Leaning upon silken pillows, his strong, silvered head and fine features in a glow of soft light, Daniel Willard led the yearly songs of praise and thanksgiving over the deliverance from bondage of the children of Israel. It was the sanctification feast of the Passover.79 High above the joyous sonorousness of the men’s voices, rose the sweet treble of the women. The wine gleamed ruby-red in crystal glasses and in the two ancient silver goblets, Willard heirlooms, always used upon this occasion, one by Daniel, one by his close, time-tested friend, Joseph May.80 Upon the satin damask before the master of the festival, was placed the little cluster of mementoes indicative of the burdens and victories of the band of God’s chosen: the unleavened bread, the bone of the paschal lamb, the bitter herb, the parsley and vinegar, the almonds—and—apples figuring as mortar.81
Usually, with good-natured placidity, Daniel hastened with the historic significances and observations, in order to hurry forward the dinner. But to-night Joseph, in his new velvet house-cap, in new, sternly serious exactitude, had allowed nothing to be omitted; every passage was given in its entirety.82 And Daniel had submitted indulgently, striving to relieve the intoning with an occasional whimsical turn or trill, arresting any unseemly laughter by a quickly raised finger or eyebrow of admonition, and then continuing gravely on over his delightfully familiar way. But despite their earnestness, Elijah had not appeared with tidings of the long awaited Prince of Peace, and his filled glass and set chair, the door left invitingly open for his coming, had served only to elicit a gay cynicism from Paul Stein.83
But the prelude was all conscientiously chanted, the fragments of unleavened bread removed, and, dinner being served, their half-restrained holiday gayety bubbled forth with the sumptuous good cheer. Dinner over, the cloth was again cleared of all but the wine, glasses, and quaintly illustrated books, and then began the Hallel, the triumphant, soul-stirring hallelujahs.84
They waxed hilarious. Soft-voiced Laura Brookman, beautiful in shimmering gala attire, looked flushed and merry, sharing her book with Paul Stein, pretending to be shocked over his low-voiced, modern elucidation of the ancient Hebraic text. Brookman, comfortably doubled over his Hagaddah, sang out like a cantor, with all his lungs, and wondrous attempts at improvising. Daniel and Joseph accompanied softly, somewhat quaveringly, as though lost in old memories of home and kindred, breaking now and then into louder ecstasy when some particular refrain carried them from their feet with reminiscences of lost loves and voices. Jean, radiant in diaphanous white, sang along in smiling abstraction, one ear given to her surroundings, the other to the possible ringing of the door-bell. But eight o’clock came, and still Elijah delayed.
It was during the full flood of the paean on the Building of the Temple that the faint peal, almost lost in the mounting, lusty singing, was heard by the listening girl, and she arose starry-eyed.85
“The Prince at last?” asked Stein, while the others looked up questioningly.
“Throw wide the door, my dear,” cried Daniel, with flushed cheeks, “and go forth to greet him.”
Joseph shaded his face with a trembling hand while the girl hostess moved into the hall.
“I came to meet Elijah,” she laughed, with winsome grace, making him a deep obeisance as they met within a foot of the dining-room.
“Did you expect him?” Philip asked, her words, herself, seeming but to bear out, to plunge him deeper into the vision of the power of the past which had opened out the night before to reabsorb him.
“We always expect him—traditionally—this night,” she smiled. “It is the Sedar night.” She pulled the portière aside, and the Past, in truth, engulfed him.
He had not expected it—the grim coincidence struck him as full of subjective, dramatic possibilities. He smiled, under his mustache, over the thought while he stood with his hand upon his father’s shoulder and Daniel Willard presented him to the other guests.
He seemed to bring with him an air of philistinism, of worldly alienation, yet of polished criticism. The sweet comfort of the moment was lost. But he begged them to continue the singing.
“Don’t let me feel that I have stopped the music,” he said, seating himself beside Jean. “That chorus sounded particularly triumphant as the door was opened for me.”
“Mr. Brookman will sing the last verse for us,” said Daniel. “He is a whole choir in himself.”
Brookman laughed. “All right. Laura, you hum along with me and divide my blushes.”
While his voice rose and swelled in the grand old air, its virile resonance toned down, yet sustained, by Laura’s liquid lilting, the wonder of it all flashed through Philip’s disturbed being. He seemed to have stepped into some strange side-show out of the grand-court of life. Yet in how many homes throughout the universe was the ancient custom being celebrated that night! To endure after so many ages, nay, in spite of so many ages, of hate, oppression—progress! It was marvelous, well-nigh supernatural.
