CLARA was introduced to Mme. Shubeyko, the warden’s sister-in-law, and to her niece, the gendarme officer’s sister. At first communication with Makar was held by means of notes concealed in cigarettes and carried to and fro by one of the warders, who received half a ruble per errand; but Clara was soon installed in the warden’s house. Once or twice Pavel spoke with Makar directly, by means of handkerchief signals based on the same code as the telegraph language which political prisoners rap out to each other through their cell walls. These signals Pavel sent from the top of a hill across the river from Makar’s cell window. To allay suspicion he would wave his handkerchief toward Masha or Clara, who stood for the purpose on a neighbouring hill, giving the whole proceeding the appearance of a flirtation. As to Makar, his cell was in an isolated part of the prison, facing the outer wall. Still, this mode of communication was exasperatingly slow and attended by some risks after all, and Pavel had recourse to it only in case of extreme necessity, although to the prisoner it was a welcome diversion.
One day, when Clara, Masha and Pavel were together, he said to the gendarme officer’s sister, with mystifying gaiety:
“Well, have you discovered the heroine of the Pievakindemonstration?” He regretted the question before it had left his lips. Clara was annoyed.
“No, why?” Masha asked, looking from him to her.
“I have the honour to introduce—” he said, colouring. For some reason Masha did not seem to be agreeably impressed by the announcement, and Clara did not fail to notice it.
As it was rather inconvenient for the son of Countess Varoff to be seen at the house of a major of gendarmes, Clara was to report to him at the residence of her parents. In the depth of the markets and the Jewish quarter his identity was unlikely to be known. Clara had lived at the warden’s house about a fortnight when Pavel’s first visit at the trunk shop took place. She offered him a rude chair in the small space between the partition of her bed-room and the window by the wall that was lined with the worn folios of her father’s meagre library. The room was pervaded by odours of freshly planed wood, putty and rusty tin which the breath of spring seemed to intensify rather than to abate.
Motl, Hannah’s sole employe, was hammering away at his bindings and courting attention by all sorts of vocal quirks and trills. During the Days of Awe, the solemn festivals of autumn, he sang in a synagogue choir; so he never ceased asserting his musical talents. As Clara’s visitor took no heed of his flourishes he proceeded to imitate domestic animals, church bells, a street organ playing a selection from Il Trovatore, and a portly captain drilling his men, but all to no purpose. As the noise he was making was a good cover for their talk, she did not stop him. At any rate, Motl scarcely understood any Russian.
“I have only seen him at a distance,” Clara said,meaning the prisoner. “But I know that he eats and sleeps well, and looks comfortable.”
“He would look comfortable if you tied him up in a sack. Is he still ‘dumb’?”
She portrayed the warden’s bed-ridden and voiceless wife who suffered from a disease of the spinal and vocal chords, and the disorder at his house and in the prison. She had always wondered at the frequent cases of political gaol-breaking, but if every gaol were conducted as this one was the number would be much larger, she thought. That vodka was quite openly sold and bought in every common gaol in the empire was no news to her, but this was a trifle compared to what she had heard of Rodkevich’s administration. One of his gaolers had told her of imprisoned thieves whom he would give leave of absence in order that he might confiscate part of their booty when they came back.
“Yes, I think he is a man who would go into any kind of scheme that offered money, or—excitement,” she said, gravely; and she added with a smile: “He might even become a man of principle if there were money in it.”
“He won’t give ‘a political’ ‘leave of absence,’ though, will he?” Pavel joked. “Still, upon the whole, it looks rather encouraging.”
“I think it does.”
“Do you?” And his eyes implored her for a more enthusiastic prediction of success.
“Indeed I do,” she answered soberly. “But whether I do or not, we must go to work and get him out.”
“This damsel is certainly not without backbone,” he said to himself.
He had familiarised himself with the details in the case of almost every revolutionist who had escaped or attempted to escape from prison. Some of these had made theirway through an underground passage; others had passed the gateman in the disguise of a soldier or policeman; still others had been wrenched from their convoy, while being taken to the gendarme office or a photograph gallery. Prince Kropotkin had simply made a desperate break for liberty while the gates of the prison hospital in which he was confined stood open, a cab outside bearing him off to a place of safety. Another political prisoner regained his freedom by knocking down a sentinel with brass knuckles, while still another, who was awaiting death in Odessa, would have made his escape by means of planks laid from his cell window to the top of the prison fence, had not these planks proved to be too flimsy. In one place an imprisoned armyofficerslipped away under cover of a flirtation in which a girl prisoner had engaged the warden. A revolutionist named Myshkin had tried to liberate Chernishevsky, the celebrated critic, by appearing at the place of his banishment, in far-away Siberia, in the guise of a gendarme officer with an order for the distinguished exile, and a similar scheme had been tried on the warden of a prison in European Russia. Both these attempts had failed, but then in the case in hand there was the hope of Rodkevich, the warden, acting as a willing victim. Pavel said he would impersonate one of the gendarmes.
“Some of the gaolers may know you,” Mlle. Yavner objected.
“That’s quite unlikely, I was away so long. Besides, the thing would have to be done in the evening anyhow. I must be on hand. It will be necessary.”
“You might be recognised after all,” she insisted, shyly.
Another project was to have a rope thrown over the prison fence, in a secluded corner of the yard. This was to be done at a signal from within, while Makar was outfor exercise, in the charge of a bribed guard. The guard was to raise an alarm when it was too late, telling how his prisoner knocked him down and was hoisted out of sight. Or Makar might be smuggled out in a barrel on some provision waggon, the prescribed examination of the vehicle being performed by a friendly gaoler. Whatever plan they took up, Pavel insisted on playing the leading part in it. He was for taking Makar away in a closed carriage, if need be under cover of pistol shots. Clara urged that in the event the equipage had to wait for some time, its presence about the prison was sure to arouse dangerous curiosity. Altogether she was in favour of a quiet and simple proceeding. Safonoff’s house was within easy distance from the prison, so if Masha could undertake to keep her brother away from home, Clara would prefer to have Makar walk quietly to that place, as a first resort, thence to be taken, thoroughly disguised, to the “conspiracy house” of the Circle. But Pavel picked the proposition to pieces.
Since her initiation into the warden’s house Clara had been in a peculiarly elevated state of mind, her whole attention being absorbed in her mission in which she took great pride. This uplifted mood of hers she strove to suppress, and the clear-headed, matter-of-fact way in which she faced the grave dangers of her task animated Pavel with a feeling of intimate comradeship as well as admiration.
As they now sat in the cleanest and brightest corner of the trunk shop he was vaguely sensible of a change in her appearance. Then he noticed that instead of the dark woolen dress she had worn at the time of their previous meetings she had on a fresh blouse of a light-coloured fabric. To be seen in a new colour is in itself becoming to a woman, but this blouse of Clara’s was evidently atribute to spring. Her face seemed to be suffused with the freshness of the month.
