“Yes, Mamma dear, I love her and she loves me and she is the dearest woman in the world and you are not going to look upon it in a manner unworthy of yourself,are you, dear little mamma mine?” He seized her fingers and fell to kissing them and murmuring: “My dear little mamma, my dear little mamma.” His endearments were too much for her.
“Pasha, Pasha! What are you doing with yourself,” she sobbed bitterly.
“Mamma darling! Mamma darling!” he shouted fiercely. “You are not going to give way to idiotic, brutal, Asiatic notions that are not really yours. Another year or two, perhaps less, and all Russia will be free from them and from all her chains, and then one won’t have to be shocked to hear that a man and a woman who love each other and belong to each other are going to marry. Mamma dear, my darling little mamma! You are the noblest woman to be found. You are not going to go back on your son because he is trying to live like a real human being and not like a hypocrite and a brute.”
She dared not cry any more.
When Clara came, the countess, turning pale, clasped her vehemently, as though pleading for mercy. Clara felt bewildered and terror-stricken, and after some perfunctory kisses she loosened her arms, but the Gentile woman detained her in an impetuous embrace, as she said: “Be good to me, both of you. He is all I have in the world.” As she saw an embarrassed smile on Clara’s beautifully coloured face, she bent forward with a sudden impulse and drew her to her bosom again, as though she had just made the discovery that the Jewish girl was not unlike other girls after all, that there was nothing preternatural about her person or speech. Whereupon Clara kissed her passionately and burst into tears.
The countess caressed her, poured out the innermost secrets of her heart to her. This Jewish girl whom shehad only seen once before heard from her the story of her past life, of her childhood, of her two unhappy marriages, of her thirst for comradeship with her son, of her conversion. The two women became intimate friends, although Clara spoke comparatively little.
Nevertheless, that night Anna Nicolayevna vainly courted sleep. Her heart was in her mouth. She wished she could implore her son to break the engagement, to sever connection with the movement, to abandon all his perilous and unconventional pursuits. But she knew that she would never have the courage to do so.
PAVEL’S prediction concerning Yossl came true, but the identity of the province to which the missing medical student belonged and the one in which the unknown Nihilist had been arrested escaped the notice of the secret service, and the Zorki gendarme officer contented himself with appropriating the Paris letter. Chance, however, soon solved the riddle for the authorities: a prisoner from Zorki, a drunkard charged with petty larceny, recognised Makar in the prison yard.
It was Masha who brought the news to Pavel and Clara.
“The general of gendarmes was there, the assistant procureur, my brother and the warden,” she said, describing the scene when Parmet was first addressed by his name in prison. “It was in the office. When he was brought in, my brother says his heart—my brother’s heart, I mean—began to beat fast. The assistant procureur offered him a chair.” She paused, with an appealing smile, her hand to her bosom. “My heart, too, is beating fearfully at this minute, as I picture the scene. I am too imaginative, I am afraid. Well, he pulled up a chair, the assistant procureur and said: ‘Be seated, Monsieur Parmet.’ The prisoner started a little, just a little, don’t you know, and then he smiled and began to rub his eyes, as if he had just been awakened. The general got angry and said nowthere was no use for him to make believe and to keep his mouth shut and the assistant procureur said very politely he might as well tell them a little more about himself and the people he knew in Miroslav, as they were well known to the gendarmes anyhow. They coaxed him and coaxed him and coaxed him until he shouted: ‘As to myself I have the honour of being a member of the Party of the Will of the People. As to those I know in Miroslav, I assure you I don’t know anybody here.’ But didn’t he tease them! 'I hoped to form some connections here,’ he said, 'but then you were foolish enough to arrest me without giving me a chance. The St. Petersburg gendarmes will laugh at you when they hear of the kind of job you have made of it.’”
Pavel roared. He thought Makar’s taunting answer would induce the local gendarme office to detain him in the hope of discovering his prospective “connections.”
“Only why should he have said he was a member of the Party of the Will of the People? That will aggravate his case,” Clara said.
“That was the dream of his life—to say that, and to say it triumphantly, to some gendarme officers. At any rate, we have no time to lose.”
That afternoon Pavel had a talk with Makar from the top of the hill overlooking the prison yard.
“Hurrah!” Makar’s handkerchief flashed back in answer to his first “hello.” “They know my name. I had some fun with them.”
“It was all right, only for the sake of everything that is noble, don’t aggravate your case. Otherwise everything looks bright. Answer no more of their questions.”
“Crazy to wag my tongue. Have not spoken so long. I am trying to make a convert of my guard. Pastime.”
“Don’t, for God’s sake don’t, or you’ll ruin it all. Promise to keep silent. Do you?”
“Don’t get angry. I can see your handkerchief gnashing its teeth. Only one thing more. May I?”
“Hurry up.”
“Here, in prison I am openly a citizen of the Social Republic, and the Czar is powerless to subdue me. I am in a cell. What more can he do with me? But here, in this cell, where his power is most complete, I openly defy him, all his gendarmes and army notwithstanding.”
Pavel went away, cursing and laughing.
Every scheme of the conspirators turned out to be beset with insurmountable difficulties. Clara did not tell Pavel all she knew and made light of those obstacles with which he was acquainted, but in her own heart she was extremely uneasy.
One evening Pavel sat on a bench in front of a public house, smoking a cheap pipe. He had a loaded pistol in his pocket and a dagger under his vest. The prison was a short distance round the third corner. When one of the customers of the public house seated himself by his side Pavel engaged him in conversation, talking garrulously in the manner of a humble, careworn government clerk.
At last a way had been found for the provision man to take Makar out of the prison yard. This was what kept Pavel in this out-of-the-way spot. In the near vicinity of the inn stood a droshky. The appearance of the provision waggon, full of empty sacks and some barrels, at a corner diagonally across the street was to serve as a signal for Pavel to walk up to a deserted ditch-bridge, where the runaway was expected to emerge from under the sacks and to put on a military cap. Then Makar and Boulatoffwould gain the droshky, mount it, and be driven to the Palace—the best hiding place one could find in all Miroslav.
Pavel was calm, determined, ready to shoot and to be shot at. By degrees he grew fidgety. Presently Clara passed along. He rose to his feet and went off in the opposite direction, the two meeting in the next street.
“It was a fizzle to-day, but it’ll be all right, Pasha,” she said in a cheery, matter-of-fact voice. “As ill luck would have it, there were some people about.”
Pavel’s brows contracted. “He’ll try again, of course.”
“Certainly. He will be there in four days.”
“Four days! Couldn’t he make it sooner?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Wait, dearest. Are you sure the people in the prison are not getting suspicious about you?” He had asked the question and she had answered it more than once before.
