“What are you going to do?” asked the lieutenant.
“We’ll pour it over the stuff and set fire to it, your high nobleness.”
“That you can’t do,” the officer returned decisively. “You’ll have to go home now.”
The rioters obeyed at once, many of them taking rolls of silk or velvet along.
THE next morning the Police Master, “in order to avoid bloodshed,” issued a proclamation forbidding Jews to leave their houses. The order was copied from one that had been issued in other riot-ridden towns where, as the Miroslav Police Master knew but too well, it meant that the Jews were prevented from uniting for their self-defence and forced to await the arrival of the mob, each family in its own isolated lodgings. At the same time every soldier of the Jewish faith was called back to barracks, none of their number being included in the patrol, “for fear of embittering the Christian population.”
A peculiar air hung about the city, an air at once of festive idleness and suppressed bustle. It looked as it might on the eve of some great fair. Gentile workmen, staying away from their shops, were parading the streets, many of them shouldering axes, sledge-hammers, bores, chisels—their tools of useful toil to be turned to weapons of demolition and pillage; peasants from neighbouring villages were arriving with sacks, pails, tubs, spades, axes, pitchforks, their waggons otherwise empty and ready to be laden with booty. Among the people in the streets were gangs of trained rioters, come from towns where their work was at an end. The Jews were in their hiding placeswhere they had passed the night. Pavel went about alone, avoiding company, asking himself questions to which his mind had no answer. He was filled with the excitement of a sportsman a few minutes before the beginning of a great race; with mental chaos and anxiety.
At one corner of Cucumber Market a group of peasants took off their coarse straw hats and bowed to two policemen.
“We are only ignorant peasants,” they said. “Will your High Nobleness tell us when his Excellency the Police Master will give the order to start in?”
“There won’t be any order to start in,” answered one of the policemen. “Move along, move along.”
The large market place became white with country people. They were getting restive. Their sacks and tubs were hungry for the goods of “Christ-killers.” Four years ago many of these very people, dressed like soldiers, had been driven to the Balkans by a force known to them as the Czar, to fire at Turks without having the least idea what sort of creatures those people called Turks were or what they had done to be fired at. Now they had come here, in obedience to the same force, to rob and do violence to Jews. Among the out-of-town looters were two tramps who had it whispered about that they were two well-known generals in disguise, personal emissaries of the Emperor sent to direct the attack upon the Jews. These two were soon put in gaol, but that which they personified, the idea that the anti-Jewish riots met with the Czar’s approval, was left at large. It seized upon soldier and civilian alike. People who usually kept at a timid distance from everything in the shape of a uniform, were now bandying jests with army lieutenants and police captains. The question this morning was not whether one wore the Czar’s uniformor citizen’s clothes, but whether one was a Jew or not. An unusual feeling of kinship linked them all together, and the source of that feeling was the consciousness that they were not Jews.
It was about nine o’clock when a large seedy-looking man with a bloated, sodden face, stepped out of a vast crowd on CucumberMarket, and walked jauntily up to a deserted fruit stand. Snatching a handful of hickory nuts, he flung it high in the air, then thrust his two index fingers into his mouth and blew a loud piercing blast, puffing himself up violently as he did so. The sound was echoed by similar sounds in many parts of the crowded market place.
“Hee-ee-eeee!” came from a thousand frantic throats.
A long stick was raised with a battered hat for a flag, a hundred human swarms rushed in all directions, rending the air with their yells, and pandemonium was loose.
There was a scramble for hardware shops, vodka shops and places where Jewish women were said to be secreted. Another few minutes and the streets were streaming with spirits. The air was filled with the odour of alcohol, with the din of broken glass, with the clatter of feet, with the impact of battering rams against doors; and coming through this general clang, thud and crash of destruction, were smothered groans of agony, shrieks of horror and despair, the terror-stricken cry of children, the jeers of triumph and lust. Here a row of shops, their doors burst in, was sending forth a shower of sugar, kerosene, flour, spices, coats, bonnets, wigs, dry goods, crockery, cutlery, toys; there a bevy of men were tearing up the street, piling up the cobble-stones which others were hurling at shop windows. Some men and women were carrying away bucketsful of vodka. Others were bending over casks, scooping out the liquid with their caps, hands or evenboots; others were greedily crouching before barrels, their mouths to the bungholes. Here and there a man leaning over a broken cask was guzzling at its contents in a torpor of drunkenness. One rioter, holding a sealed bottle in his hand and too impatient to look for a corkscrew, smashed its neck against the sidewalk, while another man, by his side, broke two similar bottles against each other, and then cursed the Jews as he licked wine mixed with his own blood off his fingers. Nearby a woman carrying a shoe full of vodka toward a four-year-old boy who was seated on a pile of logs, yelled frantically:
“Here, my darling! Taste it, precious one, so that when you grow up you may say you remember the day when the ill-gotten wealth of Jews was smashed by people of the True Faith.”
Women and children were serving vodka to the soldiers in cans, teapots, saucers, ladles, paper boxes.
Orlovsky mounted a cask and began to shout, wildly:
“Don’t drink too much, boys! Don’t befog your minds! For this is a great historical moment! Only why attack Jews alone? Behold, the Czar is at the head of all the blood-suckers in the land!”
Scarcely anybody listened to him. The crowd was too deeply absorbed in its orgy. His voice was drowned by a thousand other sounds; his flashing eyes and his air-pounding fists were part of a nightmare of brutalised faces, attitudes of greed, gesticulations of primitive humanityrunamuck. Presently, however, a group of belated rowdies came along in search of drink. They stopped in front of Orlovsky, eyeing the cask under his feet hopefully, the appearance of the bung showing that its contents were still intact.
“Who are you, anyhow?” one of them said to thespeaker. “It must be the Jews who sent you here to talk like that to good Christian people.”
“It isn’t true. You’re mistaken, old boy,” Orlovsky answered hoarsely and breathing hard, but with a kindly, familiar smile on his flushed, perspiring face. “I am one of the best friends you and all the people ever had, I mean the good of all of you fellows. What’s the use attacking Jews only, I say. We had better turn upon the authorities, the flunkeys of the Czar——”
“Do you hear what he says?” one of his listeners said, in perplexity, nudging the fellow by his side.
“He wants to get us in trouble, the sly fox that he is,” somebody remarked.
