The Bride of Dreams

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On the day I came of age a letter from my mother arrived in which she
reminded me that I was now free to go my own ways, and moreover
informed me that on her journey from the north she would stop in
Holland and hoped that she might at last clasp me in her arms again.

It was a momentous day for me when at last I was to see again my saint,
adored so many years in the holy, dusky light of memory. My heart beat
and my hands trembled as I stood behind the sleek hotel porter in front
of the closed door of the apartment and heard the voice - soft,
languidly cordial - inviting me to enter.

There she stood, tall, straight, the same face with the light gray eyes
with the deep rings under them, but much paler now, and the once blonde
hair showing silvery white beneath the black lace veil. She was dressed
in black and white with a great silver crucifix on a black chain. I
fell upon my knees before her, kissing her hands. She kissed me on the
brow and lifted me up. I trembled with emotion when I felt her cool,
soft lips, and saw her face, with the delicate pale violet and amber
tints and the fine countless little lines crossing one another, so near
my own. And I breathed the old familiar perfume of frankincense and
lavender and felt her pure breath upon my brow. It was a moment of
consecration. Even had she not been my mother, I should have felt awe
and veneration for this stately and distinguished woman with her
expression of long and patiently endured affliction, her fresh,
well-preserved old age, her solemn, dignified garb and the peculiar
sphere of purity and chastity that seemed to surround her. All my shame
and humiliation came to my mind and threatened to relieve itself in a
flood of tears. I longed to confess, to reveal all the ugliness and
foulness in my soul, so that she should purify it through her power.

Woman in the last period of her life, when maternity slips away from
her, can, if she well understands her new position and with wisdom
sustains it, become a new human creature clothed with a higher dignity.
Man in the fulness of his years still ever remains the male, and the
lover. Woman is directed toward another sexless position and fulfils a
new part not of minor importance. Thus I conceived it, when I saw my
mother, and I comprehended now why some nations so greatly revered the
power of priestesses and sibyls or feared the power of witches. I felt
the influence of an unknown potency, a natural consecration that could
forgive, purify, bless, absolve and prophesy wholly according to
priestly prerogative, but stronger here where God and Nature ordained
it than where human authority officially and formally conferred it.

My impulsive nature would undoubtedly have driven me to make a full
confession even at this first meeting, had I not soon become aware of
another person in the room. For a moment I thought of my sister, but
then I remembered that my sister had taken the veil. This was a pretty
young woman whose beauty, quite differently than with Emmy, I
immediately saw and appreciated. She had large, dark, serious and
gentle eyes, a fresh white complexion and dark glossy hair that was
brought down low over the temples, braided and twisted to a knot in
back. She was also dressed in black with a white lace collar and a gold
breast pin in which were enclosed some brown plaits of hair. She stood
at the window somewhat shy and embarrassed while I greeted my mother,
but I saw her eyes shining with kindly satisfaction that she had been
allowed to witness this scene.

My mother told me that this was Lucia del Bono, her faithful friend and
adopted daughter. And I could notice that Lucia's veneration for my
mother was almost as deep as mine, and also that the two women had
talked about me a great deal and that this meeting was an important
event not for the elder one alone.

In the unbearable grief for my lost love these visits to my mother and
her beautiful, sympathetic companion now became my greatest solace and
it was not long before I saw from my father's dark and suspicious
glances, from his listless and discouraged air, which suddenly made the
still vigorous man appear aged, and from his almost invariably silent
and tightly compressed lips, that he realized what was going on.

He did not ask, and I did not speak. But we both felt that we had been
seized by an irresistible current which was sweeping us toward an
inevitable catastrophe.

IX

Holland may be described as a painting whereof the frame constitutes
the most impressive part. It is a fit dwelling place for the hermit who
from inward meditation amid hazy meadows, dreamy cows, and peaceful
little towns can easily turn to the contemplation of the greatest
revelations of the gods - the vast heavens, the clouds and the sea. But
toward the people he must learn to assume the attitude of the ancient
hermit toward the spiders and rats in his cell. Sometimes they are
annoying and disagreeable; sometimes too, in their revelations of life,
instructive and interesting. I live on good terms with the inhabitants
of this quiet little town because I never let them see how I think of
them, and never show myself as I really am. To this attitude, which,
with sharper insight, they would consider haughty conceit, I owe my
reputation as a modest and respectable man. Were I humble enough to
treat them as my equals by being natural with them, they would then
call me a conceited ass and a cad.

But on one point we understand each other, on the subject of the water,
the sea and the sport of sailing. If I kept a horse and rode to my
nursery in the morning they would consider me a fool and I should
surely never have become treasurer of the orphanage. But the fact that
I have a yacht and frequently show them what storms she can weather,
raises me in their esteem. Only the sea can arouse in these little
shrivelled souls a dim shadow of the old boldness and beauty of life.

True, most of them are too much attached to their miserable little
lives to risk them solely for the sake of stirring emotions without
compelling need, and they prefer to let me go on my reckless
expeditions alone or accompanied by the well-paid fisher lad. But they
do not laugh at my recklessness, and at the club I notice that they
regard the old gentleman with a certain amount of respect when he
returns again from one of these sailing expeditions, which many a young
seaman would refuse to undertake even for the sake of profit, and does
not even brag or boast of it, but only slightly smiles at the
exclamations of respectful amazement. Thus they honor physical courage,
which is nothing more than muscular strength and a craving for the
pleasing excitement of danger, while the moral courage to reveal to
them the true nature of my thoughts and feelings they would punish with
such sharp and malicious ill-will that in order to retain my peace of
mind and pursue my life's task undisturbed, I think I should not
challenge it and prefer to deceive them.

