There are prayers—or something—said in the evening, aren’t there?”114 Philip demanded, laconically, on the afternoon of the funeral, when he stood again with Daniel Willard in the May dining-room. Recollections of old ceremonies were pressing in upon him.
“It is customary—yes. But to-night being Friday, there are services in the Temple—and one goes there.”115
“At what hour?”
“A quarter to eight during the winter.”
“Shall I find a seat?”
“Yes, yes; everybody is welcome. Besides, there is your father’s seat. Mine is with his. I too am going down to-night. Shall we go together?”
“Thank you.”
“I am going home now. Perhaps you will lie down a little.” He looked imploringly into the stern, gray face. His own was weary and tear-stained, but he did not know it.
“Perhaps,” returned Philip, stifling argument.
Daniel turned away. There was nothing to be gathered from the baffling wall of rigidity behind which the man had intrenched himself. Throughout the day of necessary publicity and ceremony, standing cynosure for the crowd of curiosity-seekers and gossips among the large host of the dead man’s time-proven friends, looking for the last time upon the features cowled in peace, beside the narrow bed in which they laid Joseph May next the love of his youth, the son had presented a blankness of aspect as unreflecting as the sheeted mirror in the sitting-room, symboling the vanities of life.
“You are tired,” said Jean, when her uncle entered. She helped him out of his overcoat and pressed him to eat something.
“Thank you. I have no appetite for eating.” He spoke in distant courtesy.
“Won’t you—aren’t you going to rest a while?”
He kept his hand upon the knob of the door, waiting to close it upon her. It was a house divided against itself. But the situation had become intolerable to Jean, and she suddenly threw her arms about his neck.
“I’m sorry for—for what I said yesterday morning,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “But I couldn’t stand near him at the funeral—as you asked me—feeling as I do—as everybody feels—that if it weren’t for him—directly—or indirectly—Uncle Joseph wouldn’t be where he is now.”
“At any rate,” said Daniel Willard, coldly, “there is no occasion for this repetition of the remark, is there? I do not like the sound of it.”
She drew from him with drooping head. Something in her heavy eyes and white face gave him an uneasy start.
He put his hand out to her. “My dear, are you well?” he asked, gently.
She nodded her head in assent.
“Then perhaps—what was I going to say? Perhaps a glass of wine would taste good if you would bring it to me.”
She threw him a look of gratitude and hurried off for the refreshment.
But the shadow of Philip May stood between their usual confidences, nor would it let Daniel Willard take his much-needed rest. He was thinking of certain bitter words spoken almost a year before under a beautiful February sky:
“And I made a new will according, Daniel. A fine will like you talk so much about, with Universities, and Hospitals, and—ich weiss viel!—in it. So well he can go alone and has no use for his father, so well he has no use for his father’s money.—I left him a dollar—that’s the law, Stein says—and he can make Shabos with it, or put it in a crêpe band on his hat—if it is still the style to make believe you care. But it will make me nothing out. For me—I will be silent in my grave.”
What if the vindictive testament still existed, with nothing to repudiate its revengeful spirit in the eyes of a keen world—and the conscience of the disinherited? If so, then, Joseph, alas, not silent!
Jean, in her incomprehensibility, begged him to dine with Philip May, but it was a silent meal which he partook with him. It was as silent a going forth to the place of prayer afterward.
As they stood on the back platform of the car, approaching the dark pile of the Temple, Daniel noticed that the street was filled with hurrying groups of people who were lost in the shadows of the two great flights of steps leading to the arched portico. It looked as though there were going to be an unusual attendance. As they mounted the outer steps, Daniel glanced at his companion’s face, questioning what effect this unexpected crowd might have upon him in his reclusive mood. But, quite oblivious to this feature of the moment, Philip walked in after him to their seats somewhere toward the middle of the nave.
A subdued light from many bulbs pervaded the interior. At either side the richly carved chancel glowed the great seven-branched lamps. At the farther end, above the heavy ruby velvet curtains concealing the ark, rose the gleaming pipes of the organ.116 The swing-doors at the back opened and shut to a constant flow of softly moving people; stooped, slow-moving, long-nosed, grizzled Jews—those who had paved the way; portly, important, keen-faced Jews—those who had profited by the paving; young, alert Jews of the hour—those who were inheriting;—here smug and self-satisfied, there dignified by the culture, though new, of a far-reaching cosmopolitanism;—broad-bosomed, middle-aged Jewesses in spiritualizing griefs and crêpe veils; graceful, piquant-faced, well-dressed young Jewesses, the light of the world in their eyes. And not one among all these diverse faces, not omitting the most self-approving, the most joyous, or the most empty-souled, but bore evidence of a racial potentiality which falls easily to the line of tragedy. But the Jews formed only a minor proportion of the immense gathering this evening.
