Part 12

“I thank you, good friends, for your aid. And now, good night. I go to celebrate the conquest of love.”

“May joy be with you!” they called in return, waving their hands as their galloping horses disappeared in the brightness of the street.

“Why did you try to conquer me by force?” she asked, facing him in the great chamber into which he had taken her, and speaking for the first time. “Do you not know that it is really by my will that I have come--to save you from humiliation? Do you not know that you can have no power over me?”

“Am I not King! I have power over everything.”

“You do not know who I am.”

“How can that matter, since I love you?”

“I am the Lady Melodia. I cannot be long to any one. I belong to all. I am queen absolute.”

“Did I not know that we are one!” he answered, bowing in mock humility to the stately figure. “Have you not come to me of your own will? Is it not you who guided me here?”

“That is why your deed to-night is shameful.”

“But I need you so!” he continued piteously. “Surely you will not leave me when I need you so. Let me tell you; then you will pity me. I am haunted by a hideous dream. (I never told any one before. I conceal it carefully.) Sometimes I cannot tell which is real--this life here, or the dream. I have the strange consciousness”--he looked about timidly, like a little child, lest some one hear his secret, then drew her close to him, his eyes dark with fear--“that I lead two lives. One is in another world, a world of hard material facts, where by the proper grasping of the facts one can have every joy, every comfort. But there I cannot grasp anything. I cannot accustom myself to living. I cannot feel at home. I cannot understand how men buy prosperity. I cannot learn anything. I cannot cope with people. They beat me at every turn. I lack something--that fiber of the commonplace that contends and wins. There, in that black dream-world, I cannot do the simplest things. And because I cannot, I suffer--suffer poverty and hunger. When I buy things honestly with my brain, when I win success, I cannot grasp it. Everything slips away and leaves me alone--to know the want of beggars. Your presence alone dispels that horror and makes me know that this is real, that I am real, and that here I belong.”

Like the face of a mother in tenderness was the face of the Lady Melodia, as she murmured: “Dear one! Dear one!”

“Your face lights that black dream-world like a star and rests upon my soul. But there it paralyzes the power of action.”

“But are you not willing to suffer the dream for the sake of this?” She indicated the glittering chamber.

“If I could always remember that it _is_ a dream,” he answered piteously. “But they--other people--have had real things, while I have had only the glitter of foam. I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he added boyishly. “You’ve seen a bottle dropped into water where, instead of standing upright, it wavers about, unable to keep balance? That is what I am without you. Does not that justify what I did to-night? Does not that make it right?”

Pity had taken the place of resentment when she answered: “Yes, perhaps. But you see you cannot keep me. A Titan could not do that.”

“But I am more than a Titan.”

“Once I was wholly yours--”

“When?”

“In your youth. Then I was yours unasked. Before you had grown old, before life had marred you.”

He looked at himself in a mirror. It was true that there was no sign of youth in the face, nor, strange as it may seem, was there any sign of age. It was the face of one whom some terrible passion had consumed and burnt out without materially ageing.

“Why did you leave me?”

“Because you were false to me.”

“How could I be false to you when I have had no pleasures apart from you?”

“Did I not tell you that you could not live two lives--the life of a man and the life of a god?”

“You mean love? That is the only thing that makes the black dream tolerable. It is like the honey the stinging bee carries. It is the gem in the head of the toad.”

“That is why I said you were false to me,” she replied, anger brightening her eyes.

“But now I love only you. Surely you know that.”

“How can that right the matter? I cannot belong to any one in whose heart I have been supplanted for an instant.”

“You will reconsider when you know that I am worthy. Besides, there is no one else who _is_ worthy. Perhaps you have not read my heart. I tired of that other--of love--long ago, as I have tired of every real thing. It became like a too sweet honey. It sickened me, it smothered me; it made me struggle to be free. It made me long to feel flying in my face the bright insubstantiality of dreams. And you are my brightest dream,” he said, lifting the long hair and burying his face in it.

“I know, I know, but--”

“Wait! Do not decide now. You do not know me. There are powers you have not suspected. I will make you forget. I will take you where oblivion is deepest. I will prove that I am worthy. You shall never leave me. What care I for law--for right! I will take you where there is no law, no right, except my will. I will isolate you with myself so far beyond the boundaries of the real that thought cannot return. We will go beyond the farthest edge of dreams. Come to the window where you can see the exterior of the palace. Now watch.”

