"Wherever a great soul speaks out his thoughts, there is Golgotha," quoted the listener.
"Ah, you know every word I have written," he said, childishly pleased. "Decidedly, you must translate me. You shall be my apostle to the heathen. You are good apostles, you English. You turned Jews under Cromwell, and now your missionaries are planting our Palestinian doctrines in the South Seas, or amid the josses and pagodas of the East, and your young men are colonizing unknown continents on the basis of the Decalogue of Moses. You are founding a world-wide Palestine. The law goes forth from Zion, but by way of Liverpool and Southampton. Perhaps you are indeed the lost Ten Tribes."
"Then you would make me a Jew, too," she laughed.
"Jew or Greek, there are only two religious possibilities—fetish-dances and spinning dervishes don't count—the Renaissance meant the revival of these two influences, and since the sixteenth century they have both been increasing steadily. Luther was a child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad, a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered from life, soul cut adrift from body, and sent floating through the empyrean, when it can only at best be a captive balloon. At the same time, don't take your idea of Judaism from the Jews. It is only an apostolic succession of great souls that understands anything in this world. The Jewish mission will never be over till the Christians are converted to the religion of Christ. Lassalle is a better pupil of the Master than the priests who denounce socialism. You have met Lassalle! No? You shall meet him here one day. A marvel. Me plus Will. He knows everything, feels everything, yet is a sledge-hammer to act. He may yet be the Messiah of the nineteenth century. Ah! when every man is a Spinoza, and does good for the love of good, when the world is ruled by justice and brotherhood, reason and humor, then the Jews may shut up shop, for it will be the Holy Sabbath. Did you mark, Lucy, I said, reason and humor? Nothing will survive in the long run but what satisfies the sense of logic, and the sense of humor. Logic and laughter—the two trumps of doom! Put not your trust in princes—the really great of the earth are always simple. Pomp and ceremonial, popes and kings, are toys for children. Christ rode on an ass, now the ass rides on Christ."
"And how long do you give your trumps to sound before your Millennium dawns?" said "little Lucy," feeling strangely old and cynical beside this incorrigible idealist.
"Alas, perhaps I am only another dreamer of the Ghetto, perhaps I have fought in vain. A Jewish woman once came weeping to her Rabbi with her son, and complained that the boy, instead of going respectably into business like his sires, had developed religion, and insisted on training for a Rabbi. Would not the Rabbi dissuade him? 'But,' said the Rabbi, chagrined, 'why are you so distressed about it? Am I not a Rabbi?' 'Yes,' replied the woman, 'but this little fool takes it seriously,' Ach, every now and again arises a dreamer who takes the world's lip-faith seriously, and the world tramples on another fool. Perhaps there is no resurrection for humanity. If so, if there's no world's Saviour coming by the railway, let us keep the figure of that sublime Dreamer whose blood is balsam to the poor and the suffering."
Marvelling at the mental lucidity, the spiritual loftiness of his changed mood, his visitor wished to take leave of him with this image in her memory; but just then a half-paralyzed Jewish graybeard made his appearance, and Heine's instant dismissal of him on her account made it difficult not to linger a little longer.
"My chef de police!" he said, smiling. "He lives on me and I live on his reports of the great world. He tells me what my enemies are up to. But I have them in there," and he pointed to an ebony box on a chest of drawers, and asked her to hand it to him.
"Pardon me before I forget," he said; and, seizing a pencil like a dagger, he made a sprawling note, laughing venomously. "I have them here!" he repeated, "they will try to stop the publication of my Memoirs, but I will outwit them yet. I hold them! Dead or alive, they shall not escape me. Woe to him who shall read these lines, if he has dared attack me. Heine does not die like the first comer. The tiger's claws will survive the tiger. When I die, it will be for them the Day of Judgment."
It was a reminder of the long fighting life of the freelance, of all the stories she had heard of his sordid quarrels, of his blackmailing his relatives, and besting his uncle. She asked herself his own question, "Is genius, like the pearl in the oyster, only a splendid disease?"