Jews_Must_Live/chapter

Chapter XVI

FAREWELL TO JUDAS

For you everything has finished itself out, I said to myself. Everything that has had a beginning has ended. Curiosity itself has had for you a beginning and an end. All the shapes within your vision, pleasing and unsightly alike, are pitchers you have seen filled up with rain-water, then emptied out by the pitiless sun. If you had a stouter heart, and a hammer, you might do a good job of breaking them. But are you going to spend the rest of a restless day watching the heat lick them fawningly into a mass of colored fragments?

If you had, yourself, at least, a cunning for withstanding the shattering light! But there you go, running off headlong into a shade of doorway. . . . Could you but make one last tumultuous effort, lift up that two hundred pound corpse of yours, place it on a comfortable ship, and see what a power of wind and water would do for you. Why, man! you needn't ever be yourself again! The ocean is a mighty and savage cleaver. There might be nothing left of you when you reach the other shore but what is needed to identify you with the photograph on your passport!

On the deck, a few steps away from me, a corpulent elaborately dressed young man, with a good natured east-side face, was photographing a group of giggling friends. They waved white handkerchiefs, laughed, jostled one another, and tried to maintain a homogenous group on the shore. The ship was absolutely motionless. The gray moldy woodwork of the pier rose devastatingly over everything. I was still in New York. By unchangeable schedule I would continue being there another three quarters of an hour.

The prospect was intolerable, and suddenly a way out of it shone on me. I wheeled about, tripped down to my cabin, and turned in. When I reopened my eyes I was in the embrace of a huge somnolent rhythm that pleased me. The light was streaming in through a triumphantly free porthole. I dressed hurriedly, fairly ran up the deck, and looked about me. Neither before nor behind us was there a glimpse of shore. But behind me, I knew, lay America. Before me was Europe, Europe that I had not seen for a quarter of a century.

People, all strange to me, were scattered in groups everywhere. I looked them over casually, quizzically, consciously trying not to see any one of them. Well enough did I realize their importance. For at least a week, I knew, they would be my mental and social horizon, all the world to me. I would be a little slow discovering them, and they would be a little quicker finding out my usefulness for them. Eventually, it would be the world and me all over again, as it has always been. The story of creation was beginning anew.

The ordered magnetic chaos of the Atlantic, gray, vast and darkening, was before me. Looking far out, I saw deep into my own soul. I had left America and was heading for England, a country in which I knew instinctively they liked neither Americans nor Jews, and I was both. But that did not really matter. I was going back to Europe which my people had cradled from infancy, and which, as a return favor, had cradled me. That was the arrangement, I decided. Nothing must alter it. As a mark of my resolution I sought the bar.

A pock-faced mottle-headed steward they called Jim brought me a double scotch with some ice in it. I observed the ice melt as I finished a cigarette. Two passengers, one large, grisly-faced and morose, the other slim and dark-eyed, both engineers returning from the Far East, sat down at my table. They drank quickly, as people do after a fan tine, and when my glass was emptied, ordered Jim to fill it up for me. They had spent about a month in dry America, and were glad to be getting back to England.

Jim brought many more drinks, and my newly acquired companions began to talk freely. Nothing in America had pleased them, not even the women. They deliberately drew me into the conversation, for I seemed to them American, and good game.

"Why, what have you got in America, anyway?" the older of the two demanded. His mouth had acquired an ugly twist.

"For one thing," I replied, "some one hundred million rather nice people!"

They stared at me with open mouthed wonder. They had expected me to boast of the Woolworth Building and of winning the great war. Undoubtedly they had, at their fingers' tips, fondly cherished arguments itching to reply. "You don't sound at all American," the younger one drawled.

I made a risky experiment. "Well, to be absolutely correct, I am not entirely American, being also somewhat of a Jew."

The effect of this speech was electric. My two easily acquired companions exchanged significant glances, gulped down the rest of their liquor, and without another word staggered away from the table. The taintless instinctive-ness of their procedure amazed me. My stupefaction was interrupted by the impersonal appearance of Jim, on whose plate I flung a two shilling piece.

"Any change?"

I looked up into his face and shook my head. The realization that I was on an English ship settled fully in me. I went below.

In the long elegant saloon people were getting their assignments to tables, asking questions with reluctant timidity, ordering children about, and slowly, inevitably drifting into one another.

I noted with satisfaction that there was not a pretty woman in sight. A pretty woman usually spoils everything by attracting to herself more attention than legitimately belongs to her. Like a tree standing out in a finely etched landscape. It may be a good tree. But it ruins the landscape.

I do not mix easily. Besides, I should see whether my baggage had been sorted out and brought to my cabin, in good order. My trunk was being dragged in by a pleasant-faced, pleasant-mannered steward, as I arrived. There was already a trunk, under the bed I had napped in. A strange trunk. Here was something I had not counted on at all. "Is there someone else in this cabin with me?" I asked.

The steward paused to look up at me. "Yes, sir. And you're lucky, in having only one."

"Well. Have you seen him? What's he like?"

"Oh, you'll like him, sir. He's a young gentleman, a Scotch engineer. Got two gold medals in Japan."

"Two gold medals, eh? That's going it some, I'll say."

"Oh, he's a fine lad, sir. . . . He's with the rest of the engineers now, sir."

Just then the gong sounded for dinner. I turned to the dining room feeling skeptical about the possibility of this Scotch engineer being "a fine lad" for all of his gold medals.

Opposite me at the table sat two familiar strangers. One said he was German. The other pleaded cosmopolitanism. The German was fair and fleshy, and spoke English with a substantially German accent. The cosmopolitan, at least ten years older, dressed with neat and scrupulous tightness, and displayed a shining baldness rimmed by paye-like hair. He appeared to be a super tailor, that is to say a tailor turned real estate agent. I rather liked him. At my right sat a hard boiled, past middle age Canadian with whom I enjoyed altogether one brief conversation. He asked me had I ever been to Montreal, and I asked him where was Montreal. At my left sat two mulatto girls who dressed like Spanish grandees and apparently got away with it. Very appropriately, it seemed to me, they coquetted with the German and the cosmopolitan. At the head of the table, a vivacious little woman, all black hair and black eyes, explained that she was English and didn't like Jews. On both sides of her, as if she were chaperoning them, sat a fair slender English girl and her tall grave fiancé whom I always think of as the Churchman; he was forever describing "our cathedrals." But in a corner, out of the vision of everybody, it seemed to me, was one whom I had almost escaped seeing such is the modesty of real beauty. To begin with, she was the only woman at table not in evening clothes. She presented a Queen Anne bust, a white collar rising from her white waist towards her high neck. Her hair, almost a metallic silver, parted in a straight line in the middle of her head, and fell back in two long twisted braids. She ate as if she were preoccupied entirely with herself. She sat too far away for me to judge of the smoothness of her skin. It was absolutely impossible to meet her eyes, for she did not once raise them during the hour at the table, as though she were guarding them from some imminent danger.

