his wonderful music-room. QUINCY Yes, young man, I’m going to give you the smartest audience in America. And if Poppy is right, you’re just going to rake in the dollars. America wants a composer. PAPPELMEISTER [Razses hands emphatically. | Ach Gott, ja! VERA {Zo pavip] Why don’t you speak? You’re not angry with me for interfering ? DAVID TI can never be grateful enough to you VERA Oh, not tome. It is to Mr. Davenport you DAVID And I can never te grateful enough to Herr Pappel- meister. It is an honour even to meet him. [ Bows. ] 82 PAPPELMEISTER [Choking with emotion, goes and pats him on the back.| Mein braver Funge ! VERA [Anxiously | But it is Mr. Davenport DAVID Before I accept Mr. Davenport’s kindness, I must know to whom I am indebted—and if Mr. Davenport is the man who—— QUINCY Who travelled with you to New York? Ha! Ha! . Ha! No, J’m only the junior. DAVID Oh, I know, sir, you don’t make the money you spend. QUINCY Eh? VERA [Anxtously] He means he knows you’re not in business. DAVID Yes, sir; but is it true you are in pleasure ? QUINCY [Puzzled] I beg your pardon? 83 DAVID | Are all the stories the papers print about you true? — QUINCY All the stories. That’s a tall order. Ha! Ha! Ha! DAVID Well, anyhow, is it true that ? VERA Mr. Quixano! What are you driving at ? QUINCY Oh, it’s rather fun to hear what the masses read about me. Fire ahead. Is what true? DAVID That you were married in a balloon? QUINCY Ho! Ha! Ha! That’s true enough.” “Mlarriges in high life, they said, didn’t they? Ha! Ha! Ha! DAVID And is it true you live in America only two months in the year, and then only to entertain Europeans who wander to these wild parts ? QUINCY Lucky for you, young man. You'll have an Italian prince and a British duke to hear your scribblings. 84 DAVID And the palace where they will hear my scribblings— ist true that———? VERA [Who has been on pins and needles| Mr. Quixano, what possible ? DAVID [Entreatingly holds up a hand.| Miss Revendal ! [To QUINCY DAVENPORT] Is this palace the same whose grounds were turned into Venetian canals where the guests ate in gondolas— gondolas that were draped with the most wonderful trailing silks in imitation of the Venetian nobility in the great water fétes ? QUINCY [Turns to vera] Ah, Miss Revendal—what a pity you refused that invitation! It was a fairy scene of twinkling lights and delicious darkness—each couple had their own gondola to sup in, and their own side- canal to slip down. Eh? ee Ha! Ha! DAVID And the same night, women and children died of hunger in New York! QUINCY [Startled, drops eyeglass.] Eh? DAVID [Furiously] And this is the sort of people you would invite to hear my symphony—these gondola-guzzlers ! 85 VERA Mr. Quixano! MENDEL David ! DAVID These magnificent animals who went into the gondolas two by two, to feed and flirt ! QUINCY [Dazed] Sir ! DAVID I should be a new freak for you for a new freak evening —I and my dreams and my music! UL EN GAY) You low-down, ungrateful DAVID Not for you and such as you have I sat here writing and dreaming ; not for you who are killing my America! QUINCY Your America, forsooth, you Jew-immigrant ! VERA Mr. Davenport ! DAVID Yes—Jew-immigrant! But a Jew who knows that 86 your Pilgrim Fathers came straight out of his Old Testament, and that our Jew-immigrants are a greater factor in the glory of this great commonwealth than some of you sons of the soil. It is you, freak-fashion- ables, who are undoing the work of Washington and Lincoln, vulgarising your high heritage, and turning the last and noblest hope of humanity into a cari- cature. | QUINCY [Rocking with laughter] faeetia! Ha! Ho! Ho! Ho! [To vERA. | | You never told me your Jew-scribbler was a socialist ! DAVID I am nothing but a simple artist, but I come from Europe, one of her victims, and I know that she is a failure ; that her palaces and peerages are outworn toys of the human spirit, and that the only hope of man- kind lies in a new world. And here—in the land of to-morrow—you are trying to bring back Europe—— QUINCY [Jnterjecting] I wish we could! DAVID Europe with her comic-opera coronets and her worm- eaten stage decorations, and her pomp and chivalry built on a morass of crime and misery-—— QUINCY [With sneering laugh] Morass ! 87 DAVID [With prophetic passion] But you shall not kill my dream! There shall come a fire round the Crucible that will melt you and your breed like wax in a blowpipe QUINCY [Furiously, with clenched fist] You DAVID America shall make good... .! PAPPELMEISTER [Who has sat down and remained imperturbably seated throughout all this scene, springs up and waves his umbrella hysterically | Hoch Quixano! Hoch! Hoch! Eslebe Quixano! Hoch! QUINCY Poppy! You’re dismissed ! PAPPELMEISTER [Goes to pavip with outstretched hand| Danke. [They grip hands. PAPPELMEISTER turns to QUINCY DAVENPORT. | Comic Opera! Ouf! QUINCY [Goes to street-door, at white heat.) Are you coming, Miss Revendal ? [He opens the door.| VERA [To quincy, but not moving] Pray, pray, accept my apologies—believe me, if I had known } 88 QUINCY [Furtously] Then stop with your Jew! [Exzt.] MENDEL [Frantically] | But, Mr. Davenport—don’t go! He is only a boy. [Exit after QUINCY DAVENPORT. | You must consider DAVID Oh, Herr Pappelmeister, you have lost your place! PAPPELMEISTER __.. And saved my soul. Dollars are de devil. Now I must to an appointment. Auf baldiges Wiedersehen. [He shakes pavip’s hand. | Fraulein Revendal ! [He takes her hand and kisses it. Exit. Davin and VERA stand gazing at each other.| VERA What have you done? What have you done? DAVID What else could I do? VERA I hate the smart set as much as you—but as your ladder and your trumpet DAVID I would not stand indebted to them. I know you i] meant it for my good, but what would these Europe- apers have understood of my America—the America of my music? ‘They look back on Europe as a pleasure ground, a palace of art—but I know [Getting hysterical | it is sodden with blood, red with bestial massacres——— VERA [Alarmed, anxious] Let us talk no more about it. [She holds out her hand. | Good-bye. DAVID [Frozen, taking it, holding i] Ah, you are offended by my ingratitude—I shall never see you again. VERA No, I am not offended. But I have failed to help you. We have nothing else to meet for. [She disengages her hand.| DAVID Why will you punish me so? I have only hurt myself. VERA It is not a punishment. DAVID What else ? When you are with me, all the air seems to tremble with fairy music played by some unseen fairy orchestra. go VERA [Tremulous] And yet you wouldn’t come in just now when I—— DAVID I was too frightened of the others... VERA [Smiling] Frightened indeed ! DAVID Yes, I know I became overbold—but to take all that magic sweetness out of my life for ever—you don’t call that a punishment ? | VERA [Blushing] How could I wish to punish you? I was proud of you ! [Drops her eyes, murmurs] Besides it would be punishing myself. DAVID [In passionate amaze] Miss Revendal! . . . But no, it cannot be. It is too impossible. VERA [Frightened] Yes, too impossible. Good-bye. [She turns. | DAVID But not for always ? [vera hangs her head. He comes nearer. Pas- stonately | gI Promise me that you—that I [He takes her hand again. | VERA [Melting at his touch, breathes] Yes, yes, David. DAVID Miss Revendal ! [She falls into his arms. | VERA My dear! my dear! DAVID | It is a dream. You cannot care for me—you so far above me. VERA Above you, you simple boy? Your genius lifts you to the stars. DAVID No, no; it is you who lift me there VERA [Smoothing his hair] Oh, David. And to think that I was brought up to despise your race. DAVID [Sadly] Yes, all Russians are. g2 VERA But we of the nobility in particular. DAVID [Amazed, half-releasing her| You are noble? VERA My father is Baron Revendal, but I have long since carved out a life of my own. DAVID Then he will not separate us ? VERA No. [Re-embracing him.| Nothing can separate us. [4 knock at the street-door. They separate. The automobile is heard clattering off.| DAVID It is my uncle coming back. VERA [In low, tense tones] Then I shall slip out. I could not bear a third. 1 will write. [She goes to the door. | DAVID eaves)... .. Vera. [He follows her to the door. He opens it and she slips out. | 93 MENDEL [Half-seen at the door, expostulating| You, too, Miss Revendal ? [ Re-enters. | Oh, David, you have driven away all your friends. DAVID [Going to window and looking after VERA] Not all, uncle. Not all. [He throws his arms boyishly round his uncle. | I am so happy. MENDEL Happy ? DAVID She loves me—Vera loves me. MENDEL Vera? DAVID Miss Revendal. MENDEL Have you lost your wits ? [He throws pavip off.] DAVID I don’t wonder you’re amazed. Maybe you think I wasn’t. It is as if an angel should stoop down MENDEL [Hoarsely| This is true? ‘This is not some stupid Purim joke ? 94 . DAVID True and sacred as the sunrise. MENDEL But you are a Jew! DAVID Yes, and just think! She was bred up to despise Jews—her father was a Russian baron MENDEL If she was the daughter of fifty barons, you cannot marry her. DAVID [In pained amaze] Uncle ! [ Slozoly } Then your hankering after the synagogue was serious after all. MENDEL : It is not so much the synagogue—it is the call of our blood through immemorial generations. DAVID You say that! You who have come to the heart of the Crucible, where the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all the others. MENDEL [Passionately] Not our race, not your race and mine. 95 DAVID What immunity has our race ? [Meditatively | The pride and the prejudice, the dreams and the sacrifices, the traditions and the superstitions, the fasts and the feasts, things noble and things sordid— they must all into the Crucible. MENDEL [With prophetic fury] The Jew has been tried 7n a thousand fires and only tempered and annealed. DAVID Fires of hate, not fires of love. That is what melts, MENDEL [Sneeringly] So I see. DAVID Your sneer is false. The love that melted me was not Vera’s—it was the love America showed me—the day she gathered me to her breast. MENDEL [Speaking passionately and rapidly] Many countries have gathered us. Holland took us when we were driven from Spain—but we did not become Dutchmen. Turkey took us when Germany oppressed us, but we have not become Turks. DAVID These countries were not in the making. They were old civilisations stamped with the seal of creed. In such countries the Jew may be right to stand out. But here in this new secular Republic we must look forward MENDEL [Passionately interrupting | We must look backwards, too. DAVID [A ysterically | To what? To Kishineff ? [As if seeing his vision| To that butcher’s face directing the slaughter? ‘To those ? MENDEL [Alarmed] Hush! Calm yourself ! DAVID [Struggling with himself] Yes, I will calm myself—but how else shall I calm myself save by forgetting all that nightmare of religions and races, save by holding out my hands with prayer and music toward the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God! ‘The Past I cannot mend—its evil outlines are stamped in immortal rigidity. ‘Take away the hope that I can mend the Future, and you make me mad. MENDEL You are mad already—your dreams are mad—the Jew is hated here as everywhere—you are false to your race. 97 G DAVID I keep faith with America. I have faith America will keep faith with us. [He raises his hands 1n religious rapture toward the flag over the door.| Flag of our great Republic, guardian of our homes, whose stars and MENDEL Spare me that rigmarole. Go out and marry your Gentile and be happy. DAVID You turn me out? MENDEL Would you stay and break my mother’s heart? You know she would mourn for you with the rending of garments and the seven days’ sitting on the floor. Go! You have cast off the God of our fathers! DAVID [Thundrously| And the God of our children—does He demand no service ? [Quieter, coming toward his uncle and touching him affectionately on the shoulder. | You are right—I do need a wider world. [Expands hts lungs.] I must go away. MENDEL Go, then—I’ll hide the truth—she must never suspect —lest she mourn you as dead. 98 FRAU QUIXANO [Outside, 1n the kitchen] faeeria! Ha! Ha! Ha! [Both men turn toward the kitchen and l1sten.] KATHLEEN fereria! Ha! Ha! Ha! FRAU QUIXANO AND KATHLEEN feoeeeria! Ha! Ha! Ha! 7 MENDEL [Bitterly] A merry Purim / [The kitchen door opens and remains ajar. ¥FRAU QUIXANO rushes in, carrying DAvID’s violin and bow. KATHLEEN looks in, grinning. | FRAU QUIXANO [Ailariously] Nu spiel noch! sprel ! [She holds the violin and bow appealingly toward DAVID. | MENDEL [Putting out a protesting hand] No, no, David—I couldn’t bear it. DAVID But I mut! You said she mustn’t suspect. [He looks lovingly at her as he loudly utters these words, which are unintelligible to her.| And it may be the last time I shall ever play for her. [Changing to a mock merry smile as he takes the violin and bow from her| Gewiss, Granny / [He starts the same old Slavic dance.| 99 FRAU QUIXANO [Childishly pleased] Pe hie titer! [She claps on a false grotesque nose from her pocket.] DAVID [Torn between laughter and tears] Plat rat madi tan tian MENDEL [Shocked] | Mutter ! FRAU QUIXANO Un’ du auch ! | [She claps another false nose on MENDEL, laughing in childish glee at the effect. Then she starts dancing to the music, and KATHLEEN slips in and joyously dances beside her.| DAVID [Foining tearfully in the laughter] Raia iba oP an tans [Lhe curtain falls quickly. It rises again upon the picture of FRAU QUIXANO fallen back into a chair, exhausted with laughter, fanning herself with her apron, while KATHLEEN has dropped breathless across the arm of the armchair ; Davin 15 still playing on, and MENDEL, hts false nose torn off, stands by, glower- ing. The curtain falls again and rises upon a final tableau of DAviD in his cloak and hat, stealing out of the door with his violin, casting a sad farewell glance at the old woman and at the home which has sheltered him.| Act Ill April, about a month later. The scene changes to Miss tol REVENDAL’S sitting-room at the Settlement House ona sunny day. Simple, pretty furniture: a sofa, chairs, small table, etc. An open piano with music. Flowers and books about. Fine art reproductions on walls. The fireplace 1s on the left. A door on the left leads to the hall, and a door on the right to the interior. A servant enters from the left, ushering 1M BARON und BARONESS REVENDAL and QUINCY DAVENPORT. The BARON 15 a tall, stern, grizzled man of military bearing, with a narrow, fanatical forehead and martinet manners, but otherwise of honest and distinguished appearance, with a short, well-trimmed white beard and well-cut European clothes. Although hts dignity 1s diminished by the constant nervous suspiciousness of the Russian offictal, it 15 never lost ; his nervousness, despite 1ts comic side, being visibly the tragic shadow of hts postition. His English has only a touch of the foreign in accent and vocabulary and 1s much superior to his wife's, which comes to her through her French. The BARONESS 15 pretty and dressed 1n red in the height of Parts fashion, but blazes with bar- baric jewels at neck and throat and wrist. She gestures freely with her hand, which, when un- gloved, glitters with heavy rings. She 1s much younger than the BARON and self-consciously fas- cinating. Her parasol, which matches her costume, suggests the sunshine without. QUINCY DAVENPORT is in a smart spring suit with a motor dust-coat and cap, whitch last he lays down on the mantel- piece. SERVANT Miss Revendal is on the roof-garden. I'll go and tell her. [Exit, toward the hall.| BARON A marvellous people, you Americans. Gardens in the sky ! QUINCY Gardens, forsooth! We plant a tub and call it Paradise. No, Baron. New York is the great stone desert. BARONESS But ze big beautiful Park vere ve drove tru? QUINCY No taste, Baroness, modern sculpture and menageries ! Think of the Medici gardens at Rome. BARONESS Ah, Rome! [With an ecstatic sigh, she drops into an armchair. Then she takes out a dainty cigarette-case, pulls off her right-hand glove, exhibiting her rings, and chooses a cigarette. The BARON, seeing this, pro- duces his match-box. | 102 QUINCY And now, dear Baron Revendal, having brought you safely to the den of the lioness—if I may venture to call your daughter so—I must leave you to do the taming, eh? BARON You are always of the most amiable. [He strikes a match. | BARONESS Tout a fait charmant. [Lhe Baron lights her cigarette. ] QUINCY [Bows gallantly] Don’t mention it. I’ll just have my auto take me to the Club, and then I’ll send it back for you. BARONESS Ah, zank you—zat street-car looks horreeble. [She puffs out smoke. | BARON Quite impossible. What is to prevent an anarchist sitting next to you and shooting out your brains ? QUINCY We haven’t much of that here—I don’t mean brains. maw tial Ha! BARON But I saw desperadoes spying as we came off your yacht. 103 QUINCY Oh, that was newspaper chaps. BARON [Shakes his head] No—they are circulating my appearance to all the gang in the States. ‘They took snapshots. QUINCY Then you’re quite safe from recognition. [He sniggers.] Didn’t they ask you questions ? BARON Yes, but Iam a diplomat. I do not reply. QUINCY That’s not very diplomatic here. Ha! Ha! BARON Diable ! [He claps his hand to his hip pocket, half-producing a pistol. The BARONESS looks equally anxious. | QUINCY What’s up? BARON [Poznts to window, whispers hoarsely] Regard! A hooligan peeped in! QUINCY [Goes to window] Only some poor devil come to the Settlement. 104 i BARON [Hoarsely] But under his arm-—a bomb! QUINCY [Shaking his head smilingly] A soup bowl. BARONESS ria tia! Ha! QUINCY What makes you so nervous, Baron ? [The paron slips back his pistol, a little ashamed.| BARONESS Ze Intellectuals and ze Bund, zey all hate my husband because he is faizful to Christ [Crossing tage and ze ‘T'sar. QUINCY But the Intellectuals are in Russia. BARON They have their branches here—the refugees are the leaders—it is a diabolical network. QUINCY Well, anyhow, we’re not in Russia, eh? No, no, Baron, youre quite safe. Still, you can keep my automobile as long as you like—I’ve plenty. 105 BARON A thousand thanks. [Wiping bis forehead. | But surely no gentleman would sit in the public car, squeezed between working-men and shop-girls, not to say Jews and Blacks. QUINCY It 7s done here. But we shall change all that. Already we have a few taxi-cabs. Give us time, my dear Baron, give us time. You mustn’t judge us by your European standard. BARON By the European standard, Mr. Davenport, you put our hospitality to the shame. From the moment you sent your yacht for us to Odessa—— QUINCY Pray, don’t ever speak of that again—you know how anxious I was to get you to New York. BARON Provided we have arrived in time! QUINCY That’s all right, I keep telling you. They aren’t married yet BARON [Grinding his teeth and shaking hits fist] Those Jew-vermin—all my life I have suffered from them ! 106 QUINCY We all suffer from them. BARONESS Zey are ze pests of ze civilisation. BARON But this supreme insult Vera shall not put on the blood of the Revendals—not if I have to shoot her down with my own hand—and myself after ! QUINCY No, no, Baron, that’s not done here. Besides, if you shoot her down, where do J come in, eh? BARON [Puzzled] Where you come in? QUINCY | Oh, Baron! Surely you have guessed that it is not merely Jew-hate, but—er—Christian love. Eh? [Laughing uneasily. | BARON You! BARONESS [Clapping her hands] Oh, charmant, charmant! But it ees a romance! BARON But you are married! 107 BARONESS [Dovoncast] Ab, oui. Quel dommage, vat a pecty ! QUINCY You forget, Baron, we arein America. The law giveth and the law taketh away. [He sutggers.| BARONESS It ees a vonderful country! But your vife—hein ?— vould she consent ? QUINCY She’s mad to get back on the stage—I’ll run a Heres for her. It’s your daughter’s consent that’s the real trouble—she won’t see me because I lost my temper and told her to stop with her Jew. So I look to you to straighten things out. BARONESS Mats parfaitement. BARON [Frowning at her] You go too quick, Katusha. What influence have I on Vera? And you she has never even seen! To kick out ANG Jew-beast is one thing. ... QUINCY Well, anyhow, don’t shoot Her abet the beast rather. [Sniggeringly.] 8 10 BARON Shooting is too good for the enemies of Christ. [Crossing himself. ] At Kishineff we stick the swine. QUINCY |Jnterested| Ah! I read about that. Did you see the massacre ? BARON Which one? Give me a cigarette, Katusha. [She obeys. ] We’ve had several Jew-massacres in Kishineff. QUINCY Have you? The papers only boomed one—four or five years ago—about Easter time, | think BARON Ah, yes—when the Jews insulted the procession of the Host ! | [Taking a light from the cigarette in his wife's mouth. | QUINCY Did they? I thought—— BARON [Sarcastically | I daresay. That’s the lies they spread in the West. They have the Press in their hands, damn ’em. But you see I was on the spot. [He drops into a chatr.| I had charge of the whole district. 109 QUINCY [Startled] You! BARON Yes, and I hurried a regiment up to teach the blas- pheming brutes manners— [He puffs out a letsurely cloud. | QUINCY [Whistling] Whew! . . . I—I say, old chap, I mean Baron, you’d better not say that here. BARON Why not? I am proud of it. BARONESS My husband vas decorated for it—he has ze order of St. Vladimir. BARON [Proudly] Second class! Shall we allow these bigots to mock at all we hold sacred? ‘The Jews are the deadliest enemies of our holy autocracy and of the only orthodox Church. ‘Their Bund is behind all the Revolution. BARONESS A plague-spot muz be cut out ! QUINCY | Well, I’d keep it dark if I were you. Kishineff is a back number, and we don’t take much stock in the new massacres. Still, we’re a bit squeamish—— 110 BARON Squeamish! Don’t you lynch and roast your niggers ? QUINCY Not officially. Whereas your Black Hundreds BARON Black Hundreds! My dear Mr. Davenport, they are the white hosts of Christ [Crossing himself | and of the Tsar, who is God’s vicegerent on earth. Have you not read the works of our sainted Pobie- donostzeff, Procurator of the Most Holy Synod ? QUINCY Well, of course, I always felt there was another side to it, but still BARONESS : Perhaps he has right, Alexis. Our Ambassador vonce told me ze Americans are more sentimental zan civilised. BARON Ah, let them wait till they have ten million vermin overrunning their country—we shall see how long they will be sentimental. Think of it! A burrowing swarm creeping and crawling everywhere, ugh! ‘They ruin our peasantry with their loans and their drink shops, ruin our army with their revolutionary propa- ganda, ruin our professional classes by snatching all the prizes and professorships, ruin our commercial It classes by monopolising our sugar industries, our oil- fields, our timber-trade. . . . Why, if we gave them equal rights, our Holy Russia would be entirely run by them. BARONESS Mon dieu / C’est vrai. Ve real Russians vould become slaves. QUINCY Then what are you going to do with them ? BARON : One-third will be baptized, one-third massacred, the other third emigrated here. [He strikes a match to relight his cigarette. | QUINCY [Shudderingly] Thank you, my dear Baron,—you’ve already sent me one Jew too many. We’re going to stop all alien immigration. BARON To stop all alien—? But that is barbarous! QUINCY Well, don’t let us waste our time on the Jew-problem . . . our own little Jew-problem is enough, eh? Get rid of this little fiddler. ‘Then J may have a look in, Adieu, Baron. I1i2 BARON Adieu. [Holding his hand] But you are not really serious about Vera? [The BARONESS makes a gesture of annoyance. | QUINCY Not serious, Baron? Why, to marry her is the only thing I have ever wanted that I couldn’t get. It is torture! Baroness, I rely on your sympathy. [He kisses her hand with a pretentious foreign air.| BARONESS [Jn sentimental approval] Ah! Pamour! Pamour ! [Exit QUINCY DAVENPORT, taking his cap in passing. | You might have given him a little encouragement, Alexis. BARON : Silence, Katusha. I only tolerated the man in Europe because he was a link with Vera. BARONESS You accepted his yacht and his—— BARON If I had known his loose views on divorce BARONESS I am sick of your scruples. You are ze only poor official in Bessarabia. 