9

Deep down in Rud's heart, suppressed and denied, stirred a profound conviction in complete agreement with Norvel's question. Why did no one kill him? He had had this feeling ever since the death of Chiffan, and sometimes it forced itself up almost to definite realisation. He perceived an increasing quality of menace in his bearing towards the people about him, though he tried to soften it with a spasmodic geniality and familiarity, he sensed that he was becoming too much for them and surely therefore, he decided, they must be whispering and scheming his death—as in similar circumstances he would have whispered and schemed. Of course, they were trying to kill him. They would try to do it unobtrusively, but they would do it.

He surrounded himself with precautions. He was amazed already at the recklessness with which he had exposed himself to Chiffan—if Chiffan had decided to stab or shoot. He had not thought of that. In his natural, generous way he had let the threatened man come to him. That must not happen again. Henceforth guards must hover invisibly about him and behind them other trusty guards must watch to see they attempted no treason upon him. But precautions were not enough for Rud. He had never been able to wait for an attack. The tension of his long wait for Reedly had been a torture to him. His instinct was to strike first and unexpectedly. So now he spent a considerable amount of nervous energy, peering so to speak into the world about him, to detect any possible gathering of conspirators against his Revolution and himself. He wanted to destroy every stratum of recalcitrance in the world, before it could assemble a definite attack upon him.

Christianity he had always detested, and his persecution of its assemblies and formal worship was now intensified. Quite a number of young, rather stupid men who might otherwise have gone from the cradle to the grave unlit by any touch of nobility, died like saints and heroes under the secret interrogations of Rothberg. Then Rud chanced upon a book about the Jesuits and realised that they constituted a special and efficient branch of the Christian campaign against modern enlightenment. The spirit of Loyola had been revived by the Church's disasters, and to their energy and efficiency he attributed the exasperating phenomenon of a vanishing Pope. He had wanted to offer rewards for the Pope, "properly authenticated, dead or alive," but Thirp had dissuaded him. From the Jesuits his imagination passed to Freemasonry. That mysterious body also has been suitable material always for the politically suspicious, and it required quite a lot of research before he unearthed its secret, which was that it had no secret at all, and was one thing here and another there, and nothing in particular, a mere excuse for assemblies.

Then the searchlight of his suspicions swung round upon the Jews. It swung round upon them and centred and settled upon them. In his earlier years he had adopted a very liberal attitude towards the Jews, if only on account of the indisputable "race" of his maternal grandmother. But now the chosen people drew his attention again. It flickered away from them and returned; for indeed they are a peculiar people. Focussed, the Jew became a burning centre of mental inflammation. When all the rest of the world was becoming one community, why did they still cling to their peculiarities of food and observance? It was odd, he said in the daylight, and that was all there was to it. It was odd, he said in the troubled hours of a sleepless night, and at once the old witch of dreamland set about supplying nightmare explanations of this oddity. From which dreamland he came trailing clouds of vague distrust about him, into the common light of day.

Once he was started on that slippery slope he could not get the Jewish question out of his head. It became an obsession. It became the nucleus of a tangle of fear–born impulses to extravagant violence. Assuredly there was something wrong about the persistent separateness of these people. He discussed them with Gentiles who were interested in them, and most of the Gentiles who were interested in them disliked them, because it is not reasonable for a modern intelligence to be interested in Jewish particularism without a resentful irritation. Gradually the conviction grew upon him that all Jewry constituted a conspiracy, though it was never quite clear in his mind what the conspiracy was about. Nobody could tell him what the conspiracy was about, or whether it was as non–existent as the secret of the Freemasons. They were just a peculiar people, to their own and the universal discomfort. That made that unknown, hidden objective all the more sinister. It was impossible to believe that they were still genuinely worried about the Exodus from Egypt or the Captivity or the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet still they seemed to brood and wail over these things and bear a grudge against the Gentiles on account of them. There was surely something more immediate behind this affectation of remote sorrows. But what was it? They impressed him as a savage is impressed by an inexplicable incantation. They made him feel uncomfortable and apprehensive…

So in the brain of the World Trustee the potentiality of an ultimate pogrom accumulated. And Jews themselves supplied all the food that was necessary for his conspiracy mania to grow. As ever, there were Jews demanding differential treatment and preparing themselves for that perennial surprise which has pursued them through the ages, of finding that this differential treatment, when it comes, is not preferential. The more intelligent Jews were assimilating rapidly to common mankind, but an obstinate remnant persisted, and the more it became a remnant the more it felt it fulfilled its destiny.