“I don’t think they are. Mme. Shubeyko and the Sparrow are the only ones who know all about it. As to Rodkevitch, he understands it all, of course, but he pretends not to. The Sparrow has his ‘bosom friend’ among the keepers, but that man does not know anything about me. I am quite sure of it.”
“The fewer who know what you are doing there the better, of course. Don’t be foolhardy, my charming one. Oh, I do wish it was all over. Mother wants you to go to the country with her, and I should join you two for some time.”
With a passionate handshake they parted, Clara directing her steps to the prison building. The tremulous solicitude of his warning, his tender concern for her safety left a glow of happiness and devotion in her. She visionedhim with his pistol and dagger and her heart was crushed with anxiety. With his hot-blooded temerity he was apt to act rashly, to use violence and stake his own life and Makar’s before it was necessary. Pavel’s mode of taking away the prisoner had never appealed to her strongly, and now the idea was growing on her of stealing a march on Pavel, of bringing about Makar’s liberation when her lover was not on hand. And the more she thought of thus repaying his loving care for herself the keener became her joy in the plan.
Still, the general situation looked so discouraging, that with all her thrills of amorous delight, she was in a state of black despair. The truth of the matter was that the provision man, who was eager to earn a few hundred rubles and to be plucky, had proved to be a most unreliable, boastful coward. Clara was cudgelling her brain for some new scheme, for some new line of action, when an important suggestion came from an unforeseen quarter. Mme. Shubeyko arrived at the prison, all in a flutter with a discovery: Father Michail, the prison priest, bore considerable resemblance to Makar.
“That’s so, but what of it?” Clara said between irritation and agreeable surprise.
“What of it! Why,—I have thought it all out, you may be sure of that. It all occurred to me only an hour ago. Even less,” she said with that silly smile of hers which usually so annoyed Pavel and which at this moment exasperated Clara even more than it would her quick-tempered lover.
“What did occur to you?” Clara asked, with the least bit of venom on the “did.”
Mme. Shubeyko started to explain, but her listener divined the rest herself: Makar might pass out in the disguiseof a priest, while Father Michail was with the prisoners.
“It’s an excellent idea!” she murmured gravely. She could scarcely bring herself to believe that the plan had emanated from an absurd brain like that of the woman before her.
“Someone could detain Father Michail until it was all safely over,” Mme. Shubeyko went on. “He’s awfully fond of card-playing, and if a pretty young lady like yourself was his partner he would never have the heart to get up from the table, I know he wouldn’t.”
The Sparrow, however, overruled the whole plan. Father Michail had been connected with the prison for twenty years and the two gatemen knew him as they did their own wives. What was more, the day gateman and the priest were particularly fond of each other and often exchanged jokes.
Clara’s hands dropped to her sides. Then she clenched a fist and said: “Oh, nonsense. He’ll never know. If Father Michail did not speak to him he wouldn’t think it strange, would he?”
“No, but the gateman might speak to him. Besides, you’ll have to get up early to fool him, lady.” Every officer in the prison building had his nickname, and this vigilant gateman who was a very fat man was known as Double Chin. He seemed to be dozing half the time; but the Sparrow assured Clara that when his little eyes were shut they saw even better than when they were open.
“Nonsense. Your imagination carries you too far. Anyhow, nothing venture, nothing have. We must get that man out.”
“Ready to serve you, young lady, only if I may say so, I don’t like the plan at all, young lady.”
THE next morning, as Clara walked along Kasimir Street, she saw Volodia Vigdoroff, her cousin, talking and laughing exuberantly to two elderly men in front of the flashy window of a drug store. One of his listeners wore a military uniform. It was Dr. Lipnitzky (Jewish physicians had not yet been proscribed from the Russian army)—a grey-haired, smooth-shaven, pudgy little man with three medals across his breast. It was at the Turkish war that he had won these decorations. Clara could never look at him without feeling a taste of sickness in her mouth like the one she had felt one day shortly after the war, when she was sick in bed and the little doctor, bending over, shouted to her to open her mouth wider. The best physician in town, he was the terror of his uneducated co-religionists. When a Jewish housewife paid him his fee in copper instead of silver, or neglected to wrap it up in paper, he would make an ugly scene, asking the poor woman at the top of his voice when she and others like her would learn to live like human beings. Sometimes, when a family failed to pay him altogether, pleading poverty, he would call them a lot of prevaricating knaves with a snug little hoard in the old woman’s stocking, and carry off a copper pan or brass candlestick. In every case of this sort, however, the pan or the brass candlestickwas sure to come back, sometimes with a ruble or two into the bargain.
The other man to whom Vigdoroff was speaking was Paul Zundel, the musical autocrat of the province. He was as small of stature and as irascible as Dr. Lipnitzky—a grey-haired dandy with a Mexican complexion and a pair of long black side whiskers tipped with white. He was a graduate of a German conservatory and spoke several languages with illiterate fluency.
They were both bachelors and both were frequent visitors at the governor’s house, where they were liked as much for the money they usually lost in cards (although in other houses they were known as sharp players) as for their professional services. They spent large sums on the education of Jewish children and were particularly interested in the spread of modern culture among their people. In other words, they advocated and worked for the assimilation of their people with the “deep-rooted” population. When a Talmud boy was ambitious to give up his divine studies for “Gentile books” and his old-fashioned garb for a gymnasium uniform, the two eccentric bachelors were his two stars of hope.
Vigdoroff overtook Clara as she turned the next corner. They had not met since the night when they quarrelled in front of Boyko’s court.
“I didn’t see you until I happened to turn round,” he said.
“He is trying to prove that he is not afraid of being seen in my company,” she thought to herself, as she said aloud: “I saw you talking to Dr. Lipnitzky and Zundel.”
They walked in silence a few steps. Then he uttered with a smile:
“Have you taken a vow to give us a wide berth?”
“Not at all.”
“Father and mother are always at me for it. They think I am to blame for your sudden estrangement.”
“Nobody is to blame, and there is no estrangement. Why use such words?”
“Is it only a matter of words? They are accustomed to look upon you and me as brother and sister. Do you deny that our roads have parted?”
“If they have, then, what need is there of writing at the bottom of the picture: ‘This is a lion?’” she asked testily. “If it’s a lion it’s a lion.”
“Would it be better to shut one’s eyes to the truth? As for me, common ordinary mortal that I am, I try to call a spade a spade.”
He spoke with venom, but it was all perfunctory and they were both aware of it. Then he described, with exaggerated ardour, the successes achieved by the Pupils’ Aid Society in which he was now actively interested.
