mmer's hireling!

III

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 _Fantasiestuecke_, 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?

Suddenly he became aware that he was no longer alone--forms were
seated at the tables on the fixed dining-chairs, though there was no
meal but his music; and as he played on, with swift side-peeps, other
fellow-passengers entered into his consciousness, some standing about,
others hovering on the stairs, and still others stealing in on
re