"It's that damned Bible, with its Chosen People poison. Isaiah was the first and the worst of all the Nazis!" said Rud. "Until that book is stamped out and forgotten, the Jews and Christians will coagulate and re–coagulate about it…You don't understand, Norvel."

Norvel declared that the new generation of Jews were as much ashamed of Isaiah as the new generation of Germans were ashamed of the Hitler period and the Nordic legend. "Educate," said Norvel.

Rud would not have it. He appealed to sayings and doings of the remnant. "Why do they go on being Jews at all now?" he said. "Why do they keep it up? All through history the Jew has been hunted like a dog with the Bible tied like an old tin can to his tail. Why can't they cut away from that old tin can, now that they have a chance? I want to free them. Just as much as I want to free the rest of the world. What is the good of pretending that Judaism isn't a conspiracy against human unity? Read their Holy Books, man! Read Isaiah."

It was only too evident he had been reading Isaiah.

He closed synagogues, he prohibited the printing of Bible or Talmud in spite of Norvel's remonstrances, he began to provoke the younger Jews to defiance and heroism just as he had provoked the Neo–Christians to heroic martyrdoms. Everywhere his attacks were reviving these moribund religions as convenient centres of resistance to his deification. They dared to do as members of a sect what they did not dare to do as individuals. History, in its loose, inaccurate way, was repeating itself. They would not burn incense to Divus Caesar.

"Don't heed them," said Norvel. "They will assimilate. They are assimilating. It is just a dwindling cult now of old ladies, old rabbis, sentimentalists, eccentrics, Zang wills, men with caricature profiles which they cannot escape, professional champions, who keep the old Promise alive. They're like those Druids who meet at Stonehenge on Midsummer morning. Leave them in peace. They will pass. Judaism will pass as all things pass. Leave it to them to come over."

"Jews never assimilate," said Rud, regardless of his maternal grandmother. "Once a Jew always a Jew."

And then when Norvel was about to speak, Rud went on. "Maybe there are fewer Jews," he said. "But these Christianised Jews become Neo–Christians. All of them. You haven't observed that. I have. They're not a dying breed. They go on. Christianity always has been a Jewish sect."

"But," protested Norvel, "the Christian idea is the exact opposite of Judaism. Christianity is the broadest universalism; Judaism the narrowest nationalism. Everything you and I need and care for can be put in .terms of this Neo–Christianity."

"You ask me to believe that!" shouted Rud, pacing up and down the room, and stopping with outstretched fingers to make his points. "You ask me to believe that! Then why the Bible still? Yes—you'll talk about the Old Dispensation and the New Dispensation. You know that's a quibble as well as I do. You say they are as opposite as the poles. You pretend' Christianity is a Gentile religion. Why! even after the Crucifixion, after it was all over, after the Resurrection and everything, still for a time none of them breathed a word about letting in the Gentiles. Not a word. That came later, with Paul and all those animals Peter saw in a sheet—what was that vision? Not a word from the Founder…I ask you! He comes to earth to make religion universal—and he forgets to mention it! Eh? Not much of a story, that!"

"There was the story of the Good Samaritan," said Norvel, but Rud's voice overrode him.

"New Dispensation, they say! The more the Jews and the Christians differ, the more they remain the same thing. Why do the Christians trail that old Bible about with them, if they have outgrown it? Why don't they denounce it plainly? Why do they still read the Psalms and the Prophets in church? Answer me that! You can't. Every Christian, I tell you, is a Jew or a Jew proselyte."