While they sat talking, her mother came in, an elderly Jewess, tall and stately, with a shrewd, careworn look, her hair carefully hidden beneath a strip of black satin.
“Is that you, Tamara?” she asked without taking notice of the stranger. She said something to Motl, made for the door, but suddenly returned, addressing herself to her daughter again. She wanted to know something about the law of chattel-mortgages, but neither Clara nor her visitor could furnish her the desired information.
“Always at those books of theirs, yet when it comes to the point they don’t know anything,” she said, with a smile, as she bustled out of the room.
“Are these Talmud books?” Pavel asked, pointing at Rabbi Rachmiel’s library.
“Yes,” Clara nodded with an implied smile in her voice.
“Can you read them?”
“Oh, no,” she answered, smiling.
He told her that Makar was a deep Talmudic scholar and talked of the Jewish religion, but she offered him no encouragement. She was brimful of questions herself. Her inquiries were concerned with the future destinies of the human race. With all her practical common sense, she had a notion that the era of undimmed equality and universal love would dawn almost immediately after the overthrow of Russian tyranny. This, as she had been taught by revolutionary publications, was to come as the logical continuation of Russia’s village communes, once the development of this survival of prehistoric communism received free scope. What she wanted was a clear and detailed account of life in Future Society.
Her questions and his answers had the character of atheoretical discussion. Gradually, however, he mounted to a more animated tone, portraying the future with quiet fervour. She listened gravely, her eyes full upon his, and this absorbed look spurred him on. But presently her mother came in again, this time with a peasant customer, and they went out to continue their talk in the open air. There were plenty of deserted lanes and bits of open country a short distance off. There was a vague gentle understanding between them that it was the golden idealism of their talk which had set them yearning for the unhidden sky and the aromatic breezes of spring. This upheld their lofty mood while they silently trudged through the outskirts of the market place. They could not as yet continue their interrupted conversation, and to speak of something else would have seemed profanation. At last they emerged on a lonely square, formed by an orchard, some houses and barns and the ruin of an old barrack. The air was excellent and there was nobody to overhear them. Nevertheless when Pavel was about to resume he felt that he was not in the mood for it. Nor did she urge him on with any further questions.
From the old barracks they passed into a dusty side lane and thence into a country road which led to a suburb and ran parallel to the railway tracks.
The sun was burning by fits and starts, as it were. In those spots where masses of lilacs and fruit blossoms gave way to a broader outlook, the road was so flooded with light that Clara had to shield her eyes with her hand. Now and again a clump of trees in the distance would fall apart to show the snow-crested top of a distant hill and the blueish haze of the horizon-line.
Their immediatesurroundingswere a scrawny, frowzy landscape. The lawns in front of the huts they passed,the homes of washerwomen, were overspread with drying linen.
“Delightful, isn’t it?” Pavel said, inhaling a long draught of the rich, animating air and glancing down a ravine choked with nettle. The remark was merely a spoken sigh of joy. She made no reply.
They were both hungry, and presently they began to feel tired as well. Yet neither of them was disposed to halt or to break silence except by an occasional word or two that meant nothing.
At last he said:
“You must be quite fatigued. It’s cruel of me.”
“I am, but it isn’t cruel of you,” she answered, stopping short, and drawing a deep, smiling breath.
He ran into a washerwoman’s hovel, startling a brood of ducklings on his way, and soon came back with the information that milk was to be had in a trackman’s hut beyond a sparse grove to the right.
A few minutes later they sat at a rude table in aminiaturegarden between the shining steel rails of the track and a red-painted cabin. It was the fourth track-house from the Miroslav railroad station and was generally known as the Fourth Hut. Besides milk and eggs and coarse rye bread they found sour soup. They ate heartily, but an echo of their exalted dream was still on them. To Pavel this feeling was embodied in an atmosphere of femininity that pervaded his consciousness at this moment. He was sensible of sitting in front of a pretty, healthy girl full of modest courage and undemonstrative inspiration. The lingering solemnity of his mood seemed to have something to do with the shimmering little hairs which the breeze was stirring on Clara’s neck, as she bent over her earthen bowl, with the warm colouring of her ear,with the elastic firmness of her cheek, with the airiness of her blouse.
A desire stirred in him to speak once more of the part she had unconsciously played in his conversion, and at this he felt that if he told her the story he would find a peculiar pleasure in exaggerating the importance of the effect which her “speech” had produced on his mind. But it came over him that Makar was still behind the prison gate and that this was not the time to enjoy oneself.
THAT walk to the trackman’s hut had kindled a new light in Pavel’s soul. He often found himself craving for a repetition of the experience—not merely for Clara’s companionship, but for another occasion to walk through the fields with her, to sit by her side in the breeze, and, above all, for the intimacy of seeing her fatigued and eating heartily. She dwelt in his mind as a girl comrade, self-possessed and plucky, gifted with grit, tact and spirit; at the same time she lingered in his consciousness as a responsive pupil, glowing with restrained enthusiasm over his talk, eagerly following him through an ecstasy of lofty dreams. These two aspects of her were merged in the sight and odour of healthy, magnificently complexioned girlhood between the glint of steel rails and the dusty geranium in a trackman’s window.
They had another appointment. When he called at the trunkmaker’s shop Clara greeted him with a hearty handshake. He blushed. His love seemed to be gaining on him by leaps and bounds.
“How are things?” he asked.
“First rate, Pavel Vassilyevich. The vegetable man will do it. He’s a trump, I tell you.” She went into details. She was in unusually good spirits. They talked business and of the adjustment of things under socialism. Pavel,too, was in good humour, yet floating in his mind was the same old question: And what if all fails and Makar is removed to St. Petersburg?
They met again and again. One day, after they had arrived at certain conclusions regarding Makar, Pavel said:
“Shall we take a walk?”
She nodded assent.
“I am again full of questions.”
“Again worrying about the future fate of humanity?”
“Yes, I seem to have no end of questions about it. I wonder whether I shall remember all those that have occurred to me since I last saw you. I ought to have jotted them down.”
“You don’t want to pump me dry in one day, do you?”
“Well, if the truth must be told, I rather do. You will soon be leaving us, I suppose, so I am anxious to strike the iron while it is hot.”
The personal question as to the length of his stay sent a little wave of warmth through his blood. They set out in the direction of the trackman’s hut as a matter of course. Instead of following their former route, however, they chose, upon a motion from Clara, who was more familiar with these suburbs than Pavel, a meandering, hilly course that offered them a far better view as well as greater privacy. A stretch of rising ground took them to the Beak, a promontory so called for the shape of a cliff growing out of its breast. The common people had some pretty stories to tell of a gigantic bird of which the rocky beak was a part and whose petrified body was now asleep in the bosom of the hill that had once been its nest.
