A WARNING.
IT was one o’clock when the assemblage broke up. They scattered over various sections of the town, Pavel going to his home in the Palace, while Clara, accompanied by Elkin and Orlovsky, set off in the direction of Paradise Town. But whatever the character of the district one was bound for, in their hearts there was the same feeling that they belonged to a higher life than did those who slept behind the closed shutters they were passing. This feeling made them think of their group as a world within a world. Their Circle was a magic one. Somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kieff, Odessa, Siberia, men and women were being slowly tortured, dying on the gallows; a group of brave people still at large—the mysterious Executive Committee—was doing things that thrilled the empire; and they, members of the Miroslav Circle, were the kin of those heroes. As they dispersed through the sleeping town each unconsciously remembered the organisation as so many superior beings dotting a population of human prose.
“He must be quite close to the Centre,” Orlovsky said.
The other two made no answer. It struck Clara as sacrilege to talk of Boulatoff, whose fervent face was vivid before her at this minute. Particularly unbearable was the allusion to the prince to her because it was Orlovsky who made it. The stout government clerk was one of the men in love with her, while she often disliked him to abhorrence. She felt a sincere friendship for him, yet sometimes when he spoke she would be tempted to shut her ears and to gnash her teeth as people do when they hear a window pane scratched. This was one of her causeless hatreds with which she was perpetually struggling.
Orlovsky construed their irresponsiveness as a rebuke for his speaking of the revolutionary “centre” in the street; so he started to tell them about his mother. With Clara by his side his tongue would not rest. Not so Elkin, who nursed his love in morose silence. When they heard the whistle of a distant policeman and the answer of a watchman’s rattle by way of showing that he had not fallen asleep on his post, Orlovsky raised his voice.
“She is getting more pious every day,” he said, as though defying the invisible policeman to find anything seditious in his words.
Clara’s mind was on Boulatoff. The strange avowal of the man whom she had never seen before save through the window of a princely carriage tingled through her veins in a medley of new-born exaltations. Boulatoff did seem to be close to the Executive Committee, and the sentiments of that wonderful body, voiced by this high-born young man, the nephew of the governor of Miroslav, had lit stirring images in her consciousness. Pavel stood out amid the other revolutionists of her acquaintance even as the whole Miroslav Circle did in the midst of the rest of her native town.
The interchange of signals between policeman and watchman which now and then sounded through the stillness of the night reminded her of the unknown man the gendarmes had arrested, of the hard glint of chains, of gallows. She wondered whether Elkin or Boulatoff knew anything about that man. She saw herself rapidly marching toward something at once terrible and divine. She was not the only one who followed this course—that was the great point. The kindest and best people in Miroslav, the best and the wisest in the land, and among them children of governors, of noblemen, were consecrated to that same something which was both terrible and luring. Her heart went out to her comrades known and unknown, and as she beheld a sleepy watchman curled up in the recess of his gateway, she exclaimed without words: “I’m going to die for you—for you and all the other poor and oppressed people in the world.”
Here and there they passed an illuminated window or an open street door, through which they saw Jewish artisans at work. They saw the bent forms of Jewish tailors, they heard the hammer sounds of Jewish carpenters, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, silversmiths; yet all these made no impression upon her. There were about 50,000 Jews in Miroslav and as many as three-fourths of them were pinched, half-starved mechanics, working fourteen hours a day, and once or twice a week all night, to live on rye bread and oatmeal soup; yet they made no appeal to her sympathies, while the Gentiles who were huddled up in front of the gates she was passing did. The great Russian writers whose stories and songs had laid the foundation to her love of the masses dealt in Gentiles, not in Jews. Nekrasoff bewailed the misery of the Russian moujik, not of the common people of her own race. Turgeneff’s sketches breathe forth the poetry of suffering in a Great-Russian village, not the tragedy and spiritual beauty of life among the toiling men and women of her own blood. She had never been in Great Russia, in fact; she had never seen those moujiks in the flesh. Those she had seen were the Little-Russian peasants, who came to Miroslav from the neighbouring villages. Her peasants, therefore, were so many literary images, each with the glamour which radiates from the pages of an adored author. This was the kind of “people” she had in mind when she thought of the Will of the People. The Jewish realities of which her own home was a part had nothing to do with this imaginary world of hers.