“I see one of the professors of Stanford in the pulpit,” murmured Daniel. “I could not understand the crush.”
Philip received the explanation in silence. There was a numbness possessing his faculties which gave him a sense of being put passively, through no desire of his own, by some resurrectionary process, back into a long-deserted life.
And this was the approach: music which was prayer, prayer which was music, soaring, sonorous, sublime, whether through the voice of the organ, the marvelous intoning of the cantor, or both together blending in vast, deep harmonies, which rose as out of the immensities of the past, reaching the climax in the trumpet glory of the “Shemah,”117 the hope-cry and star of a People through æons of misunderstanding, of exultation, and despair—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”—which they, having escaped from out their fastnesses, shall some day change to, “Hear, O Humanity, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”118
Presently the echoes were hushed, and soft words of comfort were spoken, gentle as a loving touch on throbbing wounds; the music trembled a faint whisper, and the mourners arose in their places, while the “Kadesh”—the glorification of Him who gives and takes in love and wisdom—was quietly chanted to them.119
Philip resumed his seat, mechanically, as he had risen, swayed by the simple, compelling services. But during the hour in which the professor of Stanford gave one of his ethically broad, yet bluntly sincere, lectures—this night on the state of the Cubans starving on the country’s borders—of which he, Philip, heard only the murmur, as of the rumble of a distant life—he seemed to be listening, stony, incapable of response, before a grave, chiding Power.120 That some day he might grasp it, bow down before it, he felt with impotent grimness, but to-night, though the mighty voice of the music had stirred him as a voice from afar, it upbore before him only the quiet old face of his father as he had seen it last in death. Stern-browed, tall, commanding, he had attracted many curious eyes when he had risen among the other mourners, but down to the moment when, the benediction said, the throng began to move slowly toward the exits, he had remained unconscious of the public among whom he sat or stood.
The rush of buzzing voices brought him back to his surroundings. He knew that Daniel Willard was returning bows and salutations and that he himself had acknowledged several such recognitions. A tall, thin man, cutting his way through with extended arm, cornered them for a moment near the door.
“Isn’t Jean here?” he demanded, with pleasant abruptness.
“No, she did not come,” murmured Daniel. “Did you expect her?”
“Well, not by agreement—I only supposed so. I thought I’d use the occasion as a medium for lending her a book we had been speaking about.”
“What brings you here, Paul? The professor?”
“He might have, but he didn’t. No, I have Yahrzeit121 for my mother—never miss coming if I can help it. Hadn’t we better be moving?”
They found themselves in the tail of the vanishing crowd. The sweet night air struck their faces.
“Have you ever noticed,” asked Paul, as they approached the portico, “how, coming out here at night, these arches let in the stars and sky exactly as though continuing the roof-scheme of the Temple within? I don’t know whether it was an architectural design or divine accident, but it actually makes us carry heaven with us at least a moment beyond the threshold. You ride, of course?”122
“Well—what do you say, Philip?”
“Isn’t the distance rather too great for you to—”
“No; and the walk will do us both good. Well, Paul, why not bring the book to Jean now?”
“Exactly. I decided to do that when you decided to walk—if you don’t mind my company.”
“We shall be glad of it,” said Philip, unexpectedly, and they veered around. There was something irresistibly attractive to him in the personality of this rough-visaged son of Judah. The old gentleman walked between, briskly, intrepidly, his young companions thought, but in the silent intimacy of his own bones, he knew he was very tired.
“What did you think of the lecturer’s flat-footed expressions of opinion, Dr. May?” asked Paul, as they strode out Sutter Street, with long, steady strides.
Philip started. “The lecture? I’m afraid I lost most of it. I was still absorbed in the echo of the services. But—was it Jewish?” He felt a sudden desire to set Paul Stein talking—for diversion; he liked the suspicion of reserve strength in his manner, the twinkle in the corner of his bright eye.
“Was what Jewish?”
“All of it—the simple prayers with most of the Hebrew omitted—the superb organ music—the non-Jew in the pulpit.”
“It was all Judaism—robbed of provincialisms and anachronisms.” The words came from Daniel Willard. “Why do you question it, Philip?”
“It seemed heretical—to the ancient idea.”
“The ancient idea is the new idea. It is long since you have been in a synagogue.”
“Yes.”