113 H BARON Be silent! Have I not forbidden——? BARONESS [Petulantly] Forbidden! Forbidden! All your life you have served ze Tsar, and you cannot afford a single automobile. A millionaire son-in-law is just vat you owe me. BARON What I owe you? BARONESS i Yes, ven I married you, I vas tinking you had a good position. I did not know you were too honest to use it. You vere not open viz me, Alexis. BARON You knew I was a Revendal. The Revendals keep their hands clean... . [With a sudden start he tiptoes norselessly to the door leading to the hall and throws it open. Nobody 1s visible. He closes it shamefacedly. | BARONESS [Has shared his nervousness till the door was opened, but now bursts into mocking laughter | If you thought less about your precious safety, and more about me and Vera BARON | Hush! You do not know Vera. You saw I was even afraid to give my name. She might have sent me away as she sent away the Tsar’s plate of mutton. 114 BARONESS The Tsar’s plate of BARON Did I never tell you? When she was only a school- girl—at the Imperial High School—the Tsar on his annual visit tasted the food, and Vera, as the show pupil, was given the honour of finishing his Majesty’s plate. BARONESS [Jn incredulous horror] And she sent it avay ? BARON Gave it to a servant. [Awed silence. | And then you think I can impose a husband on her. No, Katusha, I have to win her love for myself, not for millionaires. | BARONESS [Angry again] Alvays so affrightfully selfish ! BARON I have no control over her, tell you! [ Bitterly] I never could control my womenkind. BARONESS Because you zink zey are your soldiers. Silence! Halt! Forbidden! Right Veel! March! 115 BARON [Sullenly] I wish I did think they were my soldiers—I might try the lash. BARONESS [Springing up angrily, shakes parasol at bim| You British barbarian ! VERA [Outside the door leading to the interior] Yes, thank you, Miss Andrews. I know I have visitors. BARON [Ecstatically | Vera’s voice ! [The BARONESS lowers her parasol. He looks yearn- ingly toward the door. It opens. Enter vERA with inquiring gaze. | VERA [With a great shock of surprise] Father !! BARON Verotschka! My dearest darling! ... [He makes a movement toward her, but 1s checked by her irresponsiveness. | Why, you’ve grown more beautiful than ever. VERA You in New York! BARON The Baroness wished to see America. Katusha, this is my daughter. 116 BARONESS [Jn sugared sweetness] And mine, too, if she vill let me love her. VERA [Bowing coldly, but still addressing her father] But how? When? BARON We have just come and BARONESS [Dashing in| Zat charming young man lent us his yacht—he is adorahble. VERA What charming young man? BARONESS Ah, she has many, ze little coquette—ha! ha! ha! [She touches vera playfully with her parasol. | BARON We wished to give you a pleasant surprise. VERA It is certainly a surprise. BARON [Cazlled] You are not very . . . daughterly. VERA Do you remember when you last saw me? You did not claim me as a daughter then. 117 BARON [Covers his eyes with his hand] Do not recall it ; it hurts too much. VERA I was in the dock. BARON It was horrible. I hated you for the devil of rebellion that had entered into your soul. But I thanked God when you escaped. VERA [Softened] I think I was more sorry for you than for myself. I hope, at least, no suspicion fell on you. BARONESS [£agerly| But it did—an avalanche of suspicion. He is still buried under it. Vy else did they make Skovaloff Ambassador instead of him? Even now he risks everyting to see you again. Ah, mon enfant, 'you owe your fazer a grand reparation ! ; VERA What reparation can I possibly make ? BARON [Passionately | You can love me again, Vera. BARONESS [Stamping foot] Alexis, you are interrupting 118 VERA I fear, father, we have grown too estranged—our ideas are sO opposite BARON But not now, Vera, surely not now? You are no longer [He lowers his voice and looks around | a Revolutionist ? VERA Not with bombs, perhaps. I thank Heaven I was caught before I had done any practical work. But if you think I accept the order of things, you are mistaken. In Russia I fought against the autocracy BARON Hush! Hush ! [He looks round nervously. | VERA Here I fight against the poverty. No, father, a woman who has once heard the call will always be a wild creature. BARON But [Lowering his voice| those revolutionary Russian clubs here—you are not a member ? 11g VERA I do not believe in Revolutions carried on at a safe distance. I have found my life-work in America. BARON I am enchanted, Vera, enchanted. BARONESS [Gushingly] Permit me to kiss you, belle enfant. VERA I do not know you enough yet ; I will kiss my father. BARON [With a great cry of joy] Vera ! [He embraces her passionately. | At last! At last! I have found my little Vera again ! VERA No, father, your Vera belongs to Russia with her mother and the happy days of childhood. But for their sakes [She breaks down in emotion. | BARON Ah, your poor mother ! BARONESS [Tartly] Alexis, | perceive I am too many ! [She begins to go toward the door.| 120 BARON No, no, Katusha. Vera will learn to 1ove you, too. VERA [To BaRonEss | What does my loving you matter? I can never return to Russia. BARONESS [Pausing] But ve can come here—often—ven you are married. VERA [Surprised] When I am married? [Softly, blushing] You know? BARONESS [Smiling] Ve know zat charming young man adores ze floor your foot treads on! VERA [Blushing] You have seen David ? BARON [Hoarsely| David ! [He clenches his fist.| BARONESS [Half aside, as much gestured as spoken] Sh! Leave it to me. [Scweetly. | Oh, no, ve have not seen David. I2I VERA [Looking from one to the other] Not seen—? Then what—whom are you talking about? BARONESS About zat handsome, quite adorahble Mr. Davenport. VERA Davenport ! BARONESS Who combines ze manners of Europe viz ze millions of America ! VERA [Breaks into girlish laughter | Ha! Ha! Ha! So Mr. Davenport has been talking to you! But you all seem to forget one small point— bigamy is not permitted even to millionaires. BARONESS Ah, not boz at vonce, but-——— VERA And do you think I would take another woman’s leavings ? No, not even if she were dead. BARONESS You are insulting ! VERA I beg your pardon—I wasn’t even thinking of you. Father, to put an end at once to this absurd conversa- tion, let me inform you I am already engaged. 122 BARON [Trembling, hoarse| By name, David. VERA Yes—David Quixano. BARON A Jew! VERA How did you know? Yes, he is a Jew, a noble Jew. BARON A Jew noble ! [He laughs bitterly. | VERA Yes—even as you esteem nobility—by pedigree. In Spain his ancestors were hidalgos, favourites at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella; but in the great expulsion of 1492 they preferred exile in Poland to baptism. BARON And you, a Revendal, would mate with an unbaptized dog? VERA Dog! You call my husband a dog! BARON Husband! God in heaven—are you married already ? 123 VERA No! But not being unemployed millionaires like Mr. Davenport, we hold even our troth eternal. [ Calmer | Our poverty, not your prejudice, stands in the way of our marriage. But David is a musician of genius, and some day BARONESS A fiddler in a beer-hall! She prefers a fiddler to a millionaire of ze first families of America ! VERA [Contemptuously | First families! I told you David’s family came to Poland in 1492—-some months before America was discovered. BARON Christ save us! You have become a Jewess ! VERA No more than David has become a Christian. We were already at one—all honest people are. Surely, father, all religions must serve the same God—since there is only one God to serve. BARONESS But ze girl is an ateist ! BARON Silence, Katusha! Leave me to deal with my daughter. [Changing tone to pathos, taking her face between bis hands | 124 Oh, Vera, Verotschka, my dearest darling, I had sooner : you had remained buried in Siberia than that—— (He breaks down. | VERA [Touched, sitting beside him| For you, father, I was as though buried in Siberia. Why did you come here to stab yourself afresh ? BARON I wish to God I had come here earlier. I wish I had not been so nervous of Russian spies. Ah, Verotschka, if you only knew how I have pored over the newspaper pictures of you, and the reports of your life in this Settlement ! VERA You asked me not to send letters. BARON I know, I know—and yet sometimes I felt as if I could risk Siberia myself to read your dear, dainty handwriting again. VERA [Stzll more softened | Father, if you love me so much, surely you will love David a little too—for my sake. BARON [Dazed] I—love—a Jew? Impossible. [He shudders. | 125 VERA [Moving away, tcily] Then so is any love from me to you. You have chosen to come back into my life, and after our years of pain and separation I would gladly remember only my old childish affection. But not if you hate David. You must make your choice. BARON [Pitzfully| Choice? I have no choice. Can I carry mountains ? No more can I love a Jew. [He rises resolutely. ] BARONESS [Who has turned away, fretting and fuming, turns back to her husband, clapping her hands| Bravo ! VERA [Going to him again, coaxingly | I don’t ask you to carry mountains, but to drop the mountains you carry—the mountains of prejudice. Wait till you see him. BARON I will not see him. VERA Then you will hear him—he is going to make music for all the world. You can’t escape him, papasha, you with your love of music, any more than you escaped Rubinstein. BARONESS Rubinstein vas not a Jew. 126 VERA Rubinstein was a Jewish boy-genius, just like my David. BARONESS But his parents vere baptized soon after his birth. I had it from his patroness, ze Grande Duchesse Helena Pavlovna. VERA And did the water outside change the blood within ? Rubinstein was our Court pianist and was decorated by the Tsar. And you, the Tsar’s servant, dare to say you could not meet a Rubinstein. BARON [Wavering] I did not say I could not meet a Rubinstein. VERA You practically said so. David will be even greater than Rubinstein. Come, father, [ll telephone for him ; he is only round the corner. BARONESS [£xcitedly | Ve vill not see him! VERA [Ignoring ber] He shall bring his violin and play to you. There! You see, little father, you are already less frowning— now take that last wrinkle out of your forehead. [She caresses his forehead. | Never mind! David will smooth it out with his music _as his Biblical ancestor smoothed that surly old Saul. 127 BARONESS Ve vill not hear him ! BARON Silence, Katusha! Oh, my little Vera, I little thought when I let you study music at Petersburg VERA [Smiling wheedlingly | That I should marry a musician. But you see, little — father, it all ends in music after all. Now I will go and perform on the telephone, I’m not angel enough to bear one in here. [She goes toward the door of the hall, smiling happily. | BARON [With a last agonized cry of resistance] Halt ! VERA [Turning, makes mock military salute| Yes, papasha. BARON [Overcome by her roguish smile| You—I—he—do you love this J— this David so mucn ! VERA [Suddenly tragic| It would kill me to give him up. [ Resuming smile] But don’t let us talk of funerals on this happy day of sunshine and reunion. [She kisses her hand to him and exit toward the hall.| BARONESS [Azgrily] You are in her hands as vax! 128 BARON She is the only child I have ever had, Katusha. Her baby arms curled round my neck; in her baby sorrows her wet face nestled against little father’s. [He drops on a chair, and leans his head on the table. | BARONESS [Approaching tauntingly| So you vill have a Jew son-in-law ! BARON You don’t know what it meant to me to feel her arms round me again. BARONESS And a hook-nosed brat to call you grandpapa, and nestle his greasy face against yours. BARON [Banging hts fist on the table| Don’t drive me mad! [His head drops again. | BARONESS Then drive me home—I vill not meet him... Alexis ! [She taps him on the shoulder with her parasol. He does not move. | Alexis Ivanovitch! Do you not listen! ... [She stamps her foot. | Zen I go to ze hotel alone. [She walks angrily toward the hall. ‘Fust before she reaches the door, 1t opens, and the servant ushers 129 I in HERR PAPPELMEISTER with his umbrella. The BARONESS’S tone changes instantly to a sugared society accent. | How do you do, Herr Pappelmeister ? [She extends her hand, which he takes limply.| You don’t remember me? Non? [Exit servant. | Ve vere with Mr. Quincy Davenport at Wiesbaden— ze Baroness Revendal. PAPPELMEISTER So / [He drops her hand.| BARONESS Yes, it vas ze Baron’s entousiasm for you zat got you your present position. PAPPELMEISTER [Arching his eyebrows] So! BARONESS Yes—zere he is ! [She turns toward the BARON.|] Alexis, rouse yourself ! [She taps him with her parasol.] Zis American air makes ze Baron so sleepy. BARON [Rises dazedly and bows] Charmed to meet you, Herr 130 BARONESS Pappelmeister! You remember ze great Pappel- meister. BARON [Waking up, becomes keen| Ah, yes, yes, charmed—why do you never bring your orchestra to Russia, Herr Pappelmeister ? PAPPELMEISTER [Surprised] Russia? It never occurred to me to go to Russia— she seems so uncivilised. BARONESS [Angry] Uncivilised! Vy, ve have ze finest restaurants in ze vorld! And ze best telephones ! PAPPELMEISTER So ? BARONESS Yes, and the most beautiful ballets—Russia is affright- fully misunderstood. [She sweeps away in burning indignation. PAPPEL- MEISTER murmurs in deprecation. Re-enter VERA from the hall. She 1s gay and happy.| VERA He is coming round at once [She utters a cry of pleased surprise. | Herr Pappelmeister! ‘This is indeed a pleasure ! [She gives PAPPELMEISTER her hand, which he kisses. | 131 BARONESS [Sotto voce to the Baron] Let us go before he comes. [The Baron ignores her, his eyes hungrily on vera. | PAPPELMEISTER [Zo vera] But I come again—you have visitors. VERA [Smiling] Only my father and PAPPELMEISTER [Surprised] Your fader? Ach so/ [He taps his forehead. | Revendal ! BARONESS [Sotto voce to the BARON] I vill not meet a Jew, I tell you. PAPPELMEISTER But you vill vant to talk to your fader, and all J vant is Mr. Quixano’s address. De Irish maiden at de house says de bird is flown. VERA [Gravely] I don’t know if I ought to tell you where the new nest 1s PAPPELMEISTER [Disappointed] Ach! VERA [Smiling] But | will produce the bird. 132 PAPPELMEISTER [Looks round] You vill broduce Mr. Quixano ? VERA [Merrily] By clapping my hands. [Mystertously | I am a magician. BARON [Whose eyes have been glued on vERA] You are, indeed! I don’t know how you have bewitched me. [The Baroness glares at him. | VERA Dear little father ! [She crosses to him and strokes his hair.| Herr Pappelmeister, tell father about Mr. Quixano’s music. PAPPELMEISTER [Shaking his head] Music cannot be talked about. VERA [Smiling] That’s a nasty one for the critics. But tell father what a genius Da— Mr. Quixano 1s. BARONESS [Desperately intervening] Good-bye, Vera. [She thrusts out her hand, which vera takes. | Diehave’ a headache. You muz excuse me. Herr Pappelmeister, au plaisir de vous revoir. [PAPPELMEISTER hastens to the door, which he bolds open. The BARONESS turns and glares at the BARON. | 133 BARON [Agitated] Let me see you to the auto—— BARONESS You could see me to ze hotel almost as quick. BARON [To vera] I won’t say good-bye, Verotschka—I shall be back. [He goes toward the hall, then turns. | You will keep your Rubinstein waiting ? [verA smiles lovingly. | BARONESS You are keeping me vaiting. [He turns quickly. Exeunt BARON and BARONESS. | PAPPELMEISTER And now broduce Mr. Quixano ! VERA Not so fast. What are you going to do with him ? PAPPELMEISTER Put him in my orchestra ! VERA [Ecstatic] Oh, you dear ! [Lhen her tone changes to disappointment. | But he won’t go into Mr. Davenport’s orchestra. PAPPELMEISTER It is no more Mr. Davenport’s orchestra. He fired 134 me, don’t you remember? Now I boss—how say you in American ? VERA [Smiling| Your own show. PAPPELMEISTER Fa, my own band. Ven I left dat comic opera millionaire, dey all shtick to me almost to von man. VERA How nice of them ! PAPPELMEISTER All egsept de Christian—he vas de von man. He shtick to de millionaire. So I lose my brincipal first violin. VERA And Mr. Quixano is to—oh, how delightful ! [She claps her hands girlishly.| PAPPELMEISTER [Looks round mischievously | Ach, de magic failed. VERA [Puzzled] Eh ! PAPPELMEISTER You do not broduce him. You clap de hands—but you do not broduce him. Ha! Ha! Ha! [He breaks into a great roar of genial laughter.) 135 VERA [Chiming in merrily | Ha! Ha! Ha! But I said I have to know everything first. Will he get a good salary ? PAPPELMEISTER Enough to keep a vife and eight children ! VERA [Blushing] But he hasn’t a PAPPELMEISTER No, but de Christian had—he get de same—I mean salary, ha! ha! ha! not children. Den he can be independent—vedder de fool-public like his American - symphony or not—nicht wabr ? VERA You are good to us [Hastily correcting herself | to Mr. Quixano. PAPPELMEISTER [Smiling] And aldough you cannot broduce him, I broduce his symphony. Was? VERA Oh, Herr Pappelmeister! You are an angel. PAPPELMEISTER Nein, nein, mein liebes Kind! I fear I haf not de correct shape for an angel. [He laughs heartily. A knock at the door from the hall.| 136 VERA [Merrily] Now I clap my hands. [She claps. | Come! |The door opens. | Behold him ! [She makes a conjurer’s gesture. DAviD, bare- headed, carrying his fiddle, opens the door, and stands staring 1n amazement at PAPPELMEISTER. | DAVID I thought you asked me to meet your father. PAPPELMEISTER | She is a magician. She has changed us. [He waves his umbrella. | Hey presto, was? Ha! Ha! Ha! (He goes to DAVID, and shakes hands.| Und wie geht’s? I hear you’ve left home. DAVID Yes, but I’ve such a bully cabin—— PAPPELMEISTER [Alarmed] You are sailing avay ? VERA [Laughing] No, no—that’s only his way of describing his two- dollar-a-month garret. DAVID Yes—my state-room on the top deck ! 137 VERA [Smiling] Six foot square. DAVID But three other passengers aren’t squeezed in, and it never pitches and tosses. It’s heavenly. PAPPELMEISTER [Smiling| And from heaven you flew down to blay in dat beer- hall. Was? [pavip looks surprised. ] I heard you. DAVID You! What on earth did you go there for ? PAPPELMEISTER Vat on earth does one go to a beer-hall for? Ha! Ha! Ha! For vawter! Ha! Hal) oa hear you blay, I dink mit myself—if my blans succeed and I get Carnegie Hall for Saturday Symphony Concerts, dat boy shall be one of my first violins. Was ? [He slaps pavip on the left shoulder. | DAVID [Overwhelmed, ecstatic, yet wincing a little at the slap on his wound] Be one of your first [ Remembering | Oh, but it is impossible. VERA [Alarmed] Mr. Quixano! You must not refuse. 138 DAVID But does Herr Pappelmeister know about the wound in my shoulder ? PAPPELMEISTER [Agitated] You haf been vounded ? DAVID Only a legacy from Russia—but it twinges in some weathers. PAPPELMEISTER And de pain ubsets your blaying ? DAVID Not so much the pain—it’s all the dreadful memories— VERA [Alarmed] Don’t talk of them. DAVID I must explain to Herr Haare saree wouldn’t be fair. Even now [Shuddering| there comes up before me the bleeding body of my mother, the cold, fiendish face of the Russian officer, supervising the slaughter VERA . Hush! Hush ! 139 DAVID [Aysterically| Oh, that butcher’s face—there it is—hovering in the air, that narrow, fanatical forehead, that PAPPELMEISTER [Brings down his umbrella with a bang| Schluss! No man ever dared break down under me. My baton will beat avay all dese faces and fancies. Out with your violin ! [He taps his umbrella impertously on the table.| Keinen Mut verlieren ! [pavip takes out his violin from its case and puts it to bis shoulder, PAPPELMEISTER keeping up a hypnotic torrent of encouraging German cries. | Also! Fertig! Anfangen ! [He raises and waves his umbrella like a baton. | Von, dwo, dree, four DAVID [With a great sigh of reltef | Thanks, thanks—they are gone already. PAPPELMEISTER Ha! Ha! Ha! You see.’ And ven) ver blayivous American symphony DAVID [Dazed] You will play my American symphony ? VERA [Disappointed] Don’t you jump for joy? 140 DAVID [Still dazed but ecstatic] Herr Pappelmeister ! [Changing back to despondency]| But what certainty is there your Carnegie Hall audience would understand me? It would be the same smart set. [He drops dejectedly into a chair and lays down his violin. | PAPPELMEISTER Ach, nein. Of course, some—ve can’t keep peoble out merely because dey pay for deir seats. Was ? [He laughs. | DAVID It was always my dream to play it first to the new immigrants—those who have known the pain of the old world and the hope of the new. PAPPELMEISTER Try it on the dog. Was? DAVID Yes—on the dog that here will become a man ! PAPPELMEISTER [Shakes his head] I fear neider dogs nor men are a musical breed. DAVID The immigrants will not understand my music with their brains or their ears, but with their hearts and their souls. 141 VERA Well, then, why shouldn’t it be done here—on our Roof-Garden ? DAVID [Fumping up] A Bas-Kél! A Bas-Kél! VERA What are you talking ? DAVID Hebrew! It means a voice from heaven. VERA Ah, but will Herr Pappelmeister consent ? PAPPELMEISTER [Bowing] Who can disobey a voice from heaven? . . . But ven? VERA On some holiday evening. . . . Why not the Fourth of July? DAVID [Stl] more ecstatic] Another Bas-Kél/... My American Symphony! Played to the People! Under God’s sky! On Inde- pendence Day! With all the [Waving his hand expressively, sighs voluptuously. | That will be too perfect. PAPPELMEISTER [Smiling] Dat hasto beseen. You must permit me to invite 142 DAVID [Jn borror] Not the musical critics ! PAPPELMEISTER [Raising both hands with umbrella in equal horror] Gott bewahre! But I'd like to invite all de persons in New York who really undershtand music. VERA Splendid! But should we have room ? PAPPELMEISTER Room? I vant four blaces. VERA [Smiling] You are severe! Mr. Davenport was right. PAPPELMEISTER [Smiling] Perhaps de oders vill be out of town. Also / [Holding out his hand to pavip| You come to Carnegie to-morrow at eleven. Yes? Fraulein. ; [Kisses her hand. | Auf Wiedersehen ! [Going] On de Roof-Garden—anicht wabr ? VERA [Smiling] Wind and weather permitting. PAPPELMEISTER Thafalvaysmeinumbrella. Was? Ha! Ha! Ha! 143 VERA [Murmuring]| Isn’t he a darling? Isn’t he ? PAPPELMEISTER [Pausing suddenly] But ve never settled de salary. DAVID Salary ! [He looks dazedly from one to the other.| For the honour of playing in your orchestra ! PAPPELMEISTER Shylock! ! ... Never mind—ve settle de pound of flesh to-morrow. Lebe wohl / [Exit, the door closes. | VERA [Suddenly miserable] How selfish of you, David ! DAVID Selfish, Vera ? VERA , Yes—not to think of your salary. It looks as if you didn’t really love me. DAVID Not love you? I don’t understand. VERA [Half in tears| Just when I was so happy to think that now we shall be able to marry. 144 DAVID Shall we? Marry? On my salary as first violin? VERA Not if you don’t want to. DAVID Sweetheart! Canit be true? How do you know? VERA [Smiling] I’m not a Jew. I asked. DAVID My guardian angel ! [Embracing her. He sits down, she lovingly at hts feet.] VERA [Looking up at him] Then you do care? DAVID What a question ! VERA And youdon’t think wholly of yourmusic and forget me? DAVID Why, you are behind all I write and play! VERA [With jealous passion] Behind? But I want to be before! I want you to love me first, before everything. 145 x DAVID I do put you before everything. VERA You are sure? And nothing shall part us ? DAVID Not all the seven seas could part you and me. VERA And you won’t grow tired of me—not even when you are world-famous ? DAVID [A shade petulant] Sweetheart, considering I should owe it all to you VERA [Drawing his head down to her breast] Oh, David! David! Don’t be angry with poor little Vera if she doubts, if she wants to feel quite sure. You see father has talked so terribly, and after | all I was brought up in the Greek Church, and we oughtn’t to cause all this suffering unless DAVID Those who love us must suffer, and we must suffer in their suffering. It is live things, not dead metals, that are being melted in the Crucible. VERA Still, we ought to soften the suffering as much as— DAVID Yes, but only Time can heal it. 146 VERA [With transition to happiness] But father seems half-reconciled already! Dear little father, if only he were not so narrow about Holy Russia ! DAVID If only my folks were not so narrow about Holy Judea! But the ideals of the fathers shall notbe foisted on the children. Each generation must live and die for its own dream. VERA Yes, David, yes. You are the prophet of the living resent. Iam so happy. [She looks up wistfully. | You are happy, too ? DAVID . I am dazed—I cannot realise that all our troubles have melted away—it is so sudden. VERA You, David? Who always see everything in such rosy colours? Now that the whole horizon is one great splendid rose, you almost seem as if gazing out toward a blackness DAVID We Jews are cheerful in gloom, mistrustful in joy. It is our tragic history VERA But you have come to end the tragic history ; to throw off the coils of the centuries. 