The captive herd

Contents

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The Individual 1

The Clepsedba ......... 105

Part One The Individual

As oft from storms light craft will make for shore And hug the shelter of some safe lagoon,

Mooring their barks, wild gypsies from the sea;

So from lifers tumult come there to the tribe The nomads, who did wander far awhile,

But by the winds were driven home again Within the fold, safe captive to the Herd.

Chapter I

The sun was shining on the white buildings of Manhattan. It had shone thus for years ere it lighted Vinevar’s daily path through the streets of the metropolis to his office. It would shine years after his interesting personality would be seen in its streets no more. But when his thin figure, his parchment-like face illumined by two burning eyes, would have returned to the dust from whence they came, the effect of his projects, his power, his progress would be felt — even in Manhattan.

Vinevar drove through the crowded verisimilitude of cosmopolitan life. Isaacson was waiting for him at his office to discuss with him the carrying out of a new project. As he entered the office, he nodded to Isaacson, but although he was at least half an hour late, he made no apology. He considered himself too important to need the placid art of conciliation. He glanced at his writing table, at the pile of 3 letters already opened by his secretary awaiting his answer, letters representing appeals, appointments, interests, hut no desires. Vinevar was a man with no desires.

“I have great need of all my time, Isaacson. What is it? In the autumn of this year a change will be effected at Washington. Wilson will go out. A new man will take his place, but whoever is nominally the mouthpiece of the cabinet, my race must be represented forcefully and by the right man. There is no luck in ministerial affairs. We leave nothing to chance. What is it about which you wish to consult me?”

He did not take a chair, hut kept walking up and down as if the very echo of his own footsteps goaded him on and would not let him rest. “What advice do you want of me?” he asked solenmly.

Isaacson turned towards him as a sunflower turns to the sun, and as the petals of a sunflower reflect the brightness of its rays, Isaacson’s face brightened as it turned to Vinevar.

“I have heard of a young bond dealer, a man to suit om* purpose. His mother was a Russian, his father an Englishman with the usual English advantages, including a good pubKc school training. They emigrated to Canada, where their son was born. The son has been brought up in Canada. He was educated at a public school. Then he had one year at college. His father died. Circumstances forced him to leave college and go into a bank, from there four years ago he went into a broker’s office. He has shown exceptional ability. I was in Canada, and I heard of this young man. It seemed he might be useful for our new project.”

Vinevar gazed disdainfully at Isaacson. “Is his mother alive?”

“His mother is dead? He has no home ties. He works as though work were a kind of fienzy.”

“I fly high,” said Vinevar with a smile, “I must be sure of my wings.” The smile suddenly disappeared from his face, and a cruel expression came over it.

“We might try him and then, ‘if thine eye offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee.’ All threads cannot be woven into the cloak without seam.”

“All Judaan,” said Isaacson nodding his head.

“All Judaan.”

Vinevar flicked his pile of letters.

“Yesterday,” he said, “I had a letter from Rothschild warning us, that in England the Jews are showing themselves not Englishmen, but a nation with a foreign policy of their own, and that policy hostile to the friends of England. Englishmen will not stand that. Rothschild has protested against it in an open letter to the Morning Post. He warns me, Isaacson, lest in our zeal we err, that the pure American is not more tolerant than the Englishman. Well, well, maybe, maybe, we shall see, what we shall see. ‘They have parted my raiment among them, and for my garment they have cast lots.’ In the glass of the future much is written. Send for the young man, Isaacson. If he is useful to the Cause pay him anything. If he prove not useful, cast him out. And now, Isaacson, be gone, be gone. The time is short, and I have much to do.”

Isaacson left Vinevar’s office as a priest might have left the Holy of Holies.

Chapter II

When Vacla Melfort stood on the threshold of adult life, he had a peculiar antipathy to a fixed code of morals. “Let there be weeds in my garden,” he was wont to say. “If there is too much pruning there will be no growth.” And in his own peculiar way Vacla was sincere.