“Not that it would have been told you there in so many words. But the ancient idea of which you speak—the Talmudic idea—was that the Law was never to be a sealed matter—that it was always to remain open to the interpretation of the search-light of progress.”123
“In other words, we evolve,” put in Paul, lightly.
“That is your word—mine is progress,” held the gentle Pharisee.124 “But perhaps it all means the same in the end—perhaps we all mean the same in the end. I hope so. Yet it seems to me I can hear the silent, continuous, unhampered stride of the Jew, keeping step with Time. As though he, the freeman, were moving on to the brink of the Universal—the Messianic religion which was meant by the first and shall be the last—though we may then call it by another name. For, one by one, the superstructures of Judaism, having fulfilled their mission of promulgation, will crumble away—one by one, her messengers, having fulfilled their time and office, shall lay them down to rest and pass into a tale that is told—while she, ever with her hand at the brain of Life, stands imperturbable, immortal, gazing down the ages. And when the great moment of coalition takes place, the Jew will be found in the van and waiting.”
“In short,” said Paul, in the ensuing pause, “we shall be to the manner born—the others will be the parvenus.”125
“No, Paul; I do not like the spirit of that remark,” reproved Daniel. “Youth is always a little vindictive, it seems to me. The eyes of age are more humble—having seen. But I was not always old. Time was when I too thought that to be of the Chosen People was to be of God’s elect—his darling, a peculiar treasure unto Him. But time has taught me the mockery of any divine nepotism. We were elect—through Abraham—who, myth or man, stands forth the great intermediary, the mouthpiece between God who is God—and Man. That is all for which we were elect—all for which we are ‘to the manner born.’ But since that moment of Revelation, most men—deny it though they may—believe in a Something which we have given them—and which we call God.”126
“What do you mean by belief in God?” asked Paul.
“The sense of an existent Ideality,” replied Daniel, quietly, “an ideality—a perfectability—whither the potentiality, the growth of man tends—and which still, as we advance, retreats like the horizon, beckoning us ever onward. A gray abstraction to some, perhaps, but which alone makes for and marks our religion.”127
“And, as a race, what are we?” questioned Philip May.
“Let the Christians answer that.”
The words were Paul’s. An oppressive silence gigantic with Titanic powers and gruesome memories hung like a weight upon their senses at this retort courteous.
But Daniel Willard interposed. “No, Paul—not as a race; only—and that again only in part—as a social figure among the nations. As a race we are what our religion has made us. There is a something in the roots of every one of us, a something which has got implacably mixed with our blood and is inseparable from it, which had made us what we are long before oppression came near us. We cannot separate ourselves from this ancient heredity. The Ghettoes were only the great storehouses in which this racial germ was preserved and forced to exotic intensity. Our ethics are our birthright. And whenever a Jew fails to be proud of this birthright it is through cowardice, or ignorance, or both. And whenever a Christian is unjust to a Jew, it is through cowardice, or ignorance, or both. But what I meant to say was, that a Jew can only deny himself by word of mouth.”
“And that generally gives him away,” added Paul, feeling that the old gentleman had inadvertently approached delicate ground, “and then all his perjury is in vain. Then—what atonement can he make for his folly, Mr. Willard?”
“‘God is regained in a moment of repentance,’” quoted the scholar, quietly.128
“Not through a death-bed repentance, I hope,” laughed Stein. “That should be as theologically impossible as we have made death-bed bequests illegal. In the other world—”
“What is the other world?” demanded Daniel, sternly.
“The world of the immortal soul.”
“And what is this immortal soul of which you speak so glibly?”
“That which aspires—here and now, as the mortal is that which desires—here and now.” He spoke rapidly, delighting in the Socratic cross-questioning upon a subject for which most thinking Jews are generally ready with some independent opinion. “According to which,” he added, lightly, “in heaven, as yet—the here-and-now heaven—the gathering is small and select. Now that, I grant you, is not an idea borrowed from the seers and prophets, who kindly left all speculation upon the future state to our own ingenuity—and needs; but it agrees with my idea of a religion which, robbed of its wrappings, has for its standard of judgment only a man’s conduct—and has nothing to do with this or that bowing or kneeling acquaintance with dogmatic theology. No, I’ll wager that what the patriarchs did give us, Mr. Willard, was not the religious characteristic at all—it was rather one of economics. Why, even in the beginning, they found only one God necessary.”
“You are pleased to jest, Paul.”
“No, mon Chevalier. I only wished to relieve the oppressive sense of diving in waters too deep. I visited the Deaf and Dumb Asylum the other day and was sadly impressed by the deaf children speaking of those who can hear as ‘the hearing ones,’ as though they possessed a royal gift.129 I was beginning to fear I was speaking as though I thought my people and myself the ‘hearing ones.’”
