'You are going back to Russia!' he gasped.
He had the sensation of cold steel passing through his heart. The _pogroms_, which had been as remote to him as the squabbles of savages in Central Africa, became suddenly vivid and near. And even vivider and nearer that greater danger--the heroic Cousin David!
'How can I live away from Russia at such a moment?' she answered quietly. 'Who or what needs me in America?'
'But to be massacred!' he cried incoherently.
She smiled radiantly. 'To live and die with my own people.'
The fire in his veins seemed upleaping in a sublime jet; he was like to crying, 'Thy people shall be my people,' but all he found himself saying was, 'You must not, you must not; what can a girl like you do?'
'I must go to my mistress. _Gute Nacht, mein Herr!_'
His flame sank to sudden ashes. Only Mrs. Wilhammer's hireling!
The wind freshened towards the middle of the night, and Rozenoffski, rocking in his berth, cursed his encounter with the red-haired romanticist who had stirred up such a pother in his brain that he had not been able to fall asleep while the water was still calm. Not that he suffered physically from the sea; he was merely afraid of it. The shuddering and groaning of the ship found an echo in his soul. He could not shake off the conviction that he was doomed to drown. At intervals, during the tedious night, he found forgetfulness in translating into sound his sense of the mystic, masterless waste in which the continents swim like islands, but music was soon swallowed up in terror.
'No,' he sighed, with a touch of self-mockery. 'When I am safe on shore again, I shall weave my symphony of the sea.'
Sleep came at last, but only to perturb him with a Jewish Joan of Arc who--turned Admiral--recaptured Zion from her battleship, to the sound of Psalms droned by his dead grandfather. And, though he did not see her the next day, and was, indeed, rather glad not to meet a lady's maid in the unromantic daylight, the restlessness she had engendered remained, replacing the settled bitterness which was all he had brought back from America. In the afternoon this restlessness drove him to the piano in the deserted dining-hall, and his fever sought to work itself off in a fury of practice. But the inner turbulence persisted, and the new thoughts clung round the old music. He was playing Schumann's _Fantasiestücke_, but through the stormy passion of _In der Nacht_ he saw the red hair of the heroic Jewess, and into the wistful, questioning _Warum_ insinuated itself not the world-question, but the Jewish question--the sad, unending Jewish question--surging up again and again in every part of the globe, as Schumann's theme in every part of the piano--the same haunting musical figure, never the same notes exactly, yet essentially always the same, the wistful, questioning _Warum_. Why all this ceaseless sorrow, this footsore wandering, this rootless life, this eternal curse?