Clara’s home was on a small square which was partly used as a cart-stand and in one corner of which, a short distance from Cucumber Market, squatted a policeman’s hut. This was the district of a certain class of artisans and small tradesmen; of harness-makers, trunk-makers, wheelwrights; of dealers in tar, salt, herring, leaf tobacco, pipes, accordions, cheap finery. The air was pungent with a thousand strong odours. The peasants who brought their produce to market were here supplied with necessaries and trinkets. The name of the big market-place extended to the entire locality, and Paradise Town was just beyond the confines of that locality.
The square for which Clara was bound was called Little Market. A gate in the centre of one of its four sides, flanked by goose-yards on one side and by a row of feed-shops and harness-shops on the other, led into a deep and narrow court, known as Boyko’s. At this moment the gate was closed, its wicket, held ajar by a chain, showing black amid the grey gloom of the square.
As Clara and her two escorts came in sight of the spot they saw a man sitting on a low wooden bench near the gate.
“Somebody is waiting for me,” she said gravely. She thanked them and bade them good-bye and they went their several ways.
The man on the bench rose and went to meet her. As he walked toward her he leaned heavily on his stout, knotty cane—a pose which she knew to be the result of embarrassment. He was a tall, athletic fellow in a long spring overcoat, a broad-brimmed felt hat sloping backward on his head. He bore striking resemblance to Clara; the same picturesque flatness in the middle part of the face, the same expression. Only his hair was dark, and his eyes and mouth were milder than hers. They looked like brother and sister and, indeed, had been brought up almost as such, but they were only cousins. His name was Vladimir Vigdoroff. His family was the better-to-do and the worldlier of the two. When he was a boy of four and he envied certain other two boys because each of them had a little sister, and he had not, he had made one of his cousin. It was his father who subsequently paid for Clara’s education.
“You here?” Clara said quietly.
He nodded, to say yes, with playful chivalry. They reached the bench in silence, and then he said in a decisive, business-like voice which she knew to be studied:
“I expected to have a talk with you, Clara. That’s why I waited so long. But it’s too late. Can I see you to-morrow?”
“Certainly. Will you drop in in the afternoon?”
He had evidently expected to be detained. He lingered in silence, and she had not the heart to say good-bye. From a neighbouring lane came the buzz-buzz of a candlestick-maker’s lathe. They were both agitated. She had been looking forward to this explanation for some time. They divined each other perfectly. As they now stood awkwardly without being able either to speak or to part, their minds were in reality saying a good deal to each other.
Until recently she had made her home in her uncle’s house more than she had in her father’s. Her piano stood there, her uncle’s gift, for which there was no room in the basement occupied by her parents. She had kept her books there, received her girl friends and often slept there. But since her initiation into the secret society she had gradually removed her headquarters to her parents’ house, and her visits at Vladimir’s home had become few and far between. Clara had once offered him an underground leaflet, whereupon he had nearly fainted with fright at sight of it. He had burned the paper in terror and indignation, and then, speaking partly like an older brother and partly like the master of the house which she was compromising, he had commanded her never again to go near people who handled literature of that sort. Accustomed to look up to him as her intellectual guide and authority, as the most brilliant man within her horizon, she had listened to his attack upon Nihilism and Nihilists with meek reserve, but the new influences she had fallen under had proven far stronger than his power over her. To relieve him from the hazards of her presence in the house she had little by little removed her books and practically discontinued her visits. In the event of her getting into trouble with the gendarmes her own family was too old-fashioned and uneducated, in a modern sense, to be suspected of complicity. As to Vladimir, he missed her keenly, as did everybody else in the house, but her estrangement had a special sting to it, too, one unconnected with their mutual attachment as cousins who had grown up together. Clara’s consideration for his safety, implying as it did that he was too timid and too jealous for his personal security to work for the revolution, an inferior being uninitiated into the world of pluck and self-sacrifice to which she, until recently his pupil, belonged, galled him inordinately.
