As he followed his father into the dining-room, the wheel of time seemed to Philip May to leap back to the starting-point of memory. The past fifteen years, which had plunged him far beyond on the sea of life and thought, slipped from him and left him stranded on a shore which alone, in all the moving flux of things, seemed to have stood still. How much of this sensation was due to outward fact—the old-fashioned familiar furniture, the ancient Sabbath lamp9—an heirloom—burning this Friday night with accustomed holy brilliancy, the square-set old man himself, whose hoar-touched hair and beard but faintly suggested the silent passage of the years—he did not consider. He felt a sudden mental stooping, a bending to the cavern of a childhood which had been covered over, almost forgotten in the background of his experience.
From the farther doorway, Katie, the faithful housemaid, his quondam nurse, radiant, rosy, and rejoicing, courtesied to them as they entered.
His scrutinizing eyes fell instantly upon her, and with a flash of recognition of a different nature, he went toward her with hands outstretched.
“Well, Katie,” he said, “do you recognize the old plague of your life?”
Covered with confusion over the mastery of his voice and personality, she laid a rough, trembling hand in his, all the contemplated welcome of ecstatic words and embracing arms shrinking shamefacedly out of the back-door.
“Thankee, Mr. Philip,” she stammered. “I’m very well, thankee. You’ve growed some, sir, but I’d ’a’ knowed you was Phily anywhere.”
His laugh rang out heartily as he pressed her hand between both his. The lingering laugh startled the old woman—it was as an echo of something loved and lost. When she returned to her kitchen two unaccountable tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Shall I take my old place?” he asked, standing at the foot of the table.
“For sure, Philip, for sure,” said Joseph, vainly endeavoring to keep the army of overpowering emotions from his voice and limbs. In the church of the old man’s soul there was an intoning of prayer and thanksgiving, the while he ladled soup—the while the dominant face opposite was engraving itself upon his intoxicated senses. It was a strong, intent face rather than a handsome one—a face with little room in it for frivolity, its very reticence proclaiming that strength, or narrowness, of purpose which bespeaks “business ahead.” True, the brow, broad and thoughtful, beneath the wave of thick dark hair, might have belonged to an artist, a dreamer, but whatever the temperament of heredity it bespoke, the suggestion was overpowered by the doggedness of will of the individual as evidenced in the cool, discriminating hazel eyes and assertive mouth and jaw.
“It’s hard to realize that so many years have passed since we dined together,” the younger man observed, picking up his napkin, grimly amused over a mellowing representation of Moses with the Decalogue benignly regarding him from the opposite wall.10 “I don’t know whether it is a trick of the gods,” he continued, lightly, “or of Katie’s unrivaled soup, but I’m inclined to think I have never been away.”
“I can tell you how long. You were away—leaving out vacations—just fifteen years, three months, twenty-three days and one-half.”
The ghost of a frown gathered into the doctor’s quiet regard. “Perhaps,” he began, in the tranquil, sonorous voice which most of all seemed to measure an insurmountable distance between them, “perhaps I staid too long. My duty, I know—”
“No, no,” interrupted the father, eagerly, apologetically. “It was just like it should be. When you asked, didn’t I say yes? Didn’t I tell you I want you shall know everything money can buy when it will make you a better doctor—and a more happier? And besides, there was your friend—your poor sick friend.”
“Yes.”
“And you could not leave him. So I told to all who said, ‘But why he don’t come home to his father—maybe he, too, needs him.’ Didn’t I always say to Daniel and Jean, ‘Is it not fine a man shall stay by his friend so long he wants him?’”
Philip protested swiftly with his hand. “Who is Jean?” he asked, abruptly.