“You are, my dear Paul. And yet, for all your nonsense, I believe you to be a good Jew.”
“A Jew surely—but a good one?—save the mark! I am a composite of all that I have known—a child of to-day as well as of yesterday—and, come to think of it, I’m not sure I’m not—under that scoring—a pretty good Christian, as well.”
“Why not?” returned Daniel, quietly.
Paul cocked his ears. Philip was diverted, awaiting the next move.
“Surely you do not think that a challenge to me, Paul. Surely you must know that I do not forget that Christianity sprang from beneath the very heart of the stern-browed, eternal Mother—a beautiful, graceful youth—or, as John puts it, ‘Moses made the Law, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.’ Which, I take it, is an admission that, without Judaism as a basis, Christianity would be only a beautiful dream signifying nothing. Was not Christ a Jew—a Talmudist?130 Are not all his preachings, nay, his very phraseology, Talmudic? Only he is tenderer than the ironclad Law—necessarily ironclad for its time and surroundings. He speaks down to the masses always—the subtlety of Christianity lies in this world-tenderness. Judaism addressed itself to the strength of man, Christianity to its weakness. Therefore Judaism was for the few, Christianity for the many. The outside world was pressing too close, its own world growing too varied for the reticences of Judaism. Judaism speaks to the reason, Christianity to the heart. Judaism controls—Christianity consoles. We all have hearts and emotions; we have not all brains and the power of standing alone. The inadequacy of Judaism lay in ignoring the heart till the reason was satisfied, or, rather, it sought to satisfy the heart through the reason. A stern religion truly—but it endures. Why? Why? Why? Because in the eternal flux and vanity of all things, forms, and ceremony, and dogma, God remains. God is the keystone of Judaism. While God stands, the Jew stands.”
“And that is all that is necessary?”
“All, Philip—to the enlightened. Just as the ‘I am!’ of the first commandment comprises—to the enlightened—all of the others. ‘I am!’—What?—Justice. And what is Justice? In patois—Love.”
“Yes—the greatest Brotherly Love—in the long run,” supplemented Paul. They stood to let a car go by. When they had reached the opposite pavement, “And after all,” he continued, “what does all the cant and quibbling amount to? To my understanding, just this: Christianity teaches one to bear life for the after-heaven’s sake, Judaism to live life for life’s sake. No setting aside of this wonderful perfectible or damnable physical being, but that stern, far-reaching principle of atavism which, for the good of man, made Moses the first Board of Health, and which, in pointing out the visiting of the sins of the parents, physical and psychic, on the children unto the third and fourth generations, pronounced for that great religion of Humanity whither all sane minds are bound. And now that I have patted myself back to self-complacency, to revert to your antitheses, Mr. Willard, in what lies the inadequacy of Christianity?”
“In making Jesus a God,” returned Daniel. “Make Christ a God and you absolve man from attempting to follow in his altitudes. Leave him a man, and you establish the divine precept of example—what Man has done Man may do.”
“Oh, the Christ myth, as men who do their own thinking call Christ’s divinity, is being gently put away with other leading-strings and swaddling-thoughts,” said Paul, earnestly. “It was and is still a device for leading childish souls. But there are few children left in this era of newspaperdom, and Christ remains the great ethical teacher, the great young Radical of a hidebound theocracy, but still a Jew, who, having uttered his thought a span above the specified height, found, as Heine says, Golgotha.131 Strange that when the Christians are beginning to disclaim him as a God, the Jews are beginning to claim him as a man.”
“Showing that all light tends to a focus,” observed Daniel.
“No, showing still that we are nothing if not clannish. I am peculiarly in sympathy with all his teachings, and haven’t a particle of doubt that I should have been of his party had I lived in his day. Christ’s party, mind you—not Christianity’s. To me, Jesus has always been the Raphael of religions—as Moses is the Michel Angelo—a comparison which, no doubt, would sound blasphemous in Christian ears—but I mean it in all reverence.132 Do you understand me, Dr. May?”
“I think you are—what did you call it?—rather a radical Jew,” said Philip, with a half smile.
“If that means rational—perhaps. But I’m only one of many, especially in this feeling about Christ. Why, I know a little girl,” and here a merry, deep-seated tenderness came into his voice, “who feels her kinship with him so strongly that she cannot bear to think of the crucifixion. ‘No, I will not look,’ she said to me once, angrily. ‘And if there had been any women there—I said women,’ she repeated, pointedly—‘they would have died in their helplessness while that Roman brutishness was being perpetrated. Think, Paul, only thirty-three.’ And when at the end of the nineteenth century a Jewish maiden falls to weeping over the self-willed death of Christ, for which and in whose divine name the most unspeakable crimes of a world were perpetrated against her ancestry without even the excuse of the youth of that world, I think we may be said to be beginning to see straight.”