Table talk was dominated by the churchman who, among other things, had a goodly knowledge of Jewish affairs, and was cordial to the point of insisting that General Allenby's conquest of Palestine was the most glorious chapter of Jewish history. But I quickly tired of his spurious courtesy, and, in order not to hear him, set myself the task of making out definitely the mysterious beauty of the girl with the silver hair. But beyond the placid loveliness of her face I could make out nothing, and she had left the table in one motion of flight before I could pierce the image of her.

"What cool, impersonal beauty," ran through my mind. It was the sort that I had never had in my life, and perhaps never would live to attain.

A heavy mist had settled over the sea. Our ship seemed to move through it with round-shouldered timidity. Only a few people were on deck, those who had not yielded to the fascination of unpacking their belongings for the journey. They paced to and fro in short semi-circles, and puffed away in silence at brief cigarettes. Here and there, on a deck chair, a man could be seen sprawled out, his hands folded over his stomach, eyes half-dosed. Now and then the ship-whistle sounded shrilly over the soft lapping of the sea about the ship. The air seemed dying out.

Upon this trivial monotone of sound and movement I imposed myself for a few minutes. I could not make up my mind whether I wanted to rest or find something to do. The bar, as I passed it, had been absolutely deserted. The deck afforded not much more encouragement. The manner of the few who promenaded about was almost mystical in its seclusiveness. They talked in the hushed voices of people who are tired, rather than of those who are afraid of being overheard.

Back in the cabin I ran into the young engineer who was to share it with me for the rest of the voyage. A tall blond broad-shouldered fellow who narrowed down towards his feet. He had a big head, a square fleshy face pointed with a slight blonde moustache, blue eyes and a full sensual-lipped mouth. From a pair of broad shoulders he narrowed down alarmingly to a slender waist, thin legs and ridiculously small feet. "So you're Roth," he said abruptly, as I walked in.

"Yes," I replied.

"Well, you slept in my bed."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know it was your bed."

"My luggage was under it when you came in."

"I must have failed to see your luggage. Why don't you take the bed that hasn't been slept in, then?"

"I don't have to. I've changed the bedding around."

"Nice boy," I thought, and began pulling off my things. "I should warn you," I began jocosly, "that my feet, under the burden of two hundred pounds -"

"I won't bother about your feet," he interrupted, "if you keep your Jew head out of my affairs."

I looked up at him, and with great effort resisted a reply. Here's fate's little messenger, I vowed to myself. All ready to drag you into the Jew business again on the slightest provocation. Well, let's see how much fate can accomplish without your cooperation. I'll let this damn little squirt wilt before I take up this quarrel again.

A knock on the door of my cabin awoke me the next morning. It was the steward. "You've overslept, sir. I thought I'd call you before it was too late to get you something nice from the kitchen, sir."

"Good. Get me some ham and eggs and the exact time."

He returned, within ten minutes, bearing a tray laden with ham and eggs, toast, marmalade and coffee. "You'll find the coffee real good sir. We've a good chef this trip." He paused in the doorway. "One more thing, sir. Shall I reserve you a deck chair? It's a crown for the trip and that includes cushion and blanket."

"Alright," I said. "And there's an extra five shillings in it for you if you get it next to a really pretty woman."

"Very well, sir. Blonde or brunette?"

"I have no petty prejudices in the matter of women."

I ate, shaved, and sauntered out. At the end of the saloon, I found my steward waiting for me, a broad contented grin on his face. "I see that you've earned that five shillings," I said, pressing it into his hands. The number of my reservation was 76. "What's she, 75 or 77," I asked.

"I didn't notice, sir. But she's a beauty."

My heart rose in me with a strange hopefulness. Might it not be the girl with the silver hair?

"Good. How's the sea this morning?"

"In fine fettle, sir. Only that she looks a bit too coy."

"What does that mean?"

"Usually it means rough seas ahead, sir."

"Well, we'll take care of that in time." I ran eagerly up the easy circular stairway leading to the upper deck.

Morning on the deck was dazzling. The sun absolutely prodigal. The waters seemed to be on promenade. The atmosphere, crowded with the flow of flesh, steel, silk and water, was like a flawless mirror. I walked about for a few minutes in a daze of happiness, for it is happiness when you lose yourself in mingling with the world to the point of complete forgetfulness.

I stopped to watch a ping-pong game and noticed the number on the deck-chair nearby, 121. That reminded me. I had a quest ahead of me. I walked on slowly, watching the numbers dwindle. My mind was on the silver image of the night before. If only it turned out that it was she who occupied the chair next to mine.

A young woman in brown, her face half hidden by an old brown tamashanter sat in the deckchair to the right of 76. To the left the chair was not occupied. The glimpse I first caught of the face was pleasing. But she turned to look at me, as I sat down, and I saw that she was very lovely. "Beautiful morning," I said.

She smiled brightly, and I got a glimpse of small white teeth and copper-colored hair. "Yes," she replied. "English ships invariably play to good first mornings. But as omens of the weather to come they are not to be trusted."

"You're English, I presume. You see I'm hopelessly American."

"No. There's something about you which is super-American. I can't say just what it is."

I could have told her just what it was. But I realized that fate was handing me my cue again, and I was more than ever determined not to take it. I had only to say: Oh, yes I'm also a Jew, and the old battle would be on. But no, this time I wouldn't say it. "Probably the result of my first shave on board an ocean-liner," I said. "But to get back to the weather on English ships. Why don't you do something about it?"

"Oh, but we have. We've thought out a perfectly grand solution to the problem. We've simply sold out the stocks in our companies to the Jews."

"Delightful arrangement," I murmured. "And I suppose the Jews lose whatever money is lost on these ships."

"Oh, no. You see, losing is not their business."

"Traveling alone?"

"Oh, no. I have a sister with me. We missed you at breakfast."

"Missed me?"

"Yes. She saw you at the table last night. I was too ill to eat, myself. You can imagine what an impression you made on her because I recognized you from the minute description of you she gave me."

Hope burned bright within me. "Where is she now?"

"Walking the deck with her fiance. He's been in the Far East for more than a year. We traveled all the way over to New York in order to meet him half way back. They're to be married as soon as we reach London. There they are now."