“Jean? Oh, you don’t know who is Jean,” laughed the old man, delightedly, as though upon familiar ground. “Well, you will know her soon—to-morrow night. You see, I said to Daniel, ‘You and Jean and Philip and me will have a nice little dinner together, and while we have a little game, the children can make a little music and get acquainted.’ And Jean says, ‘But, Uncle Joseph’—she calls me Uncle Joseph for short, because I too am short—‘who do you think this Dr. Philip May is that Jean Willard should come to call on him?’ And then she goes on, ‘Now don’t tell me he is a prince—all the young Jews are princes to the old ones—tell me what he is, if you can.’ But she don’t mean one word—she’s just a little lachachlis ponim—you know what that means?11 No? It means mischief-faced one—one who says things just out of spite. Oh, by’m-bye you’ll learn Yiddish all over again when you stay long with me. But you don’t know who is Jean—. Wait. Will you take some more of Katie’s good soup?”
“It is good,” Philip acquiesced, cordially. “But I always limit myself to one plate.”
“Just like Jean. She always makes fun of me. Why? Is it more healthy? But when I learn you to speak Yiddish you will learn me what I must not eat. Of course Dr. Thallman is a fine doctor, but now when I have a doctor in the family, he don’t expect I will stay by him, I guess. Well, I will ring so Katie takes the plates out. You must not laugh when I make mistakes—I have seldom company for dinner—only Daniel and Jean sometimes, and then Jean does it all, and all me and Daniel has to do is to eat. But Jean knows better how it shall be done. To-night she wanted to order oysters and frogs and—ich weiss viel;12 but I said to her, ‘No, Jean, better we have a good old-time dinner so Philip feels more to home: a good noodle soup—’” here he began to intone like a cantor—“fish à la Yitt,13 like Daniel calls it, some nice green peas and fried potatoes, a fine young roast duck, and salad—and for dessert, well, I compromised with her on a frozen something—but with coffee and cigars, I guess you’ll pull through, hey, Philip?”
It was a long speech for Joseph May to make, but the excitement and happiness of this long-anticipated, intimate moment had loosened the reserve of half a lifetime.
“It could not suit me better,” returned Philip, the edge of his fine teeth showing in a suspicion of a smile, as he gave his attention to the fish. “But who is this oracle of your manners and menus? Who is Jean?”
“I will tell you,” said Joseph seriously, holding up his fork in one hand and a bit of bread in the other. “Help yourself to wine, Philip—Thallman says I mustn’t—I can guarantee you can get no better Sauterne nowhere—I paid a big price the case for it, years ago. Good? I knew you would like it. Well, what I was telling you? Oh, yes, about Jean. Jean is the chile of Daniel’s brother David, who lived in Los Angeles. Well, his wife died long before him, and when David died—now about ten years ago—there was no one to look after the little girl, who was about fourteen years, except an old aunt in New York. So Daniel comes to me—he always asks me what he shall do when it is business, just like I always ask him when it ain’t business—and he says, ‘Joseph, you think I am good enough to take care of that young girl?’ And I said, ‘And when she was a young angel, and when she was a young devil, there is no one who can better take care of her as you.’ So Daniel went down and brought her up, and when once you see her, Philip—. Well, I won’t say no more about it now. You know I bought these two houses for an investment, account the view and location, but when Daniel brought the chile to the city he wanted to keep house, so I thought why not rent one to Daniel and keep one for myself, for when Philip comes home? And so you have it. And about Jean, there is not much to say. Only she looks after her two old men—like she calls us—and she says she has her hands full. All I know is she leads Daniel and me round by the nose and, schtiegen!14 I’ll tell you something—we make believe we don’t know it—because we like it!”
