"And if salvation can only be bought with pain, father? If all this suffering was the price of redemption for our sins?"
"Jew!" my father snapped at me with glittering eyes, his mouth drawn disdainfully in unutterable contempt! "Jew! where did you learn this bartering morality? Buy! Buy! everything can be bought! If you are but willing to pay, you can go anywhere, even to heaven. Salvation can be bought for a slaughtered human being. A fixed price and dirt cheap! - Salvation for all mankind for the corpse of a single Jew. What a bargain! and G.o.d is Shylock, be holds to his bond! his bond! Blood is the fixed price, nothing can change that. If not the blood of sinners then let it be the blood of my son. Thus reads the contract:
"My bond! My bond!
My deeds upon my head! I crave the law!
The penalty and forfeit of my bond!"
"Do you know, Vico, why the Jews are hated so everywhere? It is instinctive resentment because the world feels that it has been infected with the Jewish poison. The priesthood, the black vermin, is a Jewish Germanic b.a.s.t.a.r.d brood. They have made a Jew of G.o.d himself and they will make one of you too. And that my son! my child, the heir!"
The suffering on my father"s face was terrible to see. Tears began to flow from his fixed eyes.
I tried to calm him. "Do come about, father! - it"s over time!"
"We"ll go on a while yet," he said with a ghastly affected airiness, and I sat there with the blood freezing in my veins, fearing he was going mad. All at once he burst out again.
"The blood of his son! the blood of his son! to buy off sin with which he himself had burdened us - his own debts thrust on us and accepted by us against our will and pleasure, and this acceptance paid for with the blood of his own child. What a Jew! What a sly, heartless usurer! Did you make these debts, Vico? - value received? What did you get for it?
What did you get for this hereditary sin? Hereditary sin! Ha! ha! ha!
hereditary sin! what an invention! - Hereditary debt! What a crafty, bartering Jew one must be to invent such an idea."
Once more I made an attempt, and standing upright at the mast I cried vigorously:
"Come about, father! - about!"
But he called back with even greater vehemence:
"Go ahead, I tell you!"
And then whilst I looked about over the sea and considered what to do:
"I tell you, Vico, there is life and there is death. And we must live as long as we can. But it must be real life too. Death is no life. The life of most men is a slow miserable death. There is no honor and no merit in maintaining a life that should more truly be called death. A bloodless, enervated, foul, rotten life. It is a shame that men do not yet know how to live, and even greater shame that they know still less how to die. I wanted to have you live. But I did not succeed and now I shall teach you to die. - Are you afraid?"
Then something began to stir and rise up in my soul, like a snake goaded forth from her cavern. I, too, began to forget the wind and the waves about me. True, I felt a tingling down my back to my very finger tips. Yet I was not a coward and I spoke firmly:
"I am not afraid, father. I believe I shall know quite as well as you how to die if it should be necessary, even without your teaching me.
But I won"t be murdered, not even by my father."
The tears from the fixed, now red-rimmed eyes began to flow more abundantly.
"Vico!" he cried in a much softer, trembling voice: "Will you be true to me then? Will you let yourself be saved? Will you save your precious life and your reason? Will you abjure this accursed harpy? Will you escape the sinister band?"
But I was irritated and excited and proudly replied: "I shall save myself, I shall be true to whomever I find worthy. I do not respect the man that curses my mother."
Then his face changed horribly, he lifted up his trembling right hand, thereby awkwardly knocking off the canvas cap from his head so that the damp gray hair fluttered. He made Jesus" sign of doom in Michel Angelo"s last judgment, screaming loudly meanwhile:
"Then I curse you, do you hear! I curse you, Lodovico Muralto. Your father curses you!"
I had enough of Old Testament sentiments left in me not to be indifferent to such an imprecation!
I started, but tried my very utmost to see in him only the raving, irresponsible maniac. At the same time the thought flashed across my mind that he himself must also have been infected by Jewish ideas, that he should clutch at these weapons, more sounding than wounding. But I said nothing, walked up to him and from behind his hand attempted to grasp the tiller. "About!" I cried.
"Very well! about!" my father cried fiercely, and with that be wrenched the tiller out of my hand and pulled it violently toward himself, so that instead of sailing before the wind it struck us directly on the beam with mainsail closely hauled and sheet fixed.
Even had I desired death as eagerly as he did at the time, yet now I would instinctively have resisted. Seamanship teaches scorn of death but still greater scorn for bad man?uvring. "Blockhead!" I cried out, hastily cutting the taut rope so that the sail fluttered out into the wind like a half-escaped bird. But the boat had shipped so much water that I could not right her again and in a moment she was entirely swamped. I climbed to the high side stretching out my hand to my father. But he gave me one look of bitter scorn, shook his head and let himself sink, freeing his hand with a wild jerk from a loop in the rigging.