I looked up. It was she, and yet the impression was now an entirely different one. The night before she had seemed to me so slight, almost a wisp of beauty. And now. . . . But of course I had only seen her face; and the perfection of her features framed by her silver hair gave her an elfin littleness. But really, she had such majestic feminine form and bearing, and as she approached us, on the arm of her escort, her walk suggested the movement of deep waters. "This is Alma," said the girl next to me. I'm Ada. And permit me to introduce Mr. Stewart."

I proceeded to introduce myself, and Stewart, my cabin-mate, was obviously not particularly pleased to meet me formally. I made no effort to appear enthusiastic myself, but happily Alma appeared entirely oblivious to this difference between us, and sank happily into the vacant chair next to mine. Stewart grudgingly sat down at the right of Ada. "Ada paints, you know," began Alma. "She'll tell you that she paints badly. But every year she gets one or two pictures into the Royal Academy exhibition. I told her last night that she simply would have to have you sit for her."

"And you?" I asked.

"Oh, I divide my time between doting on Ada and preparing myself to be a good wife to some good man. And you?"

"I write."

"Do you write the sort of books that keep children frozen stiff in their beds?"

"Good heavens, no. What gave you that impression?"

She hesitated. "I guess it must have been the way you stared at me last night."

"I'm sorry."

"Please don't. I wouldn't have missed it for worlds. I assure you I had never been so thrilled before. Promise me you'll never stop staring at me that way."

"I don't see how I can very well stop," I said.

"Alma's much too easily scared," said Ada dryly, turning from a whispered conversation she had had with Stewart. "But if your stare is anything like Alma describes it to be, I shall most certainly insist on your letting me pin it on canvass. Before you know it you'll find yourself hanging in the Royal Academy."

I bowed. "If I must hang, dear ladies, let it be in the Royal Academy."

The rest of the morning was given over to talk of pictures. Ada spoke slowly, hesitantly, almost as though she were not sure of herself. But the eyes of Alma were on me, and I knew that I had to find some way of saying things which it would be difficult to find a regular way of saying. I knew that Stewart was observing me microscopically. But you know how it is when you try to get away from doing the inevitable. You only succeed in drawing the cords of fate more tightly about you. So it was that, without any prewarning in my own mind, I suddenly settled on Rossetti and made him my favorite English painter, to the consternation of Ada and Alma, and the secret delight of Stewart. After all if I was going to show such abominable taste in pictures. . . .

I might have let the matter rest there. What difference would it make to me now, I ask you, what these people thought of my taste in art? But there was that damn bitch fate working away at my side, like the ghost of Abraham's wife impeaching me for slander. . . . I went on to explain: "My choice must depend, of course, on what I can get out of English painting. I certainly would not go to English art in order to increase my enjoyment of the spectacle of nature. Even if one had to learn French in order to enjoy a French picture, it would still be easier to gather delight from the meanest of the French naturalists than from the illustrious but tiresome Turner. As for the new dimensions which the moderns have been digging out of paint and marble, I would not try to learn new tricks from people who have not yet fully mastered the old ones. Isn't Augustus John learning to do today what Theodore Rousseau had learnt to do perfectly a half century ago? But what Rossetti gives me I cannot find anywhere else in the world."

"And what does Rossetti give you?" There was just a tinge of contempt in Ada's voice.

"English women," I said. "The most beautiful women in the world."

"Hurrah!" cried Ada. "Britannia rules the waves."

"Please explain yourself," urged Alma.

"Don't you dare," warned Ada's eyes severely. "You know damn well you're only going to make love to the poor child."

"I must," my eyes answered her. "I simply can't help it." I spoke without looking at Alma, but that only made the application of my words more obvious. "I think Alma is right. This is too lovely a morning to burden with anachronisms. Why shouldn't the things we utter have some of the properties of the sunlight which is falling so abundantly about us?

"Rossetti's English women have come to mean so much to me not because they are more English than the women of many another English painter. It is just that the things which I find most delightful about English women are in Rossetti's pictures most singularly emphasized.

"You will notice, for instance, when I name you Rossetti's five most English women, that no one of them is really English in origin: Lilith, who came before Eve, and wouldn't be acknowledged by the rabbis because, they claimed, she had no soul, was originally a Jewess. Pandora whose curiosity, Juvenal claimed, had no spiritual side to it at all, was Italian; as were also, Boccaccio's Fiammetta, and Pluto's bride Proserpine. Venus, the Goddess of Love, was, of course, Greek. Yet every one of these five women, whose origin in the mind of mankind is associated with sensual objects, Rossetti reproduces in the fresh and rich purity of a kew orchard in first bloom.

"What, for instance, does Rossetti let us see of Lilith? A lovely placid woman in a white nightgown, combing out her long brown hair before a hand-mirror held almost vertically in her left hand. The eyes, perfectly elliptic and brown, are wide open; out of them seems to flow the light by which you see her. The lips, curved and full, suggest no passion; they are lips with which to modulate the voice, not to kiss. Of his Pandora you see eyes, lips, neck and one hand, the most exquisite hand but one in the whole world. Her bosom is covered, and I swear to you that the curiosity in her eyes is purely intellectual. Nor would you know, from looking at her, that this Fiammetta of his had ever known a man with as sensual a memory as that of Boccaccio. In the midst of a shower of spring flowers, she stands tall and erect as if she had grown there in that garden. The arms, long, cold, and naked, are not such as you would wish to enfold you. Her limpid eyes are two small pools of moonlight in her delightful little head. In Proserpina, Rossetti gives us the head and shoulders of a frightened girl who is too dignified to show it. Two half closed eyes, a soft cheek, a long strong neck and a partly peeled pomegranate in a hand that might as well have been coolly gloved. Finally he gives us Venus, the naked bust of a woman whose breasts are as fresh and cool and un-licentious as apples. The lips are not parted, but no one in the world would want to part those lips to kiss them. All the attributes of love are here, all the things a man dreams of in his wildest of solitudes, the things he learns soonest he will never attain. Now this silver-haired Venus of his, Rossetti, who was as swarthy as I am, seems to have endowed with all the attributes most precious to himself. He endowed her features with a perfection made up of the miniatures of mighty things: a nose, like a white crystal; a brow like a pearl; cheeks like pale rose leaves, and a neck like a delightful white pendant. Can you tell me why, since I find so much to gild my passions in Rossetti, I should struggle for art with labors that appear to me to be only a half-hearted pageant of pomp?"