Since their talk on the bench in front of Boyko’s Court he had been longing for some humanitarian cause, for one unassociated with the hazards of the revolutionary movement. He would prove to Clara that he was no inferior creature. Her taunt that he had seized upon the Jewish question, in the course of their debate, merely as a drowning man seizes at a straw, and the implication that no phase of the problem of human suffering made the slightest appeal to him had left a cruel sting in his heart. Since then his thoughts had often turned upon the Jewish question, until he found his “cause” in the dissemination of Russian culture among his people. Formerly he had been contented with being “assimilated” himself. Now he was going to dedicate his best energies to the work of lessening that distance between Jew and Gentile, whichwas, so he argued, the source of all the woes of his race. As good luck would have it, there was such a thing as difference of opinion. “It is not anxiety about my ‘precious skin,’” he would picture himself saying to Clara, “that keeps me from reading underground prints. Did I believe in them I should do as you do. But if you think I live for myself only you don’t know me. I have another cause, one to which my convictions call me and to which I am going to give all that is in me.”
“And you?” he asked. “Still planting a paradise on earth?”
She smiled.
“Well, as for me, I content myself with working on such a humble beginning as a little bridge across the gap between Jew and Gentile.”
He consciously led the way past a Gentile of enormous bulk, who stood in the doorway of a furrier’s shop. It was Rasgadayeff, the landlord of the Vigdoroffs’ residence, he himself occupying the inner building on the same courtyard. He was a wealthy merchant with the figure of a barrel and arms that looked as though they had been hung up to dry, an impetuous Great-Russian, illiterate and good-hearted, shrewd in making money, but with no sense of its value when it came to spending it. Every other week he went off on a hideous spree, and then, besides smashing costly mirrors, which is the classical sport of the drunken Great-Russian merchant, he would indulge in such pastimes as offering a prize to every ten-year-old boy who would drain a tumbler of vodka, setting fire to live horses or wrecking the furniture in his own house. On such days his wife often sought shelter with the Vigdoroffs for fear of being beaten to death. Until a few years ago he had stood at the head of the furtrade. Since then a Jewish dealer, who went off on no sprees, had been a formidable competitor to him. Rasgadayeff now hated Jews in general as he had never done before. The Vigdoroffs were an exception. He was sincerely fond of the whole family, and entrusted the old man with some of his most important business secrets.
“Our humblest regards to Clara Rodionovna!” he said, with gay suavity, taking off his hat. “As also to Vladimir Alexandrovich!”
They returned the salute, and were about to pass on, but he checked them.
“A rose of a girl, I tell you that,” he went on, addressing himself to Vladimir, while he looked at the girl with rather offensive admiration. “Young men are fools nowadays. If I were one of them I should take no chances with a lassie like that. A plum, a bouquet, a song-bird of a mademoiselle. I should propose and get her and waste no time, or—one, two, three, and the lovey-dovey may be snapped up by some other fellow.”
Clara, who was accustomed to this sort of pleasantry from him, scarcely heard what he said. She was smilingly making ready to bow herself away, when her cousin asked of the Great-Russian:
“And how is her Illustriousness? Have you seen her lately?”
“She was here yesterday. Quite stuck on you, Vladimir Alexandrovich. Sends humblest regards. ‘When is your learned young friend going to call,’ she says.Youhave a sage of a cousin, Clara Rodionovna, an eagle of a fellow, a cabinet minister!”
“All right,” Vladimir returned, with an amused smile, yet reddening with satisfaction.
Clara remarked to herself that her cousin was flauntinghis successes with Gentiles before her. When they resumed their walk she inquired reluctantly:
“Who is ‘her Illustriousness’?”
“Oh, that’s that lame tramp of a woman, Princess Chertogoff,” he rejoined, with gestures of contempt and amusement, yet inwardly tingling with vanity at his acquaintance with her impecunious “Illustriousness.” The wealthy Great-Russian was a large holder of Princess Chertogoff’s promissory notes, and it was at his house where Vladimir had met her on several occasions. The lame noblewoman knew that Rasgadayeff was fond of the Vigdoroffs. When she saw the young man last she had, by way of currying favour with her creditor, asked the educated son of his “favourite Jew” to call on her whenever he was in the mood for it, and to “let her hear what was going on among wise men and authors.”
Vladimir and Clara passed on. He spoke of Rasgadayeff’s latest escapades and Clara listened with little bursts of merriment, but their voices did not ring true. Presently they exchanged greetings with Ginsburg, the notorious money-lender of Miroslav, a small, red-headed man with crumpled cheeks and big bulging eyes.
“Here is another treat for you!” Vladimir said, in high spirits. “Another specimen of moral perfection. Some gigantic hand must have grabbed him by the head, squeezing it like a paper ball till the eyes started from their sockets, and then thrown him into a waste basket. That’s the way he looks.” She smiled awkwardly.
He then called her attention to two bewigged old women, both of them apparently deaf, who were talking into each other’s ear, and then to the picturesque figure of a dumpy little shoemaker with a new, carefully-shined pair of topboots in his hand. Clara had never been interestedin things of this sort, but this time, in her eagerness to get away, added to a growing sense of awkwardness, his observations literally grated on her nerves. At last, when they reached a crossing, she stopped, putting out her hand.
“Somebody is waiting for me,” she said. “Remember me to uncle and aunt, will you?”
“I will. Won’t you look in at all?” As she turned to take the side street, he added: “Our roads do part, then.”
Her appointment was with Orlovsky. She had not attended the gatherings of the Circle at his house for a considerable time. He conjectured that she was engaged in some revolutionary undertaking of importance. He had missed her so abjectly that he had finally decided to avow his love. This was what he had made the appointment for. When she came, however, he cowed before her rich complexion and intelligent eyes and talked of the affairs of the Circle. A similar attempt at a love declaration was made that evening by Elkin, with similar results. By way of opening the conversation he indulged in a series of virulent taunts upon her long absence and the great revolutionary secrets that he said were written on her face, after which his efforts to turn the conversation into romantic channels proved futile. He came away agonised with jealousy. He was jealous of the girl and he was jealous of the mysterious conspiracy in which she seemed to be engaged and into which he, her revolutionary sponsor, had not been initiated.
As to Vigdoroff, he was seized with a desire to avail himself of Princess Chertogoff’s invitation, not merely to gratify his personal ambition, but also, so he assured himself,as part of his “cause.” On his way thither he paused once or twice in front of shop windows to ascertain whether his face was not strikingly Semitic. “Not offensively so, anyhow,” he concluded before a mirror at the entrance to a furniture store. The mirror reflected a well-made, athletic-looking young man one could have told for a college man through a veil. The picturesque irregularity of his features, somewhat flat in the middle of the face, drew an image of culture, of intellectual interest. He felt on his mettle. He would make a favourable impression, and that impression was to be another step across the distance not only between Gentile society and himself, but between all Jews and all Gentiles. His visit to the noblewoman was a mission. He was in an exalted mood.