The person that Vacla had loved was his mother, and with her death he saw life in an aspect that he chose to make as hard as he could. His father had already passed away, so circumstances had combined to harden and isolate him. His own bereavement had given him no sympathy with the suffering of others, it confirmed his intention to entrench himself in as great a secimity as possible.

As far as youth is conscious at all, life was to him a journey, an extraordinary journey along two rails that led from night to night. Boredom, monotony, intrigue, interest, love, and hate were sign-posts by which the wise traveller paused as it befitted his mood. i

The traveller has come from nothingness, and although he goes to nothingness, during no part of his journey does he allow himself to see again the growing nothingness. He sees no further than the flesh. As life thimders along, he has grasped one bleak truth. Feed the flesh, cultivate it, until like some quickgrowing fungus it kills the life upon which it was grafted. The immensity of the flesh little by little will kiU the soul. What disunion! The thing of a moment destroying an immortahty. So the diseased tissue achieves its full development. It lives to spread its own disease. The tragedy of the flesh is accomplished, and man becomes a parasite.

The significant thing about life at this angle is that it tarnishes. There is no annunciation of finer things to come. The flesh is pitiless. It takes at the last the toll from itself, but by that time the coiu’se of life has been changed fundamentally, the inevitable factors have done their work; the soul, the fine fragment of immortality has gone back to obscurity and nothingness. Man’s dream has failed.

As he thus idly mused, Vacla Melfort leaned on the window-sill of a hotel bedroom, looking down at the groups, the men, the faces in the street. The day was declining. On the table in the centre of the room behind him his bags were packed, and he was waiting for the porter to come and put them in the cab that was to take him to the station. Through the void of his window Vacla looked down upon the world of to-day; a world of intrigue and compromise. The groups, the men, if they were to speak, what would they say? Held together by intrigue, by mutual interest, would they ignorantly state that truth was vain?

It is an impressive spectacle, the scuffling life in a public street. With the same detachment that the gods look down upon the earth, Vacla watched the moving shadows. Heaven and hell were within himself ; that was the earth. Little by little as the sky darkened, he leaned further on the window-sill watching the passers-by, the people who exchange ideas, glances, grow impatient, angry, tender with each other and to-morrow disappear. Vacla loved himself with a sort of devotion. He never pictured himself as an angel of goodness, but as a spirit of mercilessness with a sharp sword. In the crowd below he saw a possible assuagement of himself, a fiery glimpse, that in the directing and the moulding of the objective of others, he might succeed perhaps in finding a cure for his own tragedy, his own thirst for a perpetual power. He saw no glory like that of a triumphant ego. He did not mean to cross hastily over the earth’s surface. He meant to conquer it. He did not love mankind, he loved himself: that was his curse, the infinite smallness of his belief.

Turn where you wiU, everywhere you will find nothing exists alone. Love goes in pairs. Religion derives guidance in groups. The parts of the immeasurable universe are dependent one upon the other. And the essential outlines of life teach that man is important only in the relation which he bears to the race as a whole. What Vacla saw in the street below were the groups, the faces, the shadows. What he did not see was the imperceptible relation between his own life and the life of the man in the street.

All at once Vacla drew himself up from the window, and went back into the room. The air was heavy with the mixture of odoims that accrue within and without on a hot day. The comings and goings of the crowd, what were they to him? Life was inexorable; the great attribute was strength; the crime of ignorance was weakness and uncertainty. The weak he ignored and despised. With brute strength he would advance. He crossed the room and rang the bell for the porter. He was impatient to be gone.

« jit

That same evening found Mr. Isaacson sitting before his house ruminating, chewing the cud, as it were, intellectually.

“It is now, or never,” he said to himself. “It is now or never.”

He hovered undecidedly with a match suspended in the air, before striking it upon the sole of his boot. He was wondering if he had the courage to put his market value to a fresh test. Then he leapt to a resolution. The match struck upon the sole of his boot. Mr. Isaacson had decided that it must be now.