147 DAVID [Smiling again] Yes, yes, Vera. You bring back my sunnier self. I must be a pioneer on the lost road of happiness. To-day shall be all joy, all lyric ecstasy. [He takes up his violin. ] Yes, I will make my old fiddle-strings burst with joy ! [He dashes into a jubilant tarantella. After a few bars there 1s a knock at the door leading from the hall; their happy faces betray no sign of hearing tt ; then the door slightly opens, and BARON REVEN- DAL’S head looks hesttatingly 1n. As DAVID per- ceives it, his features work convulsively, his string breaks with a tragic snap, and he totters backward into VERA’s arms. Hoarsely| The face! The face! VERA David—my dearest ! DAVID [Hits eyes closed, bis violin clasped mechanically | Don’t be anxious—I shall be better soon—I oughtn’t to have talked about it—the hallucination has never been so complete. VERA Don’t speak—rest against Vera’s heart—till it has passed away. [The BARON comes daxedly forward, half with a shocked sense of VERA’s impropriety, half to reheve her of her burden. She motions him back.| This is the work of your Holy Russia. 148 BARON [Harshly] What is the matter with him ? [pavip’s violin and bow drop from his grasp and fall on the table.| DAVID The voice ! [He opens his eyes, stares frenziedly at the BARON, then struggles out of VERA’S arms.] VERA [Trying to stop him] Dearest DAVID Let me go. [He moves Itke a sleep-walker toward the paralysed BARON, puis out his hand, and testingly touches the face.| BARON [Shuddering back] Hands off ! DAVID [With a great cry] A-a-a-h! It is flesh and blood. No, it is stone—the man of stone! Monster ! [He raises his hand frenztedly. | BARON [Whipping out bts pistol] Back, dog! , [vera darts between them with a shriek. | 149 DAVID [Frozen again, surveying the pistol stontly| Ha! You want my life, too. Is the cry not yet loud enough? BARON The cry ? DAVID [Mystically] Can you not hear it? The voice of the blood of my brothers crying out against you from the ground? Oh, how can you bear not to turn that pistol against yourself and execute upon yourself the justice which Russia denies you ? BARON Tush ! [Pocketing the pistol a little shamefacedly.| VERA Justice on himself ? For what? DAVID For crimes beyond human penalty, for obscenities beyond human utterance, for VERA You are raving. DAVID Would to heaven I were ! 150 wERA But this is my father. DAVID Your father! . . . God! [He staggers. | BARON [Drawing her to him| Come, Vera, I told you VERA meray, tates back | Don’t touch me! BARON [Starting back 1n amaze] Vera ! VERA [Hoarsely] Say it’s not true. BARON What is not true? VERA What David said. It was the mob that massacred— you had no hand in it. BARON [Sullenly] I was there with my soldiers. DAVID [Leaning, pale, against a chair, hisses] And you looked on with that cold face of hate—while my mother—my sister ISI BARON [Sullenly] I could not see everything. DAVID Now and again you ordered your soldiers to fire—— VERA [In joyous relief] Ah, he did check the mob—he dzd tell his soldiers to fire. DAVID At any Jew who tried to defend himself. VERA Great God ! [She falls on the sofa and buries her head on the cushion, moaning | Is there no pity in heaven ? DAVID There was no pity on earth. BARON It was the People avenging itself, Vera. ‘The People rose like a flood. It had centuries of spoliation to wipe out. The voice of the People is the voice of God. VERA [Meaning] But you could have stopped them. 152 BARON I had no orders to defend the foes of Christ and [Crossing himself] the Tsar. ‘The People VERA But you could have stopped them. BARON Who can stop a flood? I did my duty. A soldier’s duty is not so pretty as a musician’s. y pretty VERA 7 But you could have stopped them. BARON [Losing all patience] Silence! You talk like an ignorant girl, blinded by passion. The pogrom is a holy crusade. Are we Russians the first people to crush down the Jew? -No—from the dawn of history the nations have had to stamp upon him—the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans DAVID Yes, it is true. Even Christianity did not invent hatred. But not till Holy Church arose were we burnt at the stake, and not till Holy Russia arose were our babes torn limb from limb. Oh, it is too much! Delivered from Egypt four thousand years ago, to be slaves to the Russian Pharaoh to-day. [He falls as if kneeling on a chair, and leans bis head on the rail.] 153 O God, shall we always be broken on the wheel of history ? How long, O Lord, how long? BARON [Savagely] Till you are all stamped out, ground into your dirt. [ Tenderly | Look up, little Vera! You saw how papasha loves you—how he was ready to hold out his hand—and how this cur tried to bite it. Be calm—tell him a daughter of Russia cannot mate with dirt. VERA Father, I will be calm. I will speak without passion or blindness. I will tell Davidthe truth. I was never absolutely sure of my love for him—perhaps that was why I doubted his love for me—often after our enchanted moments there would come a nameless uneasiness, some vague instinct, relic of the long centuries of Jew-loathing, some strange shrinking from his Christless creed BARON [With an exultant cry] Ah! She is a Revendal. VERA But now [She rises and walks firmly toward pavip] now, David, I come to you, and I say in the words of Ruth, thy people shall be my people and thy God my God ! [She stretches out her hands to pavip.| 154 BARON You shameless ! [He stops as he perceives DavID remains im- passive. | VERA [With agonised cry] David ! DAVID [In low, icy tones] You cannot come to me. ‘There is a river of blood between us. VERA Were it seven seas, our love must cross them. DAVID Easy words to you. You never saw that red flood bearing the mangled breasts of women and the spat- tered brains of babes and sucklings. Oh! [He covers his eyes with his hands. The BARON turns away in gloomy impotence. At last DAvID ‘ begins to speak quietly, almost dreamily.| It was your Easter, and the air was full of holy bells and the streets of holy processions—priests in black and girls in white and waving palms and crucifixes, and everybody exchanging Faster eggs and kissing one another three times on the mouth in token of peace and goodwill, and even the Jew-boy felt the spirit of love brooding over the earth, though he did not then know that this Christ, whom holy chants proclaimed re-risen, was born in the form of a brother 155 Jew. And what added to the peace and holy joy was that our own Passover was shining before us. My mother had already made the raisin wine, and my greedy little brother Solomon had sipped it on the sly that very morning. We were all at home—all except my father—he was away in the little Synagogue at which he was cantor. Ah, such a voice he had— a voice of tears and thunder—when he prayed it was like a wounded soul beating at the gates of Heaven— but he sang even more beautifully in the ritual of home, and how we were looking forward to his hymns at the Passover table [He breaks down. The Baron has gradually turned round under the spell of DAviv’s story and now listens hypnotised. | I was playing my cracked little fiddle. Little Miriam was making her doll dance to it. Ah, that decrepit old china doll—the only one the poor child had ever had—I can see it now—one eye, no nose, half an arm. We were all laughing to see it caper to my music. . . . My father flies in through the door, desperately clasping to his breast the Holy Scroll. We cry out to him to explain, and then we see that in that beloved mouth of song there is no longer a tongue—only blood. He tries to bar the door—a mob breaks in— we dash out through the back into the street. There are the soldiers—and the Face [vERA’s eyes involuntarily seek the face of her father, who shrinks away as their eyes meet.| VERA [Jn a low sob] O God! 156 DAVID When I came to myself, with a curious aching in my left shoulder, I saw lying beside me a strange shapeless Something .... [DavID points weirdly to the floor, and vera, hunched forwards, gazes stonily at it, as if seeing the horror. | By the crimson doll in what seemed a hand I knew it must be little Miriam. ‘The doll was a dream of beauty and perfection beside the mutilated mass which was all that remained of my sister, of my mother, of greedy little Solomon— Oh! You Christians can only see that rosy splendour on the horizon of happiness. And the Jew didn’t see rosily enough for you, ha! ha! ha! the Jew who gropes in one great crimson mist. [He breaks down in spasmodic, tronic, long-drawn, terrible laughter. | VERA [Irying vainly to tranquillise him| Hush, David! Your laughter hurts more than tears. Let Vera comfort you. [She kneels by his chair, tries to put her arms round him. | DAVID [Shuddering] Take them away! Don’t you feel the cold dead pushing between us? VERA [Unfaltering, moving his face toward her lips] Kiss me ! 157 DAVID I should feel the blood on my lips. VERA My love shall wipe it out. DAVID Love! Christian love! [He unwinds her clinging arms ; she sinks prostrate on the floor as he rises. | For this I gave up my people—darkened the home that sheltered me—there was always a still, small voice at my heart calling me back, but I heeded nothing—only the voice of the butcher’s daughter. [ Brokenly | Let me go home, let me go home. [He looks lingeringly at vera’s prostrate form, but overcoming the instinct to touch and comfort her, begins tottering with uncertain pauses toward the door leading to the hall.| BARON [Evtending his arms in relief and longing] And here is your home, Vera ! [He raises her gradually from the floor; she 1s dazed, but suddenly she becomes conscious of whose arms she 1s in, and utters a cry of repul- ston. | VERA Those arms reeking from that crimson river ! [She falls back. | 158 BARON [Sullenly| Don’t echo that babble. You came to these arms often enough when they were fresh from the battle- field. VERA But not from the shambles! You heard what he called you. Not soldier—butcher! Oh, I dared to dream of happiness after my nightmare of Siberia, but you—you [She breaks down for the first time in hysterical sobs. | BARON [Brokenly]| Mera tittle Vera! Don’t cry!. You stab me! VERA You thought you were ordering your soldiers to fire at the Jews, but it was my heart they pierced [She sobs on. | BARON ... And my own. ... But we will comfort each other. I will go to the Tsar myself—with my fore- head to the earth—to beg for your pardon!... Come, put your wet face to little father’s... . VERA [Violently pushing his face away] Ihate you! Icurse the day I was born your daughter ! [She staggers toward the door leading to the intertor. At the same moment vavip, who has reached the door leading to the hall, now feeling subconsciously that VERA 1s going and that his last reason for 159 lingering on 15 removed, turns the door-handle. The click attracts the BARON’s attention, be veers round. | BARON [To pavip| Halt ! [pavip turns mechanically. vera drifts out through her door, leaving the two men face to face. The BARON beckons to DAVID, who as tf hypnotised moves nearer. The BARON whips out his pistol, slowly crosses to DAVID, who stands as 1f awatting bis fate. The BARON hands the pistol to pavip. | You were right ! [He steps back swiftly with a touch of stern heroism into the attitude of the culprit at a military execu- tion, awatting the bullet. | Shoot me ! DAVID [Takes the pistol mechanically, looks long and pensively at it as with a sense of tts irrelevance. Gradually his arm droops and lets the pistol fall on the table, and there his hand touches a string of his violin, which yields a litile note. Thus reminded of it, be picks up the violin, and as his fingers draw out the broken string he murmurs] I must get a new string. [He resumes his dragging march toward the door, repeating maunderingly | I must get a new string. [Lhe curtain falls. | 160 Act IV Saturday, Fuly 4, evening. The Roof-Garden of the Settlement House, showing a beautiful, far-stretching panorama of New York, with its irregular sky- buildings on the left, and the harbour with its Statue of Liberty on the right. Everything 1s wet and gleaming after rain. Parapet at the back. Elevator on the right. Entrance from the stairs on the left. In the sky hang heavy clouds through whtch thin, golden lines of sunset are just beginning to labour. DAVID 15 discovered on a bench, hugging his violin- case to his breast, gazing moodily at the sky. A muffled sound of applause comes up from below and continues with varying intensity through the early part of the scene. Through 1t comes the notse of the elevator ascending. MENDEL steps out and hurries forward. MENDEL Come down, David! Don’t you hear them shouting for you? [He passes bis hand over the wet bench.| Good heavens! You will get rheumatic fever ! DAVID Why have you followed me? MENDEL | Get up—everything is still damp. DAVID [Rising, gloomily| Yes, there’s a damper over everything. 161 MENDEL Nonsense—the rain hasn’t damped your triumph in the least. In fact, the more delicate effects wouldn’t have gone so well in the open air. Listen! DAVID Let them shout. Who told you I was up here? MENDEL Miss Revendal, of course. DAVID [Agitated] Miss Revendal ? How should she know? MENDEL [Sullenly] She seems to understand your crazy ways. DAVID [Passing his hand over his eyes| Ah, you never understood me, uncle. . . . How did she look? Was she pale? MENDEL Never mind about Miss Revendal. Pappelmeister wants you—the people insist on seeing you. Nobody can quiet them. DAVID They saw me all through the symphony in my place in the orchestra. MENDEL They didn’t know you were the composer as well 162 as the first violin. Now Miss Revendal has told them. [Louder applause. | There! Eleven minutes it has gone on—like for an office-seeker. You must come and show yourself. DAVID I won’t—I’m not an office-seeker. Leave me to my misery. MENDEL Your misery? With all this glory and greatness opening before you? Wait till you’re my age [Shouts of ** qutxano !”’] You hear! What is to be done with them ? DAVID Send somebody on the platform to remind them this is the interval for refreshments ! MENDEL Don’t be cynical. You know your dearest wish was to melt these simple souls with your music. And now DAVID Now I have only made my own stony. MENDEL You are right. You are stone all over—ever since you came back home to us. ‘Turned into a pillar of salt, mother says—like Lot’s wife. 163 DAVID That was the punishment for looking backward. Ah, uncle, there’s more sense in that old Bible than the Rabbis suspect. Perhaps that is the secret of our people’s paralysis—we are always looking back- ward. [He drops hopelessly into an tron garden-chair behind him. | MENDEL [Stopping him before he touches the seat] Take care—it’s sopping wet. You don’t look back- ward enough. [He takes out his handkerchief and begins drying the chair.| DAVID [Faznily smiling] I thought you wanted the salt to melt. MENDEL It zs melting a little if you can smile. Do you know, David, I haven’t seen you smile since that Purim afternoon ? DAVID You haven’t worn a false nose since, uncle. [He laughs bitterly.] Ha! Ha! Ha! Fancy masquerading in America because twenty-five centuries ago the Jews escaped a pogrom in Persia. ‘Two thousand five hundred years ago! Aren’t we uncanny? [He drops into the wiped chatr.| 164 MENDEL [Angrily] Better you should leave us altogether than mock at us. I thought it was your Jewish heart that drove you back home to us; but if you are still hankering after Miss Revendal DAVID [Pained] Uncle ! MENDEL I’d rather see you marry her than go about like this. You couldn’t make the house any gloomier. DAVID Go back to the concert, please. They have quieted down. MENDEL [Hesitating| And you? DAVID Oh, I’m not playing in the popular after-pieces. Pappelmeister guessed I’d be broken up with the stress of my own symphony—he has violins enough. MENDEL Then you don’t want to carry this about. [Taking the violin from paviv’s arms. | DAVID [Clhinging to it] Don’t rob me of my music—it’s all I have. 165 MENDEL | You'll spoil it in the wet. I'll take it home. DAVID No [He suddenly catches sight of two figures entering from the left—Fravu QUIXANO and KATHLEEN Clad in their best, and wearing tiny American flags in honour of Independence Day. KATHLEEN escorts the old lady, with the air of a guardian angel, on her slow, tottering course toward DAVID. — FRAU QUIXANO 15 puffing and panting after the many stairs, DAVID jumps up in surprise, releases the violin-casé to MENDEL. | They at my symphony! MENDEL Mother would come—even though, being Shabbos, she had to walk. DAVID But wasn’t she shocked at my playing on the Sabbath ? MENDEL No—that’s the curious part of it. She said that even as a boy you played your fiddle on Shabbos, and that if the Lord has stood it all these years, He must consider you an exception. DAVID You see! She’s more sensible than you thought. 166 I daresay whatever I were to do she’d consider me an exception. MENDEL [In sullen acquiescence] I suppose geniuses are. KATHLEEN [Reaching them ; panting with admira- tion and breathlessness] Oh, Mr. David! it was like midnight mass! But i. misthress was ashleep. DAVID Asleep ! RISE ek eat half- sadly. | meen tia ! —Ha ! FRAU QUIXANO [Panting and laughing in response] He! He! He! Dovidel lachtwidder. He! He! He! [She touches his arm affectionately, but feeling his wet coat, utters a cry of horror.| Du bist nass ! DAVID Es ist gor nicht, Granny—my clothes are thick. [She fusses over him, wiping him down with her gloved hand.| MENDEL But what brought you up here, Kathleen ? KATHLEEN Sure, not the elevator. The misthress said ’twould be breaking the Shabbos to ride up in it. 167 DAVID [Uneasily] But did—did Miss Revendal send you up? KATHLEEN And who else should be axin’ the misthress if she wasn’t proud of Mr. David? Faith, she’s a sweet lady. MENDEL [Jmpatiently| Don’t chatter, Kathleen. KATHLEEN But, Mr. Quixano DAVID [Sweetly] Please take your mistress down again—don’t let her walk. KATHLEEN But Shabbos isn’t out yet ! MENDEL Chattering again! DAVID [Gently] There’s no harm, Kathleen, in going down in the elevator. KATHLEEN Troth, Pll egshplain to her that droppin’ down isn’t ridin’. 168 DAVID [Smiling] Yes, tell her dropping down is natural—not work, like flying up. [Kathleen begins to move toward the stairs, explain- ing to FRAU QUIXANO. | And, Kathleen! You'll get her some refreshments. KATHLEEN [Turns, glaring] Refrishments, is it? Give her refrishments where they mix the mate with the butther plates! Oh, Mr. David ! [She moves off toward the stairs in reproachful sorrow. | MENDEL [Smiling] Pll get her some coffee. DAVID [Smiling] Yes, that'll keep her awake. Besides, Pappelmeister was so sure the people wouldn’t understand me, he’s relaxing them on Gounod and Rossini. MENDEL Pappelmeister’s idea of relaxation! J should have given them comic opera. [With sudden call to KATHLEEN, who with her mts- tress 1s at the wrong exit.| Kathleen! ‘The elevator’s this side! KATHLEEN [Turning] What way can that bb, when ‘i came up this side? 169 MENDEL You chatter too much. [FRAU QUIXANO, not understanding, exit. | Come this way. Can’t you see the elevator ? KATHLEEN [Perceives rrau QuixaNno has gone, calls after her in Irish-sounding Yiddish] Wu geht Ihr, bedad?.. . [Lmpatiently | Houly Moses, komm’ zurick ! [Exit anxiously, re-enter with FRAU QUIXANO. | Begorra, we Jews never know our way. [MENDEL, carrying the violin, escorts his mother and KATHLEEN to the elevator. When they are near 1t, 12 stops with a thud, and PAPPELMEISTER Springs out, his umbrella up, meeting them face to face. He looks happy and beaming over vaviv’s triumph. PAPPELMEISTER [Jn loud, joyous voice] Nun, Frau Quixano, was sagen Sie? Vat you tink of your David? FRAU QUIXANO Dovid ? Er ist meshuggab. [She taps her forehead. | PAPPELMEISTER [Puzzled, to MENDEL] Meshuggah! Vat means meshuggah ? Crazy? MENDEL [Half-smiling] You’ve struck it. She says David doesn’t know enough to go in out of the rain. [General laughter. | 170 DAVID [Rising] But it’s stopped raining, Herr Pappelmeister. You don’t want your umbrella. [General laughter. | PAPPELMEISTER 0. [Shuts it down. | MENDEL Herein, Mutter. [He pushes FRAU QUIXANO’s somewhat shrinking form into the elevator. KATHLEEN follows, then MENDEL. | Herr Pappelmeister, we are all your grateful servants. [PAPPELMEISTER bows ; the gates close, the elevator descends. | DAVID And you won’t think me ungrateful for running away—you know my thanks are too deep to be spoken. PAPPLLMEISTER And zo are my congratulations ! DAVID Then, don’t speak them, please. PAPPELMEISTER But you must come and speak to all de people in America who undershtand music. 171 DAVID [Half-smiling| To your four connoisseurs ? [Seriously | Oh, please! I really could not meet strangers, especially musical vampires. PAPPELMEISTER [Half-stariled, half-angry] Vampires? Oh, come! DAVID Voluptuaries, then—rich, idle zsthetes to whom art and life have no connection, parasites who suck our music PAPPELMEISTER [Laughs good-naturedly] Ha! Ha! Ha! Vait till you hear vat dey say. DAVID I will wait as long as you like. PAPPELMEISTER Den I like to tell you now. [He roars with mischievous laughter. ] Ha! Ha! Ha! De first vampire says it is a great vork, but poorly performed. DAVID [Indignant] Oh ! PAPPELMEISTER De second vampire says it is a poor vork, but greatly performed. 172 DAVID [Disappointed | Oh ! PAPPELMEISTER De dird vampire says it is a great vork greatly per- formed. DAVID [Complacently] Ah! PAPPELMEISTER And de fourz vampire TN it is a poor vork poorly performed. DAVID [Angry and disappointed] Oh ! [Then smiling | You see you have to go by the people after all. PAPPELMEISTER [Shakes head, smiling| Nein. Ven critics disagree—I agree mit mineself. HaliHa!l) Ha! [He slaps pavip on the back.| A great vork dat vill be even better performed next time! Ha! Ha!Ha! ‘Ten dousand congratulations. [He seizes pavip’s hand and grips it heartily. | DAVID Don’t! You hurt me. PAPPELMEISTER [Dropping vaviv’s hand,—mis- [understanding | Pardon! I forgot your vound. 473 DAVID No—no—what does my wound matter? ‘That never stung half so much as these clappings and congratu- lations. PAPPELMEISTER [Puzzled but solicitous| I knew your nerves vould be all shnapping like fiddle- shtrings. Oh, you cheniuses ! [ Smiling. | You like neider de clappings nor de criticisms,—was ? DAVID They are equally—irrelevant. One has to wrestle with one’s own art, one’s own soul, alone / PAPPELMEISTER [Patting him soothingly| I am glad I did not let you blay in Part ‘Two. DAVID Dear Herr Pappelmeister! Don’t think I don’t appre- ciate all your kindnesses—you are almost a father to me. PAPPELMEISTER And you disobey me like a son. Ha! Ha! Ha! Vell, I vill make your excuses to de—vampires. Ha! Ha! Also, David. [He lays his hand again affectionately on DAvID’s right shoulder. | Lebe wohl! I must go down to my popular classics, [ Gloomily | Truly a going down! Was? 174 DAVID [Smiling] Oh, it isn’t such a descent as all that. Uncle said you ought to have giver! them comic opera. PAPPELMEISTER [Shuddering convulsively| Comic opera. . . . Ouf! [He goes toward the elevator and rings the bell. Then he turns to DavID.| Vat vas dat vord, David? DAVID What word? PAPPELMEISTER [Groping for it] Mega—megasshu... DAVID [Puzzled] Megasshu ? [The elevator comes up ; the gates open.| PAPPELMEISTER Megusshab! You know. [He taps his forehead with his umbrella. | DAVID Ah, meshuggah ! PAPPELMEISTER [Foyously ] Fa, meshuggah ! [He gives a great roar of laughter.| miata.) Ha ! [He waves umbrella at Davip.| 175 Well, don’t be . . . meshuggah. [He steps into the elevator. | Ha! Hail Hail [The gates close, and it descends with his laughter.| DAVID [4 fier a pause] Perhaps | am... meshuggah. [He walks up and down moodily, approaches the parapet at back. | Dropping down is indeed natural. | He looks over. | How it tugs and drags at one! [He moves back resolutely and shakes his head.| That would be even a greater descent than Pappel- meister’s to comic opera. One must fly upward— somehow. [He drops on the chair that MENDEL dried. A faint music steals up and makes an accompaniment to all the rest of the scene. | Ah! the popular classics ! [His head sinks on a little table. The elevator comes up again, but he does not raise his head. VERA, pale and sad, steps out and walks gently over to him ; stands looking at him with maternal pity ; then decides not to disturb him and 1s stealing away when suddenly he looks up and perceives her and springs to his feet with a dazed glad cry.