A PAPER FROM THE CZAR.
A LARGE crowd of peasants, in tall straw hats, many of them with their whips in their hands, congregated in front of the bailiff’s office at Zorki. It was a sultry afternoon in August. A single shirt of coarse white linen and a pair of trousers of the same material were all the clothes the men wore. The trousers were very wide and baggy but drawn tight at the bottom by means of strings, so that they dropped at the ankles blouse-fashion, and the loose-fitting shirt fell over the trousers with a similar effect. Most of the shirts were embroidered in red and blue. Sometimes, as a result of special rivalry among the young women, one village will affect gaudier embroidery and more of it than its neighbours. This could be seen now at one corner of the crowd where a group of peasants, all from the same place, defined itself by the flaming red on the upper part of their sleeves. There were women, too, in the crowd, the girls in wreaths of artificial flowers and all of them in ribbons and coral beads, though some of them were barefoot.
A strong smell of primitive toil emanated from their bodies; primitive ideas and primitive interests looked out of their eyes. The northern moujik—the Great, or “real,” Russian—who speaks the language of Turgeneff and Tolstoy, has less poetry than the Little-Russian, but he also has less cunning and more abandon. To be sure, the cunning of the Zorki peasant is as primitive as his whole mind. Very few men in the crowd now standing in front of the bailiff’s office could have managed to add such two numbers as six and nineteen, or to subtract the weight of an empty pail from the weight of a pail of honey. Their book-keeping consists of notches on the door-jamb, and their armour in the battle of life is a cast-iron distrustfulness.
At last the bailiff made his appearance, adjusted the straps of his sword across his breast, and asked what they wanted. A tall old fellow with a drooping steel-grey moustache came out of the crowd, hat in hand, and bowed deeply, as he said:
“It’s like this, your nobleness. We wish to know when that paper from the Czar about the Jews will be read to us?”
“What paper from the Czar?” the bailiff asked. “What are you talking about?” He was a dry-boned man, but ruddy-faced and with very narrow almond-shaped eyes. As he now looked at the crowd through the sharp afternoon glare his eyes glistened like two tiny strips of burnished metal.
“Your nobleness need not be told what paper. It’s about beating the Jews and taking away their goods.”
The scene was being watched by several Jews, plucky fellows who had come in the interests of their people at the risk of being the first victims of mob fury. Among these was Yossl, Makar’s father, at once the most intellectual and strongest looking man in the delegation. In the meantime the other Jews, stupefied and sick with fear, had closed their shops and dwellings and were hiding in cellars and in garrets, in the ruins of an old church and in the woods. Two women gave birth to stillborn children during the commotion, one of these at the bedside of her little boy who was too sick to be moved.
“You are a fool,” the bailiff said to the spokesman, with a smile, as he raised his narrow eyes in quest of some Gentile with whom he might share the fun. “You are a lot of fools. Better go home. There is no such paper in the world. Whoever told you there was?”
“Why, everybody says so. In most places they finished the job long ago. Only we are a lot of slow coaches, people say. And then, when the higher authorities find out about it, who will be fined or put in jail? We, poor peasants. As if we did not have troubles enough as it is.”
“What will you be put in jail for?” asked the bailiff, chuckling to himself.
Here a younger peasant whispered in the spokesman’s ear not to let himself be bamboozled.
Speaking with unwonted boldness, born of the conviction that the bailiff was suppressing a document of the Czar, the tall fellow said:
“You can’t fool us, your nobleness. We are only peasants, but what we know we know.” And he went on to enumerate villages where, according to rumour, the paper had already been read and acted upon. “Although uneducated, yet we are not such fools as your nobleness takes us for. If it is a ukase direct from the Czar we aren’t going to take chances, sir. Not we, sir. Better read it to us and let’s be done with it. We have no time to waste, sir.”
One of the Jews was going to make a suggestion, but he was shouted down and waved aside.
The bailiff made a gesture of amused despair and turned to go back, when the peasants stepped forward, and chattering excitedly, they gave him to understand that they would not let him go until he had shown them the imperial ukase. The purport of their remonstrance was to the effect that the Jews had bribed him to suppress the document. The bailiff took it all good-naturedly. In his heart of hearts he was looking forward to the sport of an anti-Jewish outbreak with delight; but the noise brought the local priest upon the scene—a kindly elderly man with the face of a whimpering peasant girl. He was a victim of official injustice himself and he implored the crowd to listen to reason. His face, at once comic and piteous, was the main cause of his failures. He was a well-educated priest, yet he was kept in this obscure town. His sacerdotal locks, meant to be long and silken, hung in stiff, wretched little clumps. Nevertheless, as he now stood in his purple broad-sleeved gown, appealing to the multitude of white figures, his cross sparkling in the sun, the spectacle was like a scene of the early days of Christianity.
“It is a great sin to circulate wicked falsehoods like that and it is just as much of a sin to credit them,” he said in a pained heartfelt voice. “Ours is a good Czar. He does not command his children to do violence to human beings.”