At the house of Princess Chertogoff he found a cavalry officer and an officer of the imperial guards. He was received with patronising urbanity. The hostess introduced the two young officers as her sons, come from St. Petersburg to take a glimpse at their old mother, and Vigdoroff as “one of the brilliant young intellects of our town.” This was her excuse before her sons for having invited a Jew to the house and Vigdoroff was not unaware of it. The cavalryman’s face was round and stern, while his brother’s was oblong and smiling. When they were drunk, which happened quite often, their faces would swap expressions. It was chiefly owing to their expensive escapades that their mother’s fortune had passed into the coffers of usurers. The two uniformed men left almost immediately, pleading a pressing engagement.
The welcome Vladimir found at this house was one extended by a patroness of the fine arts to a devotee of letters. It was not long before Vigdoroff found himself fully launched on a favourite subject. Russia’s supremacyin modern literature and her false modesty became clearer to him with every new work of fiction that came from the foreign masters. The best models of the German, French or English novel were tainted with artificiality. Russia alone produced stories that were absolutely free from powder and rouge. He dwelt on Zola’sL’Assommoirand Daudet’sNabob, both of which had appeared a short time before, and each of which was looked upon as its author’s masterpiece. He saw that his hostess neither understood nor cared for these things; that he was making a fool of himself; yet, being too ill at ease to stop, he went sliding down hill. He spoke by heart as it were, the sound of his own voice increasing his embarrassment.
The princess was listening with an air of pompous assent, barely following the general drift of his talk. Her majestic crutches terrified him.
A man servant brought in a silver samovar and a tray of Little-Russian cookies. As Vigdoroff took up his glass of tea the princess said:
“I did not know you were so much of a Russian patriot. Quite an unusual thing in an educated young man these days. I certainly agree with you that Turgeneff is a good writer. He is perfectly charming.”
Later on she asked, with lazy curiosity and in her pampered enunciation:
“Do you really think our novelists greater than the great writers of France?”
“I certainly do.”
“That’s interesting,” she said, preparing to get rid of him.
“You see, the average Russian represents a remarkable duality. He is simple-hearted and frank, like a child, yet he is possessed of an intuitive sense of human nature thatwould be considered marvellous in a sage. In addition, he is the most soulful fellow in the world, and to turn his soul inside out, to himself as well as to others, is one of his ruling passions. That accounts for the inimitable naturalness and the ardent human interest of our literature. Whether Russia knows how to construct machinery or not, she certainly knows how to write.”
“You do love Russia, and literature, too”—yawning demonstratively. “I had an idea Hebrews were only interested in money matters.” She smiled, an embarrassed smile in which there was as much malice as apology, and dismissed him quite unceremoniously.
He got into the street with his face on fire. It was as if he had been subjected to some brutal physical indignities. “‘I didn’t know you were so much of a Russian patriot,’” he recalled in his agony. “Of course, I’m only a Jew, not a Russian. It makes no difference how many centuries my people have lived and suffered here. And I, idiot that I am, make a display of my love for Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoyevski, as if I, ‘a mere Jew,’ had a right to them! She must have thought it was all affectation, Jewish cunning. As if a Jew could care for anything but ‘money matters.’ The idea of one of my race caring for books, and for Gentile books, too!”
He was as innocent of the world of money as was Clara’s father. As to the great Russian writers, they were not merely favourite authors with him. They were saints, apostles, of a religion of which he was a fervent devotee. This, in fact, was the real “cause” which he had mutely served for the past six or seven years. Their images, the swing and rhythm of their sentences, the flavour of their style, the odour of the pages as he had first read them—all this was a sanctuary to him. Yet he had always felt as if hehad no right to this devotion, as if he were an intruder. This was the unspoken tragedy of his life.
Since a boy of ten, when he entered the gymnasium, he had been crying out to Russia, his country, to recognise a child in him—not a step-child merely. And just because he was looked upon as a step-child he loved his native land even more passionately than did his fellow-countrymen of Slavic blood.
Alexander, or Sender, Vigdoroff, Vladimir’s father, was known among his co-religionists as Sender the Arbitrator. His chief source of income was petition-writing and sundry legal business, but the Jews of Miroslav often submitted their differences to him. These he settled by the force of an imperturbable and magnetic disposition rather than through any special gift of judgment and insight. He was full of anecdotes and inaggressive humour. It was said of him that people who came to his house obdurate and bitter “melted like wax” in his sunny presence. As a rule, indeed, it was the contending parties themselves who then found a way to an amicable solution of the point at issue, but the credit for it was invariably given to Sender the Arbitrator, and his reputation for wisdom brought him some Gentile patrons in addition to his Jewish clientele. His iron safe always contained large sums in cash or valuables entrusted to him by others. When a young couple were engaged to be married the girl’s marriage-portion was usually deposited with Sender the Arbitrator. When security was agreed upon in connection with some contract the sum was placed in the hands of Sender the Arbitrator.
His stalwart figure, blond, curling locks and toothless smile; his frilled shirt-front, everlasting brown frock-coatand huge meerschaum cigar-holder—all this was as familiar to the Jews of Miroslav as the public buildings of their town. The business of petition-writing was gradually passing into the hands of younger and better educated men, graduated lawyers regularly admitted to the bar, and his income was dwindling. “I could arbitrate any misunderstanding under the sun except the one between Luck and myself,” he used to say, smiling toothlessly. Still, he made a comfortable income, and money was spent freely not only on his household but on all sorts of hangers-on. Vladimir’s education cost him more than his means warranted. Besides keeping him at the gymnasium and then at the university he had hired him private teachers of French, German and music. “There are a thousand Gentiles to every Jew,” was one of his sayings. “That’s why every Jew should possess as much intelligence as a thousand Gentiles. Else we shall be crushed.” He was something like a connecting link between the old world and the new. He had a large library, mostly made up of German and Hebrew books. His house was the haunt of “men of wisdom,” that is, people who wrote or thought upon modern topics in the language of Isaiah and Jeremiah, free-thinkers whose source of inspiration were atheistic ideas expounded in the Holy Tongue; yet on Saturday nights his neighbours would gather in his drawing room to discuss foreign politics and to chant psalms in the dark. He had the head of an agnostic and the heart of an orthodox Jew.
It was late in the afternoon when Vladimir reached home. His father was in the library, which was also his office, conversing with his copyist—a dapper little man whom his employer described as “an artistic penman and an artistic fool.” The windows were open. The roomwas filled with twilight and with warm air that seemed to be growing softer and more genial every minute.
“Is that you, Volodia?” the old man asked.
Volodia only nodded. It was easy to see that he was dejected. His father became interested and dismissed the clerk.