Pavel and Clara sat down to rest on the freshly carpeted slope. The town clustered before them in a huddle of red,white, green and grey, shot with the glitter of a golden-domed cathedral, the river flashing at one end like the fragment of an immense sabre. It was warm and quiet. There was not a human soul for a considerable distance around. Now and again the breeze would gently stir the weeds and the wild-flowers, lingering just long enough to scent the hillside with pine odours and then withdrawing, on tiptoe, as it were, like a thoughtful friend taking care that the two young people were kept supplied with the bracing aroma without being disturbed more than was necessary. Once or twice Clara held out her chin, sniffing the enchanted air.
“Isn’t it delightful!” she said.
“It’s a specimen of what life under Society of the Future will feel like,” Pavel jested, with a wistful smile.
At one point when she addressed him as Pavel Vassilyevich, as she usually did, he was tempted to ask her to dispense with his patronymic. In the light of the hearty simplicity of manners which prevailed in the revolutionary movement they were well enough acquainted to address each other by their first names only. Yet when he was about to propose the change the courage failed him to do so. Whereupon he said to himself, with a deep inward blushing, that the cause of this hesitancy and confusion of his was no secret to him.
“Hello there! A strawberry!” she called out, with a childish glee which he had not yet seen in her. And flinging herself forward she reached out her white girlish hand toward a spot of vivid red. The berry, of that tiny oblong delicious variety one saucerful of which would be enough to fill a fair-sized room with fragrance, lay ensconced in a bed of sun-lit leaves—a pearl of succulent, flaming colour in a setting of green gold.
“Oh, I haven’t the heart to pick it,” she said, staying her hand and cooing to the strawberry as she would to a baby: “Won’t touch you, berry darling. Won’t touch you, sweetie.”
“Spare its life then,” he answered, “I’ll see if I can’t find others.”
And sure enough, after some seeking and peeping and climbing, Pavel came upon a spot that was fairly jewelled with strawberries.
“Quite a haul,” he shouted down.
She joined him and they went on picking together, each with a thistle leaf for a saucer.
“Why, it’s literally teeming with them,” she said, in a preoccupied voice, deeply absorbed in her work. “One, two, three, and four, and—seven; why, bless me,—and eight and nine. What a pity we have nothing with us. We could get enough to treat the crowd at Orlovsky’s.”
Pavel made no reply. Whenever he came across a berry that looked particularly tempting he would offer it to her silently and resume his work. He was oppressively aware of his embarrassment in her presence and the consciousness of it made him feel all the more so. He was distinctly conscious of a sensation of unrest, both stimulating and numbing, which had settled in him since he made her acquaintance. It was at once torture and joy, yet when he asked himself which of the two it was, it seemed to be neither the one nor the other. Her absence was darkness; her presence was light, but pain and pleasure mingled in both. It made him feel like a wounded bird, like a mutely suffering child. At this moment it blent with the flavour and ruddiness of the berries they were both picking, with the pine-breeze that was waiting on them, with the subdued lyrics of spring.
And he knew that he was in love.
He had never been touched by more than a first timid whisper of that feeling before. It was Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St. Petersburg, whose image had formerly—quite recently, in fact—invaded his soul. He had learned immediately that she belonged to Zachar and his dawning love had been frightened away. Otherwise his life during these five years had been one continuous infatuation of quite another kind—the infatuation of moral awakening, of a political religion, of the battlefield.
From the Beak they proceeded by the railroad track, now walking over the cross-ties, now balancing along the polished top of one rail. She was mostly ahead of him, he following her with melting heart. By the time they reached the trackman’s place, the shadows had grown long and solemn. Pavel had no appetite. He ate because Clara did. “Here I am watching her eat again,” he thought. But the spectacle was devoid of the interest he had expected to find in it.
Nevertheless the next morning, upon waking, it burst upon him once more that seated within him was something which had not been there about a month ago. When he reflected that he had no appointment with Clara for these two days, that disquieting force which was both delicious and tantalising, the force which enlivened and palsied at once, swelled in his throat like a malady. But no, far from having such a bodily quality, it had spiritualised his whole being. He seemed unreal to himself, while the outside world appeared to him strangely remote, agonisingly beautiful, and agonisingly sad—a heart-rending elegy on an unknown theme. The disquieting feeling clamoured for the girl’s presence—for a visit to the scene of theiryesterday’s berry-picking, at least. He struggled, but he had to submit.
To the Beak, then, he betook himself, and for an hour he lay on the grass, brooding. Everything around him was in a subdued agitation of longing. The welter of gold-cups and clover; the breeze, the fragrance and the droning of a nearby grasshopper; the sky overhead and the town at his feet—all was dreaming of Clara, yearning for Clara, sighing for Clara. Seen in profile the grass and the wild-flowers acquired a new charm. When he lay at full length gazing up, the sky seemed perfectly flat, like a vast blue ceiling, and the light thin wisps of pearl looked like painted cloudlets upon that ceiling. There were moments in this reverie of his when the Will of the People was an echo from a dim past, when the world’s whole struggle, whether for good or for evil, was an odd, incomprehensible performance. But then there were others when everything was listening for the sound of a heavenly bugle-call; when all nature was thirsting for noble deeds and the very stridulation of the grasshopper was part of a vast ecstasy.
“That won’t do,” he said in his heart. “I am making a perfect fool of myself, and it may cost us Makar’s freedom.” As he pictured the Janitor, Zachar and his other comrades, and what they would say, if they knew of his present frame of mind, he sprang to his feet in a fury of determination. “I must get that idiot out of the confounded hole he put himself into and get back to work in St. Petersburg. This girl is not going to stand in my way any longer.” He felt like smashing palaces and fortresses. But whatever he was going to do in his freedom from Clara, Clara was invariably a looker-on. When he staked his life to liberate Makar she was going to be present;after the final blow had been struck at despotism, she would read in the newspapers of his prominent part in the fight.
The next time he saw her he felt completely in her power.
Clara was in a hurry, but an hour after they had parted he found an honest excuse for seeing her again that very day. The appointment was made through Mme. Shubeyko, and in the afternoon he called at the trunk shop once more.
“We have been ignoring a very important point, Clara Rodionovna,” he said solicitously. “Since the explosion at the Winter Palace the spies have been turning St. Petersburg upside down. They literally don’t leave a stone unturned. Now, Makar went away before the examinations at the Medical Academy and he disappeared from his lodgings without filing notice of removal at the police station.”
“And if they become curious about his whereabouts the name of the Miroslav Province in his papers may put the authorities in mind of their Miroslav prisoner,” Clara put in, with quick intelligence.