“Sure, he does. And it was by the Jews he was hired to come here. I know what I am talking about,” growled the man who had spoken first. “Down with him, boys!”
“Down with him!” the others echoed, thirstily.
Orlovsky was pulled off and the group of belated rioters, re-enforced by some others, rushed at the cask savagely.
Pavel was in another section of the same street. An old little Jewess whom he saw run out of a gate struck him as the most pathetic figure he had seen that day. Her fright gave her pinched little face something like a pout, an air of childlike resentment, as it were. A Gentile boy snatched off her wig and held it up, jeering to some bystanders, whereupon she covered her gray head with her bony hands, her faith forbidding her to expose her hair, and ran on with the same childlike pout. A sob of pity caught Pavel in the throat. He was about to offer to take her to a place of safety, when an elderly rowdy, apparently provoked by her outlandish anxiety about her bare hair, struck her a vicious blow on the head, accompanying it with profanity.
“Cur!” Pavel shrieked, springing up to him and landing a smart whack in his face.
The rioter looked round with surprise, muttered something and joined the looters.
“Come with me, don’t be afraid of the scoundrels,” Pavel said, taking her by the hand. His heart was melting with pity for all the Jews at this moment. He felt a rush of yearning tenderness for Clara, and he wished she could see him taking care of this woman of her race.
When he saw two marauders hand out gold and silver watches—the spoils of a raid—to the patrol, his blood was up again.
“Is that what you are here for, thieves, vermin that you are?” he shouted.
“Who is that fellow? Run him in!” somebody said.
He fought desperately, cursing the authorities and calling to the mob to turn upon the soldiers, but he was overpowered and carried away half dead. When his identity was discovered at Police Headquarters, it caused a panic among the officials of the place. He was reverently placed in a carriage and taken to the Palace.
The Defence Guard gave the rioters fight in two places, and a desperate encounter it was, but it was not to last long. Troops fell upon them, beat them with the butts of their rifles and hurled execrations at them for violating the police ordinance. Every Jew who was armed and every Jew who looked educated, Elkin among them, was arrested. The others were driven indoors. Vladimir was brought to police headquarters unconscious, with blood gushing from his head.
When the first stack of bedding was pitched out on the sidewalk at NicholasStreet, from a residence over a tobacco shop, a man with watery eyes and a beautiful Great-Russianbeard, one of the leaders, selected a big, plump, tempting feather-bed, and opened his pocket-knife with dignified deliberation. A crowd of about one thousand stood about in breathless silence, as though attending a religious ceremony of great solemnity. In order to prolong the spell, the man with the golden beard played with the feather-bed awhile, kneading, patting, punching it, brandishing his knife over it, like a barbaric high priest performing some mystic rite over a captive about to be sacrificed. Then, grasping it with sudden ferocity, his teeth a-glitter amid his enormous whiskers, his watery eyes flashing murder, he cut a quick, long gash, rent the pillow-case apart and hurled its snow-white entrails to the breeze.
“Hurrah! Hurrah!” the mob yelled savagely, as the breeze seized the down and flung it in a thousand directions. “Hurrah! Hurrah!”
The other feather-beds and pillows were ripped up, disemboweled and emptied by some of the other rioters. The summer-baked street seemed to be in the grasp of a snow-storm.
It is one of the characteristics of the housewife of the Ghetto that she will put up with a poor meal rather than with an uncomfortable bed. The destruction of pillows and featherbeds is therefore the most typical scene of anti-Semitic riots in Russia. An Anglo-Saxon crowd viewing a prize-fight is not thrilled more deeply at sight of “first-blood” than were the rioters of Miroslav at sight of the first cloud of Jewish down. Now the outbreak was in full swing. Some of the men came out in fashionable clothes, their pockets bulging with plunder. The same work of devastation and pillage was going on in many places at once. About ten thousand raiders, most of them covered with down, were skirmishing about in groups offifty to one hundred, preceded by one or two leaders and accompanied, in some cases, with a band of toy-drums and whistles. They went from street to street reconnoitering for houses or shops that had not yet been visited. Now it looked like a real anti-Jewish riot. Hurrah! Hurrah!
After the pillows came the furniture and other household goods, every bit of it either shivered to flinders or carried off. While some were busy smashing things or throwing them out of the windows, others were stripping off their own clothes and arraying themselves in the best coats, trousers, dresses, bonnets, the raided houses contained. A frowzy drunken scrub-woman emerged in a gorgeous ball dress, a costly fur cap on her head, with two gold watches dangling from her neck. One of these gangs was led by a man who wore a woman’s jacket of brown plush and a high hat. Another leader was decked out in a fashionable summer suit and a new straw hat, but his feet were bare and encrusted with dirt. A third gang was preceded by a flag consisting of the torn skirt of an outraged Jewish woman, the flag-bearer celebrating the exploit as he marched along.
Following the looters were dense crowds of spectators, many of them well dressed and with the stamp of education and refinement on their faces. These included some well known families, members of the aristocracy, who watched the scenes of the day from their fashionable equipages. Officials, merchants, people of the middle class were out in their best clothes. Miroslav made a great gala day of it. The aristocracy was in a complacent, race-track mood. Occupants of carriages were exchanging greetings and pleasantries. Cavaliers were interpreting to their ladies the bedlam of sound, odour and colour. The appearance of a drunken jade in a ball dress, strutting with her arms akimbo, in besotted imitation of a lady, brought forth bursts offacetious applause. The well-dressed spectators tried to steer clear of down and feathers, but that was almost impossible. Many streets were so thickly covered with it that it deadened the sound of traffic. But then to catch some of the Jewish down on one’s dress or bonnet or coat was part of the carnival. Where the street was strewn with jewelry, silverware or knicknacks, costly carpets, fabrics, many a noblewoman scanned the ground with the haze of temptation in her eye. “Isn’t that cameo perfectly lovely!” And in many, many instances the cameo, or the silver tray, or the piece of tapestry found its way into the lady’s carriage. This was during the early stage of the riot. Later on, when all restraint had been cast off, phaetons with crests on their sides were filled with plunder. The lame princess took home one carriage-load and hurried back for more. At every turn one saw a cavalier offering his lady some piece of finery as he might a rose or a carnation, and in most cases it was accepted, on the cogent ground that if left on the pavement it would be destroyed. On the other hand many of the rioters themselves disdained to appropriate anything that was not theirs. Very often when a Jew offered his assailants all the money he had about him as a ransom the paper money was torn to pieces and silver or coppers was flung out into the street, whereupon the crowd outside would fall over each other in a wild scramble for shreds of the paper or the metal. In one place a man offered the mob all he had in the world as a ransom for his daughter’s honour, but his money was destroyed, his daughter assaulted and he himself mortally wounded. When a peasant woman was seen carrying an armful of linen and ribbons out of a small shop, she was stopped by one of the rioters.