“Anything the matter, Volodia?” he asked.
“Nothing is the matter.” An answer of this sort usually indicated that the young man was burning to unbosom himself of something or other and that he needed some coaxing to do so. Intellectually the mutual relations of father and son were of a rather peculiar nature. Each looked up to the other and courted his approbation without the other being aware of it. Their discussions often had the character of an epigram-match.
When Volodia had told his father of his experience at the house of the lame princess, the old man said:
“I see you are quite excited over it. As for me, that penniless spendthrift reminds me of the pig that mistook the nobleman’s backyard for the interior of his mansion. The backyard was all the pig had seen of the place, and money-lenders are the only kind of Jews that lame drone has ever had an occasion to know. That she should mistake a handful of usurers for the whole Jewish people is the most natural thing in the world.”
“Oh, but they are all like that, father. Unfortunately the Jewish people are just the opposite of women in this respect. Women have a knack of flaunting all that is prepossessing and of concealing that which is unattractive in them. If the Gentiles see none but the worst Jews there are we have ourselves to blame.”
“But they don’t care to see any other Jews. As a rule, the good Jew has no money to lend. They have no usefor him. More than half of our people are hard-working mechanics on the verge of starvation. Do you expect an ornament like your Princess Chertogoff and her precious sons to maketheiracquaintance? Of the rest the great majority are starving tradesmen, teachers, Talmudists, dreamers. Would you have a Gentile reprobate go to these for a loan?”
Vladimir sat silent awhile, gazing through the open window at the thickening dusk. Then he said, listlessly at first, but gathering ardour from the relish he took in his own point:
“You are as unjust to the good Gentiles as they are to the good Jews. What is needed is more understanding between the two. If the dreamers and scholars you refer to could speak Russian and looked less antediluvian than they do the prejudice that every Jew is a money-lender would gradually disappear. As it is, Jew and Gentile are like two apples that come in mutual contact at a point where they are both rotten.”
“The Jewish apple was originally sound, Volodia. It’s through association with their Gentile neighbours that they have been demoralised—at the point of contact; our faults are theirs; our virtues are our own.”
“Oh, this is a very one-sided view to take of it, father,” Volodia rejoined, resentfully. What he coveted was consolation, not an attack on everything that he held dear, that was the soul of his best years and ambitions. His father’s light-hearted derision of the entire Russian people irritated him. “If some Jews become demoralised through contact with Gentile knaves, other Jews are uplifted, ennobled, sanctified by coming under the influence of the great Russian thinkers, poets, friends of the people,” he went on, emphasising his words with something like afeeling of spite. “Yours is an extremely one-sided view to take, father.”
The elder Vigdoroff was cowed. He felt himself convicted of narrow-mindedness, of retrogression, of fogyism, and by way of disproving the charge he put up a defence that was disguised in the form of an attack. Vladimir replied bitterly, venting his misery on his father. The two found themselves on the verge of one of those feuds which sometimes divided them for days without either having the courage to take the first step toward a reconciliation, but their discussion was broken by the appearance of a servant carrying a lamp. She was followed by Vladimir’s mother, a mountain of shapeless, trembling flesh with a torpid, wide-eyed look. In the yellow light the family likeness between father and son came pleasingly into view. Only the face of the one had a touch of oriental quaintness in it, while the other’s was at once mellowed and intensified by the tinge of modern culture. Clara’s mother was a sister of the elder Vigdoroff, but she resembled him only slightly. The girl’s features suggested her uncle far more than they did her mother.
“Never mind the lamp,” the Arbitrator said somewhat irately.
“Never mind the lamp!” his wife said, fixing her torpid eyes on him. “Are you crazy? Don’t mind him”—to the servant girl. The servant girl set the lamp down on the table and withdrew, her big fleshy mistress taking a seat by her son’s side.
“Go about your business,” her husband said, good-naturedly. “You are disturbing our discussion. I was just getting started when you came in and spoiled the job. Go. There may be some beggar-woman waiting for you in the kitchen.”
She made a mocking gesture without stirring, and her husband resumed his argument.
She was one of a very small number of Jewish women who attended divine service on week-days. She was the game of every woman pedlar and beggar in town, with whom she usually communed when her husband was out. When not thus occupied, buying useless bargains or listening to some poor woman’s tale of woe, she would spend much of her time in her big easy chair, dozing over a portly psalter. Her husband was perpetually quizzing her on her piety and her surreptitious bargains. On Fridays, when beggars came in troops for their pennies, the Arbitrator would sometimes divert himself by encouraging some of them to fall into line more than once.
LATE the next afternoon Mme. Shubeyko called at the warden’s house with a blue silk handkerchief round her face, apparently suffering from a swollen cheek or toothache.
An hour or more later, while she and Rodkevich were absorbed in a game of cards in the parlour and a solitary star shone out of the semi-obscurity of a colorless sky, Makar, clean-shaven and clad as a woman, with a blue handkerchief round his face, advanced toward the gate. Clara stood in the doorway of the warden’s office, watching the scene. “Double Chin,” the gateman, was still on duty, and as the disguised prisoner approached him the impersonation struck her as absurdly defective. Another second and all would be lost with a crash. Her heart stood still. She shut her eyes with a sick feeling, but the next instant she sprang forward, bonnetless, addressing Makar by Mme. Shubeyko’s name.
“You must not forget to let us know, dear,” she said aloud, placing herself between him and the gateman and shutting the disguised man from view. “A swollen gum is a dangerous thing to neglect, you know. Yes, figs and milk. I’ll see you down the road, dear.”
The heavy key groaned in the lock, the ponderous gate swung open and Makar and Clara walked out into the twilightof the street—he with a rush of joy, she in a turmoil of triumph and despair. It seemed as if he had never vividly hoped to see liberty, and now, suddenly, he had found himself breathing the very breath of it; while she who, a minute ago, could have walked freely through the streets, was now the quarry of that terrible force called government.
As soon as they reached the ditch, a short distance from the prison building, Makar pulled off his feminine attire, threw it under the little foot-bridge, and put on a government official’s cap. Masha, the gendarme officer’s sister, was to await him round the corner; her house was within easy reach from here, and Makar was to be taken there to change his disguise and then to be driven to the Palace; but it had all come about much sooner than they had expected, and she had not yet arrived.
“Never mind. Hire a cab to Cucumber Market,” Clara said. “There you can cross some streets in the opposite direction and then take another cab direct for Theatre Square. A very short walk will bring you to the Palace. Don’t forget the names: First Cucumber Market and then Theatre Square,” she repeated, coolly.
He nodded with a reassuring smile, shook her hand warmly, and they parted.