He nodded gloomily and both grew thoughtful.
“They would first send word to Zorki, his native town, though,” Pavel then said, “to have his people questioned, and I shouldn’t be surprised if they brought his father over here to be confronted with him.”
“That would be the end of it,” Clara remarked, in dismay.
The next day Pavel telegraphed it all over to Makar, by means of his handkerchief, from the hill which commanded the prisoner’s window.
“I have a scheme,” Makar’s handkerchief flashed back.
“For God’s sake don’t run away with yourself,” Pavel returned. “It’s a serious matter. Consider it maturely.”
“Do you know anybody in Paris or any other foreign city you could write to at once?”
“I do. Why?” Pavel replied.
“Get me some foreign paper. I shall write two letters, one to my father and one to my wife, both dated at that place. If these letters were sent there and that man then sent them to my people at Zorki, it would mean I am in Paris. Understand?”
“I do. You are crazy.”
“Why? Father will let bygones be bygones. I should tell him the whole truth. He is all right.”
“He won’t fool the gendarmes.”
“He will!” the white speck behind the iron bars flicked out vehemently. “He’ll do it. Provided he is prepared for it.”
“You are impossible. If an order came from St. Petersburg your Zorki gendarmes would not dare think for themselves. They would just hustle him off to Miroslav.”
“Then get father away from there.”
“They would take your wife, anybody who could identify you.”
“Father is better after all. He would look me in the face and say he does not know me. He could do it.”
“And later go to Siberia for it?”
“You are right. But I don’t think the order will be to take him here at once. They’ll first examine him there. He’ll have a chance to fool them.”
Clara offered to go to Zorki at once, but Makar was for a postponement of her “conspiracy trip.” Saturday ofComfort was near at hand, and then the little Jewish town would be crowded with strangers, so that Mlle. Yavner might come and go without attracting attention even in the event the local gendarmes had already been put on the case.
ZORKI was in a state of joyous excitement. The “Good Jew” of Gornovo, accompanied by a retinue of beadles, secretaries, “reciters,” attendants, scribes and hangers on, was pleased to grace the little community with his annual visit; so the Pietists had left their workshops and places of business to drink in religious ecstasy and to scramble for advice, miracles and the blessed leavings from the holy man’s table. The population of the little town was rapidly increasing by an influx of Pietists from neighbouring hamlets.
Clara, with a kerchief round her head, which gave her the appearance of an uneducated “daughter of Israel,” was watching a group of men and boys who stood chattering and joking in front of one of the best houses in town, at the edge of the market place. It was in this house where the Good Jew made his headquarters every time he came to Zorki and where he was now resting from his journey. The sun stood high. A peasant woman was nursing her baby in a waggon, patiently waiting for her husband. Two elderly peasants in coarse, broad-brimmed straw-hats, one of them with an interminable drooping moustache, were leaning against the weight-house, smoking silently. For the rest, the market place, enclosed by four broken rows of shops, dwellings and two or three governmentoffices—squatting one-story frame structures—was almost deserted; but one of the two streets bounding it, the one on which we find Clara at this minute, was quite alive with people. An opening at one side of the square showed a sloping stretch of road and a rectangular section of the river, the same as that which gleamed in Miroslav. The knot of men which Clara was watching all wore broad flat-topped caps, and, most of them, long-skirted coats. A man of fifty-five, short and stocky, with massive head and swarthy face, the image of Makar, was the centre of the crowd.
“If you were a Pietist and a decent man,” he said, in subdued accents, to a red-bearded “oppositionist” with gloomy features, “you would not wear that long face of yours. Come, cheer up and don’t be a kill-joy!” And he slapped him on the back with all his might.
“Stop!” the Oppositionist said, reddening from the blow. “What’s got into you? What reason have you to be so jolly anyhow?” And addressing himself to the bystanders: “He has not had a drop of vodka, yet he will make believe he’s in his cups.”
“What’s that?” the swarthy man protested in a soft, mellow basso, “Can’t a fellow be jolly without filling himself full of vodka? If you were a respectable man and a Pietist and not a confounded seek-sorrow of an Oppositionist you would not think so. Drink! Why, open the Pentateuch, and wherever your eye falls there is drink to make you happy. ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth!’ Isn’t that reason enough for a fellow to be jolly?”
The bystanders smiled, some in partisan approbation, others with amused superiority, still others with diplomatic ambiguity.
The heavy-set, swarthy man was Makar’s father, Yossl Parmet. He bore striking resemblance to his son. Clara stood aghast. If he were confronted with the Miroslav prisoner, the identity of the Nihilist would be betrayed, whether the old man admitted the relationship or not. The only way out of it was to avoid such a confrontation by getting Yossl away for a few months. But then, once the Miroslav gendarmerie learned that a man named Parmet whose home was at Zorki was missing, the secret could not last for any length of time. In compliance with Makar’s wish, Clara decided to take him into her secret. Accordingly, she mingled with the men, took part in the joking, and by the time the crowd dispersed she and Yossl were talking on terms of partial familiarity. Finding an opportune moment, she said to him, with intentional mysteriousness:
“There is something I want to speak to you about, Reb Yossl. I have seen your son.”
The old man gave her a startled, scrutinising glance. Then, his face hardening into a preoccupied business-like expression, he said aloud:
“Where are you stopping?”
She named her inn, and the two started thither together. There were so many strangers in town, each in quest of an audience with the “Good Jew,” and Yossl was so close to the holy man, or to those near him, that their conversation attracted scarcely any notice.
“It’s a very serious matter, Reb Yossl,” she said, as they crossed the market place. “Nobody is to know anything about it, or it may be bad for your son.”
“Go ahead,” he snarled, turning pale. “Never mind spending time on a woman’s prefaces. What is up?”
“You know how the educated young people of these daysare. There is nothing, in fact, the matter. It’ll soon be over. But for the present it would do him good if the gendarmes knew he was in Paris.”
“Why, isn’t he in Paris?” Yossl asked morosely. “I received a letter from him from there.”
“Of course he is. Only, the gendarmes, in case they look for him, and they may do so sooner or later, you know, the gendarmes may not believe he is there. So it would be a good thing if you could convince them of it. Your son would be benefited by it very much.”
Yossl took fire.
“On my part let him go to all the black ghosts!” he burst out. “‘The educated people of these days,’ indeed! First he will play with fire and then he wants me to fight his battles! Would he have his old father go to prison on account of him? He is not in Paris, then? I am as clever as you, young woman. I, too, understand a thing or two, though I am not of ‘the educated people of these days!’ It is not enough that he has got in trouble himself; he wants to drag me in, too. Is that the kind of ‘education’ he has got? Is that what he has broken with his wife and father for? The ghost take him!”