“Drop that, you old hag,” he shouted. “We are norobbers, are we?” He added a torrent of unprintable Russian and kicked the woman into a swamp of syrup, whisky and flour. A short distance from this spot other peasant women were stuffing their sacks lustily, whereupon some of them preferred loud linen to black silk and cheap spoons to silver ones. In several places large sums of money were plundered. As the bank and check system was (and still is) in its very infancy in Miroslav, this meant in most cases that people of means were literally reduced to beggary. One family was saved from personal violence as well as from the loss of its fortune by an iron safe which the looters spent the whole day in vainly trying to open. But then, while they were at work on the safe, the mother of the family went insane with fright.
Marching side by side with the leaders of the various bands were the competitors of Jewish tradesmen or mechanics who acted as guides, each pointing out the stores or workshops of his rivals. Thus Rasgadayeff, after instructing his wife and servants to see to it that no harm was done to his tenants, the Vigdoroffs, had gone to the scene of the outbreak, where he directed a crowd of rowdies to the store of his most formidable business opponent. The place was raided. A wealth of costly furs was cut to pieces and flung into the street, where cans of kerosene and pails of tar were emptied over the pile, while more than half as much again was carried off intact.
“Boys, no stealing,” Rasgadayeff said, in a drunken gibberish, when it was too late. All he could save from themaraudersfor the slashers was a sable muff over which two women rioters were fighting desperately.
In the meantime Rasgadayeff’s tenants and the people who sought shelter in their house,—the family of Clara’s sister and the two or three strangers—had had a narrowescape from coming face to face with an infuriated band of hoodlums. Their presence had been indicated by a Gentile woman across the street. Mme. Rasgadayeff had tearfully begged the rioters to desist and after some parleying it had been agreed that the Vigdoroffs and their guests should be allowed to escape to their landlord’s apartments before the mob invaded their rooms. From an attic window commanding the street Vladimir’s parents then saw their household effects and their celebrated library—the accumulations of thirty years—flung out on the pavement where it was hacked, torn, slashed, trampled upon, flooded with water, mixed with a stream of preserves, brine, kerosene, vinegar, until the contents of eight rooms and cellar, all that for the past thirty years had been their home, were turned into two mounds of pulp. The Vigdoroffs watched it all with a peculiar sense of remoteness, with a sort of lethargic indifference. When old Vigdoroff saw the rioters struggling with the locked drawer of his desk, he remarked to his wife:
“Idiots! Why don’t they knock out the bottom?” When one of the mob hurt his fingers trying to rend an old parchment-bound folio, he emitted a mock sigh, quoting the Yiddish proverb: “Too much hurry brings nothing but evil.” Only when Clara’s little niece began to shake and cry in a paroxysm of childish anguish, upon seeing her doll in the hands of a little girl from across the street, did the whole family burst into tears.
“I’m going to kill them. Let them kill me!” the old man said, leaping to his feet. But his wife and daughters hung to him, and held him back.
Later on, when the rioters had gone, the family returned to their nest. The eight rooms were absolutely empty, as though their occupants had moved out.
Gradually the various bands of rioters got into the swing of their work and did it with the system and method of an established trade. First the pavement was torn up, the cobblestones being piled up and then crashed into the windows; the padlocks were then knocked off by means of crowbars,hammersor axes and the doors battered down or broken in. Next the contents of pillows were cast to the wind, after which, the street having thus received its baptism of Jewish down, the real business of the rioters was begun by the wreckers and the looters. If the shop raided was a clothier’s and the freebooters had not yet prinked themselves they would do so to begin with, some of them returning to the streets in two pairs of trousers, two coats and even two hats. After a house or a shop had been gutted and its contents wrecked or plundered it would be left to children who would then proceed to play riot on its ruins. Here and there a committee followed in the wake of some band, ascertaining whether some Jewish dwelling or shop had not been passed over, or whether a roll of woollen or a piece of furniture had not been left undestroyed. Not a chair, not a pound of candles was allowed to remain unshattered. Kerosene was poured over sugar, honey was mixed with varnish, ink or milk. It was hard, slow work, this slashing and rending, smashing and grinding. Some raiders toiled over a single article till they panted for breath. A common sight was a man or a woman tearing at a piece of stuff with broken finger-nails and bleeding fingers, accompanying their efforts with volleys of profanity at the expense of the Jews whose wares seemed as hard to destroy as their owners. In one place the mob was blaspheming demoniacally because a heap of ground pepper from a wrecked grocery store had thrown them into a convulsion of sneezing.
The most hideous delirium of brutality was visited upon Paradise,—upon that district of narrow streets and lanes in the vicinity of Cucumber Market which was the seat of the hardest toil and the blackest need, the home of the poorest mechanics, labourers and tradesmen. As though enraged by the dearth of things worth destroying, the rioters in this section took it out of the Jews in the most bestial forms of cruelty and fiendishness their besotted minds could invent. The debris here was made up of the cheapest articles of furniture and mechanics’ tools. It was here that several Jewish women were dragged out into the street and victimised, while drunken women and children aided their husbands and fathers in their crimes. One woman was caught running through a gale of feathers and down, her child clasped in her arms. Another woman was chuckling aloud in a fit of insanity, as she passed through the district in a cab, when she was pulled off the vehicle. A good-looking girl tried to elude the rioters by disguising herself as a man, but she was recognised and the only thing that saved her was a savage fight among her assailants. A middle-aged woman came out of a house with shrieks of horror, imploring an intoxicated army officer to go to the rescue of her daughter. The officer followed her indoors, but instead of rescuing the younger woman the only thing that saved her own honour was his drunken condition. One woman who broke away from two invaders and was about to jump out of her window, was driven back at the point of the bayonet by one of the soldiers in front of the house.
