"P.S.—I am making more money than I want, and I shall be glad to send you some, if you have any wants unsupplied."
My darling boy! How could I ever have felt myself alienated from you? I will come to you and live with you and share your triumphs. No miserable scruples shall divide our lives any more. The past is ineradicable; the future is its inevitable fruit. So be it. My spiritual yearnings and wrestlings were but the outcome of a morbid physical condition. Nicholas was right. And now to read my son's article, which I have here, marked with a blue border. Why should I, with my superficial ponderings, be right and he wrong?
Saturday Night.—I have a vague remembrance that three stars marked the close of the Sabbath. And here in the frosty sky I see a whole host scintillating in the immeasurable depths. The Sabbath is over and once more I drag myself to my writing desk to pour out the anguish of a tortured spirit. All day I have sat as in a dumb trance gazing out beyond the izbas and the cabbage fields toward the eternal hills. How beautiful and peaceful everything is! God, wilt Thou not impart to me the secret of peace?
Little did I divine what awaited my eyes when they rested fondly on the first sentence of Paul's article. Voi, it was a pronouncement on the Jewish question, venomous, scathing, mordant, terrific. It was an indictment of the race, lit up with all the glow of moral indignation; cruel and slanderous, yet noble and righteous in its tone and ideals; base as hell, yet pure as heaven; breathing a savagery as of Torquemada, and a saintliness as of Tolstoï. Paul in every line, my own noble, bigoted, wrong-headed Paul. As I read it, my whole frame trembled. A corresponding passion and indignation stirred my blood to fever-heat. All my slumbering Jewish instincts woke again to fresh life; and I knew myself for the weak, miserable wretch that I am. To think that a son of mine should thus vilify his own race. What can I do? Bozhe moi, what can I do? How can I stop this horrible, unnatural thing? I dare not open Paul's eyes to what he is doing. And yet it is my duty.... It is my duty. By that token I know I shall not do it. Heaven have pity on me!
Tuesday.—Heaven have pity on Paul! Here is Nicholas's promised letter.
"Dear Demetrius,—I have strange news for you. It is quite providential (I use the word without prejudice, as the lawyers say) that I came here. But all is well now, so you may read what follows without alarm. Last Thursday morning, during my purposeful wanderings within Paul's usual circuit, I came face to face with our young gentleman. His eyes stared straight at me without seeing me. His face was ghastly white, and the lines were rigid as if with some stern determination. His lips were moving, but I could not catch his mutterings. He held a sealed letter in his hand. I saw the superscription. It was addressed to you. Instantly the dread came to my mind that he was about to commit suicide, and that this was his farewell to you. I followed him. He posted the letter at the post-office, turned back, threaded his way like a somnambulist across the bridge, without, however, approaching the parapet, walked mechanically onward to his own apartments, put the latch-key into the house-door, and then fell back in a dead faint—into my arms. I took him upstairs, explained what had happened, put him to bed, and—I write this from the bedside. For the crisis is over now; the brain fever has abated, and he has now nothing to do but to get well, though he will be longer about it than a young fellow of his age has a right to be. His body is emaciated with fasts and vigils and penances. I curse religion when I look at him. As if the struggle for life were not hard enough without humanity being hampered by these miserable superstitions. But you will be wanting to know what is the matter. Well, batiushka, what should be the matter but the old, old matter? La femme is, strange to relate, a fine specimen of our own race of lovely women, my dear Demetrius. She is a Jewess of the most orthodox family in Moscow, and therein lies the crux of the situation. (I am not playing upon words, but the phrase is doubly significant here.) Of course Paul has not the slightest idea I know all this; but of course I have had it from his hot lips all the same. As far as I have been able to piece his broken utterances together, they have had some stolen love passages, each followed by swift remorse on both sides, and—another furtive love passage. Paul has been comparing himself to St. Anthony, and even to Jesus, when Satan, ce chef admirable, spread a first-class dinner in the