Double Chin was soon to be relieved. Had he left his post before the guards missed Makar, the connection existing between Mme. Shubeyko’s toothache and Makar’s escape would never have been discovered, and Clara would have come out uncompromised. But Clara was too slow in returning, and the fat gateman was an impressionable, suspicious man, so he presently made inquiry. He found that Mme. Shubeyko was still in the warden’s parlour,nursing her cheek with one hand and holding her cards with the other.
In the commotion that followed the discovery Rodkevich wept hysterically and beat the gateman, while Mme. Shubeyko went about invoking imprecations upon the sly prisoner for stealing her new spring cloak, bonnet and parasol.
Meanwhile Clara stood at a point of vantage, watching developments. Had Double Chin left the building at the usual hour, without the prison betraying any signs of disquiet, she would have returned to her room in the warden’s house at once, and thus saved her legal existence. Otherwise she would have been forced to escape and join the army of the “ne-legalny” (illegal), of political outlaws like the majority of Pavel’s intimate friends in St. Petersburg. About twenty minutes had elapsed from the time she had parted from Makar, when she saw human figures burst from the prison-gate, accompanied by the violent trill of a police whistle. Her heart sank at the sound. From this minute on Miroslav would be forbidden ground to her. Ane-legalnyis something neither dead nor alive, the everlasting prey of gendarmes, policemen, spies—of the Czar himself, it seemed; a “cut-off slice;” an outcast without the right of being either an outcast or a member of the community, a creature without name, home or identity. She was appallingly forbidding to herself. But then in the underground worldne-legalnyis a title of indescribable distinction, and at this moment Clara seemed to feel in her own person the sanctity which she had been wont to associate with the word.
By ridding herself of her starched collar and ribbon and hastily rearranging her hair into a coarse, dishevelled knot she was sufficiently transformed to look like a young womanof the masses to strangers. She could not go to the Palace without a hat, however, and buying one at this hour would have attracted undesirable attention. So she first went to the house of Beile, her uneducated sister. Her father’s address or full name being unknown at the prison, it would be some time before the police came to look for her at her sister’s.
Beile was a little woman of thirty with glowing dark eyes and a great capacity for tears and nagging. She resembled her parents neither in looks nor in character, and her mother often wondered “whence she came into the family.” Her husband, a man learned in the Talmud, was absorbed day and night in an effort to build up a small business in hides. As a consequence, the space under Beile’s bed was usually occupied with raw skins and the two-room apartment which they shared with a tailor was never free from odours of putrefaction.
Clara entered the room with a smile. The first thing she did was to kiss and slap Ruchele, her sister’s little girl, and to tickle her baby brother under the chin.
“Why, where is your hat?” Beile screamed in amazement.
Her own hat was a matronly bonnet which she never wore except on Saturdays, when she would put it on over her wig, tying its two long, broad ribbons under her chin.
“It blew off into the river as I was crossing the bridge,” Clara replied. “That’s what brings me here. I want you to get me a hat, Beile, but you must do it quickly.”
“Are you crazy? Whatever is the matter with you, Clara? Whoever heard of a girl taking so little care of her hat that it should drop into the water? You don’t think you are a daughter of Rothschild, do you? Did you ever!”
“That’s all right, Beile. We’ll talk it all over some other time. Every minute is of great value to me.”
Beile thought her sister was in a hurry to attend a lesson, so she started. As she reached the door, with the baby in her arms, she couldn’t help facing about again.
“Didn’t you go down the bank to look for it?” she asked.
“But I am telling you I have not a moment’s time now.”
The more irritation she betrayed, the more the other was tempted to nag her.
“But somebody must have picked it up. It cost you five rubles and you’ve not worn it ten times.”
“Beile! Beile!” Clara groaned.
“Tell me where it is. I’ll go and look for it myself. Maybe it is not yet too late. Lord of the World, five rubles!”
Clara was left with Ruchele, but she changed her mind.
“I think I’ll wait at Motl’s house,” she said, overtaking her sister, with the child by her side. “It’s nearer to my lesson.”
Motl, the trunk-finisher employed by their mother, lived a considerable distance from here. Beile gave her a look full of amazement and dawning intelligence.
“At Motl’s!” she whispered, sizing up Clara’s dishevelled appearance. “Where is your collar? A rend into my heart! What have you been doing to yourself? Anyhow, go to Motl’s. Or, no, go to Feige’s. That’s much better. I’ll bring you a hat in ten minutes.” Feige was a poor old relative of Beile’s by marriage.
When Clara, in a large shepherdess hat and genteel looking, bade her sister a hurriedgood-byeand made forthe open gate, Ruchele ran after her, yelling so that her mother had to catch her in her arms and carry her gagged indoors. That was the only adventure Clara encountered on her way to the Palace.
Makar was not there.
She told Pavel of the rescue in general outline, explaining that an unexpected opportunity had presented itself and that there had been no time for sending word to him. He flew into a rage. So far from being the central figure in the affair for which he had been priming himself these many weeks he had been left out of it altogether, left out like a ninny caught napping. But this was no time for wounded pride. Clara had unexpectedly become ane-legalnyand—what was of more immediate concern—what had become of Makar?
“I hope he was not taken in the street,” he whispered.
“Masha might know. Could you send Onufri?”
Pavel disliked to use the old hussar for errands of this nature, but in the present juncture there seemed to be no way out of it.
Onufri brought back a note in which the words were all but leaping with excitement.
“No! No! No!” Masha wrote. “He has not been caught. My brother has not yet been home. Everybody is nearly crazy! But I can almost see my brother chuckling—in his heart of course! Hurrah! Hurrah! Long live the revolution!”
“Thank God!” said Clara, shutting her eyes, in a daze of relief.
“He’s a trump, after all. If they haven’t caught him so far I don’t see why he should be caught now. He may come in at any moment. But where can he be?”
The next morning, at about ten o’clock, when the countessheard the doorbell she declared, with intense agitation, that something told her it was the governor, and so it was. Clara went into her room.
“Don’t leave me for a moment, Pasha,” Anna Nicolayevna entreated her son. “I am afraid to face him alone. I should be sure to put my foot in it, if I did.”
“Just leave uncle to me,” said Pavel.
The old man looked wan and haggard, and was blinking harder than ever. He began by joking Pasha on the rarity of his visits at the gubernatorial mansion, but the young man cut him short.
“By the way, uncle, is it true that that fellow, the Nihilist, has escaped?” he asked.
“How did it reach you so soon?” the governor asked. “The town must be full of it.”
“I heard it from a cab-driver last night. It’s awful. But how did he get out? Say what you will, they are a clever set, those Nihilists.”