“We are under orders not to allow any Jews to get out,” he explained to her, good-naturedly.
“Take pity, oh, do take pity,” she was pleading, when her voice was choked off by somebody within.
Every synagogue in town was sacked, the holy ark in many cases being desecrated in the most revolting manner; while the Scrolls of the Law were everywhere cut to ribbons, some of which were wound around cats and dogs. One woman met her awful fate upon scrolls from the Old Synagogue at the hands of a ruffian who had once heard it said that that was the way Titus, the Roman emperor, desecrated the Temple upon taking Jerusalem. Two strong Jews who risked their lives in an attempt to rescue some of the scrolls were seen running through the streets, their precious and rather heavy burden hugged to their hearts. The mob gave chase.
“‘Hear, O Israel!’” one of the two men shrieked, “‘God is God. God is one.’”
But the verse, which will keep evil spirits at a respectful distance from every Jew who utters it, failed to exercise its powers on the rioters. The two men were overtaken and beaten black and blue and the scrolls were cut to pieces.
A white-haired musician, venturing out of his hiding place, begged the mob to spare his violin which he said was older than he; whereupon the instrument was shattered against the old man’s head. On another street in the same section of the city another Jewish fiddler was made to play while his tormentors danced, and when they had finished he had to break the violin with his own hands. Pillows were wrenched from under invalids to be ripped up and thrown into the street. In one tailoring shop a consumptive old man, too feeble to be moved, was found with a bottle of milk in his trembling hands, his only food until his children should find it safe to crawl back to the house.
“You have drunk enough of our milk, you scabbyChrist-killer!” yelled a rioter as he knocked the bottle out of the tailor’s hand and hit his head with a flat-iron.
Little Market in front of Boyko’s Court, the home of Clara’s father and mother, glistened with puddles of vodka, in which cats and dogs, overcome by the alcoholic evaporations, lay dead or half-dead. Now and then a drunken rioter would crouch before one of these puddles, dip up a handful of the muddy stuff with his hands and gulp it thirstily, with an inebriate smile of apology to the bystanders. The corner of a lane nearby was piled with brass dust and with broken candle-stick moulds. A horse trough in the rear of the police booth was full of yolks and egg-shells. When the goose market next door to Boyko’s Court was raided some of the fowls were stabbed or had their necks wrung on the spot, while others were driven into the vodka ponds on the square. A hundred geese and ducks went splashing through the intoxicating liquid, fluttering and cackling. A number of rioters formed a cordon preventing them from waddling out and then fell to stabbing them with knives and pitchforks, till every pool of vodka was red.
“Jewish geese, curse them! Jewish geese, curse them!” they snarled.
Not very far off, hard by a wall, a Jewish woman was giving birth to a child. Presently a Gentile woman with a basket half filled with loot took pity on the child and took it home, giving the policeman her address, while the mother was left bleeding to death.
It was also in this district of toil and squalor where the most desperate fighting was done by the Jews. One lane was held by five of them against a mob of fifty for more than half an hour until the five men were lugged off to jail, and then the remaining inhabitants of the lane becamethe victims of the most atrocious vengeance in the history of the day. A mother defended a garret against a crowd of rioters by brandishing a heavy crowbar in front of them. The maddened Gentiles then scaled the wall and charged the roof with axes and sledge-hammers. Part of the roof gave way. The woman continued to swing the crowbar until she fell in a swoon.
The houses of the richest Jews were closely guarded by the soldiery and, barring one exception, rioters were kept at a safe distance from them. Even the house of Ginsburg, the most repugnant usurer in town, was taken care of. Some army officers, indeed, directed various bands of roughs to the place on the chance of having their promissory notes destroyed, but the roughs failed to get near it. There was an instinct in official circles that the wrecking of wealthy Jewish homes was apt to develop in the masses a taste for playing havoc with “seats of the mighty.” For after all a man like Ginsburg and a titled plunderer of peasant lands are not without their bonds of affinity. The great point was that in dealing with Jewish magnates Popular Fury was liable to confuse the Jew with the magnate, the question of race with the question of class.
As to the Gentile magnates their attitude toward the rioters was one which seemed to say: “You fellows and we are brothers, are we not?” And their mansions were safe. Members of the gentry openly joined the rioters, some out of sheer hatred of the race, others for the sport of the thing, still others honestly succumbing to the contagion of beastliness. In the horrid saturnalia of pillage, destruction and rapine many a peaceful citizen was drawn into the vortex. A man stands looking on curiously, perhaps even with some horror, and gradually he becomesrestless as do the legs of a dancer when the floor creaks under a medley of sliding feet. But then there was a large number of Gentiles who acted like human beings. Among these were members of the priesthood, although there were holy “little fathers” who pointed out the houses of their Jewish neighbours to the mob.
The best friend of the Jews during that day of horrors was Vodka. The sons of Israel were made a safety valve of by the government and Vodka rendered a similar service to the sons of Israel. It saved scores of lives and the honour of scores of women. Hundreds of the fiercest rioters were so many tottering wrecks before the atrocities were three hours old, while by sundown the number of dead and wounded looters was as large as the number of murdered and maimed Jews. Two men were found drowned in casks of spirits into which they had apparently let their heads sink in a daze of intoxication. A handsome young rioter in a crimson blouse staggered over the balustrade of a balcony, hugging a Jewish vase, and was killed on the spot. One man was killed in a struggle over a Jewish woman and several others had simply drunk themselves to death, while a countless number were bruised and disabled in the general mêlée, falling, fighting, injuring themselves with their own weapons of destruction.
Toward evening some of the streets had the appearance of a battlefield after action. Hundreds of men and women, swollen, bleeding, were wallowing in the gutters, in puddles, on the sidewalks, between piles of debris, in a revoltingstuporof inebriety. Some of them slept several hours in this condition and then struggled to their feet to resume drinking. The trained rioters had thoughtfully seen to it that some casks of vodka, as also someaccordions, should be reserved for the closing scenes of the bacchanalia.