She saw the crystal walls glow as if a flame dwelled within them, while from tower to basement fell a silver veil bordered with diamond sound-crystals, which floated gracefully. Then the veil rose and vanished; the flame dimmed and faded until the palace became as frail as if made of ashes. From this ashen palace rose a diaphanous, white gauze, pearl-encrusted palace, mirroring itself in a lake of ice. The man beside her, too, had changed. He became well-nigh transparent. He looked like a spirit made visible. His hand was frailer and whiter than the gauze upon which it rested. His eyes were terrible in their concentrated power.

“Now, see where I have taken you! Now do you think that there is any return? See that avenue of white ferns there, from which the frost particles fall like rain. Can you leave me now? Do you want to? Look at that frozen sea to the north, encrusted with opaque crystals. Note its greenish pallor. You are wondering what is flying across it, are you not? I can see it in your eyes. You are saying to yourself: ‘What are those creatures which have no form and yet have every form?’ Watch them awhile--watch them! My love, those changeful and indeterminate contours are the unembodied stuff melodic dreams are made of. They are the world of my soul made visible--the soul of a creator. Now do you guess where you are? If you do, you know that there is no return. They who come here cannot go back.

“Watch the far horizon for a moment! There--that light. There, every once in a while, bright caravans swing to sight, remain visible for a time, like ships upon the desert, flooding the sea with a regretful splendor, then disappear. But you can never reach them, my love, never signal them and go away from me. Do you hear that sound? But you do not know what it is, Sweet, else you would not listen so calmly.

“High above that frozen sea (in whose heart sleep a million terrors--that frozen sea, which is genius), so high that your eye cannot see it, a brilliant-winged bird hovers and flings down the fragment of a song. The bird is love. When its song reaches the surface of that frozen sea, it is shivered and broken like a crystal, and the fragments roll on and on until they reach my gauze-built palace and make it tremble pitifully. Am I not the first of kings, the wonder king! Who can resist me! Not you!” he answered, kissing her impetuously.

“Do you never tire of mad improbabilities?”

“Tire of them! Does God tire of his Heaven? The madder they are, the more they please me. I, too, am a god. I have made a heaven of my own. I can love only a self-created world where nothing bears the mark of materiality, of other people’s commonplaceness. In my world matter takes the form of my slightest wish. I am the center about which change revolves. I am the force which projects form.” He clapped his hands. “Let the palace be lighted!”

Across the floor crept the wan shimmer of the will-o’-the-wisp, and down the walls the green phosphoric glow of fireflies. Then, at a motion of his hand, the gauze palace faded to a cold ethereal splendor until it seemed to the Lady Melodia, in her fear and wonder, that it was little more than a vague radiance against the snow-lit water. Above, three moons poised, swinging melodiously into place, streaking it with opalescent light.

“Will you deign to accept my arm?” he asked mockingly. As he bent before her, she saw that he had become as ethereal as his house of gauze. His face had an unearthly beauty, and his eyes were awful in their concentrated splendor.

They left the chamber and entered a hall, in whose center a staircase descended for two stories. Upon this staircase came and went an endless procession of pale and regal women, dull gems upon their breasts and brows.

With a gesture of offended dignity, the Lady Melodia turned as if to leave the hall.

“There is no cause for anger,” he exclaimed. “I love them, of course. Are they not made for love? But in loving them, I have dreamed only of you.”

“Your love, evidently, has not made them happy,” she retorted scornfully. “Why are their eyes so full of grief and regret? And why are they silent? Do they never speak?”

“They are not real, any more than I am. They are prisoned in the crystal prison of a melody. They are the women who rise from the whirlpools of music. Like the Russalka, they flutter over the abyss. I created them to live on the boundary line of sound and silence.”

“That is cruel. Give them life. I command you!”

“In every artist, my love, there is the soul of a Nero who longs for the burning of Rome. They who love beauty are always cruel.”

“But this is monstrous. I will not permit it.”

“I am no crueler to them than life has been to me. Like them, I have always lived on the boundary line of two worlds. In neither have I been at home. I, too, am not real. Why do you not pity me? Am I not dearer to you than they?”

“What are they begging for so piteously? See their outstretched hands!”

“For life, to break the melody in which they are encased and give them life.”

“And you can refuse?”

“Is not that just what life has refused me? Besides, I love them best as they are. Can you not see what they are to me? They are my soul’s life. They are the myriad lives that my brain lives. Look! As they strain earthward with bitter yearning, thirsting for life, for the substantiality of joy, of love, can you not understand how they inspire me, how they make me what I am? Their futile frenzy touches my brain to fire. It pours a fury into my soul and strings my nerves to mastery and to creative power.