His practiced eye measured the mien and faces of those about him. Joseph May, squat, sturdy, stubborn, symboling an impregnable foundation, defying time through an immovable, inherited bigotry rather than through any studied conviction. Daniel Willard, dreamer, idealist, joying in his own interpretation of the spirit of the law, reading life and men through his own halo—a dreamer in Israel who dreamed he was awake! Charles Brookman, calm, happy in his materiality, product of “enforced specialization”86 in his success, product of a sternly simple domestic morality in his negative goodness. Laura Brookman filling beautifully her costly frame, quick-witted, quick-cultured, consciously conventional, full of unsounded reserves. Paul Stein, deftly observant, keenly alert, strong-hearted, carrying no superfluous sentiment, frankly Semitic on his face value, heartily of his race through nature and love, intellectually above it in being able to judge it—without prejudice. Jean Willard,—but here his cool analysis paused before the dreamy power of a loveliness more of spiritual suggestiveness than of beauty of feature—for here, he thought, lay, perhaps, the answer to all the mystery, to all the poetry of passion and endurance of the race. A representative group whose blended characteristics would scarcely have produced that legendary composite—the “typical” Jew.
The song ended, Daniel cried “bravo!” and Jean clapped her hands. Her satiny white skin was stained now with a faint rosy underglow—she was happy—forgetful of all rumor, of all suspicion. Was he not there, beside her? The unconscious coquetry of joy helped unconscious nature. Conversation drifted easily into tête-à-têtes.87
Philip admired the wealth of eschscholtzias, the glorious golden California wild poppies, glowing upon the table and about the room, and Jean explained how she had kept them all day in a darkened room, only bringing them into the candle-light at the hour when she wished to awaken their satiny splendor.88
“Counterfeiting daylight for the beautiful stupids,” she said. “The only fault they have is that they fall to pieces so quickly.” The long golden petals already strewed the table-cloth.
“But nothing is permanent,” he suggested lightly. “Nothing ever is—it is only a becoming.”
“You mean evolutionally?”
“Anciently speaking—yes.”
“Nothing is—it is only a becoming,” she repeated musingly, fastening the poppy she had been toying with in her bosom. “Then there is hope for all of us. For of course that remark refers most of all to us poor dots of humanity.”
“Oh, man—man is only a passing thought in the mind of the Creator,” he teased, trying to forget himself in gauging her, and noticing how the poppy seemed to glow up into her eyes.
“What a skeptical thought! Besides it is blasphemous. According to that, how many more low thoughts He must have than great ones.” They were laughing into each other’s eyes. “And what a lot of vain sophistry and red-tape cant we Jews escape by making our God a glorious abstraction.” She was speaking in the serious strain most natural to her.
“‘We Jews!’” He drew a hard breath. “But what of Sinai?” he questioned.
“You are speaking anciently again.”
“How?”
“‘Nothing is—it is only a becoming’—nothing more so than the Jew and Jewish commentary.”89
“But—this.” His eye swept the symbols of the festivity. If she was minded to teach, why not? Surely she had the most beautiful eyes in the world! And there was a certain cadence to her pretty young voice—
“Oh, this is a picture—” she was saying, “part of our ancestral gallery—which we unveil every year for the sake of auld lang syne.90 If you could have heard our rabbi at the Congress of Religions you would understand what I mean—how we move—how singularly free, unhampered, broad, open to the light of every day, Jewish thought is.91 Oh, I was so proud of him. He seemed to overtop them all. I wish I could tell you how—but I am so densely ignorant, I never get anything but the spirit out of things.”
“May you not have judged through instinctive racial sympathy—prejudice?” he murmured, enjoying her swift enthusiasms, the music of her voice making dim the meaning of her words.
“Perhaps. But how else does one judge—honestly. One cannot detach oneself from oneself, can one?” She questioned him with her eyes, not waiting for his answer. “Wait a minute—I do remember something. Our other rabbi, our younger, beautiful-voiced one, said, at the time, that when we pray we do not pray to the divinity above us, but to the divinity within us.92 Well?”
“Truly? And you pray so? And is it efficacious?”
“Thereby hangs a tale.”
“Tellable?”
“Oh, yes; if I am willable.”
“Well?”
“It’s another proof of that ‘becoming’ theory of yours. When I was a little girl I used to say a Hebrew prayer of which I understood not one word—recited it like a poll-parrot. I could repeat it now word for word, straight from the beginning, if—”93
“How did it go?” He spoke impulsively, the color springing up his cheek.