The moon came out. Her soft mysterious light streamed through the rugged holes of shattered unlit windows; over muddy pavements carpeted with silks, velvets, satins; over rows and rows of debris-mounds on streets snowed under with down; over peasants driving home with waggons laden with plunder; over the ghastly figures of sprawling drunkards and the beautiful uniforms of patrolling hussars. Silence had settled over most of the streets. For blocks and blocks, east and west, north and south, there was not an unbroken window pane to be seen, not a light to glitter in the distance. The Jewish district, the liveliest district in town, had been turned into a “city of death.” In other places one often saw a single illuminated house on a whole street of darkness and ruin. The illuminated house was invariably the abode of Christians. Officers on horseback were moving about musingly, the hoofs of their horses silenced by thick layers of down. Most streets were impassable for the debris. Here and there the jaded sounds of revelry were heard, but there were some peasants who had come out of the day’s rioting in full control of their voices.
Seated on empty boxes and barrels, their fingers gripping new accordions, their eyes raised to the moon, a company of rioters on Little Market were playing and singing a melancholy, doleful tune. The Jews were in their hiding places.
CLARA was with her parents in a White-Russian town. The inn at which they were stopping was entered through a vast yard, partly occupied by fruit-barns. It was the height of the fruit season. The barns and part of the yard were lined with straw upon which rose great heaps of apples and pears of all sizes and colours. Applewomen, armed with baskets, were coming and going, squatting by the juicy mounds, sampling them, haggling, quarrelling mildly. Now and then a peasant waggon laden with fruit would come creaking through the open gate, attracting general attention. A secluded corner of the yard was Clara’s and her mother’s favourite spot for their interminable confidences, a pile of large bulky logs serving them as a sofa. The people they saw here and in the streets were much shabbier and more insignificant-looking than those of their native town and the south in general. The Yavners lived here unregistered, as did most of the guests at the inn, the local police being too lazy and too “friendly” with the proprietor to trouble his patrons about having their passports vised at the station house.
The town was a stronghold of Talmudic learning, and Rabbi Rachmiel felt as a passionate art student does on his first visit to Italy. When the first excitement of themeeting was over the local scholars were of more interest to him than his daughter. His joy was marred by his fear of being sent to Siberia in case Clara’s (to her parents she was still Tamara) identity was discovered by the local police; but he had a rather muddled idea of the situation and his wife assured him that there was no danger. As to Hannah, she was not the woman to flee from her daughter for fear of the police. She could not see enough of Clara. She catechised her on her political career and her personal life, and Clara, completely under the spell of the meeting and in her mother’s power, told her more than she had a mind to. What she told her was, indeed, as foreign to Hannah’s brain as it was to her husband’s; but then, in her practical old-fashioned way, she realised that her daughter was working in the interests of the poor and the oppressed, though she never listened to Clara’s expositions without a sad, patronising smile.
One day, during one of their intimate talks on the wood-pile, the old woman demanded:
“Tell me, Clara, are you married?”
“What has put such an idea in your mind?” Clara returned, reddening. “If I were I would have told you long ago.”
“Tamara, you are a married woman,” Hannah insisted, looking hard at her daughter.
“I tell you I am not,” Clara said testily.
“Then why did you get red in the face when I said you were? People don’t get red without reason, do they?”
The young woman’s will power seemed to have completely deserted her. “I am engaged,” she said, “but I am not married, and—let me alone, mamma, will you?”
“If you are engaged, then why were you afraid to say so? Is it anything to be ashamed of to be engaged? Foolishgirl that you are, am I a stranger to you? Why don’t you tell me who he is, what he is?”
“He is a nice man and that’s all I can tell you now, and pray don’t ask me any more questions, mamma darling.”
After a pause the old woman gave her daughter a sharp look and said in a whisper: “He must be a Christian, then. Else you wouldn’t be afraid to tell me who he is.”
“He is not,” Clara answered lamely, her eyes on a heap of yellow apples in the distance.
“Heisa Christian, then,” Hannah said in consternation. “May the blackest ill-luck strike you both.”
“Don’t! Don’t!” Clara entreated her, clapping her hand over her mother’s mouth, childishly.
“What! Youaregoing to marry a Christian? Youarea convert-Jewess?” Hannah said in a ghastly whisper.
“No, no, mamma! I have not become a Christian, and I never will. I swear I won’t. As to him, he is the best man in the world. That’s all I can tell you for the present. Oh, the young generation is so different from the old, mamma!” she snuggled to her, nursing her cheek against hers and finding intense pleasure in a conscious imitation of the ways of her own childhood; but she was soon repulsed.
“Away from my eyes! May the Black Year understand you. I don’t,” the old woman said. Her face wore an expression of horrified curiosity. Had Clara faced her fury with a pugnacious front, it might have led to an irretrievable rupture; but she did not. While her mother continued to curse, she went on fawning and pleading with filial self-abasement, although not without an effect of trying tosoothean angry baby. Hannah’s curses were an accompaniment to further interrogationsand gradually became few and far between. Her daughter’s engagement and her whole mysterious life appealed to an old-fashioned sense of romance and adventure in the elderly Jewess; also to a vague idea of a higher altruism. Her motherly pride sought satisfaction in the fact that her daughter was so kind-hearted as to stake her life for the poor and the suffering, and so plucky that she braved the Czar and all his soldiers. “It’s from me she got all that benevolence and grit,” Hannah said to herself. As to Rabbi Rachmiel, he asked no questions and his wife was not going to disturb his peace of mind.
“There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile among us,” Clara said in the course of her plea.
“No, there is not,” her mother returned. “Only the Gentiles tear the Jews to pieces.” And at this Clara remembered that circumstance which lay like a revolting blemish on her conscience—the attitude of the revolutionists toward the riots.
However, these matters got but little consideration from her now. She was taken up with her parents. The peculiar intonation with which her father chanted grace interested her more than all the “politics” of the world. She recognised these trifles with little thrills of joy, as though she had been away from home a quarter of a century. When her mother took out a pair of brass-rimmed spectacles on making ready to read her prayers, Clara exclaimed, with a gasp of unfeigned anguish:
“Spectacles! Since when, mamma darling, since when?”
“Since about six months ago. One gets older, foolish girl, not younger. When you are of my age you’ll have to use spectacles, too, all your Gentile wisdom notwithstanding.”
Another day or two and her communions with her mother and the odour of apples and pears began to pall on her. She missed Pavel. Her mind was more frequently given over to musings upon that atmosphere amid which he and she were a pair of lovers than to the fascination of being with her father and mother again. She felt the centuries that divided her world from theirs more keenly every day. Once, after a long muse by the side of her mother, who sat darning stockings in her spectacles, she roused herself, with surprise, to the fact that Sophia was no more, that she had been hanged. It seemed incredible. And then it seemed incredible that she, Clara, was by her mother’s side at this moment. She took solitary walks, she sought seclusion indoors, she was growing fidgety. The change that had come over her was not lost upon her mother.