“Don’t be excited, Reb Yossl,” Clara pleaded, earnestly. “It’s a treasure of a son you have and you know it. As to the education he has acquired, it is the kind that teaches one to struggle against injustice and oppression, things which I know you hate as deeply as your son does.” A tremour came into her voice, and a slight blush into her cheeks, as she added: “Your son is one of those remarkable men who are willing to die for the suffering people.”
“But who are you?” he asked with a frown, “How did you get here? If you, too, are one of those people you hadbetter leave this town at once. I don’t want to get in trouble on account of you.”
They reached the inn, and he paused in front of it, leaning against a waggon.
“Never mind who I am,” she returned.
“But where is he? Has he been arrested? Good God, what has he been doing to himself? What does he want of my old bones? Is he sorry his father is still alive?”
“You don’t want your son to perish, do you?” she said rather pugnaciously. “If you don’t, you had better get the gendarmes off his track.”
She went on arguing with renewed ardour. As he listened, a questioning look came into his face. Instead of following her plea he scrutinised her suspiciously.
“But why should you pray for him so fervently,” he asked significantly. “Why should you run risks for his sake? What do you get out of it?”
“Must one get something ‘out of it’ to do what is right?”
“Ah, may the ghost take the whole lot of you!” Yossl said, with a wave of his hand, and walked away. He felt sure that this young woman and his son were in love, and he was shocked for the sake of Miriam, Makar’s divorced wife, as well as for his own.
He made for a slushy narrow lane, but turned back, retracing his steps in the direction of the house which was the Good Jew’s headquarters, as also the home of Miriam. It was the house of her uncle, Arye Weinstein, the richest Pietist in Zorki.
The Good Jew occupied two expensively furnished rooms which were always kept sacred to his use. They were known as “the rabbi’s chambers” and although theRighteous Man visited Zorki only once a year, nobody was ever allowed so much as to sit down in his easy chair. One day, when Weinstein caught his little girl playing in the “rabbi’s bed room” with a skull-cap which the holy man had left there, he flew into one of the savage fits of temper for which he was dreaded, and slapped the child’s face till it bled. The rabbi’s chambers were never swept or dusted until a day or two before his arrival, and then half a dozen people worked day and night to make things worthy of the exalted guest. The “rabbi’s parlour” opened into a vast room, by far the largest in the house, which on Saturdays was usually turned into a synagogue, and was known in town as “Weinstein’s salon.”
Miriam was a very bright, quick-witted little woman, but she was not pretty—a pale, sickly, defenceless-looking creature of the kind who have no enemies even among their own sex. Her separation from Makar was only a nominal affair, in fact, the divorce having been brought about against the will of the young couple by her iron-willed uncle, who had succeeded in embroiling Yossl with his son as well as with himself soon after the true character of Makar’s visits to Pani Oginska’s house had been discovered; but Makar and Miriam had become reconciled, through a letter from him, and they had been in secret correspondence ever since. Yossl never lost hope of seeing them remarried, and, in order to keep the memory of his son fresh in Miriam’s mind, he had obeyed the Good Jew and made peace with the wealthy Pietist.
Yossl was in charge of the town’s weight-house and was commonly known as “Yossl the weight-house man.” When Feivish (Makar’s real first name) was old enough to be started on the Talmud, he left the weight-house to his wife, devoting himself to the spiritual education of theboy. Every time they sat down to the huge book he would pin the edge of Feivish’s shirt to his collar, leaving the child’s back bare to the strap in his hand. Whenever his wife protested he would bring her to terms by threatening to tell the Good Jew that she would have her son brought up as a dunce. He was going to make a “fattened scholar” of him. He was going to fatten him on divine Law by main force, even as his wife fattened her geese for Passover. He was going to show those fish-blooded, sneering Oppositionists that they had no monopoly of the Talmud. Often during his lesson a distracted look would come into Feivish’s dark little eyes, and Yossl’s words fell on deaf ears. Then it was that the thong would descend on the bare back. Feivish never cried. As the blow fell, he would curl himself up with a startled look, that haunted Yossl for hours after. Feivish turned out to be a most ardent Pietist. Once, for example, in a very cold wintry night, after the Good Jew had crossed a snow-covered lawn, Feivish, in a burst of devotion, took off his boots and “followed in the foot-steps of the man of righteousness” barefoot.
For four years the young couple lived happily, their only woe being the death of both children that had been born to them. But the Good Jew said “God will have mercy,” and Feivish “served his Lord with gladness.” But this did not last. Feivish was initiated into the world of free thought, and gradually the fervent Pietist was transformed into a fervent atheist. It was during that period that he first met Pavel and that his wife’s despotic uncle extorted a divorce from him.
While Yossl was twitting the red-headed Oppositionist in front of Weinstein’s house, Bathsheba, a daughter-in-lawof the man of substance, a plump, black-eyed beauty of the kind one’s mind associates with a Turkish harem, beckoned Miriam aside, in one of the rooms within, offering her a piece of cake.
“It’s from a chunk the Good Jew has tasted,” she said, triumphantly. “Eat it, and your heart will be lighter.”
“It will help me as much as blood-letting helps a dead man,” Miriam answered with a smile.
“Eat it, I say. You’ll get letters more often if you do.” For a woman to exchange love letters with the man from whom she has been divorced is quite a grave sin for a daughter of Israel to commit. The remedy Bathsheba recommended was therefore something like the prayer of a thief that the Lord may bless his business. But then Miriam questioned the power of the rabbi’s “leavings” to bring a blessing upon any business. She smiled.
“How do you know it is nonsense? Maybe it isn’t, after all,” Bathsheba urged.
“You’re a foolish little dear.”
“If I were you I should eat it. What can you lose by it?”
Maria, a Gentile servant who had been longer in the house than Bathsheba, came in. She spoke Yiddish excellently and was almost like a member of the family.
“Take a bite and you will be blessed, Maria,” Miriam joked, holding out the cake to her. “It’s from a piece the Good Jew has tasted.”
“If I was a Jewess I would,” Maria retorted reproachfully. “It’s a sin to make mock of a Good Jew.”
The other two burst into a laugh.
Left alone, Miriam was about to throw the cake away, but had not the heart to do so. She sat eyeing it for some minutes and then, making fun of herself, she bit off amorsel. She acted like the Jewess of the anecdote, who, to be on the safe side, would kiss the cross and the Hebrew prayer book at once.
An hour later Yossl was flaunting his son’s Paris letter and cursing him to a new crowd in front of the Good Jew’s headquarters.
“The ghost take him!” he said. “Indeed, the ghost is a well-travelledfellow.He can get to Paris just as readily as he does to Zorki.”