wilderness. But the poor lad must have suffered much behind all his heroics. And what his final resolution to give her up cost him is pretty evident. I suppose he must have told you of it in that letter. Isn't it the oddest thing in the world? Rachel Jacobvina is the girl's name, and her people keep a clothes' store round the corner, and her father is the Parnass (you will remember what that means) of his synagogue. She is a sweet little thing; and Paul evidently has a taste for other belles than belles-lettres. From what you told me of him I fully expected this sort of thing. The poor fellow is looking at me now from among his iced bandages with a piteous air of resignation to the will of Nicholas Alexandrovitch in bringing him back to this world of trouble when he already felt his wings sprouting. Poor Paul! He little dreams what I am writing; but he will get over this, and marry some fair, blue-eyed Circassian with corresponding tastes in fasting, and an enthusiastic longing for the Kingdom of God, when the year shall be a perpetual Lent. In his failure to realize history, he thinks it a crime to adore a Jewish virgin, though he spends half his time in adoring the Madonna. How shocked he would be if I pointed this out! People who look through ecclesiastical spectacles so rarely realize that the Holy Family was a Jewish one. But my pen is running away with me, and our patient looks thirsty. Proshchaï.
"Nicholas."
"P.S.—There is not the slightest danger of a relapse unless the image of this diabolical girl comes before him again. And I keep his attention distracted. Besides, he had finally conquered his passion. This illness was at once the seal and the witness of his unchangeable resolve. I have heard him repeat the terms of the letter of farewell he sent her. It was final."
So this was the meaning of your silence; this the tragedy that lay behind your simple sentence, "I have now conquered all the difficulties which beset me at the first." This was the motive that guided your hand to write those bitter lines about our race, so that you might henceforth cut yourself off from the possibility of allying yourself with it even in thought. I understand all now, my poor high-mettled boy. How you must have suffered! How your pride must have rebelled at the idea that you might have to make such a confession to me—little knowing I should have hailed it with delight. That temptation should have assailed you, too, at such a period—when you were publishing your great work on the ideals of Holy Russia! Mysterious, indeed, are the ways of Providence. And yet why may not all be well after all, and Heaven grant me such grace as I would willingly sacrifice my life to deserve? It is impossible that my son's passion can be utterly dead. Such fires are only covered up. I will go to him and tell him all. The news that he is a Jew will revolutionize him. His love will flame up afresh and take on the guise and glamour of duty. Love, posing as logic, will whisper in his ear that no bars of early training can avail to keep him from the race to which he belongs by blood and by his father's faith. In this girl's eyes he will read God's message of command, and I, God's message of Peace and Reconciliation. The tears are in my eyes; I can hardly see to write. The happiness I foresee is too great. Blessings on your sweet face, Rachel Jacobvina, my own darling daughter that is to be. To you is allotted the blessed task of solving a fearful problem, of rescuing and reuniting two human lives. Yes, Heaven is indeed merciful. To-morrow I start for Moscow.
Thursday.—How can I write it? No, there is no pity in Heaven. The sky smiles in steely blankness. The air cuts like a knife. Paul is well, or as well as a convalescent can be. He must have had a heart of ice. But it is fortunate he had, seeing what the icy fates have wrought. I arrived at Moscow, and hurried in a droshky across the well-known bridge to Paul's lodgings. A ghastly procession stopped me. Some burlaks were bearing the corpse of a young girl who had thrown herself into the ice-laden river. A clammy foreboding gathered at my heart, but ere I had time to say a word, an old, caftan-clad man, with agonized eyes and a white, streaming beard, dashed up, pulled off the face-cloth, revealing a strange, weird loveliness, uttered a scream which yet rings in my ears, threw himself passionately on the body, rose up again, murmured something solemnly and resignedly in Hebrew, rent his garments, readjusted the face-cloth, and followed weeping in the rear. And from lip to lip, that for once forgot to curl in scorn, flew the murmur: "Rachel Jacobvina."