“You have been rather quick to get tired of your father and mother, haven’t you?” Hannah said to her one day. “Grieving for your Christian fellow? A break into your bones, Tamara!”
Clara blushed all over her face. She was more than grieving for Pavel. She pictured him in the hands of the gendarmes or shot in a desperate fray with them; she imagined him the victim of the ghastliest catastrophes known to the movement, her heart was torn by the wildest misgivings.
One afternoon, when her mother was speaking to her and she was making feeble efforts to disguise her abstraction, Hannah, losing patience, flamed out:
“But what’s the use talking to a woman whose mind has been bedeviled by a Gentile!”
“Don’t, then,” Clara snapped back, with great irritation.
“The Black Year has asked you to arrange this meeting. Why don’t you go back to your Gentile? Go at once to him or your heart will burst.”
Clara was cut to the quick, but she mastered herself.
When she read in the newspapers and in a letter from her sister accounts of the Miroslav outbreak, her agony was far keener than that of her father and mother. The most conspicuous circumstance in every report of the riot was the bestial ferocity with which the mob had let itself loose on the homes of the poorest and hardest working population in those districts of Miroslav known as Paradise and Cucumber Market. She knew that neighbourhood as she knew herself. She had been born and bred in it. The dearest scenes of her childhood were there. Tears of homesickness and of a sense of guilt were choking her.
For the first time it came home to her that these thousands of Jewish tailors, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, lumber-drivers, capmakers, coopers, labourers, who toiled from fourteen to fifteen hours a day and lived literally on the verge of starvation, were as much at least entitled to that hallowed name, “The People,” as the demonised Russians who were now committing those unspeakable atrocities upon them. Yet the organ of her party had not a word of sympathy for them! Nay, it treated all Jews, without distinction, as a race of fleecers, of human leeches! Russian literature of the period was teeming with “fists,” or village usurers, types of the great Russian provinces in which Jews were not allowed to dwell. Drunkenness in these districts was far worse than in those in which the liquor traffic was in Jewish hands. And the nobility—was it not a caste of spongers and land-robbers? Yet who would dare call the entire Russian people a people ofhuman sharks, liquor-dealers and usurers, as it was customary to do in the case of the Jews? A Russian peasant or labourer was part of the People, while a Jewish tailor, blacksmith or carpenter was only a Jew, one of a race of profit-mongers, sharpers, parasites.
And this “People,” for whose sake she was staking her liberty and her life, was wreaking havoc on Jews because they were Jews like her father, like her mother, like herself.
People at the inn were talking of the large numbers of Jews that were going to America. “America or Palestine?” was the great subject of discussion in the three Russian weeklies dedicated to Jewish interests. One day Hannah said,gravely:
“I tell you what, Tamara. Drop your Gentile and the foolish work you are doing and let us all go to America.”
Clara smiled.
“Will it be better if you are caught and put in a black hole?”
Clara smiled again. There was temptation in what her mother said. Being in Russia she was liable to be arrested at any moment; almost sure to perish in a solitary cell or to be transported to the Siberian mines for twenty years. And were not the riots enough to acquit her before her own conscience in case she chose to retire from a movement that was primarily dedicated to the interests of an anti-Semitic people; from a movement that rejoiced in the rioters and had not a word of sympathy for their victims?
But an excuse for getting out of the perils of underground life was not what she wanted. Rather did she wish for a vindication of her conduct in remaining in the Party of the Will of the People in spite of all “thePeople” did against her race. She was under the sway of two forces, each of them far mightier than any temptation to be free from danger. One of these two forces was Pavel. The other was Public Opinion—the public opinion of underground Russia. According to the moral standard of that Russia every one who did not share in the hazards of the revolutionary movement was a “careerist,” a self-seeker absorbed exclusively in the feathering of his own nest; the Jew who took the special interests of his race specially to heart was a narrow-minded nationalist, and the Nihilist who withdrew from the movement was a renegade. The power which this “underground” public opinion exerted over her was all the greater because of the close ties of affection which, owing to the community of the dangers they faced, bound the active revolutionists to each other. Pavel and Clara were linked by the bonds of love, but she would have staked her life for every other member of the inner circle as readily as she would for him.
They were all particularly dear to her because they were a handful of survivors of an epidemic of arrests that had swept away so many of their prominent comrades. The notion of these people thinking of her as a renegade was too horrible to be indulged in for a single moment. Besides, who would have had the heart to desert the party now that its ranks had been so decimated and each member was of so much value? Still more revolting was such an idea to Clara when she thought of the Nihilists who had died on the scaffold or were dying of consumption or scurvy or going insane in solitary confinement. Sophia, strangled on the gallows, was in her grave. Would she, Clara, abandon the cause to which that noble woman had given her life?
The long and short of it is that it would have requiredfar more courage on her part to go to America and be safe from the Russian gendarmes than to live under constant fire as an active “illegal” in her native country.
This was the kind of thoughts that were occupying her mind at this minute. While her mother was urging her to go to America, she exclaimed mutely: “No, Sophia, I shan’t desert the cause for which they have strangled you. I, too, will die for it.” It seemed easy and the height of happiness to end one’s life as Sophia had done. She saw her dead friend vividly, and as her mind scanned the mysterious, far-away image, the dear, familiar image, her bosom began to heave and her hand clutched her mother’s arm in a paroxysm of suppressed tears.
“Water! Water!” Hannah cried into the open doorway. When the water had been brought and Clara had gulped down a mouthful of it and fixed a faint, wistful smile on her mother, Hannah remarked fiercely:
“The ghost knows what she is thinking of while people talk to her.”
Clara went out for a long walk over the old macadamised road that ran through the White-Russian town on its way to St. Petersburg. She loved to watch the peasant wagons, and, early in the morning and late in the evening, the incoming and outgoing stage-coaches. She knew that she was going to stay in the thick of the struggle, come what might. Yet the riots—more definitely the one of Miroslav—lay like a ruthless living reproach in her heart. She wanted to be alone with this Reproach, to plead with it, to argue with it, to pick it to pieces. She walked through the shabby, narrow streets and along the St. Petersburg highway, thinking a thousand thoughts, but she neither pleaded with that Reproach, nor argued with it, nor tried to pick it to pieces. Her mind was full of Pavel and ofSophia and of her other comrades, living or dead. “It is all very well for me to think of going to America and be free from danger,” she said to herself. “But can Sophia go there? or Hessia?”