ON Saturday morning Weinstein’s salon was crowded with worshippers, all married men in their praying shawls and skull-caps. A Good Jew is exempt from praying with the congregation, his transports of religious fervour being too sacred a proceeding for common mortals to intrude upon. Accordingly, the Man of Righteousness was making his devotions in the seclusion of the adjoining parlour.
To a stranger unfamiliar with Pietist prayer meetings the crowd here gathered would have looked for all the world like the inmates of the violent ward in an insane asylum. Most of the worshippers were snapping their fingers; the others were clapping their hands, clenching their fists with all their might or otherwise gesticulating savagely. They were running or jumping about, shrieking, sighing or intoning merrily, while here and there a man seemed to be straining every bit of his strength to shut his eyes as tightly as possible or to distort his face into some painful or grotesque expression. The Gentiles of the province called the Pietists Jumping Jacks.
Some of the worshippers gesticulated merely because it was “correct form”; others did so from force of habit, or by way of fighting off the intrusion of worldly thoughts; still others for the same reason for which one yawns whenothers do. But all these formed a small minority. The bulk of the Pietists present, including several people of questionable honesty in business matters, were honestly convulsed with a contagion of religious rapture. The invisible proximity of the Man of Righteousness, the sight of the door that concealed his holy presence, keyed them up to the highest pitch of exaltation. Their ears followed the “master of prayers” at the Stand, but their minds beheld the Good Jew of Gornovo. All hearts converged at the mysterious spot behind that door. That which sounded and looked like a pandemonium of voices and gestures was in reality a chorus of uplifted souls with the soul of the concealed man of God for a “master of prayers.”
Weinstein was slapping the wall with both hands. His large figure was enveloped in the costliest praying-shawl in the room. All that was seen of him were two wrists overgrown with red hair. Now and then he would face about and fall to striding up and down meditatively. He was a well-fed, ruddy-necked Jew of fifty with a sharp hooked nose sandwiched in between two plump florid cheeks, and a small red beard. His unbuttoned coat of a rich broadcloth reached down to his heels; his trousers were tucked into the tops of well-polished boots. Once or twice an unkempt, underfed little man in a tattered shawl and with a figure and gait which left no doubt that he was a tailor by trade, barred Weinstein’s way, snapping his fingers at him; then the two took to pacing the room together, shouting and chuckling in rapturous duet as they moved along, as is written: “Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing,” or “Because thou servedst not thy God with joyfulness and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things; thereforeshalt thou serve thine enemies.” That the little tailor did not enjoy an “abundance of all things” was evident from his pinched face and broken shoes. He did not rank high enough in his trade to have even Weinstein’s clerk for a customer, yet at the Pietist gatherings he addressed Weinstein himself by the familiar diminutive of his first name and sometimes helped to spank him or to pelt him with burrs out of his “gladness of heart.”
Yossl Parmet—Makar’s father—was tiptoeing about the crowded room, smiling and whispering fondly, as though confiding glad news to himself, but his heart was not in his prayer. He was thinking of his son and the young woman who had come to plead for him. Indeed, Yossl’s piety had deserted him long since. He clung to the Pietists for the sake of the emotional atmosphere that enveloped it and from his sincere admiration of the Good Jew’s personality rather than from faith. He was fond of Miriam and his heart was now torn between jealousy in her behalf and anxiety about his son.
The services over, silence fell upon the congregation. The Pietists were folding up their shawls, or eyeing the floor expectantly. The minutes were passing slowly. The stillness seemed to be growing in intensity. Presently a song broke from somebody in a corner. It was a song without words, a new tune especially composed for the occasion. Like most “Gornovo melodies” it was meant to be gay, and like all of them it was pervaded by the mixed sadness of the Exiled People and the brooding, far-away plaint of their Slavic neighbours. There is a mingling of fire and tears in the Pietist “hop.” It isn’t without reason that the most rabid Oppositionist of Lithuania will sing them on the Rejoicing of the Law.
The others in the room had never heard the song before,yet several of them fell to at once, seizing the tune by intuition. The rest joined in gradually, until the whole assemblage was united in chorus. The import of this kind of singing while the Good Jew is in the privacy of his room is a plea that he may issue forth and grace the crowd with his presence and “some law.” They went through the tune again and again, gathering zest as they mastered its few simple bars. The melody seemed to be climbing up and down, or diving in and out; expostulating with somebody as it did so, bewailing somebody or something, appealing in the name of some dear event in the past or future. Unable to tell definitely what their tune was saying or doing, the singers craved to see the speechless song, to make out the words it seemed to be uttering, and because that was impossible their hearts were agitated with objectless sympathy and longing, and the rabbi was forgotten for awhile. They pitied the unknown man who seemed to be climbing or diving all the more because it was in their own voices that his incomprehensible words were concealed.
Little by little, however, as the novelty of the air wore off, the consciousness that they were beseeching the Man of Righteousness to come out to them blent with their yearning sympathy for their melody. They ardently believed that the Good Jew’s soul had ascended on the wings of his ecstasy to the Divine Presence. All eyes were on his door. An indescribable ring of solemnity, of awe, of love and of prayer came into their voices. Their faces were transfixed with it. The melody was pouring out its very heart to the holy man.
Suddenly it all died away. The door flew open and, preceded by a stout “supervisor,” appeared an elderly man with a flabby-lipped mouth and a hooked little nose. Hewore a long-skirted coat of black silk with a belt of the same material wound several times round his waist, and a round cap of sable and velvet. The crowd fell apart in breathless excitement. As he advanced through the lane thus formed he was flushed and trying to conceal his embarrassment in a look of grief. He seated himself at a long table and shut his eyes. Now and then he heaved a sigh, swaying his head silently, with absorbed mien. He was supposed to be in a trance of lofty meditation, abandoned to thoughts and feelings which were to bear his soul to heaven.
The crowd was literally spellbound. Yossl Parmet was pale with unuttered sobs. He was perhaps the only man in the room who perceived that the holy man was ill at ease, and this gave him a sense of the Good Jew’s childlike purity which threw him into a veritable frenzy of reverence. More than thirty years the master of multitudes and still blushing! When Yossl was a young man he had changed his Good Jews several times. He had adored them all, but he had not liked them. His soul had found no rest until he moved to Zorki and met this Good Jew of Gornovo. Then he felt himself in the presence of absolute sincerity, of unsophisticated warmth of heart. This Good Jew was a naïve man, timid and unassertive. He had an unfeigned sense of his own supernatural powers, and was somewhat in awe of them. He felt as though there was another, a holier being within him and he feared that being in the same way as one possessed fears the unholy tenant of his soul.
Finally the Good Jew opened his eyes and began to speak. It was a simple sermon on a text taken at random from the Bible before him, but his listeners sought a hidden meaning, a mystical allusion, in the plainest of hiswords or gestures. Yossl could have instructed him in every branch of holy lore, yet he seized upon the exposition thirstily. In the first place, he had seen Good Jews who were even less at home in the Law than the Good Jew of Gornovo was, so that he felt grateful to him for not being a downright ignoramus. In the second place, he knew that he actually believed his own words to be inspired.