| Vera ! VERA [Turns, speaks with grave dignity] Miss Andrews has charged me to convey to you the heart-felt thanks and congratulations of the Settlement. 176 3 DAVID [Frozen] Miss Andrews 's very kind. . . . I trust you are well. VERA Thank you, Mr. Quixano. Very well and very busy. So you'll excuse me. [She turns to go.| DAVID Certainly. . . . How are your folks? VERA [Turns her head] - They are gone back to Russia. And yours ? DAVID You just saw them all. VERA [Confused] Yes—yes—of course—I forgot! Good-bye, Mr. Quixano. DAVID Good-bye, Miss Revendal. [He drops back on the chair. vera walks to the elevator, then just before ringing turns again.| VERA I shouldn’t advise you to sit here in the damp. DAVID My uncle dried the chair. [Bizterly | 177 M Curious how every one is concerned about my body and no one about my soul. VERA Because your soul is so much stronger than your body. Why, think! It has just lifted a thousand people far higher than this roof-garden. DAVID Please don’t you congratulate me, too! ‘That would be too ironical. VERA [Agitated, coming nearer] Irony, Mr. Quixano? Please, please, do not imagine there is any irony in my congratulations. DAVID The irony is in all the congratulations. How can I endure them when I know what a terrible failure I have made! VERA Failure! Because the critics are all divided? ‘That is the surest proof of success. You have produced something real and new. DAVID 1 am not thinking of Pappelmeister’s connoisseurs —J am the only connoisseur, the only one who knows. And every bar of my music cried “ Failure! Failure!” lt shrieked from the violins, blared from the trombones, thundered from the drums. It was written on all the faces 178 VERA [Vehemently, coming still nearer| Oh, no! no! I watched the faces—those faces of toil and sorrow, those faces from many lands. ‘They were fired by your vision of their coming brotherhood, lulled by your dream of their land of rest. And [ could see that you were right in speaking to the people. In some strange, beautiful way the inner meaning of your music stole into all those simple souls DAVID [Springing up] And my soul? What of my soul? False to its own music, its own mission, its own dream. ‘That is what I mean by failure, Vera. I preached of God’s Crucible, this great new continent that could melt up all race- differences and vendettas, that could purge and re-create, and God tried me with his supremest test. He gave me a heritage from the Old World, hate and vengeance and blood, and said, “* Cast it all into my Crucible.” And I said, ‘‘ Even thy Crucible cannot melt this hate, cannot drink up this blood.” And so I sat crooning over the dead past, gloating over the old blood-stains—I, the apostle of America, the prophet of the God of our children. Oh—how my music mocked me! And you—so fearless, so high above fate—how you must despise me! VERA PrAh no! DAVID You must. You do. Your words still sting. Were 179 it seven seas between us, you said, our love must cross them. And I—I who had prated of seven seas VERA Not seas of blood—lI spoke selfishly, thoughtiessly. I had not realised that crimson flood. Now ! see it day and night. O God! [She shudders and covers her eyes.| DAVID There lies my failure—to have brought it to your eyes, instead of blotting it from my own. VERA No man could have blotted it out. DAVID Yes—by faith in the Crucible. From the blood of battlefields spring daisies and buttercups. In the divine chemistry the very garbage turns to roses. But in the supreme moment my faith was found wanting, You came to me—and I thrust you away. . VERA I ought not to have come to you. .. . I ought not to have come to you to-day. We must not meet again. DAVID Ah, you cannot forgive me! 180 VERA Forgive ? It is I that should go down on my knees for my father’s sin. [She 15 half-sinking to her knees. He stops her by a gesture and a cry.| DAVID No! The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children. VERA My brain follows you, but not my heart. It is heavy with the sense of unpaid debts—debts that can only cry for forgiveness. DAVID You owe me nothing—— VERA But my father, my people, my country. ... [She breaks down. Recovers herself.| My only consolation is, you need nothing. DAVID [Dazed] I—need—nothing ? VERA Nothing but your music . . . your dreams. DAVID And your love? Do I not need that? 181 VERA [Shaking her head sadly | No. DAVID You say that because I have forfeited it. VERA It is my only consolation, I tell you, that you do not need me. In our happiest moments a suspicion of this truth used to lacerate me. But now it is my one comfort in the doom that divides us. See how you stand up here above the world, alone and self- sufficient. No woman could ever have more than the second place in your life. DAVID But you have the first place, Vera ! VERA [Shakes her head again] No—TI no longer even desire it. I have gotten over that womanly weakness. DAVID You torture me. What do you mean? VERA What can be simpler? I used to be jealous of your music, your prophetic visions. I wanted to come first —before them all! Now, dear David, I only pray that they may fill your life to the brim. DAVID But they cannot. 182 VERA They will—have faith in yourself, in your mission— good-bye. DAVID [Dazed] You love me and you leave me? VERA What else can I do? Shall the shadow of Kishineff hang over all your years to come? Shall I kiss you and leave blood upon your lips, cling to you and be pushed away by all those cold, dead hands? DAVID [Taking both her hands] Yes, cling to me, despite them all, cling to me till all these ghosts are exorcised, cling to me till our love triumphs over death. Kiss me, kiss me now. VERA [Resisting, drawing back] I dare not! It will make you remember. DAVID It will make me forget. Kiss me. [There 1s a pause of hesitation, filled up by the Cathedral music from “ Faust” surging up softly from below. | VERA [Slozly] I will kiss you as we Russians kiss at Easter—the three kisses of peace. [She kisses him three times on the mouth as in ritual solemnity. | 183 DAVID [Very calmly] Easter was the date of the massacre—see! I am at peace. VERA God grant it endure ! [They stand quietly hand in hand.] Look! How beautiful the sunset is after the storm ! DAVID turns. The sunset, which has begun to grow beautiful just after VERA’S entrance, has now reached its most magnificent moment; below there are narrow lines of saffron and pale gold, but above the whole sky 1s one glory of burning flame. | DAVID [Prophetically exalted by the spectacle] It is the fires of God round His Crucible. [He drops her hand and points downward. | There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east] —the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, —black and yellow VERA [Softly, nestling to him] Jew and Gentile DAVID Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm 184 and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the King- dom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward ! [He ratses his hands 1n benediction over the shining city. Peace, ae to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent—the God of our children give you Peace. [An instant’s solemn pause. The sunset 1s swiftly fading, and the vast panorama 1s suffused with a more restful twilight, to which the many-gleaming lights of the town add the tender poetry of the night. Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twinkles over the darkening water the torch of the Statue of Liberty. From below comes up the softened sound of voices and instruments joining in ““ My Country, ’tis of Thee.” The curtain falls slowly. | 185 HULA Fy eg KAY ' # a3 * ) u MARA ne Ne ALA THE MELTING POT IN ACTION APPENDIX A ALIENS ADMITTED TO THE UNITED STATES IN THE YEAR African (black) Armenian . Bee stitanand Mo- ravian Bulgarian, Berviah, Montenegrin Chinese Croatian and St, vonian Cuban : Dalmatian, Bos- nian, Herzegovi- nian Dutch and Bicinish East Indian English Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Irish . Italian (north) Italian (south) Carried forward 187 ENDED JUNE 9,734 9,554 11,852 10,083 3.487 44,754 6,121 4,775 18,746 233 100,062 14,920 26,509 101,764 409,933 105,826 48,103 54,171 264,348 875,975 30TH, 1913 Brought forward Japanese Korean Lithuanian . Magyar Mexican Paciac Islander . Polish Portuguese . Roumanian Russian Ruthenian (Russ- niak) Scandinavian Scotch Slovak Spanish Spanish- -American Syrian Turkish Welsh West Indian (ex- cept Cuban) Other peoples Total . 875,975 11,672 31,434 29,094 15,017 3,409 10,019 2,132 3,922 2.22 Wy 1,427,227 APPENDIX B THE POGROM (I) A RUSSIAN ON ITS REASONS [From The Nation, November 15, 1913] Ir is now over thirty years since the crew of the sinking ship of Russian absolutism first tried this unworthy weapon to save their failing cause. ‘This was when Plehve organised an anti- Semitic agitation and Jewish pogroms in 1883 in South Russia, where the Jews formed almost the only merchant class in the villages, and where the ignorant peasants, together with some crafty Russian tradesmen, had a natural grudge against them. The result was that the prevailing discontent of the masses was diverted against the Jews. A large public meeting of protest was organised at that time in the London Mansion House, the Lord Mayor taking the chair. English public opinion rightly appreciated the value of this criminal method of using Jews as scapegoats for political purposes. Now we see merely a further, and let us hope a final, development of the same tactics. ‘They have been used on many occasions since 1883. One of the largest Jewish pogroms of the latest series in Kishineff in 1903 has been clearly traced to the same expe- rienced hand of Plehve, when the passive attitude of the local administration and the military was explained by the presence in the town of a mysterious colonel of the Imperial Gentian who arrived with secret orders and a large supply of pogrom literature from St. Petersburg, and who organised the scum of the town population for the purpose of looting and killing Jews. The repulsive stories of further pogroms all over the country - immediately after the issue of the constitutional manifesto of 188 October 17, 1905, are fresh in the memory of the civilised world. At that time anti-Semitic doctrine was openly preached, not only against Jews, but against the whole constitutional and revolutionary upheaval. Pogroms against both were organised under the same pretext of saving the Tsar, the orthodoxy, and the Fatherland. Local police and military officials had secret orders to abstain from interference with the looting and mur- dering of Jews or “their hirelings.”” Processions of peaceful citizens and children were trampled down by the Cossack horses, and the Cossacks received formal thanks from high quarters for their excellent exploits... . N. W. TcHaykovsky. (II) A NURSE ON ITS RESULTS [From Public Health, Nurses’ Quarterly, Cleveland, Ohio, October 1913] I was a Red Cross nurse on the battlefield. The words of the chief doctor of the Jewish Hospital of Odessa still ring in my ears. When the telephone message came, he said, ‘‘ Moldvanko is running in blood; send nurses and doctors.” ‘This meant that the Pogrom (massacre) was going on. haa came into the wards with these words: “‘ Sisters, there is no time for weeping. ‘Those who have no one depen- dent upon them, come. Put on your white surgical gowns, and the red cross. Make ready to go on the battlefield at once. God knows how many of our sisters and brothers are already killed.”” ‘Tears were just running down his cheeks as he spoke. In a minute twelve nurses and eight doctors had volunteered. ‘There was one Red Cross nurse who was in bed waiting to be operated on. She got up and made ready too. Nobody could keep her from going with us. ‘‘ Where my sisters and brothers fall, there shall I fall,” she said, and with these words, jumped into the ambulance and went on to the City Hospital with us. ‘There they had better equipment, and 189 they sent out three times as many nurses as the Jewish Hospital. At the City Hospital they hung silver crosses about our necks. We wore the silver crosses so that we would not be recognised as Jewish by the Holiganes (Hooligans). Then we went to Molorosiskia Street in the Moldvanko (slums). We could not see, for the feathers were flying like snow. ‘The blood was already up to our ankles on the pave- ment and in the yards. ‘The uproar was deafening but we could hear the Holiganes’ fierce cries of ‘‘ Hooray, kill the Jews,” on all sides. It was enough to hear such words. ‘They could turn your hair grey, but we went on. We had no time to think. All our thoughts were to pick up wounded ones, and to try to rescue some uninjured ones. We succeeded in rescuing some uninjured who were in hiding. We put ban- dages on them to make it appear that they were wounded. We put them in the ambulance and carried them to the hospital, too. So at the Jewish Hospital we had five thousand injured and seven thousand uninjured to feed and protect for two weeks. Some were left without homes, without clothes, and children were even without parents. My dear reader, I want to tell you one thing before I describe the scenes of the massacre any further; do not think that you are reading a story which could not happen! No, I want you to know that everything you read is just exactly as it was. My hair is a little grey, but I am surprised it is not quite white after what I witnessed. The procession of the Pogrom was led by about ten Catholic (Greek) Sisters with about forty or fifty of their school children. They carried ikons or pictures of Jesus and sang ‘‘ God Save the Tsar.” They were followed by a crowd containing hun- dreds of men and women murderers yelling ‘‘ Bey Zhida,” which means ‘ Kill the Jews.” With these words they ran into the yards where there were fifty or a hundred tenants. They rushed in like tigers. Soon they began to throw children out of the windows of the second, third, and fourth stories. They would take a poor, innocent six-months-old baby, who could not possibly have done any harm in this world and 190 throw it down on to the pavement. You can imagine it could not live after it struck the ground, but this did not satisfy the stony-hearted murderers. ‘They then rushed up to the child, seized it and broke its little arm and leg bones into three or four pieces, then wrung its neck too. They laughed and yelled, so carried away with pleasure at their successful work. I do wish a few Americans could have been there to see, and they would know what America is, and what it means to live in the United States. It wa: not enough for them to open up a woman’s abdomen and take out the child which she carried, but they took time to stuff the abdomen with straw and fillit up. Can you imagine human beings able to do such things? I do not think anybody could, because I could not imagine it myself when a few years before I read the news of the massacre in Kishineff, but now I have seen it with my own eyes. It was not enough for them to cut out an old man’s tongue and cut off his nose, but they drove nails into the eyes also. You wonder how they had enough time to carry away everything of value—money, gold, silver, jewels— and still be able to do so much fanc; killing, but oh, my friends, all the time for three days and three nights was theirs. The last day and nigh it poured down rain, and you would think that might stop them, but no, they worked just as hard as ever. We could wear shoes no longer. Our feet were swollen, so we wore rubbers over our stockings, and in this way worked until some power was able to stop these horrors. They not only killed, but they had time to abuse young girls of twelve and fourteen years of age, who died immediately after being operated upon. I remember what happened to my own class-mates. ‘They were two who came from a small town to Odessa to become midwives. These girls ran to the school to hide themselves as it was a government school, and they knew the Holiganes would not dare to come in there. But the dean of the school had ordered they should not be admitted, because they were Jewish, as if they had different blood running in their veins. 193 So when they came, the watchman refused to open the doors, according to his instructions. ‘The crowd of Holiganes found them outside the doors of the hospital. They abused them right there in the middle of the street. One was eighteen years old and the other was twenty. One died after the operation and the other went insane from shame. Some people ask why the Jews did not leave everything and go away. But how could they go and where could they go? The murderers were scattered throughout the Jewish quatters. All they could do was hide where they were in the cellars and garrets. The Holiganes searched them out and killed them where they were hidden. Others may ask, why did they not resist the murderers with their knivesand pistols? Thegrown men organised by the second day. ‘They were helped by the Vigilantes, too, who brought them arms. The Vigilantes were composed of students at the University and high-school boys, and also the strongest man from each Jewish family. There were a good many Gentiles among the students who belonged to the Vigilantes because they wanted justice. So on the second day the Vigilantes stood before the doors and gave resistance to the murderers. Some will ask where were the soldiers and the police? ‘They were sent to protect, but on arriving, joined in with the murderers. However, the police put disguises on over their uniforms. Later, when they were brought to the hospital with other wounded, we found their uniforms underneath their disguises. When the Vigilantes took their stations, the scene was like a battlefield. Bullets were flying from both sides of the Red Cross carriages: We expected to be killed any minute, but notwithstanding, we rushed wherever there were shots heard in order to carry away the wounded. Whenever we arrived we shouted “‘ Red Cross, Red Cross,” in order to help make them realise we were not Vigilantes. Then they would stop and let us pick up the wounded. They did this on account of their own wounded. The Vigilantes could not stop the butchery entirely because they were not strong enough in numbers. On the fourth day, 192 the Jewish people of Odessa, through Dr. P , succeeded in communicating to the Mayor of a different State. Soldiers from outside, strangers to the murderers, came in and took charge of the city. The city was put under martial law until order could be restored. On the fifth day the doctors and nurses were called to the cemetery, where there were four hundred unidentified dead. Their friends and relatives who came to search for them were crazed and hysterical and needed our attention. Wives came to look for husbands, parents hunting children, a mother for her only son, and so on. It took eight days to identify the bodies and by that time four hundred of the wounded had died, and so we had eight hundred to bury. If you visit Odessa, you will be shown two long graves, about one hundred feet long, beside the Jewish Cemetery. ‘There lie the victims of the massacre. Among them are Gentile Vigilantes whose parents asked that they be buried with the Jews... . Another case I knew was that of a married man. He left his wife, who was pregnant, and three children, to go on a business trip. When he got back the massacre had occurred. His home was in ruins, his family gone. He went to the hospital, then to the cemetery. There he found his wife with her abdomen stuffed with straw, and his three children dead. It simply broke his heart, and he lost his mind. But he was harmless, and was to be seen wandering about the hospital as though in search of some one, and daily he grew more thin and suffering. This story is told in the hope that Americans will appreciate the safety and freedom in which they live and that they will help others to gain that freedom. APPENDIX..C THE STORY OF DANIEL MELSA ANOTHER example of Nature aping Art is afforded by the romantic story of Daniel Melsa, a young Russo-Jewish violinist who has carried audiences by storm in Berlin, Paris and London, and who had arranged to go to America last November. The following extract from an interview in the Fewish Chronicle of January 24, 1913, shows the curious coincidence between his beginnings and David Quixano’s : | ‘““Melsa is not yet twenty years of age, but he looks some- what older. He is of slight build and has a sad expression, which increased to almost a painful degree when recounting some of his past experiences. He seems singularly devoid of any affectation, while modesty is obviously the keynote of his nature. ‘“ After some persuasion, Melsa put aside his reticence, and, complying with the request, outlined briefly his career, the early part of which, he said, was overshadowed by a great tragedy. He was born in Warsaw, and, at the age of three, his parents moved to Lodz, where shortly after a private tutor was engaged for him. ‘“““ Although I exhibited a passion for music quite early, I did not receive any lessons on the subject till my seventh birth- day, but before that my father obtained a cheap violin for me upon which I was soon able to play simple melodies by ear.’ ‘““ By chance a well-known professor of the town heard him play, and so impressed was he with the talent exhibited by the boy that he advised the father to have him educated. Acting upon this advice, as far as limited means allowed, tutors were engaged, and so much progress did he make that at the age of nine he was admitted to the local Conservatorium of 194 Professor Grudzinski, where he remained two years. It was at the age of eleven that a great calamity overtook the family, his father and sister falling victims to the pogroms. “‘Melsa’s story runs as follows : ““ Tt was in June of 1905, at the time of the pogroms, when one afternoon my father, accompanied by my little sister, ventured out into the street, from which they never returned. They were both killed,’ he added sadly, ‘by Cossacks. A week later I found my sister in a Christian churchyard riddled with bullets, but I have not been able to trace the remains of my father, who must have been buried in some out-of-the-way place. During this awful period my mother and myselt lived in imminent danger of our lives, and it was only the recollection of my playing that saved us also falling a prey to the vodka- besodden Cossacks.’ ”” APPENDIX D BEILIS AND AMERICA Tue close relation in Jewish thought between Russo-Jewish persecution and America as the land of escape from it is well illustrated by the recent remarks of the Few1sh Chronicle on the future of the victim of the Blood-Ritual Prosecution in Kieff. ‘‘ So long as Beilis continues to live in Russia, his life is unsafe. ‘The Black Hundreds, he himself says, have solemnly decided on his death, and we have seen, in the not distant past, that they can carry out diabolical plots of this description with complete immunity. .. . He would gladly go to America, provided he was sure of a living. The condition should not be difficult to fulfil, and if this victim of a barbarous régime— we cannot say latest victim, for, as we write, comes the news of an expulsion order against 1200 Jewish students of Kieff— should find a home and place under the sheltering wing: of freedom, it would be a fitting ending to a painful chapter in our Jewish history.” That it is the natural ending even the Jew-baiting Russian organ, the Novoe Vremya, indirectly testifies, for it has published a sneering cartoon representing a number of Jews crowded on the Statue of Liberty to welcome the arrival of Beilis. One wonders that the Russian censor should have permitted the masses to become aware that Liberty exists on earth, if only in the form of a statue. 196 APPENDIX E THE ALIEN IN THE MELTING POT Mr. Freperick J. Haskin has recently published in the Chicago Daily News the following graphic summary of what immigrants have done and do for the United States : I am the immigrant. Since the dawn of creation my restless feet have beaten new paths across the earth. My uneasy bark has tossed on all seas. My wanderlust was born of the craving for more liberty and a better wage for the sweat of my face. I looked towards the United States with eyes kindled by the fire of ambition and heart quickened with new-born hope. I approached its gates with great expectation. I entered in with fine hopes. I have shouldered my burden as the American man of all work. I contribute eighty-five per cent. of all the labour in the slaughtering and meat-packing industries. I do seven-tenths of the bituminous coal mining. I do seventy-eight per cent. of all the work in the woollen mills. I contribute nine-tenths of all the labour in the cotton mills. I make nine-twentieths of all the clothing. I manufacture more than half the shoes. I build four-fifths of all the furniture. I make half of the collars, cuffs, and shirts. I turn out four-fifths of all the leather. I make half the gloves. I refine nearly nineteen-twentieths of the sugar. I make half of the tobacco and cigars. 