"I never saw those picture in that light before," said Alma breathlessly.

"If you ask me," said Stewart, "I think it's downright obscene."

"You mean Rossetti or myself?" I asked.

"Both of you," he stormed.

"But you notice he didn't ask you," put in Alma severely. "I think I want to take another turn about the ship before we go down to luncheon. Will you take me?" she asked, turning to me.

I saw the scowl darken on Stewart's brow, but there was nothing to do but take Alma's arm.

"Have you known many English women?" she asked.

"Besides the five I have already described," I replied, "there are a few I have read about."

"Then you have never known an English woman in the flesh and blood?" she cried.

The gallantry of the words flesh and blood thrilled me. The warmth of her arm against mine became sweet and personal. I didn't dare look at her. "I hope to - in England," I said.

No other words passed between us, till we returned to Ada and Stewart who said that it was time to go down to the dining room.

Luncheon, lightened for me by the discovery that Stewart would not be at our table, for sharing one set aside exclusively for the engineers, was full of the zest of trivial talk and venture. From where I sat I could see Alma clearly. She had changed places with her sister, and smiled continually at me. The churchman, whom we had not missed, came late, and he was full of story.

There had been quite a bit of excitement in first class which, this trip, was particularly well spotted with society, dramatic and film celebrities, among them a certain famous and temperamental Polish Pianist. There were also, returning as guests of the line, the four amateur pugilistic champions of England who had come over to America and had wiped the floors of the Commodore with America's four amateur fighting champions. The Pianist and the ship's captain, who was making this his last voyage, were old friends, the Pianist had always graciously consented to play for the Seaman's Fund, which was quite a prize for any voyage. They had been standing on deck that morning in the midst of a breezy conversation when the English amateur heavyweight champion hove into view. "There's a lad I'd like you to meet," cried the captain who was a great boxing enthusiast, and called the fighter by name.

The fighter came up and shook hands with the captain. "Mr. Przenski," he said proudly, "I want you to meet the amateur heavyweight champion of England, Mr. Isaac Cohen."

The Pianist stood stiffly and made no move to touch the young hand that was outstretched for his. "You will excuse me," he said, "but I think I will go back to my cabin. I see that you will have no difficulty whatever filling your Seaman's Fund quota this trip."

"Does that mean that he won't play this trip?" asked the black-eyed, black-haired little woman.

"Certainly not," said the churchman. "The captain followed him immediately and apologized. He might really have known better because Przenski's attitude towards Jews is very well known."

"Well, thank God it won't keep him from playing," sighed the little Englishwoman.

"What about the Jew?" asked Ada.

"Oh, he's going about with a chip on his shoulder. He had his things transferred immediately to second class, and he threatens that he'll ruin Przenski's concert by fighting someone here that night. He's got a good prospect too in Battling O'Brien - see him at that table to your left - who was once light heavyweight champion of America. And if you ask me, a good fight will outsell a good concert anytime."

"That would be a dirty Jewish trick!" exclaimed Ada.

I looked at the German and the cosmopolitan but they were staring deep into their plates. "Why?" I asked.

"Do you think it was very nice of Przenski to snub Cohen so cavalierly?" I demanded.

Ada's eyes seemed to narrow into a hard glint. "You're a Jew, aren't you?" she said.

"I don't see what difference that makes."

"Only this. You wouldn't ask such a question if you were not a Jew. And if your Cohen fights O'Brien I hope O'Brien knocks his damn head off."

I looked at Alma, but I couldn't find her eyes any more. A whole world of loveliness seemed to have passed out of my life. "Alright," I said, turning back to Ada. "I'll give odds on Cohen."

"I'll take you," she snapped. "It'll be a pleasure even to lose against you."

There was nothing to say to this. As soon as I could I got away from the table. I avoided the cabin, because I wanted to see as little as possible of Stewart, and I felt unable to face the sunlight of the deck. So I spent the rest of the day at an open window of the ship's library. Fate and I had had our first open clash, and, as usual, I had come out second best.

As if to utterly confound me, everyone came to dinner that night in evening clothes. The negresses looked more than ever like Spanish grandees. The dark little Englishwoman showed surprising lines of voluptuousness. Even Ada looked soft in her aloofness. But Alma - Alma succeeded herself for the third time in my fancy. The first time I had fallen in love with a dainty silver bust. The second time it was Rossetti's Proserpine which drew my eyes. This time it was Whistler's Girl in White. She greeted me as she approached the table with Ada, but it seemed to me a formal greeting, so I returned it in the same spirit, and did not venture to speak to her. Only a casual word now and then passed between her and Ada. In fact no general conversation developed at the table, so before we could realize it, dinner was over. I had no fancy for pacing the deck alone, so I got myself a magazine at the news stand and went into the bar.

Several small drinking parties were already in progress. I could recognize no one I knew, so I sat down at a little table occupied by a tall swarthy looking fellow about whom there was such an air of dejection that I thought I guessed who he was. "You're Mr. Cohen, aren't you?" I said.

He turned to look at me. I could tell by the wetness of his mouth that he was hostile to any intrusion, and that he had already drunk considerable for that day. "Well, what's it to you?" he growled.

"Nothing. But as one Jew to another, I don't think you've been very tactful. In fact I'm afraid you're going to find it rather rough sailing."

He made an ugly grimace. "Me find it a tough trip? You're crazy. You think they've counted me out because I happen to be a Jew. I can count myself out if I want to. But they can't count me out, see? I've got something on them, but they've got nothing on me. I'm not just a bloody Jew, see? I'm a fighter. I don't care what they think of Jews. When they see me fight they'll go crazy over me. Why? I got something to give them no other Jew can. There's that guy Einstein people talk about. What can he give them? Ideas. Or Lord Melchett; he can only give them money. But me, I got something to give them that they want more than ideas, yeh, even more than money. You know what?" He paused dramatically as if to wait for an answer.

"I'm sure I haven't a notion."

"And yet I heard them say that you're not only a Jew but a writer," he said contemptuously. "This is a Christian ship, isn't it? And these are bloody Christians, mostly, traveling on it, aren't they? Well, what do Christians like even more than love and money? You don't know. Well, I'll tell you. It's blood. And when I fight I give them blood, plenty of it. You wait and see if they don't go nuts over me."

"I hope so," I said. His vehemence had astonished me and taken me completely off my guard.

"Have a drink?" he asked me. Jim had come up alongside us.

"If you let me set them up," I conditioned. "And I should warn you," I. added when Jim was gone, "that if you pass out on me I'm not sure whether I'm strong enough to carry you back to your cabin."