A few minutes after the sermon the Good Jew beckoned Yossl to a seat by his side. Makar’s father accepted the invitation in a quiver of obsequious gratitude.
“How are you, Yossl? Any news of Feivish?”
“He’s in Paris now,” Yossl answered with a gesture of disrelish and speaking aloud, so that the entire crowd might hear him. He hated to tell the holy man a lie, yet he did so readily, the occasion being his best opportunity for giving the story wide circulation.
“In Paris!”
“Yes, he has been there since the beginning of summer. I have letters from him.”
“Letters from Feivish!”
“He wanted to show off I suppose. Wanted his father to see he’s in Paris. On my part he may go to perdition.”
“What is he doing there? Studying medicine in French?”
“That’s what he says in his letter. Yes, he has quite broken with Judaism, rabbi, quite a Gentile. All that is required to make the transformation complete is that he should extort bribes from Jews for allowing them to breathe. One Jew he prevents from breathing already”—pointing at himself.
The rabbi swayed his head sympathetically.
“What a misfortune! What a misfortune! Men like him could not be had for the picking.”
“He has left a wound in my heart and it will not heal, rabbi. If this is the kind of doctor he is going to be, he won’t make much headway. ‘I had a vineyard,’ rabbi,” he went on in a lugubrious sing-song, quoting from Isaiah, “‘I fenced it and gathered out the stones thereof and planted it with the choicest vine. What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?’”
“Don’t grieve, my son, I forbid you, do you hear?” the Good Jew said, limply. He was deeply touched. “Better give us a song, boys!”
The song burst forth and was taken up by the glad crowd on the lawn, some Gentiles, standing at a respectful distance, listening reverently.
Yossl had uncovered to the rabbi only part of his heart’s wound. Since his son’s compulsory divorce Weinstein had personified the cruelties and injustices of the whole world to him. When a couple applies for a writ of divorcement it is the duty of the rabbi to persuade them from the step. God wants no severance of the marriage bond. “When a man divorces his first wife, the altar weeps,” says the Talmud. Yet Weinstein, who had so brutally extorted such a divorce from Feivish, continued to be looked upon as a pillar of the faith. All this had stirred a novel feeling, a novel trend of thought in Yossl.
The next morning Weinstein’s salon was jammed with people begging for admission to the Good Jew, who was in the next room.
The scribes were busy writing applications, praying the rabbi to “awaken the great mercy of the Master of Mercies.”
“My wife is ill, her name is Sarah, daughter of Tevye,”one man besought. “Do be so kind. If I don’t get in at once it may be too late.”
Another applicant, with a crippled boy in his arms, sought a blessing for the child and himself. One father, whose son had been declared a blockhead by his teachers, wanted the Good Jew to pray that the boy might get “a good head.” A white-haired man was picking a quarrel with two other Pietists who were trying to get in front of him. The old man’s married daughter was childless and her husband did not care for her, so he wanted the rabbi to “give her children and grace in the eyes of her spouse.” Several others wanted dowries for their marriageable daughters. That the Master of Mercies would grant the Good Jew’s prayer in their daughters’ behalf was all the more probable because in cases of this sort either the Good Jew himself or some of his well-to-do followers usually came to the poor man’s assistance.
Yossl sat at the corner of the table watching the scene pensively when Clara entered the room. The blood rushed to his face as he recognised her, and he hastened to take her out into the road.
“What are you doing in this town so long?” he then asked, in a rage. “I thought you had left long since. What do you want of us all? Do you want to get everybody in trouble?”
“How will I get you in trouble? Am I the only Jewish woman who has come to Zorki these few days? Have I no right to be here like everybody else? Besides, it’s to bid you good-bye that I want to see you now. I am going away.”
Her few words, uttered with simple earnestness, had a softening effect on him.
“You look like a good girl,” he said, frowning at heramicably. “Tell me frankly: are you and my son having a love affair?”
Clara coloured literally to the roots of her brown hair. She paused to regain her self-possession and then said, with a smile at once shamefaced and amused:
“It is not true, Reb Yossl. What is more, your son and I are not even acquainted.”
“Can that be possible!”
“It’s the absolute truth I am telling you, Reb Yossl.”
He shrugged his shoulder and proceeded to question her on his son’s case, on his mode of life before he was arrested, on the meaning of the struggle to which he had dedicated himself.
MEANWHILE Pavel, Mme. Shubeyko, Masha, Mlle. Andronoff and her fiancé, the near-sighted judge with the fluffy hair, went on with their plot. A considerable sum was needed to bribe the warden, the head keeper (a bustling little man who was known in the conspiracy as the Sparrow), and others. The plotters had five thousand rubles, and in order to obtain the rest without delay Pavel went so far as to take his mother into the secret. The countess received his story with a thrill of gratitude and of a sense of adventure. After a visit to the bank, she handed him ten thousand rubles in crisp rainbow-coloured one hundred ruble notes. She was pale with emotion as she did so. Her heart was deeper in his movement than he supposed. It was as if every barrier standing between her and her son had been removed. She was a comrade of his now.
“The only thing that worries me,” she said for something to say, “is uncle’s visits. He has not been here for some time, but if he comes, I shan’t be able to look him in the face. He is a very good man at heart, Pasha.”
“Still, you had better make no haste about trying to convert him,” Pavel answered, with a smile, struggling with the pile of notes.
The bulk of the sum—eight thousand rubles—was tobe paid by Mme. Shubeyko to the warden, half of it in advance and the other half upon the carrying out of the project. Rodkevich pretended to receive the four thousand rubles as a loan. He barred all frank discussion of the scheme, hinting that he was scarcely a master in his own prison and that all he could do was to “overlook things under pressure of business at times.” As a matter of fact, he scarcely incurred any risks.
Pavel missed Clara keenly. A feverish yearning feeling had settled in him, often moving him to tears, but he fought it bravely. Once or twice he went to the Beak and indulged in a feast of self-torture, but otherwise he worked literally day and night, seeing people, deliberating, scheming. The only manifestation of his nervousness was an exaggerated air of composure, and as this was lost on his fellow plotters, nothing was farther from their thoughts than that he experienced a sensation as though his heart were withering within his breast and that the cause of it was Clara Yavner.
When he received word of her return he said to himself, in a turmoil of joy, terror and impatience, that he could not bear it any longer and that he would tell her all the next time they were alone.
He saw her the very next day, at the trunk shop. Both blushed violently. The first minutes of their conversation were punctuated with nervous pauses, like the first talk of people who have been reconciled after a long estrangement. He said to himself: “Now is the time,” and vaguely felt confident of success, yet he was still in awe of her and all he managed to do was to turn the conversation upon his mother.