After this, I drifted about four hours. We had been missed and the life-boat had been sent out after us, but for a long time was unable to find me, as the dusk had begun to fall. Finally I was picked up by a fisherman who signalled for the life-boat to come and get me. I had lost consciousness and when I awoke it was night and I found myself in bed hearkening to the soft voices of two women in the room. I thought I was in Italy with my mother and my nurse in our house at Milan, so eloquent of the past were the old familiar sharp sss and rr sounds of these soft Italian whisperings. But soon I recognized the Dutch hotel furnishings, Lucia, and beneath the black lace veil the silvery hair of my venerable mother.
X
When for four hours, wet and benumbed upon a wave-swept piece of wood, with nothing round about but the sea and falling night, one has fought for the maintenance of a thing, one begins to consider that thing important after all, even though before it was ever so indifferent to us.
I had never valued my life so highly; but after I had once been incited to a stubborn, desperate but successful resistance against the attempt of robbing me of it, it had become dearer to me. Now I was determined to know everything there is to be known concerning the value of this hard-won treasure.
Why did I make this tremendous effort? What do I gain by it? And all these others, none of whom, forsooth, praise life as so glorious and desirable a joy, what induces them to cling to it so frantically at the cost of so much pain and trouble?
My father had taught me, and no one, not even my mother and the priests denied it, that we are reasonable beings who ought to act reasonably.
To exert oneself for something undesirable, I consider, and everyone with me considers, unreasonable. If it is a Jewish idea to do or to give naught for naught - well, you may label me Jew then. That was also my idea of justice. And then I felt myself more of a Jew than the Jew, Spinoza, who says that one should love G.o.d without expecting love in return. My inborn pa.s.sion for sober truth was stirred to opposition by these words. I did not believe that this feeling could be true, not even in Spinoza. He must merely have imagined it because he wished to be different from the grasping Jews and Hollanders of his age. Right remains right. Love demands love in return, - and life must be good for something if we are willing to suffer and struggle for it. I could be as liberal and generous as the best of Italians, but the highest striving in all nature is for balance, and he who lets himself be pushed off his chair disturbs the balance instead of preserving it, and he who throws his own cabbages to his neighbor"s hogs fosters laziness and injustice.
"Yes! now my life has been saved, dear mother," I said on the first day of my recovery. "But at the cost of much trouble and distress. Father and I parted the while he cursed me and I denounced him as a "blockhead." I am not superst.i.tious, but these are not comforting memories. I defied his curse, I resisted him and retained my life. But for what? Who tells me that he was not right and that it had not been better for me to die?"
"G.o.d has willed it so, my boy. I fear that for your unhappy father there is no salvation; he died cursing and without repentance. But G.o.d has preserved you so that you should live for him."
"Preserved me to live for him? Does he need me then? The creator of the sun and the fixed stars, the milky way and the nebulae? Needs me? How is that, mother?"
"He wished to preserve you through his merciful love. You need him.
Therefore you must live for him."
"If I need him, mother, then he must live for me and not I for him. How can anyone who needs help himself live for another? G.o.d is surely not in need of help. But I -"
"You must love him with all your heart and all your soul. You must be ready to offer all to him. You must be willing to bear life and to suffer for him. You have received everything from him. Joy and sorrow - it must all be equally dear to you because it comes from him."
"Dear mother, then I must surely have received my reason and my tastes from him too. And when my father gave me a watch and a compa.s.s I trusted that these things would point right. And when G.o.d gives me reason and tastes, must I then suppose that these point wrong?
Wherefore did I receive them then? My reason calls it nonsensical to lead a wretched and miserable life, even for the sake of the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth. How can this be pleasing to a supreme being? What can it matter to him? And my taste calls happiness desirable and sorrow reprehensible, whether it come from one or from another. Sugar is sweet though it come from the devil, and quinine is bitter though it come from G.o.d. I cannot taste it differently."
"And is the bitter not just what you need to heal you, Vico?"
"Is it less bitter, therefore? And should I even thank the Almighty for first letting me get sick, which is unpleasant enough already, and moreover giving a bitter taste to the medicine which he made necessary?
He has made me so that I feel glad and thankful for whatever gives happiness and tastes sweet, but not for affliction and bitterness."
"That is your pride, Vico! Your father instilled that into you. Learn to love G.o.d! Lay away your pride. Learn to love G.o.d humbly and through love thankfully to accept the bitter from him."
"Listen, mother. I might say now: Yes! yes! I can repeat it all after you exactly and persuade myself that I feel it all too. But then I would lie. And G.o.d has made me so that I would rather not lie if I can help it. I know no reason why I should be thankful to G.o.d for afflictions or should call the bitter sweet and the ugly beautiful. If he is my creator then he is also responsible for the desires and feelings of his creature."
"What I tell you, Vico, is something you cannot understand except through the light of grace. You must be born again through faith. You reason now as all who trust to their human understanding. I can only pray that his grace will be poured out over you. And for the sake of your mother, who loves you so, you surely do not wish to shut your heart and blind yourself to the true light? You surely will want to hear what the church teaches and want to obey and accept what older and wiser people, through love, tell and advise you."