"Don't you worry about having to carry me," he growled, and drank down the new glass of brandy at a gulp. "If you're not careful you're gonna be in a hell of a lot more trouble yourself."

"That's very interesting."

"A few of those English engineers were in drinking this afternoon. That's how I heard about you. One of them sounded particularly sore. Talk about my not being tactful. How about your going off with that engineer's dame the first day of the voyage?"

"That's ridiculous. I've barely exchanged greetings with her."

"I don't doubt you. But you know how touchy those fellows are about their women."

"That boy seems an utter idiot to me," I said, "and I'm not taking any further notice of him."

"Well, he's taking plenty of notice of you, I can tell you. If you really don't want to get into trouble with him I'd advise you to keep away from that dame of his."

My indignation was rising. "You mean to tell me," I cried, "that he sat here discussing me and his fiancee so that you could overhear him?"

"Overhear him. I'd have to be deaf not to hear him. But he was a bit drunk, I can tell you. And so were his friends. It looks as if they're going to make one grand souse out of the whole trip."

"I see where I'm going to have a grand time," I murmured.

"Afraid of him?"

"Not exactly. But you see, he shares my cabin with me."

"That is sure tough," he said sympathetically, and suddenly leaned forward with a bright suggestion. "They gave me a cabin all to myself down here. Why don't you ask your steward to move your things in with me?"

"I'd like to," I said. "But I'm afraid I can't."

"Why not? It'll be alright with the steward. You haven't any idea what an English steward will do for five shillings."

"I'm not worrying about the steward, Cohen. But about myself. I've never run away from anything in my life, before. Do you think I can afford to start with this fool of a young Scotchman?"

He scowled. "A question of courage again. How is it that when cowards meet it is always courage that is most talked about. Here we are talking courage, a couple of prize cowards. Yes, and in the very stuff we count ourselves heroes - this Jewish-ness of ours. I go about the world calling myself Cohen, and you let on to innocent bystanders that you're a Jew - like a leper who tells you that he's a leper not to warn you but to extract sympathetic alms. You know what a Cohen is? When I was a kid I learned that to be a Cohen was to be like a priest, a Jewish priest, a sort of holy man, a holiness one is born with. Well, if I was born with holiness, it's been shot so full of holes the best Cohens in the world couldn't recognize it. And you call yourself a Jew. You make me laugh.

"Let me tell you something about this hero, drunk in my chair on his fifth glass of gin. As a kid, would you believe it, I was a particularly good Jew. And holy? Holy smoke! I believed practically everything I was told on the business of holiness. I used to spend Saturday afternoons with my nose against the windowpane waiting for the sun to go down before beginning the new week's devilry. You see I'd been told what it meant to be a Cohen, and I tried to live up to the bloody thing. All the hell in me was frozen to a sort of white holiness.

"Both of my parents are dead now. So if you must make copy of some of the things I'm going to tell you, go right ahead and be damned. Tell the world that One-Punch Cohen was a religious kid, and a yellow little Jew at heart. Dead afraid. And of what? You'll laugh when I tell you. You wouldn't guess in a million years. I wouldn't tell you in a million years if I wasn't stinking drunk. I was afraid that I wasn't really a Jew. Did you ever hear the likes of it? It's true, though.

"It started the day my father first caught me whistling behind the barn on a Sabbath afternoon. We had a particularly good dinner, and mother had made me happy by pinching my neck in a way she had when she was really pleased with me. I had wandered out of the house in a daze of ecstasy, with the day drifting over the meadows before me like a ship. I felt so pleased with myself there was only one way to express it, with no other children about to play it out with. I whistled. I whistled a holy tune, the Friday night Lechu Dodi. When my father, who I thought was dozing in his bed, appeared, I stopped whistling even before I realized that I was doing something wrong. But there he stood glaring at me, his face purple. "Shaigetz! Goy!" he cried, and slapped me twice, once on each cheek, a slap with each epithet. I think the words hurt more than the blows.

"The next time he hurled those words at me was when he caught me swinging my legs under the table at meal time. What does a boy think of when he swings his feet under the table that it can merit punishment? It seemed as if I could do nothing to please myself without arousing the anger of my father. There were always blows. And with the blows always came those terrible words: "Shaigetz! Goy!"

"It grew worse as I grew older. If I went out into the windy sunlight without a hat, which was always a glorious thing to do; when, while begging my mother's pardon for some accidental rudeness, I sank down on my knees before her; everything that was beautiful to me seemed goyish to my father. And I began to be afraid that there must be something wrong with me. I seemed instinctively to do the things which were un-Jewish.

"One night mother told us the story of the Ger Tzadick, a gentile who fell in love with Jewish ways and sacrificed the rest of his life in service of Jews. Not a poor gentile, a man of title, a man who by becoming a Jew lowered himself in the esteem of the world. It's dangerous enough to practice being a Jew when you're born into it. But to try to be a Jew when you're actually born Christian. That's why the Jews love him so much, my mother explained to us.

"'But do you think he was a good Jew?' I asked her.

"'Why not?' she replied. 'He was more than just good. He was beautiful. Beautiful, I tell you.'

"To me the story was a great relief. I no longer had to be afraid of whether I was a Jew or not. Because, if a goy could be a Jew and a saint . . . At worst, if I lived honestly and sincerely, I would be a Ger Tzadick, and entitled to a certain amount of love . . .

"There is a legend, I think, in every man's childhood up which the rest of his life crawls like a vine. If you look back into your own origins you'll find some such tale which began by striking your fancy, made itself at home in your mind, and became the unconscious guide to every growing action of yours ever afterwards. My mother's version of the Ger Tzadick was mine. It grew up with me and I grew up with it.

"Without having any inkling of the matter myself, I became a Ger Tzadick in my own sub-consciousness. I began to divide the world into Jews I didn't like and those who were Ger Tzadickim, like myself. All the Jews around me were just Jews. But when a Jew I met said a fine thing or gave expression to a beautiful gesture I thought immediately he was a Ger Tzadick.

"It is a strange sort of fantasy to discover roaming about in one's blood. But we must live by what we have, for we can live by nothing else. Day by day I found myself consciously growing away from the ordinary type of Jew. When my mother died I left my father's house altogether and went to live by myself. It was because I couldn't bear the old associations, I told the people. And it was true. I couldn't stand the horrible Jewish faces about me.

"It tormented me, of course, this repulsion of mine for my own people. I remember that there was a man in Cambridge, a Jew whom I confided in, and he tried to talk me out of it. "The feeling is unworthy of you and contemptible he said. "As a Jew you have every reason to be proud of yourself. Think: you are racially one with Rambam, Spinoza, Heine, Karl Marx and Einstein.