As he glowed and expanded, enumerating all his homely loves under the pleasantly interested gaze of his son, it seemed to Joseph May—to his own surprise—that, despite the strong grief of his youth, life still held in reserve for him a bright spot into which he was now entering. And so, while they ate the savory dishes and drank the golden wine, he drew nearer the knowledge of his son, telling, with his unconquerable Jewish rhythm and accent, in quaint choice of English, now quite correct, now ridiculously faulty, occasionally mixed with the Yiddish jargon—the story of his simple life: the few hours passed in the downtown office, his fingers ever on the realty and stock market, with Daniel for his amanuensis; the sunny afternoons when he and Daniel would take the car and ride to the Park, where, sitting among the trees and flowers, they reviewed past and present through the medium of a good cigar; of the rainy or foggy evenings when Daniel or he would step across the connecting porch at the back and pass an hour or two together over a little game of picquet.15
“And sometimes we go to the the-ay-ter,” he concluded, with an air of reminiscent joy. “Generally Jean gets the tickets for us, because she knows the good places and what Daniel and me will like. Daniel, he likes somethings sometimes what I wouldn’t like, so he and Jean goes alone. Say, Philip, you know about the time Daniel bought the tickets?” He bent a laughing face upon him, his very nose seeming to scent the memory of the joke.
“No; what was that?” questioned Philip, the feeling that he was at some variety performance growing with the speeding minutes.
With a wave of the hand Joseph swept plate and glasses out of his way, and leaned his arms upon the table in an abandonment of enjoyment, his bushy eyebrows appearing to wink at Philip as he bent forward in confidential confab.
“You know,” he said, speaking in a somewhat lower voice, as though fearful of being overhead, “Daniel isn’t the man who gets the best of a bargain. He’s a little too good, you know. Where he has to do with business he is like a little chile. You know what the young people call him?—the Chevalier.16 Because, Jean explained to me, he is like some man who once lived who was ‘without reproach.’ Well, he goes to the telephone, and takes off his hat, because he thought at first a lady’s voice answered him, and he asks for two good seats; ‘the first seats, please,’ he says—I give you my word—I heard him. And what do you think? When we come to our seats, sure enough we have the first seats—the first seats from the door! Daniel gets red in the face like fire, but he only lifts up his head and says, ‘There was some misunderstanding’—and could I tell him it was a joke? But that ain’t all. Now comes the joke on me. You know it’s a piece about a man what escapes from prison, and when they go running after him, somehow, in the excitement, they catch the wrong man, and I too got so excited I jump up and holler out, ‘You’ve got the wrong man! You’ve got the wrong man!’ And Daniel pulls me by the coat and says, ‘Sit down, Joseph, sit down; they’ve got the right man—it’s that way in the play’—and he drags me into my seat. Gott! I thought I should die a-laughing.”
He wiped his eyes now, and as the appreciative response died from Philip May’s lips, the distance between them had widened as star from star.
“I am not of this world,” thought the scion of cultured modernity, even as, centuries before, another young Jew said of another world and found—Golgotha.17 But he continued to smile pleasantly upon his father.
“Oh, we can tell you lots of little stories like that,” Joseph promised, tilting back his chair in order to reach the box of cigars on the side-table. “But—I guess you won’t want to be sitting nights with an old stick-in-the-mud like me. Lots of young men they like to come and sit or talk with Daniel, but me, I guess I ain’t much company. Of course when you begin to practice you won’t have much time”—he leaned across to light his cigar at Philip’s—“but—”
He noticed that his companion’s attention had wandered, and presently realized that the room was filled with distant music.
“Who is that?” demanded Philip, briefly.
“That is Jean. You can always hear it like it was in the next room. What you think of that?” He looked at him in placid triumph.
The music thrilled gloriously through the dividing-walls. Philip listened in artistic wonderment and enjoyment.
“She knows how to play,” he returned, with the last note.
“Yah. So every one says. There she goes again.”
But in the midst of the mounting Schubert ecstasy there was a sudden crash of chords—and silence.
“She often does like that,” said Joseph, as though relieved. “But I was saying about the way you will pass your time. Of course you will join a club; I was thinking I will have your name put up at the Concordia, and Louis Waterman says he wants you in the Verein.”18
Dr. May meditatively flicked the ash from his cigar. He had a singularly well-formed hand, and Joseph was attracted by its perfect control. Suddenly the cool hazel eyes looked up and met his father’s.
“I may as well tell you at once,” he said, in pleasant brevity, with a gentle intonation, as he might have used in addressing a woman or a patient, “that I shall not join any Jewish club.”