At one moment it flashed through her brain that to be true to the people was to work for it in spite of all its injustices, even as a mother did for her child, notwithstanding all the cruelties it might heap on her. The highest bliss of martyrdom was to be mobbed by the very crowd for whose welfare you sacrificed yourself. To be sure, these thoughts were merely a reassertion of the conflict which she sought to settle. They offered no answer to the question, Why should she, a Jewess, stake her life for a people that was given to pillaging and outraging, to mutilating and murdering innocent Jews? They merely made a new statement of the fact that she was bent upon doing so. Yet she seized upon the new formulation of the problem as if it were the solution she was craving for. “I shall bear the cross of the Social Revolution even if the Russian people trample upon me and everybody who is dear to me,” she exclaimed in her heart, feeling at peace with the shade of Sophia.
She walked home in a peculiar state of religious beatitude, as though she had made a great discovery, found a golden key to the gravest problem of her personal life. Then, being in this uplifted frame of mind, she saw light breaking about her. Arguments were offering themselves in support of her position. When Russia was free and the reign of fraternity and equality had been established the maltreatment of man by man in any form would be impossible. Surely there would be no question of race or faith then. Anti-Jewish riots were now raging? All the more reason, then, to work for Russia’s liberty. Indeed, was notthe condition of the Jews better in free countries than in despotic ones? And the Russian peasant, would he in his blind fury run amuck the way he did if it were not for the misery and darkness in which he was kept by his tyrants? Her heart went out to the mob that was so ignorant as to attack people who had done them no harm. And then, once the great Reproach had been appeased in her mind, the entire Jewish question, riots, legal discriminations and all, appeared a mere trifle compared to the great Human Question, the solution of which constituted the chief problem of her cause.
The next time her mother indulged in an attack upon Gentiles in general and Clara’s “Gentile friends” in particular the young woman begged her, with tears in her voice, to desist:
“Look at her! I have touched the honour of the Impurity,” the old woman said, sneering.
“Oh, they are not the Impurity, mamma darling,” Clara returned ardently. “They are saints; they live and die for the happiness of others. If you only knew what kind of people they were!”
“She has actually been bedeviled, as true as I am a daughter of Israel. Jews are being torn to pieces by the Gentiles; a Jew isn’t allowed to breathe, yet she——”
“Oh, they are a different kind of Gentiles, mamma. When that for which they struggle has been realised the Jew will breathe freely. Our people have no trouble in a country like England. Why? Because the whole country has more freedom there. Besides, when the demands of my ‘Gentile friends’ have been realised the Christian mobs won’t be so uneducated, so blind. They will know who is who, and Jew and Gentile will live in peace. All will live in peace, like brothers, mamma.”
Hannah listened attentively, so that Clara, elated by the apparent effect of her plea, went on, going over aloud the answer that she gave her own conscience. When she paused, however, Hannah said with a shrug of her shoulders and a mournful nod of her head:
“So you are bound to rot away in prison, aren’t you?”
“Don’t talk like that, mamma, dear, pray.”
“Why shouldn’t I? Has somebody else given birth to you? Has somebody else brought you up?”
“But why should you make yourself uneasy about me? Iwon’trot away in prison, and if I do, better people than I have met with a fate of that kind. I wish I were as good as they were and died as they did.”
“A rather peculiar taste,” Hannah said with another shrug which seemed to add: “She has gone clear daft on those Gentile books of hers, as true as I live.”
Clara remained in the White-Russian town two days longer than her parents. At the moment of parting her mother clung to her desperately.
“Will I ever see you again?” Hannah sobbed. “Daughter mine, daughter mine! Will my eyes ever see you again?”
The old Talmudist was weeping into a blue bandanna.
As Clara walked back to her lodging alone the streets of the strange town gave her an excruciating sense of desolation.
A MONTH had elapsed. Clara was in a train, bound for Moscow, where her lover was awaiting her arrival. The nearer she drew to her destination the more vivid grew his features in her mind and the more violent was her fidget. “I am madly in love with him,” she said to herself, and the very sound of these words in her mind were sweet to her. The few weeks of separation seemed to have convinced her that the power of his love over her was far greater than she had supposed. Things that had preyed upon her mind before now glanced off her imagination. She wept over the fate of Hessia and her prison-born child, yet she felt that if Pavel asked her to marry him at once she would not have the strength to resist him. Nay, to marry him was what her heart coveted above all else in the world.
Being an “illegal,” she had to slip into the big ancient city quietly. As she passed through the streets, alone on a droshky, she made a mental note of the difference in general pictorial effect between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but she was too excited to give her mind to anything in particular.
Her first meeting with Pavel took place in a large café, built something like a theatre, with two tiers of stalls, a gigantic music box sending up great waves of subduedsound from the main floor below. He waited for her in front of the building. When she came they just shook hands smilingly, and he led the way up one flight of stairs to one of the stalls—a fair-sized, oblong private room, its walls covered with red plush, with upholstered benching to match.
“I am simply crazy, Clanya!” he whispered, pressing her to him tremulously.
At first they both experienced a sense of desuetude and awkwardness, so that in spite of his stormy demonstrations he could not look her full in the face. But this soon wore off. They were overflowing with joy in one another.
A waiter, all in white, suave and hearty as only Great-Russian waiters know how to be, brought in “a portion of tea,” served in attractive teapots of silver, with a glass for the man and a cup for the lady, and retired, shutting the door behind him, which subdued the metallic melody that filled the room still further and added to the sense of mystery that came from it. They talked desultorily and brokenly, of her parents and of the revolutionists gathered in Moscow. The subject of the Miroslav riot was tactfully broached by Clara herself, but she strove to give this part of their incoherent conversation the tone in which people usually discuss some sad but long-forgotten event, and she passed to some other topic as quickly and imperceptibly as she could. That he had seen that riot he did not tell her, though he once caught himself on the point of blurting it all out.