“Ah, you do not know--no one will ever know--what they have been to me, what stories, what caprices they have breathed into me. Their mute eloquence has told me tales of wild longing, of unspeakable desires, of unknown loves--I cannot tell you how I love them. They set a-tingle in my brain the centers of creative fancy. They swing me into the harmonies of the silences. They project upon the canvas of my soul melodic visions. I live with the unexpanded vigor of their prisoned lives. Their desires are realized in me.

“Ah!” he continued, becoming reminiscent and talking as if to himself, “I have had strange, strange loves indeed, which not even tone-magic can picture, beyond the limits of time and space. I have always been the king of _bons viveurs_. I have been a pagan exquisite, a Lucullian epicure! How I have despised those who had only money to enjoy with! What miserable beggars are they! What has gold to do with the brain? It is the brain that enjoys.

“But to-night is the crowning night. To-night I have you. To-night I have for a love her whom no mortal has dared to love before. In your eyes I shall not read the memory of other lovers. Their ghosts cannot come between us. Upon your lips I shall not taste the savor of their kisses. Your sweetness has been reserved for me. What matters it that I have made a bonfire of my soul to buy you! If I had ten lives, I would do the same. This way! This way! There is another room. This room was made for you. No other woman has entered it. It is a strange room. It is lighted only by the stars, those discreet stars which have shone upon the amorous sleep of lovers.”

No sooner had they crossed the threshold, however, than the Lord of Mozart began to tremble violently. Beads of sweat dotted his brow. He put out his hands gropingly, as do they who cannot see.

“_The dream! Again the dream!_ Oh, keep it from me! Banish it with your kisses! Banish it with your mouth and the clasp of your arms. How is it possible that I suffer from a horror like this in the splendid palace of my genius? I cannot see you, but I know that you are here. I see only the dream. In the dream I am dying, dying miserably, in a shabby rooming-house in old Vienna. Through a little window I can see that it is misty and gray outside, and that a cold rain drizzles down. In the room where I lie are poverty and the weeping of little children.

“Oh, fling it from me with your love! Let me bury my face in your breast and forget. Keep it away from me! Keep it away from me! Why can I not reason! Why can I not know that the world would not permit one gifted as I am to die in want--one who bears within his blood the genius of his race!

“Yet I do die there. I know it. I see it. Unaccompanied by a single one who mourns, my shabby coffin is borne along in the rain--to the potter’s field where the beggars lie, and the red earth covers my mouth.”

* * * * *

The Lady Melodia bent her head and wept. She knew that the dream was true, and that the king of the world had died.

THE KING

In a low doorway, beneath a sign which advertised his saloon in three languages, Hebrew, German, and wretched phonetic Mauschel, stood the Polish keeper, bawling out for the benefit of his countrymen the arrival of fresh vodka from the Vistula.

Since the “_hep hep_” riots and the _Judenkrawall_, the Hamburg Ghetto gates had been closed and the quarter shut off from supplies. This morning they were open again, and noise and excitement followed.

The news kindled the inhabitants’ volubility. Men and women rushed into the street to discuss it. Their minds were divided between love of money and need of supplies and the world-old fear of bodily injury. They recalled the horrors of the weeks preceding the ban, and shivered to think that there was no way of escape. They must expose themselves to fresh injuries or starve.

In one of the most wretched rooms of the quarter this subject had been under discussion since sunrise. Here lived Gaon Zunz, his aged wife, Deborah, and his fifteen-year old granddaughter, Rahel.

Since the exile, Gaon had increased his hours of prayer and fasting, and he felt convinced that restoration to liberty had been brought about by his prayerful intercession. Therefore he decided that in the future Rahel must go to the city and beg, that he might devote himself to prayer and study.

Gaon Zunz was born in southern Russia, where he became a follower of the Chassidim. In his early manhood he journeyed westward to preach to the less devout Jews of central Europe that fond fanaticism of the East. In Hamburg he married and settled, with the hope of raising sons to the glory of Israel. Disappointed in this and feeling it to be God’s justice for weakness lurking in the flesh, he gave himself over to prayer and fasting, to month-long meditation upon the mystic Cabbala, and to interpreting the Torah and the Talmud after the manner of the chosen. Thus he earned the prouder name of Father of the Faith.

Late in life, a daughter was born to Deborah and Gaon, but there was no rejoicing in the house of Zunz. Then, indeed, Gaon felt that the hand of God was heavy upon him. And when, at the age of seventeen, Rahel, his daughter, after persistently refusing to enter into his arrangements for marriage, ran away with a French artist who had become enamored of her rare Oriental beauty, and had painted her as “_La Belle Juive_,” he felt that there was no sinner so great as he, for was he not responsible for his household?