“Oh such gibberish!” She ran through it laughingly.
He could have repeated in unison—they were linked by a ‘coincidence of family tradition.’
“But I renounced that as soon as I was allowed the silence of prayer. I remember at that stage I was very confidential to my God, told him all my little vanities and ambitions, begged him to make me successful in my examinations, to make my teachers love me, to give me certain pretty frocks, and all the other desires of childhood. Then, as I grew older, and life grew shorter and more sacred, I ceased to itemize—I adopted a sort of cipher—a shorthand mode of communication. And then I discovered that my God was not listening to me—that I was blasphemous in thus addressing him—and so I ceased to pray.”
A silence fell between them.
“And yet,” she looked up with a flash of radiance, “the primitive notion is there just the same. Because in very happy moments I do pray—instinctively.”
“What do you pray?” What a child she was, still full of the wonder of her own growth.
Her mouth dimpled merrily. “My uncle says it’s the whole of religion in a nut-shell.”94
“Well, teach me.”
“Oh, no,” she answered very quietly.
“Oh, but you must.”
She raised her eyes to his insistent gaze. What! repeat to this self-constituted critic, this cold-eyed man of the world her fragmentary rhapsody of joy and gratitude for life, her childish “God bless everybody, and make me be a good little girl”! “Little” girl, forsooth!
Yet he could feel the family bent through her blushing reticence. She was a girlish Daniel Willard—and he told her so.
“Then diagnose Uncle Daniel—and I’ll prescribe for myself.”
He looked down at her, noticed inconsequently a tendril of dark hair caressing her tiny ear—struggled a moment against her physical charm—and submitted.
She was no longer Jean Willard, the Jewess. She was only a beautiful girl sitting close beside him, whom it lay within his possibilities to attract. He turned more directly to her. . . . There rushed over Jean the full sway of a brilliant man throwing aside his accustomed reticences for her sake. The murmur of the other voices died out of her consciousness. Whether it was only the briefest span of time or a cycle in which they spoke together she could not have told. She only felt that she had traveled deep and far alone with him.
“Come,” he said, half rising from his chair. “Where’s your piano? I’ll play you a strain—two strains—three—more eloquent of these different phases of the grand passion in different types of humanity than I could or would describe to you in words. The music to you—” He paused, resuming his seat as the maid presented a card to her mistress.
Jean’s foot tapped the floor impatiently. “Oh dear,” she murmured, with frank annoyance, and, with a fleeting pout lost in a smile, she murmured a word of excuse, and left the room.
Could Stephen Forrest have guessed she was on the point of relenting? Else how account for his assurance in again crossing her threshold, she wondered impatiently, hurrying through the hall. How could she get rid of him without hurting his dangerous sensitiveness, without letting him know that he was an intrusion upon a moment so superlatively happy she had wished it without end?
But her impatience fled at sight of his weary pallor. “Let us both sit down,” she said in an impulse of compassion, all party spirit and inclination lost through the woman. “You look tired to death.”
“I am,” he said, following her example and sinking into a chair, surprise over her gentle acceptance of his being there giving his conscience a leap of shame. “And I can give no excuse for my daring—after our last meeting—except—”
“The picture?” She prompted kindly as he paused.
His little scheme of vengeance looked mean and petty beside her broad forbearance. He had never seen her as she seemed revealed to-night—his impressionable senses took in her full value for love and art.
“You are going out,” he said with quickened breath, his eye sweeping over her unusual radiance.
“No. I am staying in.” She spoke gently, but shortly.
“Then I am intruding—you expect others.”
“Oh no. No one else is coming.”
He chafed under her courteous curtness. He fully appreciated her spiritual absence, her reluctance to being there with him. He could feel her resolving his visit into a business interview, nothing more. And he could not, in all decency, force it into anything longer.
“And so,” she added, breaking in upon his reflection, “what is that long thought?”
“Yes, I am going. No, don’t trouble to speak the little social fib—you know I always understood what was passing behind your face. But as for our last set-to, I believe, yes, I feel sure you are going to relent.”
“Perhaps. If you promise to be good.” The playful words were charged with a warning meaning, which he grasped at once. Unfortunately, however, they only served to recall the real object of his being there.