It was my father who made me a slave to the intoxication of the
thrilling suspense of sailing out amidst whistling winds, seething
foam, immense surging waves round about, fallow driving clouds above,
the tugging taut rope in one hand, the straining tiller in the other,
the eye travelling from sail to horizon, from pennant to ocean, the
boat trembling the while from the waves breaking against her bow, and
amid this tumult weighing the chances for a safe homecoming, total
submersion or the breaking of the rigging. It was then he felt
happiest; it deadened his melancholy, as biting on wood deadens a
gnawing toothache. And he found in me a willing pupil, eager as I was
for violent emotions and tortured by self-contempt, wild passions and
all the pangs of lost love-joys.

In Holland, too my father had immediately hired a boat to sail the
ocean, and the Scheveningen seamen had quite some trouble to make him
understand that the North Sea was not an Italian gulf or lake and in
rough weather would not permit of any rash enterprises in small
sailboats. Yet after a few weeks, be managed to attain his object and I
followed him gladly.

One afternoon we had sailed out, dressed in our oilskins, and the
skipper who, submerged to the waist, had pushed us off the shore
through the breakers, had warned us to be back within two hours, for at
that time the ebb-tide set in and, with the fresh north breeze, the
strong current would make it difficult for us to land. My father had
nodded as though he were thinking of something else and had long ago
penetrated and computed the caprices of the gray and formidable North
Sea.

For an hour we sailed on silently, as was frequently our wont, my
father holding the rudder. The coast had dwindled to a faint luminous
line above which like a thin white mist hung the foam of the breakers.
I lay on the deck, glanced toward land and horizon - then at my watch,
and said:

"Come about; father, it's time." He did not seem to hear, and I turned
toward him repeating: "It's time! come about!" Then I saw that be did
not want to hear. He had hauled the mainsail in closely, luffing
sharply, the sheet tightly drawn, and was staring fixedly and straight
ahead under the large yellow sou'-wester. His eyes had the hard grim
expression of old people who after a long life of struggle still fight
for the bit of breath left them, or of indulged and long-tortured
invalids, or of the starved or shipwrecked who no longer have feeling
for anyone or anything but their own distress. Between his
close-cropped gray whiskers and his tightly pressed lips I saw - what
before I had never noticed - two sallow lines deeply furrowing his
cheeks. All at once I felt a pity, such as I had never felt for him
before - as though the realization of all the grief which he had
suffered under my very eyes now suddenly penetrated my consciousness.

"What ails you, father?" I asked. He began talking away regardlessly as
though there were no wind and no waves about him.

"You said three years ago that by this time you would be lost. I think
you are right. You are."

"No, father, I think I was mistaken. I am beginning to see salvation."

"You do not see salvation, Vico, you see ruin. I understand it very
well. Your mother has you again in her clutches. She is a harpy; do you
know the monsters? Part woman, part vulture. They suck away half your
healthy life-blood and replace it with gall. Melancholy and gloom are
her idols. Suffering, pain, grief, trouble, bitterness - these are the
archangels in her heaven. She makes sorrow her object of worship, and
she pictures her God as a hideous corpse hanging on a cross with
pierced bands and feet, covered with blood, wounds, scars, sores,
matter, dirt and spittle, - the more horrible the better. And that
attracts the dull masses exactly as the colored prints of murders and
barbarians depicted in the papers. Was there ever more devilish error?"

"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 God 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 bastard brood. They have made a Jew of God 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 God without expecting love in
return. My inborn passion 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 superstitious, 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?"

"God has willed it so, my boy. I fear that for your unhappy father
there is no salvation; he died cursing and without repentance. But God
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? God 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 compass I
trusted that these things would point right. And when God 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 God. 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 God! Lay away your pride. Learn to love God 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 God 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 God 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."

"My heart is open to every light, mother. I am willing to hear and to
consider everything. But though I would ever so gladly, I cannot obey
and accept unless what I am told and advised seems acceptable to me."

"May God break your self-conceit!" my mother sighed.

What I have written here is an average and collective type of many
hundreds of conversations which I had with my mother during the ten
years following. With the indefatigable zeal of flies incessantly
buzzing up and down and striking against a window pane, we two
tenacious and autocratic persons tried to thrust upon one another our
own peculiar individuality. My mother with a more aggressive love, I
more on the defensive, but in my self-assertion, none the less
militant. Possessed by the universal conceit of the reasonableness of
our feelings and convictions, neither one of us noticed that this was
simply a struggle between two natures whereof one was trying to subject
the other. And accustomed as almost all the human herd to the idolatry
of the true word, we both imagined that by merely talking, talking we
could finally make the word which we ourselves considered true the idol
of our fellow-man too, like two missionaries of different faith holding
up their symbol before one another until one of the two falls on his
knees.

And the mother now said that it was the father's education that made me
refractory, just as the father had thought to oppose the maternal
influence: as though they continued the old feud about me and through
me.

The four hours of anxious suspense on the capsized boat, my father's
curse ringing in my ears, his grim sinking face before my eyes, had
struck such a deep gash into my young and tender soul that at first I
would awaken every morning from a dream, in which the whole thing was
lived through again, crying for help in a voice hoarse from screaming
as I had cried so long across the lonely dusky sea. Only very gradually
did these evil memory dreams cease, and till late in my life they would
recur whenever my power of resistance was weakened.

These dreams acted upon me like warnings, repeating the stern lesson of
the terrible event. "You have repelled your father and chosen your
mother's side. You have rejected his ideas and thereby driven him to
death. And what if he had been right now? Are you sure that your mother
deserved this sacrifice? Are you sure that your life was worth saving?
What have you - really - of that life which you so desperately
defended? By your defiance you have taken a heavy responsibility upon
yourself. You must now seek this assurance: the assurance that your
father was in the wrong and that you are doing right by continuing to
live and adhering to your mother."

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