Mr. Isaacson’s house was in the main street of the town, and the garden extended as far as the river. The house was a square building with two colonial pillars on either side of the front door. It had sheltered the ambitious head of Mr. Isaacson for ten years, but Mr. Isaacson’s hfe was on the point of undergoing a complete change. He had not yet arrived, but he was in the process of arriving.

Passers-by down the main street on summer evenings were accustomed to see, through the garden gate, Mr. Isaacson seated before his front door reviewing in memory the chief events of the day. The door was too far from the main street for a stranger to form a clear idea of him, but who did not know his short round body, his bald head, his pale face that grew in pallor daily, his face that bore the imprint of perpetual fatigue, so intensely did he throw himself into every idea, every circumstance, every point of view on his way through life. In the midst of this pallor shone his small blue eyes (that the passing of time was dimming) a little troubled perpetually, not so much from unquenchable fire as from the fact that they were constantly moving.

The door behind Mr. Isaacson opened. Mrs. Isaacson appeared with an air of comfortable solicitude. Mr. Isaacson did not look behind him to see who it was ; he knew.

“Well, Mother?” said Mr. Isaacson.

Mr. Isaacson had neither sons nor daughters, but he had a way of calling Mrs. Isaacson Mother, that defied any listener to imagine that he might have wanted anything he did not have. The intonation imphed that Mr. Isaacson had a luxuriant family, which he had done away with as a matter of convenience. When he called his wife Mother, he made his relationship to Mrs. Isaacson quite clear, and he stopped argument.

He was aware of Mrs. Isaacson. She stood behind him making no reply to his greeting. Abruptly he waved his pipe above his head in the direction of a placard labelled, “To Let.”

“It’s the last night in the old house,” he said. “We’ve got to ver-moose. Mother. We’ve got to ver-moose.”

“There are endless reasons, no doubt,” replied Mrs. Isaacson resignedly. “I shall just have to go along.”

“For better, for worse,” retaliated Mr. Isaacson.

“But I hate to leave my asparagus bed.”

“For richer, for poorer,” elaborated Mr. Isaacson.

“And my strawberries. The plants are so hardy.”

“It is now or never,” repeated Mr. Isaacson.

“Now or never.”

A fly settled on Mr. Isaacson’s bald head, and with a quiet waving of her hand Mrs. Isaacson disturbed it and drove it away.

“It is difficult to express things,” she said slowly. “I am a plain woman. I have been happy here. There are many good things in life, though, and I may be just as happy where I am going. Still I shall miss my asparagus bed and my strawberries.”

“There is something wonderful about adventure,” observed Mr. Isaacson.

Mrs. Isaacson disregarded that. She was looking at the sign, “To Let” on the colonial pillar. “Jacob,” she said, “If we are not coming back, why don’t you sell the place? Why rent it?”

Mr. Isaacson replied with a peculiar resonance. Something in his voice and manner made his wife look at him.

“Jacob Isaacson never goes back on anything that has served him,” he said. “Let an animal, a human being, even a house once be of service to Jacob Isaacson, and he will never part with it.”

Mrs. Isaacson rested her hands on her husband’s shoulder.

“You are sorry, too. Why do we go?”

Mr. Isaaacson knocked his pipe against the colonial pillar. “Something drives me, Anna. Something tells me that it is now or never. Life makes its claims. To the Jew it is a restless futility. There is no tranquillity for us until we have reconquered our independence and are again at home in Palestine. As a race, we have had a long journey. We have never been at home, but it may be that our sons” — Mr. Isaacson corrected himself — “it may be, that the next generation wiU return to the Holy Land. Emancipation, emancipation from the yoke of nations. The Jewish people will be themselves at last.”

Mrs. Isaacson sighed.

“For centm’ies they have lived among strangers,” he continued. “The Jewish people were destined to go through discipline. Their destiny is accomplished.”

“Yes, Jacob,” Mrs. Isaacson spoke soothingly, “you love this thought. We will go. I am content. Quite content to leave my asparagus bed and my strawberries.” Mrs. Isaacson sighed again softly. “But,” her words came jerkily, as though forcing themselves through her generally placid brain, “I cannot help but ask you, Jacob, how all this trade will take the Jewish people back to their own land?”