At last he lost control over himself.
“You are playing with fire, Clara,” he said, lingering by the bench.
“I suppose that’s what you want to speak to me about,” she answered with calm earnestness, “but this is hardly the place for a discussion of this sort, Volodia.”[B]
“If you want me to go home you had better say so in so many words. The high-minded interests you are cultivating are scarcely compatible with shyness or lack of frankness, Clara.”
“Don’t be foolish, Volodia. You know you will make fun of yourself for having spoken like that.”
“I didn’t mean to say anything harsh, Clara. But this thing is scarcely ever out of my mind. It’s a terrible fate you have chosen.”
“How do you know I have?” she asked in a meditative tone that implied assent.
“How do I know? Can’t we have a frank, honest talk for once, Clara? Let us go somewhere.”
“We can talk here. To be on the safe side of it, let us talk in Yiddish.”
He made a grimace of repugnance, and seating himself on the bench he went on in nervous Russian.
“You have fallen into company that will do you no good, Clara. If you are arrested it will break the heart of two families. Is there no soul left in you?”
“What put it into your mind that I should be arrested?” she returned, lugubriously. “And is that all one ought to be concerned about? All Russia is in prison.”
“I expected something of that sort. Alluring phrases have made you deaf and blind. It is my duty to try to save you before it is too late.”
He had come for friendly remonstrance, for an open-hearted explanation, but that mood had been shattered the moment he saw her approaching with two of her new friends. He persisted in using the didactic tone he had been in the habit of taking with her, and he could not help feeling how ridiculously out of place it had become. He chafed under a sense of his lost authority, and the impotent superiority of his own manner impelled him to bitterness.
“Is that what you have come for—to rescue me from empty phrases and bad company?”
“Yes, to rescue you from the intoxication of bombast and dangerous company, whether you are in a sarcastic mood or not.”
“And how are you going to do it, pray?” she asked with rather good-natured gaiety.
“Laugh away. Laugh away. Since you took up with those scamps——”
“Scamps! I can’t let you speak like that, Volodia. I don’t know what you mean by ‘taking’ up with them, but if by ‘scamps’ you mean people who are sacrificing themselves——”
“You misunderstand me——”
“If by scamps you mean people who will be tortured or hanged for opposing the tyranny that is crushing us all rather than feather their own nests, then it is useless for us to continue this talk.”
“Be calm, Clara. You don’t wish to misjudge me, do you? Of course, I needn’t tell you that what you say about sacrificing oneself and all that sort of business is no news to me. Some other time, when you are not excited, I may have something to say about these things——”
“That everlasting ‘something to say!’ People are being throttled, butchered and you—you have ‘something to say.’ We are speaking in two different languages, Volodia.”
“Maybe we are. And I must say you have picked up that new language of yours rather quickly. I am not going to enter into a lengthy discussion with you to-night. All I will say now is this: You know that four Jewish revolutionists have been hanged within the last few months—in Odessa, Nicolayeff, Kieff and St. Petersburg. If you think that does the Jewish people any good I am very sorry.”
“What else would you have Jews do? Roll on feather-beds and collect usury? Would that do ‘the Jewish people’ good?”
“You talk like an anti-Semite, Clara.”
“There is no accounting for tastes. You may call it anti-Semitism. You may be ashamed of four men who die bravely in a terrible struggle against despotism.”
He cast an uneasy look in the direction of the police booth, but his courage failed him to urge her to lower her voice.