When she asked him about the general state of the movement he gradually warmed up. The outlook was brilliant, he said.
Urie, the tall blond nobleman with the strikingly Great-Russian features, who had played the part of cheesemongeron Little GardenStreet, St. Petersburg, was in Moscow now, mending the shattered organisation. He was the centre of a busy group of revolutionists, Jews as well as Slavs. Several well-known veterans of both nationalities, who had been living in foreign countries during the past year or two, were expected to return to Russia. Everybody was bubbling with enthusiasm and activity.
“And your fiery imagination is not inclined to view things in a rather roseate light, is it?” she asked, beaming amorously.
“Not a bit,” he replied irascibly. “Wait till you have seen it all for yourself. The reports from the provinces are all of the most cheerful character. New men are springing up everywhere. The revolutionisa hydra-headed giant, Clanya.”
“But who says it isn’t?” she asked, with a laugh.
She got up, shot out her arms, saying:
“Now for something to do. I feel like turning mountains upside down. Indeed, the revolution is a hydra-headed giant, indeed it is. And you are a little dear,” she added, bending over him and pressing her cheek against his.
They had been married less than a month when he learned from a ciphered letter from Masha Safonoff that the gendarmes were looking for him.
“Well, Clanya,” he said facetiously, as he entered their apartment one afternoon, “you are a princess no longer.”
Her face fell.
“Look at her! Look at her! She is grieving over the loss of her title.”
“Oh, do stop those silly jokes of yours, Pasha. Must you become illegal?”
“Yes, ma’am. I am of the same rank as you. That puts a stop to the airs you have been giving yourself.” It was in the course of the same conversation that he told her of his trip to Miroslav and of all that had happened to him there.
They were known here as brother and sister, his legal residence being in another place, but now both these residences were abandoned, and they moved into a new apartment, in another section of the town, which he took great pains to put in tasteful shape. Indeed, so elaborately fitted up was it that he fought shy of letting any of his fellow Nihilists know their new address. A table against one wall was piled with drawings, while standing in a conspicuous corner on the floor were a drawing-board and a huge portfolio—accessories of the rôle of a russified German artist which he played before the janitor of the house. Before he let her see it he had put a vase of fresh roses in the centre of the table.
When he and Clara entered their new home, he said in French, with a gallant gesture:
“Madame, permit me to introduce you.”
He helped her off with her things and slid into the next room, where he busied himself with the samovar. She had with her a fresh copy of theWill of the People—a sixteen page publication of the size of the average weekly printed on fine, smooth paper; so she took it up eagerly. Its front page was in mourning for President Garfield. An editorial notice signed by the revolutionary executive committee tendered an expression of grief and sympathy to the bereaved republic, condemning in vigorous language acts of violence in a land “where the free will of the people determines not only the law but also the person of the ruler.” “In such a land,” the Nihilist Executive Committeewent on to explain, “a deed of this sort is a manifestation of that spirit of despotism the effacement of which in Russia is the aim of our movement. Violence is not to be justified unless it be directed against violence.”
The declaration made an exceedingly pleasant impression on Clara.
“Bravo! Bravo!” she called out to her husband, as she peered into the inside pages of the paper.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her from the next room, distractedly, choking with the smoke of his freshly lit samovar.
She made no answer. The same issue of her party’s organ devoted several columns to the anti-Jewish riots. She began to read these with acute misgivings, and, sure enough, they were permeated by a spirit of anti-Semitism as puerile as it was heartless. A bitter sense of resentment filled her heart. “As long as it does not concern the Jews they have all the human sympathy and tact in the world,” she thought. “The moment there is a Jew in the case they become cruel, short-sighted and stupid—everything that is bad and ridiculous.”
“What’s that you said, Clanya?” Pavel demanded again.
She had difficulty in answering him. “He is a Gentile after all,” she said to herself. “There is a strain of anti-Semitism in the best of them.” She was in despair. “What is to be done, then?” she asked herself. “Is there no way out of it?” The answer was: “I will bear the cross,” and once again the formula had a soothing effect on her frame of mind. And because it had, the cross gradually ceased to be a cross.
She warmed to her husband with a sense of her own forgiveness, of the sacrifices she was making. She felt a new glow of tenderness for him. And then, by degrees, thingsappeared in milder light. Pavel’s rapture over her was so genuine, his devotion so profound, and the general relations between Jew and Gentile in the movement were marked by intimacies and attachments so sincere, that the anti-Semitic article could not have sprung from any personal taste or sentiment in the author. It was evidently a mere matter of revolutionary theory. Justly or unjustly, the fact was there: in the popular mind the Jews represented the idea of economic oppression. Now, if the masses had risen in arms against them, did not that mean that they were beginning to attack those they considered their enemies? In the depth of her heart there had always lurked some doubt as to whether the submissive, stolid Russian masses had it in them ever to rise against anybody. Yet here they had! Misguided or not, they had risen against an element of the population which they were accustomed to regard as parasites. Was not that the sign of revolutionary awakening she had fervently been praying for?
She went so far as to charge herself with relapsing into racial predilections, with letting her feelings as a Jewess get the better of her devotion to the cause of humanity. She was rapidly arguing herself into the absurd, inhuman position into which her party had been put by the editor of its official organ.
And to prove to herself that her views were deep-rooted and unshakable, she said to herself: “If they think in Miroslav I am the only person who could restore harmony to their circle, I ought to go there and try to persuade Elkin to give up those foolish notions of his.” What they were saying about her in that town flattered her vanity. The thought of appearing in her revolutionary alma mater, in the teeth of the local gendarmes and police, an “illegal”known to underground fame, was irresistible. Her thirst of adventure in this connection was aroused to the highest pitch.
At eight o’clock the next morning she sat in a chair, looking at her husband, who was still in bed, sleeping peacefully. He had an early appointment, but she could not bring herself to wake him. She was going to do so a minute or two later, she pleaded with herself, and then they would have tea together. The samovar was singing softly in the next room. It was of her love and of her happiness it seemed to be singing. Her joy in her honeymoon swelled her heart and rose to her throat. “I am too happy,” she thought. As she remembered her determination to go to her native place, she added: “Yes, I am too happy, while Sophia is in her grave and Hessia is pining away in her cell. I may be arrested at any moment in Miroslav, but I am going to do my duty. I must keep Elkin and the others from abandoning the revolution.”