“Oh, well, little father,” one peasant broke in. “You don’t seem to have heard of it. That’s all. If the Czar has not ordered it, then why do they beat the Jews everywhere else and the police and soldiers stand by and see to it that they do the work well?”
The bailiff burst into a horse-laugh and slapped his knees violently. The priest’s face bore a look of despair.
“Can it be that you believe such foolishness?” he said.
“What do we know? We are only common people. All we do know is that whatever happens it is our skin that is peeled off. If we can’t get the paper we’ll do our duty without it.”
“That’s it, without it!” the others chimed in in excited chorus.
Further parleying made it clear that many of them had no inclination to do any personal harm to the Jews or to their property. They were on friendly terms with their Jewish neighbours, and all they wanted was to get rid of a disagreeable duty. The rest, about half of the entire crowd, had had their heads turned with stories of lakes of vodka and fabulous piles of loot, but even these proved susceptible to argument.
“Here,” Yossl shouted at the top of his voice and with great fervour. “I have a scheme, and what will you lose by it if you hear me out? If you don’t like it, I’ll take it back and it won’t cost you a cent.” The intensity of his manner took them by storm. He was allowed to finish. “My scheme amounts to this: The Jews will sign a paper taking upon themselves all responsibility for your failure to smash their shops and houses, so that if the authorities call you to account for violating the imperial ukase, we will answer and you will come out clear.”
First there was perplexed stillness, then a murmur of distrust, and finally a tumult of rejection.
“Crafty Jew! There must be some trick in it!” they yelled sneeringly.
The priest was wiping the perspiration from his forehead. Finally he shouted huskily:
“Very well, I’ll sign such a paper.”
After some more arguing, the plan, in its amended form, was adopted. The older men flaunted their experience by insisting upon a formal “certificate” bearing the priest’s official seal and signature, so that when the Czar’s inspectors arrived the peasants might have something tangible to present. When all this had been complied with, there was some portentous talk about the Jews sprinkling the bargain with vodka; but having followed the “little father’s” advice in the main point the peasants were now in a yielding mood toward him generally, and the vodka shops being closed, he had no difficulty in getting them to go home sober.
A large number of them had to cross the river. To occupy their minds while they were waiting for the ferry—a small antediluvian affair which could only accommodate about one-fifth of the crowd at a time—the priest asked them for a song. And then the quiet evening air resounded with those pensive, soulful strains which for depth of melancholy have scarcely an equal in the entire range of folk-music. Thus the men who might now have been frenzied with the work of pillage, devastation and, perhaps, murder, stood transfixed with the poetry of anguish and pity. Race distinctions and ukases—how alien and unintelligible these things were to the world in which their souls dwelt at this minute! The glint of the water grew darker every second. The men on the ferry continued their singing. Then somebody on the other side joined in and the melody spread in all directions. The fresh ringing treble of a peasant girl, peculiarly doleful in its high notes, came from across the water. A choir of invisible choirs, scattered along both banks, sang to the night of the sadness of human existence.
The Jews returned from their hiding-places, but very few of them went to bed that night. The tragedy in many houses was intensified by the circumstance that the heads of these families were absent from the town, having gone to the Good Jew for prayer and advice as to the spreading calamity. Weinstein’s spacious rooms were full of neighbours and their families. The presence of the man whom one had been accustomed to regard as a monument of worldly power had a special attraction for the poorer Pietists this evening. Besides, one dreaded the hallucinations of solitude and in Weinstein’s house one was sure to find company. Most of them sat in the large prayer room, keeping close to each other, conversing in subdued, melancholy voices, comfortable in the community of their woe, as though content to remain in this huddle until the end of time. Yossl was curling his black side-locks morosely. The other people in the room importuned him for details of the scene in front of the bailiff’s office, but he was not in the mood for speaking. Weinstein was snapping his fingers at his own florid neck, as he walked backward and forward. Presently Maria, his Gentile servant, who spoke good Yiddish, addressed him, with sad, sympathetic mien:
“Master dear,” she said in Yiddish. “Will you let me break a couple of windows?”
He did not understand.
“You see,” she explained bursting into tears. “If they get at me because I did not smash things in your house, I’ll be able to swear that I did.” For an instant he stood surveying her, then, in a spasm of rage and misery, he shrieked out:
“Why, certainly! Go ahead! Break, smash, everything you set your eye on. You are the princess, we are only Jews. Go smash the whole house.” And in his frenzy he went breaking windows and chairs, shrieking as he did so:
“Here! Look and let your heart rejoice.”
“Madman,” Yossl said calmly, “you’ll alarm the town. They’ll think it’s a riot and the Gentiles will join in.”
Weinstein sat down pale and panting. “Go and tell your people to come and delight in the sight of a Jew’s broken windows,” he said to the Gentile woman.
She put her hands to her face and left the room sobbing.