“And he says ‘that’s good going!’ He says it stolidly, as though it were British troops across the Regent’s Canal—Man, man, where’s your imagination? The names—the ancient names—don’t they fire you at all? Jerusalem! Beersheba! Gaza! Mount Sinai! The Red Sea!... Why they’re our history—ours. They call like trumpets. And to think I shall be out there among it all in a few weeks. Dealing blows for my own land! Richard, it—it drives me crazy....”
David’s eyes were a blaze of bright brown; his mouth trembled—“Doesn’t it excite you that the Jews are going to win back the Holy Land for the Jews?—it must excite you,” he pleaded.
“I didn’t know you were a Zionist.”
“I am—and this war ought to have made you a Zionist as well.—Come along, we get off at this corner.—Hasn’t it proved incontestably that you’ve got to have some place to be patriotic about, if you’re to be patriotic at all? The English have had one spasm of illumination by which they saw that; and so the Jewish regiment was formed, and so they’re going to give us back Palestine, after the war.... Israel for the Israelites—and our gratitude to England....” David leapt on to the pavement, walked along for a few moments in silence, and then said in his most matter-of-fact voice—“They shall learn that the Jew can give his pound of flesh as well as claim it.”
“They want to get rid of you—and that’s the whole spasm,” Richard chaffed the enthusiastic young Zionist—“Fed up with the Chosen Race—too clever by half.”
But David was in too radiant a humour to be baited. He merely declaimed in answer to the taunt:
“A Prince without a sword,
A Ruler without a Throne;
Israel follows her quest.
In every land a guest,