“As for me,” she went on, “I certainly am proud of them. I hold their names sacred, yes, sacred, sacred, sacred, do you understand? And if you intend to continue calling such people scamps then there is nothing left for us to say to each other. And, by the way, since when have you been a champion of ‘the Jewish people’—you who have taught me to keep away from everything Jewish; you who are shocked by the very sound of Yiddish, by the very sight of a wig or a pair of side-locks; you who are continually boasting of the Gentiles you are chumming with; you who would give all the Jews in the world for one handshake of a Christian?”
“Well, I am prepared to take abuse, too, to-night. As to my hatred of Yiddish and side-locks, that does no harm to anybody. If all Jews dropped their antediluvian ways and became assimilated with the Russian population half of the unfortunate Jewish question would be solved.”
“Oh, this kind of talk is really enough to drive one mad. The whole country is choking for breath, and here you are worrying over the Jewish question. But then—since when have you been interested in the Jews and their ‘question?’”
“Whether I have or not, I never helped to aggravate it as those ‘heroes’ of yours do. If there are some few rights which the Jew still enjoys, they, too, will be taken away from him on account of that new-fangled heroism which has turned your head.”
“Nobody has any ‘rights.’ Everybody is trampled upon, everybody. That’s what those ‘scamps’ are struggling to do away with.”
“Everybody has to die for that matter, yet who cares to die an unnatural death? If the Jews were oppressed like all others and no more, it would be another matter, but they are not. Theirs is an unnatural oppression.”
“Well, that’s what those ‘scamps’ are struggling for: to do away with every sort of oppression. Would you have the Jews keep out of that struggle? Would you have them take care of their own precious skins, and later on, when life becomes possible in Russia, to come in for a share of the fruit of a terrible fight that they carefully stayed away from?”
“Those are dreams, Clara. Dreams and phrases, phrases and dreams. That’s all you have learned of your new friends. Do you deny the existence of a Jewish question?”
She scrutinised his face in the grey half-tones of the gathering dawn and said calmly:
“Look here, Volodia, you know you are seizing at this ‘Jewish question’ as a drowning man does at a straw. You know you have no more interest in it than I have.”
“I am certainly not delighted to see it exist, if that’s what you mean.”
“May I be frank with you, Volodia? All the Jews of the world might cease to exist, for all you care.”
“It isn’t true. All I want is that they should become Russians, cultured Russians.”
“Well, as for me there is only one question—the question of plain common justice and plain elementary liberty. When this has been achieved there won’t be any such thing as a Jewish, Polish or Hottentot question. Yes, those ‘scamps’ are the only real friends the Jews have.”
“But one cannot live on the golden mist of that glorious future of yours, Clara. It takes a saint to do that. Every-day mortals cannot help thinking of equal rights before the law in the sordid present.”
“Think away! Much good will it do the Jews. The only kind of equal rights possible to-day is for Jew and Gentile to die on the same gallows for liberty. That’s the ‘scamps’’ view of it.” At this the word struck her in conjunction with the images of Boulatoff, Olga, the judge, and the other members of the Circle, whereupon she burst out, with a stifled sob in her voice: “How dare you abuse those people?”
Not only had she broken loose from his tutelage, but he had found himself on the defensive. They had changed rôles. The pugnacious tone of conviction, almost of inspiration, with which she parried his jibes nonplussed him. Usually a bright talker, he was now colourless and floundering. And the more he tried to work himself back to his old-time mastery the more helplessly at a disadvantage he appeared.
“I don’t recognise you, Clara,” he said. “They have mesmerised you, those phrase-makers.”
She leaped to her feet. “I don’t intend to hear any more of this abuse,” she said. “And the idea of you finding fault with phrase-makers! you of all men, you to whom a well-turned phrase is dearer than all else in the world! If they make phrases they are willing to suffer for them at least.”
“Oh well, they have made a perfect savage of you,” he retorted under his breath. “Good night.”
She was left with a sharp twinge of compunction, but she had barely dived under the wicket chain when her thoughts reverted to Boulatoff and what he had said to her.