Misery and sorrow fell upon him. The roots of his faith were shaken. Surely there must be sin in his heart, else he could not so grievously err.

The intervening years had served somewhat to lighten this burden of grief, along with the self-justifying thought that when the ban had been pronounced against his daughter he had been the first to join in the curse. Likewise he remembered, and with a thrill of pleasure, that the next day he had celebrated, in tolerable serenity of soul, the ceremony in honor of the dead.

Two years later the artist husband died, and one winter morning, Rahel, with a ten-days’-old child, came back to the old East Ghetto gate to beg admittance. Kind-hearted Joel, the keeper, took her petition to the chief rabbi and interceded for her.

All day she waited in the cold by the gate, while the rabbis, after having summoned her father, deliberated. Gaon said nothing in her favor. He had buried her, and she no longer existed. He would abide by the will of the majority. Toward sunset it was agreed that she should be taken back.

The chill of the day of waiting in the snow by the windy gate was more than her weakened condition could bear, and she died shortly, leaving baby Rahel to the stern up-bringing of her aged grandparents.

At the thought that his daughter had died in the faith of her fathers, a great peace settled down upon Gaon, and with it the blessed realization that she could sin no more. “The Lord killeth and maketh alive: He bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up,” he repeated with fervor. He had at last received substantial proof of the answering of prayer. He had received his reward as a faithful “Son of the Commandment,” who places reverence for the Law before love of family.

In return for this favor of the Most High, he determined so to bring up the little Rahel that there might be no repetition of her mother’s waywardness.

A sad childhood was hers. The playtimes with little neighbors were embittered by scornful treatment and the nicknames “Gentile” and “Christian dog.” They had been told that she was not of the ancient blood. She learned to feel that she was an outcast. When she told these things to her grandfather, he explained, as best he could, that her father had belonged to the wicked world outside the gate, and that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.

She meditated long and deeply upon this, but she could not understand. As a result there remained with her an unspeakable fear of that stern Hebrew God to whom her grandfather prayed, and whose dwelling was the round-topped prayer house. After feast days she lay awake far into the night, tormented by visions of ghostly, white-clad figures with up-stretched arms weaving to and fro for hours in the ecstasy of prayer, or intoning the ancient desert songs of Judea. She had watched them ever since she could remember from her seat beside her grandmother in the long gallery behind the grating.

Despite the regular attendance at the synagogue, Gaon was unable to impress upon the child the sacredness of the ancient ceremonial. Fruitless were his exhortations. She was neither willful nor perverse. They made no impression upon her. They failed to penetrate the depths of her being. She could not be brought to realize the wickedness of eating butter after meat, nor of eating it from the same plate; nor of touching the implements for making fire between Friday night and Saturday night. Indeed, her very first whipping was for drinking the cup of wine poured for Elijah.

Gaon looked upon these pranks as the outcome of childish dullness. In addition, he was preparing himself by prayer for the favor of the ecstatic vision. So bent was he upon self-examination that he did not perceive that in the child-soul was being fought the ancient battle of the Latin and the Hebrew, the worshippers of the flesh and the worshippers of the spirit, the realists and the dreamers, which, in ages past, had made the self-denying followers of the Hebrew Moses repellant and unlovely to Judea’s pleasure-loving, pagan governors.

By the time little Rahel reached her eighth year, she had learned not to play with other children. Cruelty had made her timid. She preferred to stay within rather than subject herself to taunts. In the dingy little front room, hung about with old clothes, and tawdry, half-worn ornaments, she would sit for hours and watch the children through the top half of the dirty window, which reached the street level. At first this isolation was grief unspeakable, and rebellion filled her soul. She watched them through blinding tears, while longing for love and companionship gripped her heart.

Time eased this feeling and taught her to amuse herself. She found she could make any number of playmates with a pencil. Soon the days were not long enough to fix upon paper the swarming children of her fancy. She reproduced everything she saw; the passers in the street, the women who bought old clothes of her grandmother, and the furniture in the room.

When her eyes and back ached from long bending, she would look up through the broken pane of the dirty window at a scrap of blue sky ever and ever so far away, and the color gave her pleasure. It reminded her of one of her grandfather’s stories of the Holy Land of the Jews, where there was a sea called Galilee, which was as blue as the turquoise in the Polish saloon-keeper’s wife’s _Shabbes_ brooch.