"'I would be,' I replied, 'If I were certain they were really Jews.'

"He looked amused. 'Even Houston Chamberlain does not deny us Spinoza.'

"I tried to explain myself: 'I grew up among Jews like you,' I said to him. 'The Jews I saw and listened to every day were shrewd, ambitious and law-abiding at home, but perfect anarchists abroad, outside their own homes. When I met a Jew who was sober, orderly and scrupulously honest he never looked to me like a Jew, or even sounded like one. When I began reading the Old Testament I found myself thinking the same way. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were Jews alright. They were hardy, domineering, profoundly calculating, and instinctively thieving. But Moses did not seem to me, at all like a Jew. Neither did Isaiah nor Jesus.

"'When I was fifteen I was struck in Genesis by the peculiar wording of the description of Rebekah's pregnancy: "And the Lord said unto her: Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be separated from thy bowels." How, I asked myself, could two nations be in a woman's womb unless two nations had placed them there? Was that possible?

"'I might have gone to the rabbis with my perplexity. Luckily I didn't like them. So I went to the teacher of biology in my school, and he explained the matter to me, to my complete satisfaction. A woman, a promiscuous woman, could have twins of two different fathers. The author of Genesis could have had nothing else in mind, for he goes to such pains to show that, both by his heritage and because of his glorious personal qualities, Esau was certainly not a Jew.

"'I do not imply that all Jewish women are lusty promiscuous bitches like Rebekah. Towards the production of a whole stream of Esaus in Jewish life, this is not an essential condition. Every generation of Jews is plentifully pogrommed, raided and raped, so that the seed of Esau is constantly sown in the womb of Rebekah. It is my sincere conviction that it is of this sowing that Jewish mothers give birth to Montaignes, Spinozas, and Heines who bear no resemblance whatever to the unbearable merchants and swindlers who spring everlastingly from the seed of Jacob.'

"I did not convert this Cambridge friend of mine, any more than I am trying to convert you. But I have always believed it myself. So you see how my carrying on under the name Cohen is the sheerest and emptiest bravado."

I told him that I had really had no intention of posing as a hero. That nasty little Scotchman might, for all I cared, get as nasty as he liked!

"Alright, have it your own way. But if you ever find yourself needing any help -"

"Thanks. But I think I can manage things well enough. Why don't you and I get out of this stuffy room and promenade the deck and get some of these kinks out of our brains?"

We paid and left. But it had suddenly grown very cold on deck and after a few minutes we returned each to his own cabin.

Next morning the window of our cabin was engulfed. The sea was in an uproar.

Neither Ada nor Alma showed up for breakfast or luncheon. All thought of going on deck was abandoned by everyone.

Three distinct card parties grew up in the saloon. One of English men and women. Another of engineers. And a third of Americans and Jews, which I joined.

There was at our table a little Canadian Jew called Zauber, en route to Galicia with funds for the starving, entrusted to him by their relatives in Montreal. He attracted to himself attention not at our table alone. Small, meager, of a sallow complexion, he talked rapidly and excitedly about everything and quarreled interminably at the drop of a card. His manners and mannerisms became the butt of the merriment of the ship.

Among other things Zauber was very keen on "exchange." You knew that the pound had risen to three dollars and eighty cents when he offered you three dollars and seventy five cents for it. He had two busy vest coat pockets, one for American quarters, the other for Canadian ones. When an American quarter fell on the table he would contrive to change it for one of his Canadian quarters. By this transaction he earned six cents. No one objected. He enjoyed the liberty afforded a pet monkey.

I might have been able to bear the Canadian Yiddle if it weren't for the prize fighter O'Brien at our table. O'Brien - a burly raucous fellow with a coarse infectious laugh - addressed Zauber as "kike." If Zauber was hurt he didn't show it. On the contrary. It appeared to please him so much, I half suspected he realized how deeply it annoyed me.

After calling Zauber 'kike' O'Brien's biggest pleasure came from slapping Zauber's hand every time it fell innocently on the table, of digging him in the ribs and kicking his shins on the slenderest pretenses. He laughed uproariously every time he sounded the word "kike," and every time he slapped and kicked the Jew. The table joined him without prejudice. The Jew was good game.

Once, when the uproar following one of O'Brien's particularly hilarious pranks on the Jew had attracted some of the unattached passengers to our table, I caught sight of Solomon towering over the rest. There was a scowl in the face with which he regarded O'Brien's, but when he saw me staring at him he made a sour grimace and walked off.

I was glad when dinner time came and put a temporary end to Zauber and O'Brien's tricks. The table was even barer than it had been for luncheon. But in the midst of the meal a steward brought me a note. It was from Alma, and it asked me to step into her cabin after dinner.

"Come in," said Alma. I found her, when I entered her cabin, seated at her little writing table, a pen poised in her hand over some letter paper. "Please sit down," she murmured, pointing to a chair opposite her. "And because I've not come to the table today please do not treat me like an invalid. It's just a touch of seasickness, and I wouldn't be surprised to find myself coming up for breakfast tomorrow."

"And Ada?"

"Ada's gone visiting - so that we might have this conversation. She was sure, though, you wouldn't come. She offered me odds on it."

"And you didn't take her up?"

Alma leaned back magnificently and looked at me with tremendous intentness. "I don't bet on a sure thing. I knew that you'd come because you're in love with me."

"And how, pray, do you know that?"

She looked defiant. "I know."

"You know only that I'm in the habit of staring at you. Don't other men stare at you?"

"Of course. Many of them. But don't you see, the staring of other men means nothing to me."

"And mine does?"

"Yes," she said quietly. "I love you, too."

I looked at her. It was as if a picture I admired had found voice and returned me the compliment. I felt absolutely incapable of continuing the conversation from that point. I thought of the nearest subterfuge. "And Stewart?" I asked.

"I'm going to tell him tomorrow."

"What will you tell him?"

"That I don't love him and will never marry him. It wouldn't make any difference now what is to be the outcome of you and me. I simply don't love him any more, and I wont have him annoying us."

I shook my head. "How do you think he'll take it?"

"I don't know," she snapped. "And I don't think I care. He'll be much more sensitive about what the boys think of it than of how it affects him with me. I'm ready to forget that I've ever known Stewart." She paused. "You're not afraid of him, darling?"

"Not exactly. But I would not think of underrating the force of his displeasure. Stewart's not a child, although he is quite as uncivilized as one. There's sure to be a mess. But let's say no more about it."