The blood surged darkly over Joseph’s face as if in response to a blow. “Why not?” he managed to ask.
“Frankly,” explained Philip, lightly, “beyond the blood I was born with, pretty nearly all the Jew has been knocked out of me.”
“So,” said Joseph May.
“I rather think it got its first blow the day when, a little shaver, I ran howling to Katie demanding to know what the fellows in the street meant by calling me a ‘Christ-killer’—they did such things here in the early seventies, you know. ‘Sure,’ said Katie—I remember her word for word—‘that’s what you be, I guess, my lamb.’ ‘And who was Christ?’ I asked. You remember the name was taboo on Jewish lips in those same broad-minded days. ‘Bless the little haythen,’ said Katie, ‘don’t he know that Christ was the Lord?’ ‘And when did I kill him?’ I asked, deeply interested in my forgotten crime. ‘Oh, centuries ago,’ replied the girl, ‘hundreds of centuries ago.’ ‘Before I was born?’ I asked, in astonishment. And, pityingly, she answered, yes. It was a curious conundrum to start a child with on the road of investigation. I unraveled it as I went—knocked the meaning out of it against the bars, vague, yet ever discernible to a sensitive nature, which ever and again rose between my playmates, my schoolmates, my teachers, and myself, and huddled me into my inherited confines. It was not a pretty inheritance. It proscribed me here even in my boyhood. I was an American—with a difference. I hated the difference. I wanted to be successful—successful socially as well as professionally. I resolved to override every obstacle to obtain that perfect success.
“The opening came at Harvard. Thanks to you I have been endowed with a name which tells no tales, thanks to my mother my features are equally silent. I was thrown in with a crowd of young Bostonians—Harleigh was one of them—who, through the fact that I had been seen in the Unitarian church, took me for one of their own persuasion. It was a suggested evasion of an unfit shackle. There was no preconceived deception. I simply filled the bill. No doubt was ever evinced and no chance of an explanation ever offered itself. There was no need to drag in an uncongenial fact when the nature of our intimacy never called for one.”
“No,” said Joseph May.
“After that came Leipsic, and still I was bound by the closest ties of friendship to Harleigh, who was just then beginning to show symptoms of the disease which eventually—. But about my backsliding from Judaism. You know Germany is scarcely the soil one would select for fostering the ancient seed, the body Judaic being held there, for the most part, in manifest social disfavor. I once saw a curious exhibition of conflicting forces in a beer-hall in Berlin. A party of students, musicians, were seated at a table near me, drinking, making merry, and talking freely, when one of them ventured the sentiment that what the Jewish composers couldn’t borrow they stole, in conformity to Jacobian precept and tradition.19 Thereupon, a young fellow, with Hebrew characters written all over his face, struggled to his feet, was about to vent his indignation, but, upon second thought, laughed confusedly, and sat down again. Discretion had conquered valor. It was an interesting psychic display. Here’s another incident in point which may amuse you. I was seated one night in Paris at a fashionable table d’hôte,20 when there entered a number of English parvenu Jews, glaringly and aggressively attired, and evidently dazzled by the unaccustomed importance and luster of their own jewels and satins. I had just become disinterestedly conscious of their entrance, when a grande dame21 seated near me leaned quickly forward and said, ‘Pardon, monsieur, but would you mind taking the seat next to me? I shudder to think of one of those Jews being placed beside me.’ It was highly diverting, but I moved up, and trust she was more comfortable. But so the fashion goes the world over. The question—if it is a question—is no better in England, where a noted English litterateur, himself a Jew, has summed up the situation by saying that the great middle class, at least, hung between the Ghetto it has outlived and the Christian society it can neither live with nor without, presents the miserable picture of a people astray. And judging by my incognito visits behind the scenes, in intercourse with my own countrymen, I should say that the Jew, per se, has never been given the latch-key to the American Christian heart. At best he is received with a mental reservation. Apparently, practically, we present the magnificent spectacle of a country without racial prejudices. Individually, morally, as the French say, we are very wide of the mark. Why, the mere fact of the restrictions against them at many of the summer resorts throughout the country openly bears me out.22 In short, I have discovered that to be a Jew, turn wheresoever you will, is to be socially handicapped for life.”