“Clever nothing! Our gendarmes are the most stupid lot on God’s earth. That’s where the trouble comes in. There was a governess at the warden’s house. It was she who seems to have managed the whole affair. Of course, the warden is a scoundrel, but what does he know of these things? It’s for the gendarme office to scent a bird of that variety, but then the gendarme office is made up of rogues and blockheads. To clip one’s wings, that’s all they are good for. Wherever one turns, he bumps his head against the ‘independent power’ of the gendarmerie. It’s a government within a government, that’s what it is. Else one would be able to show St. Petersburg that Miroslav was not the kind of place for Nihilists and all sorts of ragamuffins to play the mischief with. Those swaggering gendarmes go around poking their noses everywhere, smellingnothing but their own grand epaulets, and yet they are beyond the control of civil authorities. The consequence is that when something happens somebody else is held responsible, because the prisons, forsooth, are under the Department of the Interior! To set an example of idleness and stupidity is all they seem to be needed for, the gendarmes; that’s all, that’s all.”
Pavel agreed with him.
Another week passed. The police and the gendarmes were still searching for Makar and the governess, as much in the dark as ever.
Yossl Parmet, Makar’s father, was brought to Miroslav a prisoner, but he was soon discharged. He was proud of his son. He now fully realised that his Feivish belonged to a secret society made up of educated people who preached economic equality and universal brotherhood as well as political liberty, and that they were ready to go to prison for their ideas. This made a strong appeal to his imagination and sympathies, and the fact that his Feivish had outwitted the authorities and escaped from prison inclined him to shouts of triumphant laughter. He searched the Talmud for similar sentiments, and he found no stint of passages which lent themselves to favourable interpretation. A new vista of thought and feeling had opened itself to Yossl.
IN 1648, when Chmyelnicki’s Cossacks slaughtered 40,000 Jews, Miroslav was among the cities that fell into their blood-dripping hands. It was a small town then; the Jewish population did not exceed eight hundred, but these unanimously decided to be slain rather than abandon their faith. Not a man, woman or child was spared. The scene of the slaughter, a small square in the vicinity of Cucumber Market, is sacred ground to the Jews of Miroslav. The Bloody Spot they call it reverently. A synagogue stands there and ten recluses find shelter under its roof, so that the Word of God may be heard with unbroken continuity within its walls. If this house of prayer and divine study were to fall silent for a single minute, say the children of the town, the blood of the slain Jews would burst into a roar of sobbing that could be heard for seven miles.
But the ten recluses were not the only Talmudists in the place. The Old Synagogue, as it was generally called, was the favourite haunt of scholars. It was here where Rabbi Rachmiel, Clara’s father, spent every day and evening in the week except Saturdays and holidays.
It was about eight o’clock of a warm evening, several days after the disappearance of the political prisoner. The Old Synagogue was filled with people. The eveningservice was over. Candles flickered on gaunt, tallow-stained reading-desks and blazing oil-lamps dangled from the ceiling. The recluses were freely gossiping or snoozing; there were so many others to do the holy work—a medley of voices and melodies—from the enthusiastic soprano of the schoolboy to the dignified drone of the elderly merchant; from the conscious, over-elaborate intonation of the newly-married young man to the absorbed murmur of the tattered old scholar. As to the Talmudists themselves, they found stimulating harmony in this chaos. To them it was as if the synagogue itself were singing in a hundred voices, an inspired choir that quickened one’s intellectual passions and poured fire into one’s gesticulations.
One of the younger men in the crowd was Makar. Seated in a snug corner, with his reading-desk tilted against his breast, he was sincerely absorbed in a passage on the slaying of cattle. The treatise is one of the most intricate in the Talmud, and he had taken it up as he might a game of chess. The lower part of his face was buried in the sloping surface of a huge long book, the handle of a tin candlestick hooked to the top of the folio. The flame of a guttering candle threw a stream of light upon his dusky high forehead and heavy black eyebrows. Slightly rocking the desk, he intoned the Chaldaic text and the Yiddish interpretations, listening to his own sing-song as one listens, at some distance, to a familiar voice.
Rabbi Rachmiel, Clara’s father, was studying quietly in a corner, in peaceful ignorance of the mad hunt that was going on for his daughter at this moment. That this red-bearded little man was the father of the Nihilist girl who had brought about his escape Makar had not the least idea.
After bidding Clara good-bye on the evening of his rescue,he had taken the first cab he came across, getting off at Cucumber Market, as directed. After zig-zagging about for five minutes, he was going to hail another cab, but checked himself because the man proved to be the same who had brought him to Cucumber Market. A boy stopped to look at him, whereupon he made up his mind that the official cap which he wore (and which had been expected to give him the appearance of a teacher in a government school for Jews) scarcely went well with his face, and that it must be this cap of his which had attracted the boy’s attention. He therefore went to a capmaker’s shop and bought an ordinary cap, such as is worn by the average old-fashioned Jew, explaining to the artisan that it was for his father, who had his size. This part of the town he knew well, for it was in the centre of the Jewish quarter, not many minutes’ walk from his former lodgings. The Old Synagogue was in the same neighbourhood, and it flashed upon him to seek temporary refuge in the celebrated house of worship and learning. Living in such a place was like hiding in the depths of the Fourth Century—the age of the Talmud, which was still the soul of the Ghetto, still the fountain-head of the spiritual and intellectual life of the orthodox Jew. He would be in his native element there, at any rate, and would certainly feel more comfortable than amid the imposing interiors of a noblewoman’s mansion. On his way to the synagogue he twisted the hair at his temples till he looked as he used to, before he left Zorki. As to his shave, he prepared an explanation: he was subject to a species of skin disease that made shaving unavoidable.
The assistant beadle at the Old Synagogue was a man with a luxurious white beard. He was not learned in the Talmud himself, but he had served in the great “houseof study” so long that he was familiar with the titles of the various volumes and sections in the same way as an old servant at a medical college is familiar with anatomical nomenclature. He danced attendance on every diligent scholar, and was the terror of every boy who romped or talked “words of daily life” over his holy book. He was in charge of the synagogue library and the candle supply. His salary was no larger than that of a street labourer, yet he had the appearance of a stern, prosperous merchant.
When Makar first applied for a book and a candle the assistant beadle cast a knowing look at his smooth-shaven face, and then, handing him the volume, said:
“You are in the army, aren’t you?”
“How do you know, by my shaved face?” Makar asked, sadly.
The assistant beadle smiled assent. The skin-disease story proved unnecessary.
“There is many a Talmudist among soldiers nowadays,” the old man said. “To think of a Child of Law having to live in military bondage, to wear a uniform, to shave and to handle a gun!” He regarded Makar as a martyr. When he saw him reading his book in a pleasing, absorbed sing-song, he paused and watched him with a look of paternal admiration.
“Do you belong here?” he asked later.
“No.” He named the first town that came to his tongue.
“Have you relatives here?”