She put down her pen and drew her chair closer to mine. "We've two and a half days more at sea," she whispered. They're going to be terribly long, aren't they, darling?"

I nodded. I couldn't speak. I had never found my energies so completely tied up before.

She leaned forward so that I could feel her sweet breath on my face. "Why don't you kiss me?" she said. "Your eyes have been pleading for it since the first time they looked at me."

I took her head in both of my hands gently and touched her curved lips with my mouth.

She gave me a little pleasure of her own and drew her mouth back, laughing. "You kiss like - like a virgin," she cried.

"I do adore you," I pleaded.

"Your eyes adore me," she said with assumed severity. "But your mouth treats me entirely too respectfully. Have you never kissed before?"

"I used to kiss my prayer-book," I said to her.

"Your prayer-book!" she exclaimed.

"Yes." And I explained to her, like every other Jewish child, I had been taught to kiss the covers of a book on opening and closing it, as a token of my affection for my studies."

"But you must have kissed living people. Your mother -"

"I never kissed my mother and I do not remember that she ever kissed me."

"But surely -"

"Surely I've kissed women, yes. But I have never given myself over to the business with great enthusiasm."

"Well, then," she said, "I have at last found myself the occupation of a lifetime. I shall teach you how to kiss. But you know, you are terribly wistful when you speak of your Jewishness. It sounds like the beginning of a story. Some day you must tell it to me. But in the meantime you must kiss me."

I now lifted her bodily out of her chair and drew her to me so that I clasped her wholly in my arms.

"You are learning already," she cried, drawing away her warm face. "Tell me are you married?"

I nodded.

"Children?"

"Yes, darling. Two."

"And your wife?"

"Very beautiful and relentlessly intelligent. I assure you I am not at all worthy of her."

"Of course, or you would not throw yourself into my arms. And the children?"

"Don't ask. They're both born into the courts of the Sun."

She caught her breath swiftly. "And how could it be otherwise! But tell me: what are you going to do with me?"

I looked at her a moment. "I don't know," I said. "I don't see how I can have anything to say about disposing of you."

"I don't understand you, darling."

"I feel like a beggar who has been invited to the office of a banker, and the first thing the banker asks him is how he expects to dispose of all the money in the bank. I can't believe that you are mine to dispose of."

She got off my lap and resumed her place opposite me. "Maybe I'm not for you to dispose of," she said, and a moment later was kneeling before me. "Don't believe me when I say things like that, darling," she pleaded. "I do love you. We'll find a way out, too, in time."

I just about managed to kiss her once more, hurriedly, before Ada, in a majestic black cape, swept in. "I'm glad you're still here, Roth," she said breezily. "I've got some good advice for you. Alma's little boy friend's found out about your coming here, and if you want to sleep soundly tonight I suggest that you ask your steward for another cabin. The boy's at the bar now, with the rest of the engineers in his party, all stewed to the gills."

"I should have changed my cabin before," I replied. "But I'm afraid it's too late now. Stewart'll think I'm running away from him."

"Aren't you?" asked Ada archly.

Why did everyone take it for granted that because that worm was angry, I had to be afraid! Was I afraid! I'd find out soon enough.

"No," I replied to Ada, and added: "Good night." It was all I could do to restrain myself from banging the door as I went out.

In the blind rush for my cabin, I could only think of two people. It would probably upset me completely to meet Cohen - of that I was certain. As for the other, I did want to encounter him. The cabin which he shared with me seemed the logical place to seek him out. And yet, deep in my heart, I loathed the prospect of looking at him. Maybe, I said to myself, you've reached the point where the sight of a Jew has become obnoxious to you; but you are still far from being at ease with the rest of the world . . . Then whom was I looking for?

I felt a distinct sense of mystery enveloping me as I opened wide the cabin door and shut it slowly behind me. The cabin seemed quite bare. The Scotchman was out - probably drinking again. Yet for all of the cabin's bareness I did not feel alone. I felt cornered, shadowed as though my destiny had suddenly become embodied and was haunting me. I stepped forward hesitantly, paused at the water basin, and caught sight of the mysterious presence.

Something so familiar and yet so strange! Either I had never been quite so near him before, or I had never glimpsed him in the proper moment of space. The whole man before me seemed to blaze like a torch, as I tried to make up my mind why so much more of me feared him than had ever feared anything else before in a lonely universe. His brow darkened so that it was like a shadow cast by his fierce shock of black hair. His eyes stared with startling intelligence out of their deep sockets. They seemed more afraid of being seen than of what they might see if they dared to receive vision. His full thick lips were pressed together with the contemptuous despair of an animal which is cornered, but knows that it will be allowed to escape. Without apparently opening his mouth he made distinct mouthless speech.

JUDAS: What do you want with me?

I: I want you to order the pride to die out in your eyes. I want you to be ashamed and confess your guilt.

JUDAS: But I am guilty of nothing. So what is there to be ashamed of?

I: Perhaps you can explain what you happen to be doing here. Spying on me, aren't you? But what is spying to you that it should worry your conscience? And whom do you think you serve by imposing your unpleasant presence on me?

JUDAS: You yourself.

I: Perfect. It's what I expected you to say. It wouldn't properly be you if you didn't interpret your easy meanness as an act of unselfish philanthropy. That's the most damnable thing about you. You must lie and cheat because it's second nature with you. But you must always be doing it in the name of some worthy cause. You put your ill-smelling hands on a man, and proceed to carefully, painstakingly choke the life out of him. But that is not enough. Not for you. You must explain to the world that you are really doing a good thing, that you are choking the man out of sheer love of him. [37]

JUDAS: I do love you.

I: Of course. I do not doubt it. You love me, just as you love your mother, your wife, your sons or your daughters. For you are not content with being merely good: you are respectable, too. You have made of your house a very fortress of respectability. No one loves a mother more than you love a mother. No one adores a sister more tenderly than you adore a sister. But you have built a fence about your home and about those you fancy to love. You have drawn an ominous line under your life and under the lives of those related to you by the more obvious blood-ties. Do you remember what they taught you in school about a line? That it's really imaginary, that it has no existence in the physical world? Such a line you have drawn to separate yourself from the world you rob, choke and murder. You think it is the essence of virtue to feed your own mother and starve the mothers of others. You think it an irreproachable thing to build a tender shelter about your sister and expose the sisters of others to shame and hunger. Well, you have fooled yourself. There is no difference between your mother and other mothers, between your sister and other sisters, between your daughter and the daughters of the people you hold aloof from as strangers. And so, without knowing it, you have consigned your own precious mothers, sisters and daughters to your own loathsome brothels.