“Good? Oh, I’ll be good enough,” he laughed with a contemptuous snort. “I’ll paint a picture that will be a picture, never fear—but it will be you—only you—and I’ll be romantic and call it—‘the Jewess’—but remember, it will be only you. And then when it’s quite finished, and I’ve put it away, out of the reach of memory, I’ll paint its companion. Want to hear what that will be like?”
“I am listening to you.”
“It won’t be so much to your taste, because, I promise you, it will belong utterly to the realistic school—and you don’t like naked truths, do you?”
“Not ugly ones. I mean I shouldn’t choose them—for companions. And what will you call my ‘companion’?”
“‘The Jew.’”
“Indeed. And you think you can find nothing but an ugly model?”
“Oh, he has stood for me already. But you mistake my meaning—he is most inconsistently good to look at in conventional attire. We were speaking about naked truths.”
“And where did you discover this interesting sham?”
“In Dr. May.”
“Yes?” The rising inflection was sweetly, stilly dangerous.
“’Pon honor. He stood unconscious model for me last night. Oh, it was rich, rich!” He threw up his arms in an ecstasy of false delight, but hurried on, goaded by, trampling ruthlessly over, the protest in her proud face. “I’ll paint him,” he continued, leaning toward her in smiling, low-voiced confidence, “as he never chose to be painted before—full face, not profile—at the moment when his counterfeit bit of pasteboard was torn to shreds by a set of finical young Christians who politely shut their club-door in his face. I could throw a good deal of quiet drama into that. I think you would prefer it to the more sensational pose of clutching the throat of the man who dared to call him Jew?”
His still smiling face was ghastly, his nostrils quivering; he scarcely saw the features of the girl before him. “He has a hand of steel, that mutual friend of ours. Look!” He threw back his head disclosing to her battling senses the still plainly discernible red marks upon his delicate throat. “Philip May—his mark—at your service,” he presented with mock courtesy. “What spicy reading the press could make of it if placed at their clever interpretation.”
An icy hand pressed upon her heart; she strove vainly to answer his waiting pause.
“Pshaw!” he laughed roughly, “you’re deathly pale. Don’t take it so seriously. Let me assure you it will have a tame enough ending. I should only need to offer him this alternative—publicity, or apology before witnesses—and flop! the Jew would be in character—upon his knees.”
She sprang to her feet, a flood of released blood rushing madly from her throat to her brow. “You lie!” she flamed, in imperious suffocation. “You lie Stephen Forrest!”
He laughed somewhat dazedly at the passion he had evoked.
“Why,” she repeated more slowly, measuring his ironic insolence, “I’ll prove that you lie.”
Acting impetuously upon the impetuous thought, she was out of the room before either of them could take count.
Somewhat surprised over her low-voiced summons, Dr. May followed her through the hall. She did not turn to him until they were both well in the room, and Stephen Forrest, hiding his astonishment over her summary retort under a gracious suavity, stood up. He looked deferentially toward her while she spoke.
“You must pardon my calling you so impulsively, Dr. May,” she laughed, still tremulously, “but I have challenged Mr. Forrest to prove his boast that you would sooner go on your knees to him than see your name—attached to some vile story of his concoction—in print. Will you second me?”
He smiled reassuringly into her beautiful eyes, turning from her to Forrest and looking him over as a mastiff might a terrier. “Is that your proposition?” he asked quietly, with a raised eyebrow.
A light, the quick light of jealous insight, flashed in upon the artist’s confused consciousness: her intensified loveliness, her dress, her unexpected gentleness toward him, her passionate umbrage, Philip May’s presence. “Decidedly you have me at a disadvantage,” he said softly, turning to the girl, a mad pain at his heart. “Surely you must know I never should have expressed myself as I have, had I known that the love you felt for Dr. May, so naïvely, yet plainly expressed to me not long ago, had this consummation in view—had come to this. Was it quite fair to me?” He held out a hand of truce.
She looked down at it, white, impassive. Something indescribable in her face smote into his pity. “Ah well, I’ve made a mess of it, as usual,” he confessed sharply, “and the only way out of it is through the door. Good-night.” He brushed past Philip as he limped his way out.
Philip turned hurriedly to Jean. “I’m sorry you have been drawn into this unpleasant affair,” he said in a matter-of-fact, impersonal manner, a scowling light in his eyes, “and sorry my pleasant evening has been spoiled. Mr. Forrest and I will settle this little discussion outside. Excuse me to Mr. Willard, will you?” He took her hand gently, pressed it strongly, scarcely glanced at her, and caught the front door just as it was closing behind Stephen Forrest.