“No. But I have obtained a furlough and am going home. I am waiting for a letter and some money. I have left my uniform with a friend.”
The assistant beadle asked Makar for news—whetherthere were any rumours of some new war, or of some fresh legislation affecting the condition of Jews. The query was made on the supposition that Makar, as a member of the Czar’s army and one who saw so many officers, could not be unfamiliar with what was going on “up above”; and Makar appeased the old man’s curiosity with some suitable bits of information. The assistant beadle was particularly interested in the story of a certain colonel, a bitter anti-Semite, who used to beat the Jews in his regiment because a Jewish money-lender had him under his thumb. Now this “Jews’ enemy” lay in bed, stricken with paralysis—a clear case of divine reckoning. Did Makar know him? Makar said he did.
The discussion was interrupted by the appearance of a bewigged woman with a pound of candles, in commemoration of the anniversary of a death. She wanted to make sure that they were going to be used for diligent study and not to be thrown away on loafers, and the assistant beadle told her that it would be all right and that she had better go home and put the children to bed. Another woman, whose boy was studying in a corner, was watching his gesticulations with beaming reverence. She had an apple for him and a copper coin for the assistant beadle, and when she saw Makar looking at her son, she said, nodding her head blissfully:
“Praised be the Master of the World. It is not in vain that I am toiling. The boy will be an adornment to my old age.”
Later in the evening a woman burst into the synagogue, lamenting and wringing her hands. She besought the recluses to pray for her newly-married daughter, who was on her death-bed. Makar was deeply touched. He felt like a foreigner amid these scenes that had once been hisown world, and the consciousness of it filled him with melancholy.
He slept at the synagogue. After the service next morning he sent out a boy for some bread, butter and pot cheese, and at two o’clock a devout widow brought him, at the assistant beadle’s recommendation, a pot of soup and boiled meat. He ate his dinner with Talmudistic bashfulness, the woman looking on piously, and mutely praying to heaven that her dinner might agree with the holy man and give him strength for the study of God’s laws.
Toward evening he ventured out on a stroll through the spacious courtyard which lay between the Old Synagogue and several other houses of worship. In this yard was a great octagonal basin, celebrated for its excellent tea water, with moss-grown spouts and chained wooden dippers. He watched the water-bearers with their pails and the girls with their jugs—a scene that seemed to have sprung to life from certain passages in the Talmud—until he came within a hair’s breadth of being recognised by his former landlady.
Rabbi Rachmiel was absent from the synagogue that day. When Makar returned to the house of study he noticed signs of excitement. The recluses and other students were absorbed in whispered, panic-stricken conversation. They dared not discuss the news in groups, some even pretending to be engrossed in their books, as much as to say: “In case it comes to the knowledge of the police that you people are talking about it, I want you to remember that I took no part in your gossip.” The meaning of Clara’s disappearance was not quite clear to them. They knew in a very dim way that there were people, for the most part educated people, who wanted to do away with czars in general, and now it appeared thatRabbi Rachmiel’s daughter was one of those mysterious persons. Those of the Talmudists who knew Clara were trying to imagine her as something weird, preternatural, and when her familiar face came back to them they uttered subdued exclamations of amazement.
When the news reached Makar he wondered whether it would not be advisable for him to decamp at once. But he was so snugly established in his present berth that he was loath to abandon it.
Some of the worshippers who dropped in to read a page or two of an evening would gather in groups, bandying gossip or talking foreign politics, of which, indeed, they had the most grotesque conceptions. Here Makar picked up many a side-splitting story illustrative of the corruption, intemperance and childlike ineptitude of government officials. His attention seized with special eagerness upon a description of the demoralised state of things in the printing shop connected with the governor’s office. There is not an article of merchandise over which the Russian authorities maintain a more rigorous control than they do over type, every pound, almost every letter of it, used in the empire being registered and supposedly kept track of; yet the foreman of that shop often offered some of the Czar’s own supply for sale, and in default of buyers (the licensed private printers of the town being too timid to handle this most dangerous species of stolen goods) he had once molten a large quantity of new type and sold it for scrap lead. Makar could not help picturing the revolutionists in regular communication with this man. Nor did his fancy stop there. Gradually all the typesetters under that foreman would be supplanted by revolutionists, and the Czar’s printing office would print theWill of the People!
Two days elapsed before Rabbi Rachmiel returned. When he did he scarcely spoke to anybody. Naturally a man of few words, he now spent every minute reading his book with ferocious absorption.
The next day was Friday. In the evening the turmoil of Talmudic accents gave way to an ancient chant, at once light-hearted and solemn—the song of welcome to Sabbath the Bride. The brass chandeliers, brightly burnished, were filled with blazing candles. About half of the seats were occupied by worshippers, freshly bathed and most of them in their Sabbath clothes. Rabbi Rachmiel wore a beaming face, “in honour of the Sabbath,” that was plainly the result of effort. As Maker watched him chant his Sabbath-eve psalms, the heart of the escaped Nihilist was contracted with sympathy and something like a sense of guilt.
Meanwhile CountLoris-Melikoffhad abolished the Third Section, transferring the secret service to the Interior Department, and while the change had not displaced the Dandy from office, yet it materially impaired his usefulness to his party.
When Makar returned to St. Petersburg Pavel met him with kisses and hugs and punches. The Janitor, whom he saw the next day, shook his hand heartily.
“It’s all right,” he said, looking Makar over with an amused air.
“What are you smiling at?” Parmet demanded, colouring.
“At you. I can’t get myself to believe it was really you who made such a neat job of it.”
“I!” Makar protested, exultingly. “Any idiot would know how to be arrested. It’s Clara that carried the scheme through.”
“Still, there is better stuff in you than I gave you credit for.”
Makar was quivering to know something of the use that had been made of his arrest, but conspirators ask no questions. Indeed, to try to know as little as possible, to avoid information upon anything except that in which one was personally participating was (or was supposed to be) an iron law of the movement; and now Makar was more jealous of his reputation as a conspirator than ever.
“Well, it’s all right,” the Janitor said, reading his thoughts. “Something has been done and it’s all right; only under the new system it’s rather slow work.”
Makar did not understand. The abolition of the Third Section had taken place while he was in prison. When he heard of the change he said in dismay: “Will that affect my scheme?”
“Your scheme? I don’t think it will,” the Janitor answered mysteriously. “Of course, we’ll first have to see how the new system works. We must do some sounding and watching and studying before we know how to go about things. Can’t you wait a month or two?”
Makar was silent, then his face broke into a roguish smile.
“I will if you get me into an underground printing office for the interval,” he returned.
The Janitor took fire. “What has that got to do with your cursed scheme?” he said with a slight stutter. “As if I had printing jobs to give away!”