“Because,” Mr. Isaacson declared with sudden force, “our position of dependence has been too insufferable, too unbearable. Dependent! We the most hard-working, discipbned, thrifty people on earth. Yet we are hardly tolerated in society. We foresaw we must have power. Money is power. The Jew trades. He buys. He sells for more. He buys again. He grows rich. The Christian borrows, the Jew lends. He gains control. He has long sight, the Jew. He sees that the one who has the power in the future is he who owns the raw materials of the world. The Jew dives his hands, his long fingers into the very bowels of the earth. He will command. And then he will go where he pleases back to his own land. Trade,” continued Mr. Isaacson, “trade is like the circulation of the air; without it the heart of the world would stop.”

Mr. Isaacson mopped his brow.

“Don’t get excited, Jacob,” said Mrs. Isaacson, “don’t get excited.”

******

Yet again. At the same hour that Vacla leaned upon his window, that Mr. Isaacson sat before his house, at the hour when twilight was being absorbed by the dark shadows of night, from a village in the Laurentian hills, a yovmg girl walked down to the cliff to see the moon rise across the St. Lawrence River. The day had been grey and damp. Low-lying clouds, that formed a bank on the southern horizon, were being gently dispersed by the evening wind. The river was calm, but on the cliff the leaves of the birches made from time to time a little rustling sound. The wide St. Lawrence, the fringe of pine trees, the hush of approaching night made a rare effect of beauty, and with it was mingled that air which is partly of the Laurentian Hills and partly a whiff blown through the gulf from the Atlantic Ocean. The young girl gazed and gazed. Those wonderful clear evenings of early summer are like the radiant moments of first love, and like first love in their indefinable quality, they do not occur again.

She was a tall slim girl, with an olive skin and dark thick hair. Her figure had not yet lost the slightness that belongs to childhood. It was languid, as though she had grown too quickly, but lithe, betraying a nervous temperament. And her eyes, her dark brown eyes were more unfathomable than the river which flowed beneath. They were passionate and impulsive with something dangerous in their expression for herself. She had just completed her nineteenth year.

There was a breath of wind. It had caught the seaweed laid bare by the low tide and was redolent of the ocean. It was a whiff of something strong and vital and unknown. Something stirred in her memory, something her brain did not reflect, but which lay in the ether of her soul. A vapour of the past. Some phenomenon of an anterior life, hastening to her, stretching out invisible hands to warn her, to recall some form of life to her yoxmg memoiy. Nineteen years on earth, but where before? Memory is limited by the years; but emotion? Over what dark waters may it not have come? May it not hve through the experience we call death and persist? What is it that hastens to us at certain moments of our lives? Something which seems familiar, but which we do not recognize. This strange something penetrated the mood of the girl standing on the chff as, with parted lips and outstretched hands, she murmured the question that is so often flung out by the young:

“Life, life. What do you hold for me?”

Chapter III

On the morning of the twentieth of June, Mr. Isaacson sat in his new office prepared to set in motion the ideas that were to carry his projects further into life. The morning was fine. The sunbeams streamed through the halfopen window. The air that came to touch his face was neither hot nor cold. From the street below the ascending noise of the traffic together with the honk-honk of the motor cars came up crisply as if the life of the city was in very good tune. Indeed there seemed to be no false note, nothing to destroy the general atmosphere of well being. Life beat in upon him very hopefully.

The office boy entered with a card. He glanced at it.

“Show him in,” he said briskly. “Show him in.”

As the little office boy went out, Mr. Isaacson passed his hand over his face preparatory to adopting his sententious manner. Even with 19 the office boy he was sometimes sententious. He glanced at the clock. Eleven to the minute. That was good. He liked punctuality. Neither too early, nor too late. That was punctuality.

In the doorway stood a young man with broad shoulders, a head of curly hair, very intelligent, piercing eyes under strongly-marked eyebrows; a thick, well-cut mouth; altogether a personality not of a common type, that made a forceful impression.