197 And yet, I am the great American problem. When I pour out my blood on your altar of labour, and lay down my life as a sacrifice to your god of toil, men make no more comment than at the fall of a sparrow. But my brawn is woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of your national being. My children shall be your children and your land shall be my land because my sweat and my blood will cement the foundations of the America of 'To-Morrow. If I can be fused into the body politic, the Melting-Pot will have stood the supreme test. 198 Afterword I The Melting Pot is the third of the writer’s plays to be published in book form, though the first of the three in order of composition. But unlike The War God and The Next Religion, which are dramatisations of the spiritual duels of our time, The Melting Pot sprang directly from the author’s concrete experience as President of the Emigration Regulation Department of the Jewish Territorial Organisation, which, founded shortly after the great massacres of Jews in Russia, will soon have fostered the settlement of ten thousand Russian Jews in the West of the United States. ** Romantic claptrap,” wrote Mr. A. B. Walkley in the Zimes of “this rhapsodising over music and crucibles and statues of Liberty.” As if these things were not the homeliest of realities, and rhapsodising the natural response to them of the Russo-Jewish psy- chology, incurably optimist. The statue of Liberty is a large visible object at the mouth of New York har- bour ; the crucible, if visible only to the eye of 1 imagina- tion like the inner reality of the sunrise to the eye of Blake, is none the less a roaring and flaming actuality. These things are as substantial, if not as important, as Adeline Genée and Anna Pavlova, the objects of Mr. Walkley’s own rhapsodising. Mr. Walkley, never having lacked Liberty, nor cowered for days in a cellar in terror of a howling mob, can see only theatrical exaggeration in the enthusiasm for a land of freedom, just as, never having known or never having had eyes to see the grotesque and tragic creatures existing all 179 around us, he has doubted the reality of some of Balzac’s creations. It is to be feared that for such a play as The Melting Pot Mr. Walkley is far from being the yapées of Aristotle. ‘The ideal spectator must have known and felt more of life than Mr. Walkley, who resembles too much the library-fed man of letters whose denunciation by Walter Bagehot he himself quotes without suspecting de te fabula narratur. Even the critic, who has to deal with a refracted world, cannot dispense with primary expe- rience of his own. For “the adventures of a soul among masterpieces” it is not only necessary there should be masterpieces, there must also be a soul. Mr. Walkley, one of the wittiest of contemporary writers and within his urban range one of the wisest, can scarcely be accused of lacking a soul, though Mr. Bernard Shaw’s long-enduring misconception of him as a brother in the spirit is one of the comedies of literature. But such spiritual vitality as Oxford failed to sterilise in him has been largely torpified by his profession of play-taster, with its divorcement from reality in the raw. His cry of ‘‘ romantic claptrap ” is merely the reaction of the club armchair to the ‘“‘ drums and tramplings ” of the street. It is in fact (he will welcome an allusion to Dickens almost as much as one to Aristotle) the higher Podsnappery. “Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. ... The world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter past, breakfasted at nine, went to the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven.” 200 Mr. Roosevelt, with his multifarious American experience as soldier and cowboy, hunter and historian, police-captain and President, comes far nearer the ideal spectator, for this play at least, than Mr. Walkley. Yet his enthusiasm for it has been dismissed by our critic as “‘ stupendous naiveté.”” Mr. Roosevelt apparently falls under that class of “ people who knowing no rules, are at the mercy of their undisciplined taste,’ which Mr. Walkley excludes altogether from his classi- fication of critics, in despite of Dr. Johnson’s opinion that “ natural judges ”’ are only second to ‘* those who know but are above the rules.” It is comforting, therefore, to find Mr. Augustus ‘Thomas, the famous American playwright, who is familiar with the rules to the point of contempt, chivalrously associating himself, in defence of a British rival, with Mr. Roose- velt’s “stupendous naiveté.”’ “Mr. Zangwill’s ‘ rhapsodising’ over music and crucibles and statues of Liberty is,’’ says Mr. Thomas, ‘a very effective use of a most potent symbolism, and I have never seen men and women more sincerely stirred than the audience at The Melting Pot. ‘The impulses awakened by the Zangwill play were those of wide human sympathy, charity, and compassion ; and, for my own part, I would rather retire from the theatre and retire from all direct or indirect associa- tion with journalism than write down the employment of these factors by Mr. Zangwill as mere claptrap.”’ ** As a work of art for art’s sake,” also wrote Mr. William Archer, “the play simply does not exist.” He added: “but Mr. Zangwill would not dream of appealing to such a standard.” Mr. Archer had the 201 misfortune to see the play in New York side by side with his more cynical confrére, and thus his very praise has an air of apologia to Mr. Walkley and the great doctrine of “‘art for art’s sake.” It would almost seem as if he even takes a “‘ work of art ” and a *‘ work of art for art’s sake ”’ as synonymous. Nothing, in fact, could be more inartistic. ‘* Art for art’s sake ” is one species of art, whose right to existence the author has amply recognised in other works. (The King of Schnorrers was even read aloud by Oscar Wilde to a duchess.) But he roundly denies that art is any the less artistic for being inspired by life, and seeking in its turn to inspire life. Such a contention is tainted by the very Philistinism it would repudiate, since it seeks a negative test of art in something outside art— to wit, purpose, whose presence is surely as irrelevant to art as its absence. The only test of art is artistic quality, and this quality occurs perhaps more frequently than it is achieved, as in the words of the Hebrew prophets, or the vision of a slum at night, the former consciously aiming at something quite different, the latter achieving its beauty in utter unconsciousness. Il It will be seen from the official table of immigration that the Russian Jew is only one and not even the largest of the fifty elements that, to the tune of nearly a million and a half a year, are being fused in the greatest “‘ Melting Pot”? the world has ever known ; but if he has been selected as the typical immigrant, it is because he alone of all the fifty has no home- 202 land. Some few other races, such as the Armenians, are almost equally devoid of political power, and, in consequence, equally obnoxious to massacre; but except the gipsy, whose essence is to be homeless, there is no other race—black, white, red, or yellow—that has not remained at least a majority of the population in some area of its own. ‘There is none, therefore, more in need of a land of liberty, none to whose future it is more vital that America should preserve that spirit of William Penn which President Wilson has so nobly characterised. And there is assuredly none which has more valuable elements to contribute to the ethnic and psychical amalgam of the people of to-morrow. The process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an all-round give-and- take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished. ‘Thus the intelligent reader will have remarked how the somewhat anti-Semitic Irish servant of the first act talks Yiddish herself in the fourth. Even as to the ultimate language of the United States, it is unreasonable to suppose that American, though fortunately protected by English literature, will not bear traces of the fifty languages now, being spoken side by side with it, and of which this play alone presents scraps in German, French, Russian, Yiddish, Irish, Hebrew, and Italian. That in the crucible of love, or even co-citizenship, the most violent antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity is a truth of both ethics and observation, and it was in order to present historic 203 enmities at their extremes that the persecuted Jew of Russia and the persecuting Russian race have been taken for protagonists— the fell incenséd points of mighty opposites.” The Jewish immigrant is, moreover, the toughest of all the white elements that have been poured into the American crucible, the race having, by its unique experience of several thousand years of exposure to alien majorities, developed a salamandrine power of survival. And this asbestoid fibre is made even more fireproof by the anti-Semitism of American uncivilisa- tion. Nevertheless, to suppose that America will remain permanently afflicted by all the old European diseases would be to despair of humanity, not to mention super-humanity. Ill Even the negrophobia is not likely to remain eternally at its present barbarous pitch. Mr. William Archer, who has won a new fame as student of that black problem, which is America’s nemesis for her ancient slave-raiding, and who favours the creation of a Black State as one of the United States, observes: ‘‘ It is noteworthy that neither David Quixano nor anyone else in the play makes the slightest reference to that inconvenient element in the crucible of God—the negro.” ‘This is an oversight of Mr. Archer’s, for Baron Revendal defends the Jew-baiting of Russia by asking of an American: ‘“‘ Don’t you lynch and roast your niggers ?”? And David Quixano expressly throws both “black and yellow” into the crucible. No 204. doubt there is an instinctive antipathy which tends to keep the white man free from black blood, though this antipathy having been overcome by a large minority in all the many periods and all the many countries of their contiguity, it is equally certain that there are at work forces of attraction as well as of repulsion, and that even upon the negro the “ Melting Pot” of America will not fail to act in a measure as it has acted on the Red Indian, who has found it almost as facile to mate with his white neighbours as with his black. Indeed, it is as much social prejudice as racial antipathy that to-day divides black and white in the New World; and Sir Sydney Olivier has recorded that in Jamaica the white is far more on his guard and his dignity against the half-white than against the all-black, while in Guiana, according to Sir Harry Johnston in his great work “‘ ‘The Negro in the New World,” it is the half-white that, in his turn, despises the black and succeeds in marrying still further white- wards. It might have been thought that the dark- white races on the northern shore of the Mediterranean —the Spaniards, Sicilians, &c.—who have already been crossed with the sons of Ham from its southern shore, would, among the American immigrants, be the natural links towards the fusion of white and black, but a similar instinct of pride and peril seems to hold them back. But whether the antipathy in America be a race instinct or a social prejudice, the accusations against the black are largely panic-born myths, for the alleged repulsive smell of the negro is consistent with being shaved by him, and the immorality of the negress is consistent with her control of the nurseries 205 of the South. The devil is not so black nor the black so devilish as he is painted. ‘This is not to deny that the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of countenance or that it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics, or that white and black are as yet too far apart for profitable fusion. Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a racial defence for the white as the counter-instinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black. But neither colour has suc- ceeded in monopolising all the virtues and graces in its specific evolution from the common ancestral ape, and a superficial acquaintance with the work of Dr. Arthur Keith teaches that if the black man is nearer the ape in some ways (having even the remains of throat- pouches), the white man is nearer in other ways (as in his greater hairiness). And besides being, as Sir Sydney Olivier says, ‘a matrix of emotional and spiritual energies that have yet to find their human expression,” the African negro has obviously already not a few valuable ethnic elements—joy of life, love of colour, keen senses, beautiful voice, and ear for music—contributions that might somewhat compensate for the dragging-down of the white and, in small doses at least, might one day prove a tonic to an anemic and art-less America. A musician like Coleridge-Taylor is no despicable product of the ‘‘ Melting Pot,” while the negroes of genius whom the writer has been privileged to know— men like Henry O. Tanner, the painter, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet—show the potentialities of the race even without white admixture; and as 206 | men of this stamp are capable of attracting cultured white wives, the fusing process, beginning at the top with types like these, should be far less unwelcome than that which starts with the dregs of both races. But the negroid hair and complexion being, in Men- delian language, ‘‘dominant,”’ these black traits are not easy to eliminate from the hybrid posterity ; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage. Blacks of this temper, however, would serve their race better by making Liberia a success or building up an American negro State, as Mr. William Archer recommends, or at least asserting their rights as American citizens in that sub-tropical South which without their labour could never have been opened up. Meantime, however scrupulously and justifiably America avoids physical intermarriage with the negro, the comic spirit cannot fail to note the spiritual miscegenation which, while clothing, com- mercialising, and Christianising the ex-African, has given “ rag-time ” and the sex-dances that go to it, first to white America and thence to the whole white world. The action of the crucible is thus not exclusively physical—a consideration particularly important as regards the Jew. ‘The Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic inter- action. 207 IV Among the Jews The Melting Pot, though it has in some instances served to interpret to each other the old generation and the new, has more frequently been misunderstood by both. While a distinguished Christian clergyman wrote that it was “‘ calculated to do for the Jewish race what ‘ Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for the coloured man,” the Jewish pulpits of America have resounded with denunciation of its supposed solution of the Jewish problem by dissolu- tion. As if even a play with a purpose could do more than suggest and interpret! It is true that its leading figure, David Quixano, advocates absorption in America, but even he is speaking solely of the American Jews and asks his uncle why, if he objects to the dissolving process, he did not work for a separate Jewish land. He is not offering a panacea for the Jewish problem, universally applicable. But he urges that the conditions offered to the Jew in America are without parallel throughout the world. And, in sooth, the Jew is here citizen of a republic without a State religion—a republic resting, moreover, on the same simple principles of justice and equal rights as the Mosaic Commonwealth from which the Puritan Fathers drew their inspiration. In America, therefore, the Jew, by a roundabout journey from Zion, has come into his own again. It is by no mere accident that when an inscription was needed for the colossal statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, that ‘“‘ Mother of Exiles”? whose torch lights the entrance to the New Jerusalem, the best expression 208 of the spirit of Americanism was found in the sonnet of the Jewess, Emma Lazarus: Give me your tirea, your puo7, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. And if, alas! passing through the golden door, the Jew finds his New Jerusalem as much a caricature by the crumbling of its early ideals as the old became by the fading of the visions of Isaiah and Amos, he may find his mission in fighting for the preservation of the original Hebraic pattern. In this fight he will not be alone, and intermarriage with his fellow- crusaders in the new Land of Promise will naturally follow wherever, as with David Quixano and Vera Revendal, no theological differences divide. ‘There will be neither Jew nor Greek. Intermarriage, wherever there is social intimacy, will follow, even when the parties stand in opposite religious camps; but this is less advisable as leading to a house divided against itself and to dissension in the upbringing of the children. It is only when a common outlook has been reached, transcending the old doctrinal differ- ences, that intermarriage is denuded of those latent discords which the instinct of mankind divines, and which keep even Catholic and Protestant wisely apart. These discords, together with the prevalent anti- Semitism and his own ingrained persistence, tend to preserve the Jew even in the “ Melting Pot,” so that his dissolution must be necessarily slower than that of 200 © the similar aggregations of Germans, Italians, or Poles. But the process for all is the same, however tempered by specific factors. Beginning as broken-ofi bits of Germany, Italy, or Poland, with newspapers and theatres in German, Italian, or Polish, these colonies - gradually become Americanised, their vernaculars, even when jealously cherished, become a mere medium for American conceptions of life; while in the third generation the child is ashamed both of its parents and their lingo, the newspapers dwindle in circulation, the theatres languish. ‘The reality of this process has been denied by no less distinguished an American than Dr. Charles Eliot, ex-President of Harvard Univer- sity, whose prophecy of Jewish solidarity in America and of the contribution of Judaism to the world’s future is more optimistic than my own. Dr. Eliot points to the still unmelted heaps of racial matter, without suspecting—although he is a chemist—that their semblance of solidity is only kept up by the constant immigration of similar atoms to the base to replace those liquefied at the apex. Once America slams her doors, the crucible will roar like a closed furnace. Heaven forbid, however, that the doors shall be slammed for centuries yet. The notion that the few millions of people in America have a moral right to exclude others is monstrous. Exclusiveness may have some justification in countries, especially when old and well-populated; but for continents like the United States—or for the matter of that Canada and Australia—to mistake themselves for mere countries is an intolerable injustice to the rest of the human race. 210 The exclusion of criminals even is as impossible in practice as the exclusion of the sick and ailing is unchristian. Infinitely more important were it to keep the gates of birth free from undesirables. As for the exclusion of the able-bodied, whether illiterate or literate, that is sheer economic madness in so empty a continent, especially with the Panama Canal to divert them to the least developed States. Fortunately, any serious restriction will avenge itself not only by the stagnation of many of the States, but by the paralysis of the great liners which depend on steerage passengers, without whom freights and fares will rise and saloon passengers be docked of their sailing facilities. Mean- time the inquisition at Ellis Island has to its account cruelties no less atrocious than the ancient Spanish— cruelties that only flash into momentary prominence when some luxurious music-hall lady of dubious morals has a taste of the barbarities meted out daily to blameless and hard-working refugees from oppression or hunger, who, having staked their all on the great adventure, find themselves hustled back, penniless and heartbroken, to the Old World. V Whether any country will ever again be based like those of the Old World upon a unity of race or religion is a matter of doubt. New England, of course, like Pennsylvania and Maryland, owes its incep- tion to religion, but the original impulse has long been submerged by purely economic pressures. And the same motley immigration from the Old World 211 is building up the bulk of the coming countries. At most, the dominant language gives a semblance of unity and serves to attract a considerable stream of immigrants who speak it, as of Portuguese to Brazil, Spaniards to the Argentine. But the chief magnet remains economic, for Brazil draws six times as many Italians as Portuguese, and the Argentine two and a half times as many Italians as Spanish. It may be urged, of course, that the Italian gravitation to these countries is still a matter of race, and that, in the absence of an El Dorado of his own, the Italian is attracted towards States that are at least Latin. But though Brazil and the Argentine be predominantly Latin, the minority of Germans, Austrians, and Swiss is by no means insignificant. The great modern steamship, in fact—supplemented by its wandering and seductive agent—is playing the part in the world formerly played by invasions and crusades, while the “economic ”’ immigrant 1s more and more replacing the refugee, just as the purely commercial company working under native law is replacing the Chartered Company which was a law to itself. How small a part in the modern movement is played by patriotism proper may be seen from the avidity with which the farmers of the United States cross the borders to Canada to obtain the large free holdings which enable them to sell off their American properties. How little the proudest tradition counts against the environment is shown in the shame felt by Argentine-born children for the English spoken by their British parents. The difference in the method of importing the ingredients makes thus no difference to the action of 212 the crucible. Though the peoples now in process of formation in the New World are being recruited by mainly economic forces, it may be predicted they will ultimately harden into homogeneity of race, if not even of belief. For internationalism in religion seems to be again receding in favour of national religions (if, indeed, these were ever more than superficially superseded), at any rate in favour of nationalism raised into religion. If racial homogeneity has not yet been evolved completely even in England—and, of course, the tendency can never be more than asymptotic—it is because cheap and easy transport and communication, with freedom of economic movement, have been late developments and are still far from perfect. Hence, there has never been a thorough shake-up and admix- ture of elements, so that certain counties and corners have retained types and breeds peculiar to them. But with the ever-growing interconnection of all parts of the country, and with the multiplication of labour bureaux, these breeds and types will be—alas, for local colour !