The White Terror and The Red Part 45

The moon came out. Her soft mysterious light streamed through the rugged holes of shattered unlit windows; over muddy pavements carpeted with silks, velvets, satins; over rows and rows of debris-mounds on streets snowed under with down; over peasants driving home with waggons laden with plunder; over the ghastly figures of sprawling drunkards and the beautiful uniforms of patrolling hussars. Silence had settled over most of the streets. For blocks and blocks, east and west, north and south, there was not an unbroken window pane to be seen, not a light to glitter in the distance. The Jewish district, the liveliest district in town, had been turned into a "city of death." In other places one often saw a single illuminated house on a whole street of darkness and ruin. The illuminated house was invariably the abode of Christians. Officers on horseback were moving about musingly, the hoofs of their horses silenced by thick layers of down. Most streets were impa.s.sable for the debris.

Here and there the jaded sounds of revelry were heard, but there were some peasants who had come out of the day's rioting in full control of their voices.

Seated on empty boxes and barrels, their fingers gripping new accordions, their eyes raised to the moon, a company of rioters on Little Market were playing and singing a melancholy, doleful tune. The Jews were in their hiding places.

CHAPTER XL.

LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.

Clara was with her parents in a White-Russian town. The inn at which they were stopping was entered through a vast yard, partly occupied by fruit-barns. It was the height of the fruit season. The barns and part of the yard were lined with straw upon which rose great heaps of apples and pears of all sizes and colours. Applewomen, armed with baskets, were coming and going, squatting by the juicy mounds, sampling them, haggling, quarrelling mildly. Now and then a peasant waggon laden with fruit would come creaking through the open gate, attracting general attention. A secluded corner of the yard was Clara's and her mother's favourite spot for their interminable confidences, a pile of large bulky logs serving them as a sofa. The people they saw here and in the streets were much shabbier and more insignificant-looking than those of their native town and the south in general. The Yavners lived here unregistered, as did most of the guests at the inn, the local police being too lazy and too "friendly" with the proprietor to trouble his patrons about having their pa.s.sports vised at the station house.

The town was a stronghold of Talmudic learning, and Rabbi Rachmiel felt as a pa.s.sionate art student does on his first visit to Italy. When the first excitement of the meeting was over the local scholars were of more interest to him than his daughter. His joy was marred by his fear of being sent to Siberia in case Clara's (to her parents she was still Tamara) ident.i.ty was discovered by the local police; but he had a rather muddled idea of the situation and his wife a.s.sured him that there was no danger. As to Hannah, she was not the woman to flee from her daughter for fear of the police. She could not see enough of Clara. She catechised her on her political career and her personal life, and Clara, completely under the spell of the meeting and in her mother's power, told her more than she had a mind to. What she told her was, indeed, as foreign to Hannah's brain as it was to her husband's; but then, in her practical old-fas.h.i.+oned way, she realised that her daughter was working in the interests of the poor and the oppressed, though she never listened to Clara's expositions without a sad, patronising smile.

One day, during one of their intimate talks on the wood-pile, the old woman demanded:

"Tell me, Clara, are you married?"

"What has put such an idea in your mind?" Clara returned, reddening. "If I were I would have told you long ago."

"Tamara, you are a married woman," Hannah insisted, looking hard at her daughter.

"I tell you I am not," Clara said testily.

"Then why did you get red in the face when I said you were? People don't get red without reason, do they?"

The young woman's will power seemed to have completely deserted her. "I am engaged," she said, "but I am not married, and--let me alone, mamma, will you?"

"If you are engaged, then why were you afraid to say so? Is it anything to be ashamed of to be engaged? Foolish girl that you are, am I a stranger to you? Why don't you tell me who he is, what he is?"

"He is a nice man and that's all I can tell you now, and pray don't ask me any more questions, mamma darling."

After a pause the old woman gave her daughter a sharp look and said in a whisper: "He must be a Christian, then. Else you wouldn't be afraid to tell me who he is."

"He is not," Clara answered lamely, her eyes on a heap of yellow apples in the distance.

"He _is_ a Christian, then," Hannah said in consternation. "May the blackest ill-luck strike you both."

"Don't! Don't!" Clara entreated her, clapping her hand over her mother's mouth, childishly.

"What! You _are_ going to marry a Christian? You _are_ a convert-Jewess?" Hannah said in a ghastly whisper.

"No, no, mamma! I have not become a Christian, and I never will. I swear I won't. As to him, he is the best man in the world. That's all I can tell you for the present. Oh, the young generation is so different from the old, mamma!" she snuggled to her, nursing her cheek against hers and finding intense pleasure in a conscious imitation of the ways of her own childhood; but she was soon repulsed.

"Away from my eyes! May the Black Year understand you. I don't," the old woman said. Her face wore an expression of horrified curiosity. Had Clara faced her fury with a pugnacious front, it might have led to an irretrievable rupture; but she did not. While her mother continued to curse, she went on fawning and pleading with filial self-abas.e.m.e.nt, although not without an effect of trying to soothe an angry baby.

Hannah's curses were an accompaniment to further interrogations and gradually became few and far between. Her daughter's engagement and her whole mysterious life appealed to an old-fas.h.i.+oned sense of romance and adventure in the elderly Jewess; also to a vague idea of a higher altruism. Her motherly pride sought satisfaction in the fact that her daughter was so kind-hearted as to stake her life for the poor and the suffering, and so plucky that she braved the Czar and all his soldiers.

"It's from me she got all that benevolence and grit," Hannah said to herself. As to Rabbi Rachmiel, he asked no questions and his wife was not going to disturb his peace of mind.

"There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile among us," Clara said in the course of her plea.