“I should like you to meet her,” he said. “She has heard of you.”
“Your mother?” she asked in shamefaced astonishment.
“She is a very good woman,” Pavel observed, gravely. “She is in sympathy with the movement, you know, although it was only the other day I brought her the first few things to read. If it isn’t asking too much I should like to introduce you to her, Clara Rodionovna. She would be delighted.”
He paused, but she maintained her air of respectful curiosity, so he went on. “She is very enthusiastic. She would like to know some of the Miroslav radicals, and I took the liberty of telling her about you. I need not tell you that I spoke in a very, very general way about you.”
One afternoon the Palace, which the trunk-dealer’s daughter had known all her life as a mysterious, awe-inspiring world whose threshold people of her class could never dream of crossing, the Palace threw open its imposing doors to her, and she was escorted by Pavel up the immense staircase and into the favorite room of Countess Anna Nicolayevna Varoff. As it was an unheard-of thing for a Jewish girl to visit the Palace, it was agreed, as a safeguard against the inquisitiveness of the servants, that she should be known to them by such a typically Russian name as Daria Ivanovna Morosoff (Morosova).
Barring the two great statues and an ancient cabinet inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, the room was rather below her undefined anticipations. Her preconceived notion of the place soon wore off, however, under a growing sense of venerable solidity, of a quiet magnificence that was a revelation to her.
“I’m awfully glad to know you, Clara Rodionovna, awfully,” the countess said when the first formalities ofgreeting were over, and they were all seated. This Jewish girl was the first Nihilist she had ever met (indeed, Pavel was only “Pasha” after all), and she identified her in her mind with every revolutionary assassination and plot she had read about. She was flushed with excitement and so put out that she was playing with Pavel’s fingers as she spoke, as a mother will do with those of her little boy. As to Clara, she had an oppressive feeling as though the pair of big musty statues, graceful, silent, imposing, were haughtily frowning on her presence under this roof. Pavel seemed to be a different young man. She scarcely seemed to be acquainted with him. Only the sight of Anna Nicolayevna fondling his fingers warmed her heart to both. On the other hand, her own smile won the hostess.
The countess released Pavel’s hand, moved over to the other end of the sofa and huddled herself into the corner, thrusting out her graceful elbows and great pile of auburn hair. The presence of Pavel kept her ill at ease. Finally she said: “I think you had better leave us two women to ourselves, Pasha. We shall understand each other much better then, won’t we, Clara Rodionovna?”
“I hope so,” Clara answered, awkwardly.
Pavel withdrew. In his absence their embarrassment only increased.
The next time Clara and Pavel met, in the trunk-shop, he asked her when she would call on his mother again.
“Oh, I don’t know. The point is I don’t know what to do with my hands there,” she said, with a laugh. “I can’t seem to shake off the feeling that I am in the house of—in ‘the Palace,’ don’t you know.”
It was a hot day, but the air in the basement was quitecool. Motl was silently painting a trunk, and Pavel was conscious of the oppressive smell of the paint and of the impact of the brush against the wood as he answered, with pained stress in his voice.
“But my mother does not feel like a countess. She is above and beyond all such things.”
“I know she is. Only I somehow don’t manage to feel at home there.”
“But it’s only a matter of habit I am sure. You’ll get over it. You won’t feel that way next time. You must promise me to call to-morrow.” It was as if Clara’s was a superior position in life and as if that superiority lay in this, that her home was a squalid trunk-shop, while his was a palace.
“If I do, my mind will be in a whirl again,” she laughed.
“Oh, it isn’t as bad as all that. You must promise me to call on her.”
“Can’t we put it off—indefinitely?”
“Clara Rodionovna!”
His imploring voice threatened to draw from him the great yearning plea that was waiting to be heard, but this same entreating voice of his thrilled her so that she hastened to yield.
“Very well,” she said.
“Will you come? Oh, it’s so kind of you. I am ever so much obliged to you—but I declare I am raving like a maniac,” he interrupted himself with a queer smile that forthwith lapsed into an expression of rage. “What I really want to say is that I love you.”
The lines of her face hardened. Her rich complexion burst into flame. She looked gravely at nothing, as he proceeded:
“It seems to me as though I had felt that way ever since that Pievakin episode, Clara Rodionovna. I owe so much to you. If it had not been for you I might still be leading the life of a knave and an idiot. What you did on that occasion served to open my eyes and showed me the difference between light and darkness. And now it seems to me that if you were mine, it would infuse great energy and courage into me. I have got so used to seeing you, I hate to think of being apart from you for a single moment. Oh, you are so dear to me, I am so happy to sit by your side, to be allowed to say all this to you.”
“You are dear to me, too,” she said in great embarrassment.
He grasped her hand in silence, his face a burning amorous red.
On their way to the Beak, after another outburst from him, she spoke in measured accents, firm and sad, like the voice of fate.
“I don’t know where this will lead us, for either of us or both may be arrested at any time, and then this happiness would add so much poison to the horrors of prison life. Besides, even if we are not arrested, as long as present conditions prevail our love would have to remain hidden underground, like our dear movement——”
“My mother will know it. I want her to know it; and if it is possible to tell your parents, too——”
“Oh, it would kill them. Theirs is an entirely different world.”
“Then, for the present, let them be none the wiser for it. As to my mother, she likes you very, very much already and when she hears of it she will love you to distraction, Clara Rodionovna. My friends of the party will know it, too, of course, and what do we care for the restof this wretched world? But oh, I do wish you could tell your mother, or could I speak to her?”
“Oh, that’s absolutely impossible,” she said in a voice vibrant with a suggestion of tears and the music of love at once. “Your mother may understand me. We can speak in the same language at least, but my poor parents—one might as well tell them I am dead. Well, when the Will of the People has scored its great victory and Russia is free, then, if we are alive, we shall announce it to my poor parents.”
He picked up a stone and flung it with all his might. He was in a fidget of suppressed exultation. Now that his suspense was over, they changed parts, as it were. The gnawing gloom which had tantalised him during the past few weeks had suddenly burst forth in torrents of sunshine; whereas in her case the quiet light-hearted happiness which had been the colour of her love had given way to an infatuated heart filled with anguish.
He told his mother the news the very next morning. The explanation took place in the immense ball-room. It was a windy morning outside, and they were marching up and down the parquette of polished light oak, arm in arm. Presently they paused at one of the windows facing the garden. They could faintly hear the soughing of the wind in the trees. They stood gazing at the fluttering leaves, when he said, musingly:
“I have something to tell you, mother. I told Mlle. Yavner I loved her and I want you to congratulate me.”
“Mlle. Yavner?” she asked, with a look of consternation.