“Oh, Jean always goes the full length,” murmured Daniel, recognizing the picture. “And I think you are inclined to follow after, Paul.”
Paul laughed softly, and a sudden cold distaste for the man attacked Philip May. He resented the laugh, resented his right to that outspoken inflection of tenderness. He shook hands with both of them when they stopped before his door.
“I—I shall see you to-morrow,” hesitated Paul Stein,—“about your father’s will.”
“The will? I had forgotten about that. It will have to be to-morrow night, then.” He spoke shortly. Had he been able to see in the dark, he might have noticed the swarthy color in Paul Stein’s high cheek-bones, and the troubled setting of Daniel Willard’s tired face. The appointment made, he bade them good night, letting himself into his own house as the other two entered the one next door.
The oppression which had petrified him throughout the long day was disturbed—the usual nice balance of his nerves overthrown. He walked hastily from the dimly lit hall into the sitting-room, but out of its shadows rose the long black shape of that which had claimed it for two days, and he wheeled about, walking toward the less haunted dining-room. Midway he seemed to come upon a horror of memory, for he stopped short as though fearful of stepping upon something. The next minute, however, with a rough shake of the shoulders, he went forward. But the stiff order of the room, with its straight-backed chairs, was not what he sought, and retracing his steps, his brow drawn in deep, impatient furrows, he walked upstairs to his study. The room was at the back of the house, and he entered its wide darkness with a sense of passionate thankfulness for its quiet remoteness. His leather easy-chair was pushed near the open window, and he threw himself into it with a hard-drawn breath of relief.
The dread day was over. In the first moment after the calamity, when he could take thought of what had happened, he had wished, with elemental savagery, for carriage and spade that he might take and bury his dead in quiet and alone—that the carping, peering world might be forced aside and left unaided to make its own inferences, which must necessarily be beside the mark. That he and his father had parted in something deeper than reconciliation, something stronger, in its silent recognition of mutual need and growing custom, he had not the morbidity to put aside. In truth, he kept the knowledge beside him as he would have kept his father, had he had the power. Besides, during the eight or nine months following his withdrawal from all interests in the power called society, he had become almost a world, a law, and a judge unto himself—immune to the power’s approval or condemnation. If he was living down the derision, he was accomplishing it unconcernedly, immersed as he was in his profession. His old habit of success was his again in the sphere in which he had now concentrated all his energies and ambitions, and he had thought himself content to go on—although a girl next door held for him in the depths of her beautiful eyes nothing but a corroding contempt and detestation. And now—what?
The echo of the two quiet-souled, thinking men he had just left acted like a rasp to his deliberate equanimity. They had met the guns of fate with an unquestioning “right about face!” and come out calm, unscathed, self-approved from the fire. What were the narrow prejudices of the world to them? They were happy in their life, happy in their circle—independent. He alone—. His nostrils dilated in his sneer at self. But it was not a cold, superior sneer—it was hot, and miserable, and jealous—not over the well-deserved spirit of peace which encompassed those two, his mental equals, but because one, the younger of the two, had the right to meet “a little girl” he knew, on equal terms—had the right to speak of her—. He ground his teeth over the thought, stifling the groan which rose to his lips as the sound of a raised window drew his eyes to the wall of the other house just facing him.
The white figure of Jean Willard placing a glass with violets upon the broad outer ledge, leaned for a moment against the casement, then she put up her hand to close the window, her head thrown back and up, her eyes arrested by the young moon, which, drawing her out of the dark, made her own face a shadowy, slender moon of beauty.
All a lover’s vocabulary surged from Philip’s soul to his lips as she appeared thus again to him in his second hour of need. He sprang recklessly to his feet, and stood—wordless—facing her. Then—
“Jean, will you not speak to me?” his voice crushed out, hoarsely.
She drew back, startled by the second summons, crossing her wrists instinctively over her bare white throat, her eyes, her lips forbidding him utterance.
“Good night,” he challenged, desperately.
For a fleeting second a bewildering, bewildered softness mutinied over her countenance, gone before he could grasp it. Then, “Good night,” she answered, distantly, faintly. And window and blind fell between them, while, on either side, two souls stood struggling, the girl against, the man in the toils of a master-spirit common to humankind.