He made a cimious impression on Mr. Isaacson ; he awakened in him respect for his power and a kind of involuntary liking. Mr. Isaacson made a tentative movement to rise in his chair, then he remembered that he was now a capitalist employing labour. Instead of rising, he swung his legs free of the desk and sat sideways on his revolving chair.

“Glad to see you,” he said. It was difficult for him to deaden his natural effusiveness.

As his visitor came forward, he motioned to a chair facing the window. “Fine weather we’re having,” he said cheerfully. “Remarkably beautiful morning.”

Thus far Vacla had not spoken. Feeling it was time that a ball came back over the net, Mr. Isaacson rested his elbows on his chair.

placed the tips of his fingers together, and waited. Vacla squared himself for the interview.

“I have been told,” he began, “that we might be mutually useful to each other.” Mr. Isaacson’s eyebrows shot up.

This was always Vacla’s method of attack, first to sting his listener to a sense that he infringed upon his dignity, then with the suave persuasion of an Irish priest to smooth down the ruffled feathers, beguile his listener into a pleasant mood, and so give evidence at once of his, Vacla’s powers.

“I have been led to believe,” Vacla repeated, “that I could help you — and you could help me.”

Mr. Isaacson with his eyebrows up, sat stiffly in his chair.

“But unquestionably it is absurd that a man with yoin* vision, your enterprise, your special genius for the expansion of trade, should need anyone, not to mention anyone so comparatively untried as I am.”

Mr. Isaacson’s eyebrows came down. This was the proper focus.

“Still even great men can do nothing without the proper tools, and I have come to see whether we might not work together for our mutual benefit.” Up went the eyebrow. Vacla had now sighted this sign as a signal of dissatisfaction to be watched. “And whether,” he continued, “with your psychological vision you might not guide me into the doing of some efficient work. I am young. I am strong. I am intelligent. I am willing. That is what I bring to the market.”

Mr. Isaacson relaxed in his chair. He began to like this new tool.

“The function of the stock market,” said Mr. Isaacson adopting his sententious manner, “is not to reflect past or present conditions, but to discount the future. Have you foresight?”

“No, but they say that you have.”

“What is your business qualification?” asked Mr. Isaacson sharply.

“I can make others believe in what I believe. The object may be worthless, but if I believe in it, I can carry my hearers into a similar belief. I can make them see it as I see.”

“The object isn’t worthless,” observed Mr. Isaacson.

“I know. I was merely saying that my asset is my belief in my own powers.”

Mr. Isaacson passed his hand over his face preparatory to impressive speech.

“Business lags,” he said, “and optimism refuses to assert itself. We are making immistakable progress toward readjustment, but there is no assurance that the future does not hold stiU other troublesome problems and impleasant surprises. European countries are reentering all markets. Undoubtedly from now on reports will confirm my opinion, that cheap labour in the older coxmtries combined with economical executives will be efiicacious in injuring American trade.”

“You are an American, you work for America?” asked Vacla.

“I am an Israelite. I work for Jacob Isaacson. I do not pick, nor choose. Three-score years and ten, a Jewish life — there is no time. Where I find myself, there I labour. At present I am an American in America. After reviewing conditions in more than one country I stay in America — for the present. And it is here that I hope to carry out my impressive catalogue.”

Vacla bowed his head to intimate that he was listening. He wondered why Mr. Isaacson used the word, catalogue. To Mr. Isaacson it conveyed the impression of something vague yet capable of being amplified, filled in, as it were, as his brain elaborated.

“Only a few months ago, we were practically under the shadow of impending panic. All danger of this has disappeared. But a period of low earnings is psychologically depressing, and the market is not prone to optimism. Buyers are not confident. They will not come forward with their money.”

Vacla saw Mr. Isaacson’s chin drawn in, and his forehead put forward. He was preparing to project his individuahty upon his listener. It was a promising sign. There was something tremendously mental about Jacob Isaacson at that moment.