The gleam of mania appeared in Rud's eyes—but his voice became gentle and persuasive. He appealed to Norvel as a man might appeal to a child with incredible delusions. "Are you blind, Norvel?" he said. "Do you really and truly think that Christianity changes Jews? Not a bit of it. It disguises them. It makes them more than ever the same thing. Why are there so few Jews? Because there are so many Christians. The Jews breed and breed and never increase. Isn't it plain? They're in the other Warren. All that is left of the Christian Churches to–day is three parts crypto–Jew. Three parts, I tell you. You will see. You will see—One fine day something will happen to me, Norvel, something will happen to me…Something will happen to my Revolution…They'll manage it. Unless we strike first."

He walked away to a window and came back. He brought his hot face close to Norvel's and Norvel hoped that his own expression would not betray his eager wish that something should happen to Rud.

"And then, then at last, at last, when they think the time is ripe, they will push one of the real race into my place, and you will have a Jew World Dictator, a Jew Emperor—a Son of David, Lord of the World! Solomon, with wives and concubines, all complete. So that the Promise shall be fulfilled, and the Jews inherit the Earth! That is the eternal dream of the Jews and they will go on dreaming it. What else can they be dreaming about?…Unless we deal with them, Norvel—now…"

So far Rud was following in the footsteps of his German precursor, Hitler, in his attack on the Jewish riddle, but it is to be remarked that, quite unlike Hitler, he never betrayed any traces of that physical race mania which is so frequent an aspect of the pogrom complex. He regarded the Jews as a conspiracy. Hitler felt them as a biological pressure, multiplying around him and his kind. He bore a personal sexual hate for them. But Rud had no sense of race. It was not the Jewish race he hated, it was the Jewish idea.

"Stamp it out, stamp it all out now," he would mutter between sleeping and waking. He would lie in bed pursuing a reverie that passed into a nightmare of triumphant violence. Should he make them renounce the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? In so many words? Would an enforced renunciation be enough? He planned a world–wide Sicilian Vespers—Jews and Christians butchered together. No ghetto seclusion, no exile, would satisfy his imagination. It would have to be a world–wide terror this time, a cumulative massacre…

Whom should he use? Whom could he trust? How could he prepare for this last and final world purge, get thousands of people straining at the leash, and yet take these doomed Bible cultures by surprise? The Pogrom would have to burst simultaneously throughout the earth. It must be like the fall of some tremendous meteorite. Out of a blue sky. Abruptly in every cinema he would appear, full of menace, advancing, filling the picture, until there was nothing to be seen but his eyes and nothing to be heard but his voice roaring in their ears, drowning every other sound. Or should he appear in great effigies thrown across the smoke–screened heavens? Everywhere all over the world the loud–speakers would shout together with one terrible voice: "The Day of Wrath, the Day of the Wrath of Rud, has come." They would hear what was coming to them in the cinemas, in the market–places, in their homes. That voice, that face of hatred, would pursue them everywhere.

Everywhere too Rothberg's police, reinforced a thousandfold, would be picking out the special victims. This time there would be no place to shelter them, anywhere on earth. Earth and air would howl against them. Conspuez—what a good word that was! His reveries became more and more gigantically apocalyptic. Mountains were thrown about like ninepins. The seas were tinged with blood. No more Jews. No more Jehovah.

More and more did he brood on this crowning surprise for mankind. It began with him as a dream; then it became a wilful imagination which he would conjure up at will. "Rud," he whispered. "Thud. Thunder." They thought he had done what he had to do, did they? They thought he was played out. He'd show them. Why! He was only beginning. Wait just a little…

He would wander about his carefully guarded apartments and gardens. He would come to a standstill, a small, dark figure in some vertically tremendous archway. Far off stood Rothberg's unobtrusive, trustworthy men shielding him from danger. He would sit alone on his terrace, elaborating it all. He whistled thinly through his teeth just as he had done when as a boy he had wandered over the countryside fighting imaginary battles…