—increasingly absorbed in the general mass. For fusion and unification are part of the historic life-process. ‘‘ Normans and Saxons and Danes ”’ are we here in England, yes and Huguenots and Flemings and Gascons and Angevins and Jews and many other things. In fact, according to Sir Harry Johnston, there is hardly an ethnic element that has not entered into the Englishman, including even the missing link, as the Piltdown skull would seem to testify. ‘The earlier discovery at Galley Hill showed Britannia rising from 213 the apes with an extinct Tasmanian type, not unlike the surviving aboriginal Australian. ‘Then the west o? Britain was invaded by a negroid type from France followed by an Eskimo type of which traces are still tc be seen in the West of Ireland and parts of Scotland. Next came the true Mediterranean white man, the Iberian, with dark hair and eyes and a white skin ; and then the round-headed people of the Bronze Age, probably Asiatic. And then the Gael, the long- headed, fair-haired Aryan, who ruled by iron and whose Keltic vocabulary was tinged with Iberian, and who was followed by the Brython or Belgian. And, at some unknown date, we have to allow for the invasion of North Britain by another Germanic type, the Caledonian, which would seem to have been a Norse stock, foreshadowing the later Norman Conquest. And, as if this mish-mash was not confusion enough, came to make it worse confounded the Roman conquerors, trailing like a mantle of many colours the subject-races of their far-flung Empire. Is it wonderful if the crucible, capable of fusing such a motley of types into “ the true-born Briton,” should be melting up its Jews like old silver? The comparison belongs to Mr. Walkley, who was more moved by the beauty of the old and the pathos of its passing than by the resplendence of the new, and who seemed to forget that it is for the dramatist to register both impartially—their conflict constituting another of those spiritual duels which are peculiarly his affair. Jews are, unlike negroes, a ‘‘ recessive’ type, whose physical traits tend to disappear in the blended off- spring. ‘There does not exist in England to-day a 214 single representative of the Jewish families whom Cromwell admitted, though their lineage may be traced in not a few noble families. ‘Thus every country has been and is a “* Melting Pot.”? But America, exhibiting the normal fusing process magnified many thousand diameters and diversified beyond all historic experience, and fed not by successive waves of immigra- tion but by a hodge-podge of simultaneous hordes, is, in Bacon’s phrase, an ‘‘ ostensive instance” of a universal phenomenon. America is the ‘‘ Melting rots? Her people has already begun to take on such a complexion of its own, it is already so emphatically tending to a new race, crossed with every European type, that the British illusion of a cousinly Anglo- Saxon people with whom war is unthinkable is sheer wilful blindness. Even to-day, while the mixture is still largely mechanical not chemical, the Anglo-Saxon element is only preponderant ; it is very far from being the sum total. VI While our sluggish and sensual English stage has resisted and even burked the writer’s attempt to express in terms of the theatre our European problems of war and religion, and to interpret through art the “‘vears of the modern, years of the unperformed,” it remains to be acknowledged with gratitude that this play, designed to bring home to America both its comparative rawness and emptiness and its true significance and potentiality for history and civilisa- tion, has been universally acclaimed by Americans 215 as a revelation of Americanism, despite that it contains only one native-born American character, and that a bad one. Played throughout the length and breadth of the States since its original production in 1908, given, moreover, in Universities and Women’s Colleges, passing through edition after edition in book form, cited by preachers and journalists, politicians and Presidential candidates, even calling into existence a ‘“* Melting Pot”? Club in Boston, it has had the happy fortune to contribute its title to current thought, and, in the testimony of Jane Addams, to “ perform a great service to America by reminding us of the high hopes of the founders of the Republic.” Lee Fanuary 1914. Printed in the United States of America. AN t ie at Wes rs Ay) he Agr yy HS ti AN \ Ke ae dy te i : Mad t ye i ve’ i han Ue if] | Bd (4 i hit d o iy! tail) AN Ye ie Pell 4) he At iH } Hci nt } H PAY, Wa i hide / ii rian aii ee yy Nat ip at A A Cea WH ite eM de TRA AT Tiny Weer eee i 1} Aleut a th wht vice hy Oh) Bi WA CHOSEN PEOPLES Being The First ‘‘Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture’”’ delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Easter- 1918 Passover Sunday, ae a 0) ony i A ae TO MRS. REDCLIFFE N. SALAMAN THIS LITTLE BOOK IN HER FATHER’S MEMORY NOTE HE Arthur Davis Memorial Lec- ah ture was founded in 1917, under the auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England, by his collaborators in the translation of “The Service of the Syna- gogue,” with the object of fostering He- braic thought and learning in honour of an unworldly scholar. The Lecture is to be given annually in the anniversary week of his death, and the lectureship is to be open to men or women of any race or creed, who are to have absolute liberty in the treat- ment of their subject. FOREWORD Mr. Arthur Davis, in whose memory has been founded the series of Lectures de- voted to the fostering of Hebraic thought and learning, of which this is the first, was born in 1846 and died on the first day of Passover, 1906. His childhood was spent in the town of Derby, where there was then no Synagogue or Jewish minister or teacher of Hebrew. Spontaneously he developed a strong Jewish consciousness, and an enthusiasm for the Hebrew lan- guage, which led him to become one of its greatest scholars in this, or any other, country. He was able to put his learning to good 9 10 Foreword use. He observed the wise maxim of Leonardo da Vinci, “Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.” He was not one of those learned men, of whom there are many examples—a recent and conspicuous instance was the late Lord Acton—whose minds are so choked with the accumulations of the knowledge they have absorbed that they can produce little or nothing. His output, though not prolific, was substantial. In middle life he wrote a volume on “The Hebrew Ac- cents of the Twenty-one Books of the Bible,” which has become a classical au- thority on that somewhat recondite sub- ject. It was he who originated and planned the new edition of the Festival Prayer Book in six volumes, and he wrote most of the prose translations. When he Foreword 11 died, though only two volumes out of the six had been published, he left the whole of the text complete. To Mr. Herbert M. Adler, who had been his collaborator from the beginning, fell the finishing of the great editorial task. Not least of his services lay in the fact that he had transmitted much of his know]l- edge to his two daughters, who have worthily continued his tradition of He- brew scholarship and culture. Arthur Davis’s life work, then, was that of a student and interpreter of Hebrew. It is a profoundly interesting fact that, in our age, movements have been set on foot in more than one direction for the revival of languages which were dead or dying. We see before our eyes Welsh and Irish in process of being saved from extinction, 12 Foreword with the hope perhaps of restoring their ancient glories in poetry and prose.. Such movements show that our time is not so utilitarian and materialistic as is often sup- posed. A similar revivifying process is affecting Hebrew. For centuries it has been preserved as a ritual language, shel- tered within the walls of the Synagogue; often not fully understood, and never spoken, by the members of the congrega- tions. Now it is becoming in Palestine once more a living and spoken language. Hebrew is one example among many of a language outliving for purposes of ritual its use in ordinary speech. A ritual is regarded as a sacred thing, unchanging, and usually unchangeable, except as the result of some great religious upheaval. The language in which it is framed con- Foreword 13 tinues fixed, amid the slowly developing conditions of the workaday world. Often, indeed, the use of an ancient language, which has gradually fallen into disuse among the people, is deliberately main- tained for the air of mystery and of awe which is conveyed by its use, and which has something of the same effect upon the intellect as the “dim religious light” of a cathedral has upon the emotions. Fur- ther, it reserves to the priesthood a kind of esoteric knowledge, which gives them an additional authority that they would desire to maintain. So we find that in the days of Marcus Aurelius an ancient Salian liturgy was used in the Roman temples which had become almost unin- telligible to the worshippers. The ritual of the religion of Isis in Greece was, at 14 Foreword the same period, conducted in an unknown tongue. In the present age Church Slavonic, the ecclesiastical language of the orthodox Slavs, is only just intelligible to the peasantry of Russia and the neigh- bouring Slav countries. The Buddhists of China conduct their services in Sanscrit, which neither the monks nor the people un- derstand, and the services of the Buddhists in Japan are either in Sanscrit or in an- cient Chinese. I believe it is a fact that in Abyssinia, again, the liturgy is in a lan- guage called Geez, which is no longer in use as a living tongue and is not under- stood. But we need not go to earlier centuries or to distant countries for examples. In any Roman Catholic church in London to- day you will find the service conducted in Foreword 15 a language which, if understood at all by the general body of the congregation, has been learnt by them only for the purnoses of the liturgy. Of all these ritual languages which have outlived their current use and have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, so far as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs of re- newing its old vitality—like the roses of Jericho which appear to be dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover their vitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again in Palestine Hebrew may recover something of its old supremacy in the field of morals and of intellect. To render this possible the work of scholars such as Arthur Davis has con- 16 Foreword tributed. To him this was a labour of love, and for love. He would receive no payment for any of his religious work or writings. Part of the profits that accrued from the publication of his edition of ““The Services of the Synagogue” has been de- voted to the formation of a fund from which will be defrayed the expenses—after the first—of a series of annual lectures on subjects of Jewish interest, to be de- livered by men of various schools of thought. We are fortunate that the ini- tial lecture is to be delivered to-day by the most distinguished of living Jewish men of letters. Arthur Davis was a man of much eleva- tion and charm of character. He took an active part in the work of communal, and particularly educational, organizations. Foreword 17 He was one of those men—not rare among Jews, though the rest of the world does not always recognize it—who are philan- thropic in spirit, practical in action, mod- est, self-sacrificing, devoted to a fine family life, having in them much of the student and something even of the saint. It is fitting that his memory should be kept alive. HERBERT SAMUEL. \ fy Wy i) ovat Wi ROMANS Nine? a ia \ fy » An CHOSEN PEOPLES i - ‘ { x 4 { Mf is i y ¢ . i aa 4 ‘ n Y —,, “ys = i ri ’ ae ei N nl ’ ’ = . 4 é ; ' i i - ’ Oh | «J! H ™ ‘ 2 j * - ) i ie ena? ey, Pia ee CHOSEN PEOPLES I HE claim that the Jews are a “Chosen People” has always irri- tated the Gentiles. “From olden times,” wrote Philostratus in the third century, “the Jews have been opposed not only to Rome but to the rest of humanity.” Even Julian the Apostate, who designed to rebuild their Temple, raged at the doc- trine of their election. Sinai, said the Rabbis with a characteristic pun, has evoked Sinah (hatred). In our own day, the distinguished ethi- cal teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit, complains, 21 22 Chosen Peoples like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked and blighted all other na- tional inspiration: in his book “The Soul of America,” he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally ‘the claim to spiritual supremacy over all the peoples of the world.” The recent revelation of racial arro- gance in Germany has provided our ene- mies with a new weapon. “Germanism is Judaism,” says a writer in the Ameri- can Bookman. 'The proposition contains just that dash of truth which is more dan- gerous than falsehood undiluted; and the saying ascribed to Von Tirpitz in 1915 that the Kaiser spent all his time praying and studying Hebrew may serve to give it colour. “‘As he talks to-day at Pots- > dam and Berlin,” says Verhaeren, in his Chosen Peoples 23 book “Belgium’s Agony,” “the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thou- sand years ago at Jerusalem.” The chronology is characteristic of anti-Sem- itic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrew reckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings of Jerusalem were not Jewish. But it is undeniable that Germanism, like Juda- ism, has evolved a doctrine of special elec- tion. Spiritual in the teaching of Fichte and Treitschke, the doctrine became gross and narrow in the Deutsche Religion of Friedrich Lange. ‘The German people is the elect of God and its enemies are the enemies of the Lord.” And this Ger- man God, like the popular idea of Jeho- vah, is a “Man of War’ who demands “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” and cries with savage sublimity :-— 24 Chosen Peoples I will render vengeance to Mine adversaries, And will recompense them that hate Me, I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood, And my sword shall devour flesh. Judaism has even its Song of Hate, ac- companied on the timbrel by Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is a byword. “We utterly destroyed every city,” Deuteron- omy declares; “the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of the cities.” David, who is promised of God that his seed shall be enthroned for ever, slew sur- rendered Moabites in cold blood, and Judas Maccabeeus, the other warrior hero of the race, when the neutral city of Eph- ron refused his army passage, took the city, slew every male in it, and passed Chosen Peoples 25 across its burning ruins and_ bleeding bodies. The prophet Isaiah pictures the wealth of nations—the phrase is his, not Adam Smith’s—streaming to Zion by argosy and caravan. “For that nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish. ... Aliens shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee. Thou shalt suck the milk of na- tions.” “The Lord said unto me,” says the second Psalm, “Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of Me and I will give the nations for thine inher- itance. . . . Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron.” Nor are such ideas discarded by the synagogue of to-day. Every Saturday night the orthodox Jew repeats the prayer for material prosperity and the promise of 26 Chosen Peoples ultimate glory: “Thou shalt lend unto many nations but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many nations but they shall not rule over thee.” “Our Father, our King,” he prays at the New Year, “avenge before our eyes the blood of Thy servants that has been spilt.” And at the Passover Seder Service he still re- peats the Psalmist’s appeal to God to pour out His wrath on the heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwell- ing. “Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord?’ II UCH might, of course, be adduced M to mitigate the seeming ferocity or egotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia, which Napoleon wittily described as “hatched from a can- non-ball,” should be found really resem- bling Judea, whose national greeting was “Peace”; whose prophet Ezekiel pro- claimed in words of flame and thunder God’s judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity; whose medieval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might be almost a contemporary pic- ture of a brazen autocracy “that planned in secret, performed in daring.” And, as 27 28 Chosen Peoples a matter of fact, some of these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework: the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is to be avenged is the blood of martyrs “who went through fire and water for the sanctifica- tion of Thy name.” But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore—as completely as Jesus did—that the legal penalty of “eye for eye” had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? “Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!” When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren Chosen Peoples 29 or a Maeterlinck over Belgium and not of a medieval Jew over the desolated home of Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she would like to kill every German—man or woman—with her own hand! And here we see the absurdity of judg- ing the Bible outside its historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James Hinton, “The Bible needs inter- preting by Nature even as Nature by it.” And it is by this canon that we must in- terpret the concept of a Chosen People, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can give us the clue to the Bible. ‘This is the only “Guide to the Perplexed,” and Maimonides but made 30 Chosen Peoples confusion worse confounded when by alle- gations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the effort of Manasseh ben Israel to recon- cile it with itself. The Baraitha of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrep- ant a third text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that distorted dialectic known as Pilpul. ‘The only true “Conciliador” is history, the only real rec- onciler human nature. An allegorizmg rationalism like Rambam’s leads nowhere —or rather everywhere. The same method that softened the Oriental amor- ousness of “The Song of Solomon”’ into an allegory of God’s love for Israel be- came, in the hands of Christianity, an al- legory of Christ’s love for His Church. Chosen Peoples 31 But if Reason cannot always—as Bachya imagined—con/jirm tradition, it can ex- plain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strands from the higher in that motley collection of national literature which, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked with strayed frag- ments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to the apocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesi- astes of even a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism when put forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward as uniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the people that produced and pre- served and the Synagogue that selected and canonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because occasionally amid 32 Chosen Peoples the organ-music of its Miltons and Words- worths there is heard the primeval saga- note of heroic savagery. III S Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his A “Biblical Archeology” and as Sir James Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual is permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides himself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a purer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and gradually rose be- yond them. And it was the same with concepts as with practices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of cen- turies of spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly beyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testa- 33 34 Chosen Peoples ment, even as it has replaced polygamy by monogamy. ‘That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God re- bukes the angels who wished to join in the song. “How can ye sing when My crea- tures are perishing?” ‘The very miracles of the Old Testament were side-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special creations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went its course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages, is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of the soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven inter- fered with the voting on a legal point, en mashgichin be-bathkol—“We cannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah Chosen Peoples 35 is for earth, not heaven” —was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason and the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the era of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoher- ence of the Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking. Post-bib- lical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal- Shem its St. Francis. But it has been at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never to have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a reverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the masses, whose mentality would in any case have trans- formed the new back again to the old. 36 Chosen Peoples Thus it has carried its whole lumber pi- ously forward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, “a veritable museum of relics,” or as whales have ves- tiges of hind legs with now immovable muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had begun to evolve “the service of the Synagogue,” but it did not shed the animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the destruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs substitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the ages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the Jehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of pop- ular imagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing Israel was only equalled by its bad taste, Chosen Peoples 37 it would not follow that Judaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago. The truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament that is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by Judaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so satu- rated with the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for universal salvation, that the more material prophe- cies—evoked moreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved to foretell restoration and glory—are prac- tically swamped. At the worst, we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are in the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to understand 38 Chosen Peoples the paradox of the junction of Israel’s glory with God’s, if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are rarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own individual success or at least in- dividual importance. Even Jesus looked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the right hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the balance of motives been cast so over- whelmingly on the side of idealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate serves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When he brought the Roman ensigns with Cesar’s effigies to Jerusalem, the Jews so wearied him with their petitions to remove Chosen Peoples 39 this defiling deification that at last he sur- rounded the petitioners with soldiers and menaced them with immediate death un- less they ceased to pester and went home. “But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their necks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed.” And Pilate, touched, removed the effigies. Sucha story explains at once how the Jews could pro- duce Jesus and why they could not wor- ship him. “God’s witnesses,” “a light of the na- 39 66 99 <6 tions,” “a suffering servant,” “a kingdom of priests’—the old Testament metaphors for Israel’s mission are as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur are unparalleled in literature 40 Chosen Peoples for their fusion of ethical passion with poetical beauty. ‘Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of Isaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of the Bible we owe to America.) Behold My servant whom I uphold; Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth; I have put My spirit upon him, _ He shall make the right to go forth to the na- tions : He shall not fail or be crushed Till he have set the right on the earth, And the isles shall wait for his teaching. Thus saith God the LORD, He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth, He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it, He that giveth bread unto the people upon it, And spirit to them that walk therein: I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, And have taken hold of thy hand, And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, Chosen Peoples 41 For a light of the nations; To open the blind eyes, To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, And them that sit in darkness out of the prison- house. Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all civilization. “Let justice well up as waters and righteous- ness as a mighty stream.” “Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall there be war any more.” Nor does this mission march always with the pageantry of external triumph. “Despised and forsaken of men,” Isaiah paints Israel. “Yet he bore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors ... with his_ stripes we were healed.” Happily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or Matthew Ar- A2 Chosen Peoples nold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that this ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less un- derstood of the world. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast chosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law.” Here is no choice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that “from Zion shall the Law go forth”’ it is obvious what that servant’s task is to be. “What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of Israel,’ says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love con- sist? Is it that we have been pampered, cosseted? ‘The contrary. “A Law, and commandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us.” Before these were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records, Israel was explicitly in- Chosen Peoples 43 formed that only by obedience to them could he enjoy peculiar favour. “Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.” A chosen people is really a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert that the Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israel accepted the yoke. How far the discipline of the Law ac- tually produced the Chosen People postu- lated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr. Lucien Wolf once urged that “the yoke of the Torah” had fashioned a racial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages over aver- AA, Chosen Peoples age humanity, as well as_ sociological superiorities of temperance and family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and brain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to invite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen. But whether this general superiority—a superiority not inconsistent with grave failings and draw- backs—is due to the rigorous selection of a tragic history, or whether it is, as Ana- tole Leroy-Beaulieu maintains, the herit- age of a civilization older by thousands of years than that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the people, or the people—precisely because of its greatness—made the Torah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial election to study, it is not in any self-suf- Chosen Peoples 45 ficient superiority or aim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic altruism. The old Hebrew writers in- _ deed—when one considers the impress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, and imagination of the world—might well be credited with the intuition of genius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And the Jews of to- day in attributing to themselves that quality would have the ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless that election is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely for world- service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when fashioned was exiled and scat- tered like wind-borne seeds, and of the consummation of which his ultimate re- patriation and glory will be but the sym- 46 Chosen Peoples bol. It is with Alenw that every service ends—the prayer for the coming of the Kingdom of God, “when Thou wilt re- move the abominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the King- dom of the Almighty and all the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the earth. . . . In that day the Lord shall be One and His name One.” Israel disappears altogether in this diurnal aspiration. IV SRAEL disappears, too, in whole I books of the Old Testament. What has the problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism of Ecclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter would scarcely have had so uni- versal an appeal had it been essentially rooted in a race. In the magnificent cosmic poem of Psalm civ—half Whitman, half St. Francis—not only his fellow-man but all creation comes under the benediction of the Hebrew poet’s mood. “The high hills are for the wild goats; the rocks are a 47 48 Chosen Peoples refuge for the conies ... The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God . . . man goeth forth unto his work, and to his labour until the eve- ning.” Even in amore primitive Hebrew poet the same cosmic universalism reveals itself. ‘To the bard of Genesis the rain- bow betokens not merely a covenant be- tween God and man but a “covenant be- tween God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” That the myth of the tribalism of the Jewish God should persist in face of such passages can only be explained by the fact that He shares in the unpopularity of His people. Mr. Wells, for example, in his finely felt but intellectually incoher- ent book, “God the Invisible King,” dis- misses Him as a malignant and par- Chosen Peoples 49 tisan Deity,” jealous and pettily stringent. At most one is entitled to say with Mr. Israel Abrahams in his profound little _ book on “Judaism” that “God, in the early literature a tribal, non-moral Deity, was in the later literature a righteous ruler, who, with Amos and Hosea, loved and de- manded righteousness in man,” and that there was an expansion from a national to auniversal Ruler. Butif “by early litera- ture” anybody understand simply Genesis, if he imagines that the evolutionary move- ment in Judaism proceeds regularly from Abraham to Isaiah, he is grossly in error. No doubt all early gods are tribal, all early religions connected with the hearth and ancestor worship, but the God of Isaiah is already in Genesis, and the tribal God has to be exhumed from practically all 50 Chosen Peoples parts of the Bible. But even in the crudities of Genesis or Judges that have escaped editorship I cannot find Mr. Wells’s “malignant” Deity—He is ? really “the invisible King.” The very first time Jehovah appears in His tribal aspect (Genesis xii.) His promise to bless Abraham ends with the assurance— and it almost invariably accompanies all the repetitions of the promise—“And in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” Nay, as I pointed out in my essay on “The Gods of Germany,” the very first words of the Bible, “In the be- ginning God created the heaven and the earth,” strike a magnificent note of uni- versalism, which is sustained in the deriva- tion of all humanity from Adam, and again from Noah, with one original lan- Chosen Peoples 51 guage. Nor is this a modern gloss, for the Talmud already deduces the interpre- tation. Racine’s “Esther” in the noble lines lauded by Voltaire might be almost -rebuking Mr. Wells:— Ce Dieu, maitre absolu de la terre et des cieux, N’est point tel que l’erreur le figure 4 vos yeux: L’Eternel est son nom, le monde est son ouv- rage ; I] entend les soupirs de ’humble qu’on outrage, Juge tous les mortels avec d’égales lois, Et du haut de son trdéne interroge les rois. —there is the true Hebrew note, the note denounced of Nietzsche. Is this notorious “tribal God” the God of the Mesopotamian sheikh whose seed was so invidiously chosen? Well, but of this God Abraham asks—in what I must continue to call the epochal sentence in the Bible—‘‘Shall not the Judge of all the 52 Chosen Peoples earth do right?’ Abraham, in fact, bids God down as in some divine Dutch auc- tion—Sodom is not to be destroyed if it holds fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, nay ten righteous men. Com- pare this ethical development of the an- cestor of Judaism with that of Pope Gregory XIII, in the sixteenth century, some thirty-one centuries later: Civitas ista potest esse destrui quando in ea plures sunt heretici (“A city may be destroyed when it harbours a number of heretics’). And this claim of man to criticize God Jehovah freely concedes. Thus the God of Abraham is no God of a tribe, but, like the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nine- teenth-century Martineau, “the seat of - Chosen Peoples 58 authority in Religion” has passed to the human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and the peo- ple He designs to destroy. “Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, For evil did He bring them forth to slay them in the mountains .. .? Turn from Thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil against Thy people.” Moses goes on to remind Him of the covenant, “And the Lord re- pented of the evil which He said He would do unto His people.”’ In the same chap- ter, the people having made a golden calf, Moses offers his life for their sin; the Old 54 Chosen Peoples Testament here, as in so many places, an- ticipating the so-called New, but rejecting the notion of vicarious atonement so dras- tically that the attempt of dogmatic Chris- tianity to base itself on the Old Testa- ment can only be described as text-blind. And the great answer of Jehovah to Moses’s questionng—‘“I AM THAT I AM’’—yields already the profound meta- physical Deity of Maimonides, that “in- visible King’? whom the anonymous New Year liturgist celebrates as: Highest divinity, Dynast of endlessness, Timeless resplendency, Worshipped eternally, Lord of Infinity! And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and that Chosen Peoples 55 “a mixed multitude” went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows that the narrow tribal- ism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the re- grettable rejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity; while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of “Ruth,” with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite woman, is an index that univer- salism was still unconquered. We have, in fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces, and what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph of the latter is that the race being one with the religion could not resist that religion’s universal implications. I?f there were only a single God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He be confined to Israel? The Mission could 56 Chosen Peoples not but come. ‘The true God, urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through idols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind seekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been the governing principle in Jewish history. “T do not know the origin of the term Jew,” says Dion Cassius, born in the sec- ond century. “The name is used, how- ever, to designate all who observe the cus- toms of this people, even though they be of different race.” Where indeed lay the privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined a non-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah as greater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila and Theodotion, each of whom made a Greek Chosen Peoples 57 version of the Bible; while the orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless accompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte Onkelos. The disagreeable ref- erences to proselytes in Rabbinic litera- ture, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesque conception of their status towards their former families, can- not counterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work, “The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans,” that there was a carefully planned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell the Pharisees: “Yecompass sea and land to make one proselyte’? Do not Juvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeans proselytised al- most by force? “The Sabbath and the 58 Chosen Peoples Jewish fasts,” says Lecky, doubtless fol- lowing Josephus, “became familiar facts in all the great cities.’ And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion, which Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatest documents, declares in noble language: “There ought to be but one Temple for one God ... and this Temple common to all men, because He is the common God of all men.” It would be a very tough tribal God that could survive worshippers of this temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there were seventy sacrifices of- fered for the seventy nations. For the medieval and rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcely exists—even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Con- queror, whose success will be the test of Chosen Peoples 59 his genuineness. And Spinoza—though he, of course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper—refused to see in the Jew any superiority save of the sociological system for ensuring his eter- nity. The comparatively modern Chas- sidism, anticipating Mazzini, teaches that every nation and language has a special channel through which it receives God’s gifts. Of contemporary Reform Juda- ism, the motto ‘Have we not one father, hath not one God created us?” was for- mally adopted as the motto of the Con- gress of Religions at Washington. “The forces of democracy are Israel,” cries the American Jew, David Lubin, in an ultra- modern adaptation of the Talmudic scale of values. There is, in fact, through our post-biblical literature almost a note of 60 Chosen Peoples apology for the assumption of the Divine mission: perhaps it is as much the off- spring of worldly prudence as of spiritual progress. ‘The Talmud observed that the Law was only given to Israel because he was so peculiarly fierce he needed curbing. Abraham Ibn Daud at the beginning of the twelfth century urged that God had to reveal Himself to some nation to show that He did not hold Himself aloof from the universe, leaving its rule to the stars: it is the very argument as to the need for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his “Foundations of Belief.” Crescas, in the fourteenth century, declared—like an earlier Buckle—that the excellence of the Jew sprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his recent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, al- Chosen Peoples 61 leges that when Rabbi Akiba called the Jews “Sons of God” he meant only that all other nations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said—what indeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards. In the words of Hosea: When Israel was a child, then I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son. | No evidence of the universalism of Israel’s mission can away with the fact that it was still his mission, the mission of a Chosen People. And this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literature and broidering itself with an Oriental exuber- ance of legendary fantasy, poetic or puer- ile, takes on in places an intimacy, some- times touching in its tender mysticism, 62 Chosen Peoples sometimes almost grotesque in its crude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation are bound up with His people’s, and that He must not go too far in His chastisements lest the heathen mock. Reversed, this apprehen- sion produced the concept of the Chillul Hashem, “the profanation of the Name.” Israel, in his turn, was in honour bound not to lower the reputation of the Deity, who had chosen him out. On the con- trary, he was to promote the Kiddush Hashem “the sanctification of the Name.” Thus the doctrine of election made not for arrogance but for a sense of Noblesse oblige. As the “Hymn of Glory” recited at New Year says in a more poetic sense: “His glory is on me and mine on Him.” “He loves His people,” says the hymn, Chosen Peoples 63 “and inhabits their praises.” Indeed, ac- cording to Schechter, the ancient Rabbis actually conceived God as existing only through Israel’s continuous testimony and ceasing were Israel—per impossibile—to disappear. It is a mysticism not without affinity to Mr. Wells’s. A Chassidic Rabbi, quoted by Mr. Wassilevsky, teaches in the same spirit that God and Israel, like Father and Son, are each in- complete without the other. In another passage of Hosea—a passage recited at the everyday winding of phylacteries— the imagery is of wedded lovers. “I will betroth thee unto Me for ever, Yea I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness and in Judgment and in loving-kindness and in mercy.” But it is in the glowing, poetic soul of 64 Chosen Peoples Jehuda Ha-Levi that this election of Israel, like the passion for Palestine, finds its supreme and uncompromising expres- sion. ‘Israel,’ declares the author of the “Cuzari’ in a famous dictum, “is among the nations like the heart among the limbs.” Do not imagine he referred to the heart as a pump, feeding the veins of the nations—Harvey was still five cen- turies in the future—he meant the heart as the centre of feeling and the symbol of the spirit. And examining the question why Israel had been thus chosen, he de- clares plumply that it is as little worthy of consideration as why the animals had not been created men. ‘This is, of course, the only answer. The wind of creation and inspiration bloweth where it listeth. As Chosen Peoples 65 Tennyson said in a similar connection: And if it is so, so it is, you know, And if it be so, so be it! V UT although, as with all other mani- festations of genius, Science cannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it can show us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in consider- ing yourself a Chosen People—as indeed the accusation with which we began re- minds us. And it can show us that a na- tion’s assignment of a mission to itself is not a sudden growth. “Unlike any other nation,” says the learned and _ saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in his article on “Chosen People’ in the Jewish Encyclopedia, “the Jewish people began their career conscious of their life- 66 Chosen Peoples 67 purpose and world-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religious truth.” This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theory that its author was ex- pounding the biblical standpoint, and not his own, can it be reconciled with his gen- eral doctrine of progress and evolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to ac- cept the Sinaitic Covenant as a literal epi- sode, and even to synchronise the Mission with it. But an investigation of the his- tory of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic sum- mary of the national genius for religion, a sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other nations must have been evolved still later. ‘The conception or feeling of a mission grew up and was 68 Chosen Peoples developed by slow degrees,” says Mr. Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said, history is the sole clue to the Bible—history, which ac- cording to Bacon, is “philosophy teaching by example.” And the more modern the history is, and the nearer in time, the bet- ter we can understand it. We have be- fore our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest of nations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblest mission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another great prophet—sprung like Amos from the people—through Abraham Lincoln, America had already swept away slavery. I do not know ex- actly when she began to call herself ““God’s own country,” but her National Anthem, “My Country, ’tis of thee,” dating from Chosen Peoples 69 1832, fixes the date when America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814, consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle rhetoric. The Pil- grim Fathers went to America merely for their own freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called “The Melting Pot,” with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the world at large. The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history. That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach undaunted and indomitable, be- 70 _ Chosen Peoples gan with that mere insular patriotism which finds such moving expression in the pean of Shakespeare: This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, Thissiend of aa Heap soune this deans dear land. This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and at first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon developed an assurance of special protection—“‘‘the favour of the love of Heaven,” wrote Milton in his “Areo- pagitica,” “we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us’—was tempered Chosen Peoples re by that humility still to be seen in the liturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might of the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred and twenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Eliza- bethan translators of the Bible called “Our Sion,” and whose mission, accord- ing to Milton, had been to sound forth “the first tidings and trumpet of reforma- tion to all Europe,” had sunk to the swag- gering militarism that found expression in “Rule, Britannia.” When Britain first at Heaven’s command Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain: Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves. 72 Chosen Peoples The nations not so blest as thee Must in their turn to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish, great and free, The dread and envy of them all. To thee belongs the rural reign, Thy cities shall with commerce shine: All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles, thine. It is the true expression of its period— a period which Sir John Seeley in his “Ex- pansion of England” characterizes as the period of the struggle with France for the possession of India and the New World: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France had replaced Spain in that great com- petition of the five western maritime States of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeley sums up the bulk of two centuries of European history. Chosen Peoples 73 Well may Mr. Chesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an Old Testament sense of being “an- swered in stormy oracles of air and sea” lowered Englishmen into a Chosen Peo- ple. Shakespeare saw the sea serving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be the high-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 the Kast India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 is founded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. It helps us to un- derstand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated in the atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in 1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of the Bible. In Cromwell, that typical Englishman, 74 | Chosen Peoples these two strands of impulse are seen united. Ever conceiving himself the serv- ant of God, he seized Jamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was not Catholic Spain the enemy of God? Delenda est Carthago is his feeling towards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. “The Lord by his Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us the opportunity to draw off those horse.” Yet this elect of God ruthlessly massacres surrendered Irish garrisons. “Sir,” he writes with almost childish naiveté, “God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon shot.” We do not need Carlyle’s warning that he was not a hypocrite. Does not Marvell, la- menting his death, record in words curi- Chosen Peoples 15 ously like Bismarck’s that his deceased hero The soldier taught that inward mail to wear And fearing God, how they should nothing fear? The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with the uni- verse. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous tendency. At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations. But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty, ignorance, and gin- drinking at home. We recapture the at- mosphere of “Rule, Britannia” when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of the joy-bells and the flare of the bon- fires by which the mob celebrated its fore- 76 Chosen Peoples ing Walpole into a war to safeguard Brit- ish trade in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the Km- pire was always sub-conscious or semi- conscious at its best. This is not wholly true, for in “The Masque of Alfred” in which “Rule, Britannia” is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of the lines of England’s destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic excog- itation. For after a vision which irresist- ibly recalls the grosser Hebrew prophecies: I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world: All nations serve thee; every foreign flood, Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames, he points to the virgin shores “beyond the vast Atlantic surge” and cries: This new world, Shook to its centre, trembles at her name: Chosen Peoples 77 And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms. Britons, proceed, the subject deep command, Awe with your navies every hostile land. Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain: They rule the balanced world who rule the main. But you have only to remember that Seeley’s famous book was written ex- pressly to persuade the England of 1883 not to give up India and the Colonies, to see how little “Rule, Britannia” expressed the truer soul of Britain. The purifica- tion of England which the Methodist movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible in- stinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that of 78 Chosen Peoples the Old Testament, to spiritualize the doc- trine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the visions of the Hebrew bards. The Lord our God Most High, He hath made the deep as dry, He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth. . But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is characteris- tically practical. Keep ye the Law—be swift in all obedience ; Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own, That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord. And it is a true picture of British activities. Chosen Peoples 79 Even thus has England on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic motives drew her. ‘The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lich- nowsky, agrees with Rhodes that the sal- vation of mankind hes in British imperial- ism. But note how the less spiritual fac- tors are ignored, how the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining road. Missions are not discov- ered till they are already in action. Not unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to them- 80 Chosen Peoples selves purposes of which they were orig- inally unconscious. First comes the ting- ling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, Eng- land, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental suc- cess of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. ‘There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton’s fallen friend, the poet Ver- nede, yet even he writes :— God grant to us the old Armada weather. Thomson was not poet enough—nor the eighteenth century naive enough—to cre- Chosen Peoples 81 ate a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he throws “Rule, Britannia” eight centuries back to the time of Alfred the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country’s future is prophetically un- rolled, serves to illustrate the retrospec- tive habit of national missions. The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven centuries has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping itself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always troubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope complained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to Magic casements opening on the foam Of faéry lands in perilous seas forlorn. But Israel had abundant time to per- 82 Chosen Peoples fect her conception of herself. From Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of the race are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a proc- ess analogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved into a Peo- ple chosen for world-service? 'The Cov- enant of Israel was inscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existence elsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lord would write there, no more objective reality than the Charter which Britain received when “first at Heaven’s command” she “rose from out the azure main,” or than that Contrat Social by which Rousseau ex- pressed the rights of the individual in so- ciety. But to say this is not to make the mission false. Ibsen might label these Chosen Peoples 83 vitalizing impulses “Life-illusions,” but the criteria of objective truth do not apply to volitional verities. National missions become false only when nations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolution rob them of their mystery. Hamlet is not less inspired because Shakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers. If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under its spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical vocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal tendency. Claudian, addressing the Em- peror Theodosius, wrote :— O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat zther. The Egyptian god Ammon, in the great 84 Chosen Peoples battle epic of Rameses II, assured the monarch :— Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon! Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall up- hold thee in danger, More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers. The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be “in pursu- ance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the Earth.” Vi ETURNING now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that “Germanism is Judaism,” we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey re- sembles a man. Where it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the mean- est of its citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the com- mon British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather with Japan than with Judea. For in Japan, 85 86 Chosen Peoples too, beneath all the romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individ- uality scarcely existed, which could ex- pose infants or kill off old men because the State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater scale of the medieval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its subservi- ent citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has given a new reading to the Gospel: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Nietzsche, who, though he strove to up- set the old Hebrew values, saw clearly through the real Prussian peril, defined Chosen Peo ples 87 such a State as that “in which the slow suicide of all is called Life,” and “a wel- come service unto all preachers of death” —a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. ‘We are,” boasts a Japanese writer, “a people of the pres- ent and the Tangible, of the Broad Day- light and the Plainly Visible.” But Germany was not always thus. “High deeds, O Germans, are to come from you,’ wrote Wordsworth in his “Sonnets dedicated to Liberty.” And it throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she lay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission pro- claimed for her by Fichte was one of peace and righteousness—to penetrate the life of humanity by her religion—and he de- 88 Chosen Peoples nounced the dreams of universal monarchy which would destroy national individual- ity. Calling on his people as “ the con- secrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan,” “To you,” he says, “out of all other modern nations the germs of hu- man perfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire of mind and reason—to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the ruler of the world.” And throwing this mission back- wards, he sees in what the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Goths and Huns the proof that the Ger- mans have always stemmed the tide of tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant and Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist as Goethe, and a welcomer Chosen Peoples 89 of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophe- sied that if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they, “by preserv- ing in their contact with outward things the intensity of their inner life, will per- chance surpass their teachers’: and in curiously prophetic language he called for a hero “to realize by blood and iron the political regeneration of Germany.” If Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal for his nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to hold the sceptre of the na- tions, so as to ensure the peace of the world. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as the stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a per- verted nobility; as Pol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: “If the devil knew 90 Chosen Peoples he had horns the cherubim would offer him their place.” And though it was only in the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of the Will-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the “blood and iron” of Junkerdom that perverted Prussia—Junkerdom still lives simply— as the gross industrial prosperity that fol- lowed on the victory of 1870. A modern German author describes his countrymen —it is true he has turned Mohammedan, probably out of disgust—as tragically de- generated and turned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. This industrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is by Verhaeren—attack- ing Judaism from another angle—as- cribed to its Jews, so it is comforting to remember that when England started the Chosen Peoples 91 East India Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany is clearly where England was in the seven- teenth century, and in Prussia England meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely more conscious and conse- quent than her “Rule, Britannia” period, with a ruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. While England’s right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany’s right hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sin- ister activities. There is in Henry James’s posthumous novel—“The Sense of the Past”’—a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot get back to his own era. ‘This is the fate that now menaces civilization. Nor is the civili- zation that followed the struggle for 92 : Chosen Peoples America by the scramble for Africa en- tirely blameless. Germany, federated too late for the first mélée and smarting under centuries of humiliation—did not Louis XIV insolently seize Strassburg? —is avenging on our century the sins of the seventeenth. So far from Germanism being synony- mous with Judaism, its analogies are to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded Germany, albeit less effi- ciently, in the path of militarism. It is the same alliance as prevailed everywhere be- tween the traders and the armies and navies, and the Kaiser’s crime consists mainly in turning back the movement of the world which through the Hague Con- ferences was approaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of war. Chosen Peoples 93 His blasphemies are no less archaic. Tle repeats Oliver Cromwell, but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates the Puritan with the Cava- lier. “From childhood,” he is quoted as saying, “I have been under the influence of five men—Alexander, Julius Cesar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.” No great man moulds him- self thus like others. It is but a theatrical greatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus were “‘the Kings of Jerusalem” even “six thousand years ago.” Our kings had the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the Rabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight qualifica- tions, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a good name is the best of all. 94 Chosen Peoples Compare the German National Anthem “Heil dir im Siegeskranz” with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in the seventy- second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference between Judaism and Ger- manism. ‘This King, too, is to conquer his enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and violence, “and pre- cious will their blood be in his sight.” VII I F I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between Juda- ism and Germanism, it would be the word “Recessional.” While the prophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation, the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. “You only have I known among all the families of the earth,” says the message through Amos. “Therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities.” The Bible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. “Is- rael is the villain, not the hero, of his own story.” Alone among epics, it is out for truth, not high heroics. To flout the 95 96 Chosen Peoples Pharisees was not reserved for Jesus. “Behold, ye fast for strife and conten- tion,” said Isaiah, ‘‘and to smite with the fist of wickedness.” While some German writers, not content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced, vaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to Michael Angelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinch- ingly exposes the flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for verac- ity unknown among other peoples—is even Washington’s story told without gloss’—that gives false colour to the leg- end of Israel’s ancient savagery. ‘The title of a nation to its territory,” says Seeley, “is generally to be sought in primi- tive times and would be found, if we could recover it, to rest upon violence and mas- Chosen Peoples 97 sacre.’ The dispossession of the Red In- dian by America, of the Maori by New Zealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this universal process is sophisticated. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, the Aineid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the contemporary ideal backwards—as all missons are put—and into the prophetic mouth of Jove:— Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos. It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy Palestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him: “Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost thou 98 Chosen Peoples go to possess this land; but for the wicked- ness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” In English literature this note of “Re- cessional” was sounded long before Kip- ling. Milton, though he claimed that “God’s manner” was to reveal himself “first to His Englishmen,” added that they “mark not the methods of His coun- sel and are unworthy.” “Is India free,’ wrote Cowper, “or do we grind her still?” “Secure from actual warfare,” sang Coleridge, “we have loved to swell the war-whoop.” For Words- worth England was simply the least evil of the nations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a “History of England” in the very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes ‘‘who loved fields and seized them.” Chosen Peoples 99 But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the chorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian Har- den, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the only real “culture in Germany. Ihave been at pains to examine the literature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm, ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding any swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its most popu- lar work—Lazarus’s “Soziale Ethik im Judentum’’—published as late as Novem- ber, 1913, by the League of German Jews —a grave indictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly ex- plaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the individual to the com- 100 Chosen Peoples munal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that what unites individuals separates nations. “The work of justice shall be peace,” he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent—indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and that another now lies in prison for explain- ing in his “Biologie des Krieges”’ that the real objection to war is simply that it com- pels men to act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the no- blest and most practical treatise on ‘“Per- petual Peace” came from that other Ger- man professor, Kant, the hope is-not alto- gether ausgechlossen that in the internal Chosen Peoples 101 convulsion that must follow the war, there may be an upheaval of that finer German- ism of which we should be only too proud to say that it 7s Judaism. VItl UT meantime we are waiting, and the soul “waiteth for the Lord more than watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the morning.” Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in darkness, listening to the silence of God—a silence that can be felt. “Watchmen, what of the night?’ Such a blackness fell upon the ancient Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on them- selves and created an inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since. Such a blackness fell on the 102 Chosen Peoples 103 ancient Christians when the Huns invaded Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes, began to wonder if perchance this was not the venge- ance of the discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St. Augustine to create an inner “City of God.” How shall humanity meet this blackest crisis of all? What new “City of God” can it build on the tragic wreck- age of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated quarrel—half misunderstanding, like most quarrels. 104 Chosen Peoples Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively—as logicians say—those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology of atonement woven by Paul un- der Greek influences, either of them might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just missed. Is it not humili- ating that Islam, whose Koran expressly recalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the work of universalization? Maimonides acknowl- edged the good work done by Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the universalism they achieved held Chosen Peoples 105 faulty elements, is that any reason why the purer truth should shrink from universali- zation? Has Judaism less future than Buddhism—that religion of negation and monkery—whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which con- soles the disciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its ancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expres- sions of the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen main- tains, as sterile for the future as Bud- dhism, too irretrievably narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his 106 Chosen Peoples magnificent tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last word is with Christianity? FEucken, too, would call the future Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a stumbling- block rather than a help. Abraham Lin- coln being only a plain man, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theo- logian, and with the simplicity of great- ness he confessed: “I have never united myself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving my assent, with- out mental reservation, to the long, com- plicated statements of the Christian doc- trine which characterize their Articles of Belief and Confessions of Faith.” “When any church,” he added, “will inscribe over Chosen Peoples 107 its altar, as its sole qualification for mem- bership, . . . “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour as thyself,’ that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul.” 7 Can one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about that Lincoln did not even know there was such a church? But call the coming religious reconstruc- tion what you will, what do names matter when all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to save it from mean- ingless frictions and massacres? “Would that My people forgot Me and kept My commandments,” says the Jerusalem Tal- mud. Too long has Israel been silent. “Who is blind,” says the prophet, “but 108 Chosen Peoples My servant, or deaf as My messenger?” He is not deaf to-day, he is only dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the new world-order is shap- ing. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not to be. “The religion or the Jews is indeed a light,” said Coleridge in his “Table Talk,” “but it is as the light of the glow-worm which gives no heat and illumines nothing but itself.” Why let a sun sink into a glow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not that prudent maxim of the even pay Babylonian Talmud, Dina dimalchutha dina (“In Rome do as the Romans’). Despite every effort of Jews as individual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe saw them a century ago in his “Borough” :— Chosen Peoples 109 Nor war nor wisdom yields our Jews delight, They will not study and they dare not fight. It is because they fight under no banner of their own. But the time has come when they must fight as Jews—fight that “mental fight” from which that greater English poet, Blake, declared he would not cease till he had “built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” To build Jerusalem in every land—even in Palestine—that is the Jewish mission. As Nina Salaman sings—and I am glad to end with the words of a daughter of the lofty-souled scholar in whose honour this lecture is given— Wherefore else our age-long life, our wandering landless, Every land our home for ill or good? Ours it was long since to join the hands of na- tions Through the link of our own brotherhood. AFTERWORD (Nays Ny) i ey) a y hie hk : DEERE AYES We My Rey ARO AFTERWORD Dr. IsrarL ABRAHAMS, Reader in Tal- mudic and Rabbinic Literature in the University of Cambridge, in seconding the vote of thanks to the speakers, moved by the President of the Jewish Historical Society (Sir Lionel Abrahams, K.C.B.), said that the Chairman had already paid a tribute to the memory of Arthur Davis. But a twice-told tale was not stale in repetition when the tale was told of such aman. He was a real scholar; not only in the general sense of one who loved great books, but also in the special sense that he possessed the technical knowledge of an expert. His “Hebrew Accents” reveals 113 114 Chosen Peoples Arthur Davis in these two aspects. It shows mastery of an intricate subject, a subject not likely to attract the mere dilettante. But it also reveals his interest in the Bible as literature. He appre- ciated both the music of words and the melody of ideas. When the work ap- peared, a foreign scholar asked: “Who was his teacher?’ ‘The answer was: him- self. ‘There is a rather silly proverb that the self-taught man has a fool for his master. Certainly Arthur Davis had no fool for his pupil. And though he had no teacher, he had what is better, a fine capacity for comradeship in studies. ? “Acquire for thyself a companion,” said the ancient Rabbi. There is no friend- ship equal to that which is made over the common study of books. At the Talmud Chosen Peoples 115 meetings held at the house of Arthur Davis were founded lifelong intimacies. Unpretentious in their aim, there was in these gatherings a harmony of charm and earnestness; pervading them was the true “Joy of service.” Above all he loved the liturgy. Here the self-taught man must excel. Homer said :— Dear to gods and men is sacred song. Self-taught I sing: by Heaven and Heaven alone The genuine seeds of poesy are sown. And, as the expression of his inmost self, he gave us the best edition of the Festival Prayers in any language: better than Sachs—than which praise can go no higher. This Prayer Book is his true memorial, unless there be a truer still. Perhaps his feeling that he might after 116 Chosen Peoples all have lost something because he had no teacher made him so wonderful a teacher of his own daughters. In their continu- ance of his work his personality endures. At the end of his book on Accents he quoted, in Hebrew, a sentence from Jere- miah, with a clever play on the double meaning of the word which signifies at once “accent” and “taste.” Thinking of his record, and how his beautiful spirit animates those near and dear to him, we may indeed apply to him this same text: “His taste remaineth in him and his fra- grance is not changed.” THE END PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA URBANA UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS UU | | | iM