"No, there is not," her mother returned. "Only the Gentiles tear the Jews to pieces." And at this Clara remembered that circ.u.mstance which lay like a revolting blemish on her conscience--the att.i.tude of the revolutionists toward the riots.

However, these matters got but little consideration from her now. She was taken up with her parents. The peculiar intonation with which her father chanted grace interested her more than all the "politics" of the world. She recognised these trifles with little thrills of joy, as though she had been away from home a quarter of a century. When her mother took out a pair of bra.s.s-rimmed spectacles on making ready to read her prayers, Clara exclaimed, with a gasp of unfeigned anguish:

"Spectacles! Since when, mamma darling, since when?"

"Since about six months ago. One gets older, foolish girl, not younger.

When you are of my age you'll have to use spectacles, too, all your Gentile wisdom notwithstanding."

Another day or two and her communions with her mother and the odour of apples and pears began to pall on her. She missed Pavel. Her mind was more frequently given over to musings upon that atmosphere amid which he and she were a pair of lovers than to the fascination of being with her father and mother again. She felt the centuries that divided her world from theirs more keenly every day. Once, after a long muse by the side of her mother, who sat darning stockings in her spectacles, she roused herself, with surprise, to the fact that Sophia was no more, that she had been hanged. It seemed incredible. And then it seemed incredible that she, Clara, was by her mother's side at this moment. She took solitary walks, she sought seclusion indoors, she was growing fidgety.

The change that had come over her was not lost upon her mother.

"You have been rather quick to get tired of your father and mother, haven't you?" Hannah said to her one day. "Grieving for your Christian fellow? A break into your bones, Tamara!"

Clara blushed all over her face. She was more than grieving for Pavel.

She pictured him in the hands of the gendarmes or shot in a desperate fray with them; she imagined him the victim of the ghastliest catastrophes known to the movement, her heart was torn by the wildest misgivings.

One afternoon, when her mother was speaking to her and she was making feeble efforts to disguise her abstraction, Hannah, losing patience, flamed out:

"But what's the use talking to a woman whose mind has been bedeviled by a Gentile!"

"Don't, then," Clara snapped back, with great irritation.

"The Black Year has asked you to arrange this meeting. Why don't you go back to your Gentile? Go at once to him or your heart will burst."

Clara was cut to the quick, but she mastered herself.

When she read in the newspapers and in a letter from her sister accounts of the Miroslav outbreak, her agony was far keener than that of her father and mother. The most conspicuous circ.u.mstance in every report of the riot was the b.e.s.t.i.a.l ferocity with which the mob had let itself loose on the homes of the poorest and hardest working population in those districts of Miroslav known as Paradise and Cuc.u.mber Market. She knew that neighbourhood as she knew herself. She had been born and bred in it. The dearest scenes of her childhood were there. Tears of homesickness and of a sense of guilt were choking her.

For the first time it came home to her that these thousands of Jewish tailors, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, lumber-drivers, capmakers, coopers, labourers, who toiled from fourteen to fifteen hours a day and lived literally on the verge of starvation, were as much at least ent.i.tled to that hallowed name, "The People," as the demonised Russians who were now committing those unspeakable atrocities upon them. Yet the organ of her party had not a word of sympathy for them! Nay, it treated all Jews, without distinction, as a race of fleecers, of human leeches! Russian literature of the period was teeming with "fists," or village usurers, types of the great Russian provinces in which Jews were not allowed to dwell. Drunkenness in these districts was far worse than in those in which the liquor traffic was in Jewish hands. And the n.o.bility--was it not a caste of spongers and land-robbers? Yet who would dare call the entire Russian people a people of human sharks, liquor-dealers and usurers, as it was customary to do in the case of the Jews? A Russian peasant or labourer was part of the People, while a Jewish tailor, blacksmith or carpenter was only a Jew, one of a race of profit-mongers, sharpers, parasites.

And this "People," for whose sake she was staking her liberty and her life, was wreaking havoc on Jews because they were Jews like her father, like her mother, like herself.

People at the inn were talking of the large numbers of Jews that were going to America. "America or Palestine?" was the great subject of discussion in the three Russian weeklies dedicated to Jewish interests.

One day Hannah said, gravely:

"I tell you what, Tamara. Drop your Gentile and the foolish work you are doing and let us all go to America."

Clara smiled.

"Will it be better if you are caught and put in a black hole?"

Clara smiled again. There was temptation in what her mother said. Being in Russia she was liable to be arrested at any moment; almost sure to perish in a solitary cell or to be transported to the Siberian mines for twenty years. And were not the riots enough to acquit her before her own conscience in case she chose to retire from a movement that was primarily dedicated to the interests of an anti-Semitic people; from a movement that rejoiced in the rioters and had not a word of sympathy for their victims?

But an excuse for getting out of the perils of underground life was not what she wanted. Rather did she wish for a vindication of her conduct in remaining in the Party of the Will of the People in spite of all "the People" did against her race. She was under the sway of two forces, each of them far mightier than any temptation to be free from danger. One of these two forces was Pavel. The other was Public Opinion--the public opinion of underground Russia. According to the moral standard of that Russia every one who did not share in the hazards of the revolutionary movement was a "careerist," a self-seeker absorbed exclusively in the feathering of his own nest; the Jew who took the special interests of his race specially to heart was a narrow-minded nationalist, and the Nihilist who withdrew from the movement was a renegade. The power which this "underground" public opinion exerted over her was all the greater because of the close ties of affection which, owing to the community of the dangers they faced, bound the active revolutionists to each other.

Pavel and Clara were linked by the bonds of love, but she would have staked her life for every other member of the inner circle as readily as she would for him.