JUDAS: I cannot understand this passion of yours. I have done nothing wrong, nothing unlawful.

I: I do not accuse you of being unlawful, but of being inhuman. Why, pray tell me, do you praise only what you sell, and invariably scowl at what you buy? Is that not against all sense of decency and humanity? You purchase what seems fair in your eyes, and certainly it must be precious to the one who parts with it. Yet when you are making the fatal exchange - money for beauty - you have not a smile or a kind word for the man who is about to enrich you by yielding something of a reluctant order to your grasping faculties. Have you ever seen yourself when you offer something for sale? What you sell may have usefulness. If it ever had beauty the beauty died in it the moment you touched it. Yet as you offer your awful offal your face lights up with animation, your lips curve with joyous anticipation, and only words of praise tinkle from your tongue.

JUDAS: That's handel, business.

I: Maybe. Handel seems to justify you in almost every one of your monstrous acts. But if I were you I would try to change about a bit. I would be a little critical of what I sell, and a bit appreciative of what I buy. If only as a first exercise in elementary honesty. And I have another major recommendation to make. You have already got yourself into the habit of wearing glasses. Why not wear smoked glasses?

JUDAS: Why?

I: So that you will see less and find what you do see a little less desirable. Nothing in the world seems to me to be quite as extensive and as destructive as your vision. You seem to see everything. And whatever you see you want.

JUDAS: But my wants have never been immoderate.

I: You mean you never thought your wants were immoderate. How could you consider any want of yours immoderate when in your black heart you feel that as a son of that old thief Jacob you are the true owner of everything lovely and desirable on earth? Maybe if you will see less your heart will lust less and your arms and your hands will not always be reaching out for the property of others. If I were you I would lose no time finding densely smoked glasses to cover the eyes. Otherwise hands might be extended to pluck them out.

JUDAS: One or two eloquent gestures in that direction have already been made.

I: Yes, I know. And you are not frightened. Not because you are unafraid. Because you know that always, at the last moment, the world is softened by your pleas, and withholds its hands. You have learned thoroughly the trick of falling on your knees before it and imploring mercy in the names of all your sacred devils. So frequently have you given this performance that the world has almost come to regard those sacred devils as its own. The grand result may be that instead of the world plucking out your terrible eyes, it will be you who, with your filthy fingers, will nail out the eyes of the world. For you have succeeded in teaching the world mercy without ever seriously entertaining the idea yourself.

JUDAS: So you even fear for the world on account of me?

I: And with good reason. In the struggle for civilization the issue has always been between the world and you: the world striving upward, you pulling down, down. It will be a wonderful thing for the world when you are quite completely gone.

JUDAS: You hate me, don't you?

I: Yes, I hate, I loathe you.

JUDAS: I can't understand why?

I: I don't fully understand it myself. But I do know that I hate you. I particularly hate your face, face of a Judas, of a Satzkin. The revengeful heels left their tracks on that horrible face of yours. It is a face which has absorbed an ocean of outraged spit, and it is drooping with a dark greenness out of the mean corners of your mouth.

JUDAS: And that you think is a good enough reason for your hatred?

I: Look at you. You have no bank, yet your are represented at all bank counsels. You have no army of your own, yet you dictate wars in which armies of the young of the world are destroyed. You have no honor, no decency, and yet you talk continually of your pride. You have no real possessions of your own, yet you are always prepared to advise other people how to divide what is their own. All the things in the world which are hateful are hateful in you. And the things which in the rest of the world are lovely and lovable in you are hateful and contemptible. If it is a beautiful thing in a brother to love a sister it is a mean thing when it is a Jewish brother loving a Jewish sister. If it is a beautiful thing for a man to stand up for his country, when it is a Jew who stands up for his country the act is corroded with hatefulness. I know that the whole arrangement of the universe, as I am living in it, is a sort of benevolent democracy in which the smaller as well as the more monstrous reptiles, the insects which attack one's blood from within and those planetary powers which shape us from without, each has a function, a usefulness, a justification. So have you, I suppose. But I abhor you even more than I abhor lice, spiders, diseased orifices of the body, roaches, the germs of syphilis and gonorrhea, and those rebellious little aristocrats who compose cancer. You seem to me to be some un-healable disease in the blood of the race. Without you, life for humanity might be as free, joyous, happy-go-lucky and adventurously fatal as it must be for the rest of animal creation, as it probably was for those lucky races who spermed into a world that had not yet fallen under the shadow of your dominion. I do not know when I hate you most: by day or by night, when you are victorious or when you have lost, old or young, stout or lean, drunk or sober, just or unjust, when you are most happy or when you are most miserable. I only know that I hate you with a hatred so steady and deadly that it consumes in me all sense of time and place. What can I do to you to prove to you how fearfully I detest you? Abuse you with speech as I am doing now? Futile gesture! About whom have nastier or more terrible things been said? Spit on you? The whole world has spit in your face and ground its heel into the spittle. I know. This solid drinking glass may well do something a whole world has failed to do. See me hold it up? In another moment it will go crashing through your horrible skull. . . .

The mirror fell in a thousand shattered fragments at my feet.

Top

[37] "The difference," says Boris Abramovitch in Skolom Ash'es Three Cities, "between the Russians and the Jews consists rather in this: that the Russian loves to confess the evil that he does to his fellow-men, while the Jew prefers to confess only his good deeds. He conceals the evil within him, or forces himself to express it. The reason at the back of this is that the Russian likes to have something on his conscience; without a few pecks of sin, as it were, he doesn't like to show himself in the street, and if he shouldn't happen to have committed any he thinks up a few sins simply that he may be able to promenade with the mark of Cain on his brow. The Jew, on the other hand, likes always to have a clean conscience so as to be on the sure side. The slyness for which Jews are so famed consists in keeping their 'account' in the spiritual ledger perpetually balanced, as if an inspector might come along at any minute. A Jew may commit the meanest offenses, but he will always find some way of putting them in such a pure light in his own mind that they are changed into little virtues. If nothing else will serve, then he will make the good Lord his accomplice, as Jacob did. If a Christian had tricked Laban like Jacob - even if only in a small fraud like the peeled wands - he certainly would have felt guilty; but Jacob actually made a good deed out of it, on the excuse that it was necessary for his wife and children. The Jew is always prepared to transform his dirty, brutally egotistic interests into holy virtues. That's the kernel, if you'll excuse my saying so, of Jewish cunning."