“If you join me,” he said, “it would be your business to make buyers come forward with much money. It would be your business to raise thirteen miUions.”

“It is a great smn,” objected Vacla.

“It is a clear possibihty,” Mr. Isaacson asserted, almost with violence.

“I have power,” Vacla afiirmed, “but have I enough to exercise it to this extent?”

“Well?” Mr. Isaacson said at last, as Vacla did not speak. “There are no mediums. There is black. There is white. There is yes. There is no. You take it, or you don’t take it. Which? To the strong swimmer nothing is out of reach. You take it, or you don’t take it, which?”

With a quick gesture Vacla lifted his head. “I take it,” he said.

“Good,” said Mr. Isaacson, “good. I will think out details and you will come to me tomorrow at eleven. Not earlier, not later, but eleven. I will then give you yoim first instructions.”

“We must construct,” said Mr. Isaacson as if half to himself. “The world’s idols are breaking down, we must construct.” His voice had the tone of anxiety, genuine anxiety.

“Thank you very much,” said Vacla getting up and making a bow. “I shall be here tomorrow at eleven.”

Mr. Isaacson turned his sharp little eyes on his visitor. An idea had presented itself.

“Wait a minute. You understand? There must be no wild berries. You must keep your belief in yourself.”

“Yes,” said Vacla. “I will be here tomorrow at eleven,” he repeated as he left the room.

Vacla in speaking to himself about the cultivation of his garden had always been wont to say, “There must be no weeds in my garden.” He had not mentioned berries.

The Jew is the enigma of the world and sometimes the Jew is an enigma to himself. In the case of Mr. Isaacson, there was his real self and his superficial self. His associates had long reahzed the superficial, the real Mr. Isaacson was only suspected by himself. No one pretends to deny that many a man goes down to his grave with valuable and carefully guarded qualities undeveloped and imknown. On the other hand, the man himself may guess them and he may be too lazy, too hampered by conventionality and self -ease to generate the intellectual power necessary for their growth.

Neither laziness, self-ease, nor conventionality hampered Mr. Isaacson.

When Vacla Melfort left him that morning the lines of his plan were only beginning to form in Mr. Isaacson’s mind. He was not sure of the exact pattern. He meant to adapt himself in time to circumstances. Now the Jewish law allows the Jew to do business with a Gentile on a different basis from that on which he does business with a brother Jew. Had the Jew remained in Palestine, he would never have become the financial power that he is, because the old law of Moses forbade the taking of interest; and interest, almost a speculative interest, has been the basis of his finance. Moreover, the Jew could not make money out of another Jew’s distress, because the land which was apportioned among the people might be lost by debt, or sold in cases of need, but every fifty years in the “year of jubilee” it was returned to its original family ownership. The Jews have not got rich out of one another, but out of the people among whom they have lived, and it is the “Law of the Stranger,” the law which says, “unto a stranger thou mayst lend upon v^ury; but unto thy brother thou shall not lend upon usmy,” which has allowed them to obey their principles and yet become master financiers among the people with whom they have sojourned.

In a marked degree the Jew possesses a commercial genius. First and foremost he is a trader. The Gentiles stiU claim, and some modern spiritual leaders of Judaism claim, that Israel’s mission to the nations is spiritual; but observation does not convince that the Israel of today is fulfilling that assertion. It is as a trader that his instincts have driven him round the earth. His migrations have been accompanied by unpopularity of marked evidence which he has tended to increase himself as he has not cared to cultivate the friendship of the Gentile masses, believing that he belongs to a superior race. Now the Jew undoubtedly has a very high average of intellectual ability. Combined with this, he is shrewd, inventive and resourceful, never showing his hand until the game is played. And the game which he has played in every country throughout the world is as yet hardly beginning to be known. Like Disraeli, his illustrious brother, the smaller Jew is a conspirator.

With a feehng of annoyance that he was being interrupted again, Jacob Isaacson looked up at the sound from the doorway intimating that some one was entering, but as the visitor appeared and the eyes of the two men met, their faces lighted up.

“Vinevar.”

“Isaacson.”