He paused to relight his cigar. His father sat with his elbows on the table, his hand partly shading his face. He had laid down his half-smoked cigar. The doctor, after a few thoughtful puffs toward the ceiling, resumed his quietly serious monologue.
“I don’t know whether I wrote you, but among my personal treasures I value nothing more highly than the friendship formed while abroad with the family of Dr. Otis of this city, an uncle of Harleigh, who, in anticipation of my coming, has named me for the lately vacated chair of clinical surgery at C— College.
“I am not at all anxious to disclose to him, just at present at least, that I am not what I have appeared to him to be—a Christian born. You see I should be making a move in the wrong direction were I to identify myself unnecessarily with any Jewish club, Jewish anything, or Jewish anybody. Dr. Otis’s son wrote me some weeks before I left Edinburgh that, with my consent, he would be glad to put my name up at his club. I accepted, not that I am particularly anxious to get into this or any Christian club, but feel quite sure that is all that I shall have time or inclination for. And from the nature of the life I have led, I am certain that Otis’s club will prove more congenial than would a club composed entirely of Jews, from whom I have become estranged both socially and sympathetically.”
He threw down his cigar, having fully analyzed his position. “Religiously,” he concluded, with a smile of indifference, “from the meager memory I have of it, I consider Judaism a dead letter, a monument to the past. If it advances, it does so crab-like—as its followers read their prayer-books—backward. Only professionally have I any use for graveyards, and for ceremonies—the meaningless yearly shams and shows and protestations—not that!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “Well, father,” he asked, with a pleasant laugh, bringing his hand down upon the table in mark of finality, “do you understand my stand? Are you wid me or agin me?”
He glanced toward the silent figure opposite, sitting with hand on brow. The hand was slowly lowered and the old man turned his face upon his son. His mouth was curiously twisted, as though a smile had been contorted into a sneer. He leaned across the table, vainly endeavoring to speak, the dark blood rushing thickly over his neck and face.
The doctor was beside him on the instant. “Lean back,” he commanded, his arm about his shoulders, his hand at his cravat.
The old man hurled him off with intolerant violence. “Let go,” he articulated, in an unrecognizable voice, “let go—you—you—meshumad!”23
The barbarous-sounding word held no meaning for Philip May. Scarcely understanding the cataclysmal effect of his words, conscious only of the urgent need of help, he summoned the housekeeper on the instant.
“My father needs assistance,” he said, briefly; “see what you can do for him—and quickly, please.”
The bewildered woman came forward wringing her hands. “The drops, sir,” she said, “the drops; Miss Jean said they was—Lord o’ mercy, Mr. May, where did she say they was?”
“Run—ask,” gasped the old man, struggling with pain, his eyes turned completely from the pale, frowning man standing frustrate beside him. “Ask—but say—she shall not come—nor Mr. Willard. Say I am—very happy—only this—”
“Go, Katie,” commanded Dr. May, sharply.
The woman opened the door and fled across the back porch. Her wild ringing was immediately answered, Daniel Willard’s tall figure appearing holding wide the door.
“Where’s Miss Jean?” she implored, half sobbingly; and as at that moment the girl herself approached, she stepped over the threshold. “Oh, Miss Jean,” she cried, distractedly, “where did you say you left the drops the doctor—”
“In the upper drawer of the sideboard. Run back at once, Katie, if Mr. May is ill.”
“Yes, yes, Miss Jean—the top drawer. Oh, no, he’s not sick. Him sick! Nary a bit—he’s just billin’ and cooin’ wid Mr. Philip same’s a pair of turtle-doves.” Her voice was lost in the distance.
Daniel Willard turned a pair of startled eyes upon his niece.