The Melting-Pot - Israel Zangwill (miss read books .TXT) 📗

title="[Pg 145]">

DAVID

Shall we? Marry? On my salary as first violin?

VERA

Not if you don't want to.

DAVID

Sweetheart! Can it 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 his feet.]

VERA [Looking up at him]

Then you do care?

DAVID

What a question!

VERA

And you don't think wholly of your music 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.

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.

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 not be 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 present. I am 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.

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 is a knock at the door leading from the hall; their happy faces betray no sign of hearing it; then the door slightly opens, and Baron Revendal's head looks hesitatingly in. As David perceives 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 [His eyes closed, his 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 dazedly forward, half with a shocked sense of Vera's impropriety, half to relieve her of her burden. She motions him back.]

This is the work of your Holy Russia.

BARON [Harshly]

What is the matter with him?

[David'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 like a sleep-walker toward the paralysed Baron, puts 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 frenziedly.]

BARON [Whipping out his pistol]

Back, dog!

[Vera darts between them with a shriek.]

DAVID [Frozen again, surveying the pistol stonily]

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!

VERA

But this is my father.

DAVID

Your father!... God!

[He staggers.]

BARON [Drawing her to him]

Come, Vera, I told you——

VERA [Frantically, shrinking back]

Don't touch me!

BARON [Starting back in 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——

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 did 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 [Moaning]

But you could have stopped them.

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.

VERA

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 his head on the rail.]

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 David the 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 David]

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 David.]

BARON

You shameless——!

[He stops as he perceives David remains impassive.]

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 spattered 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 Easter 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 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 David'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 [In a low sob]

O God!

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