LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.
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 the meeting 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? Foolish girl 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.
“He is a 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! You are going to marry a Christian? You are a 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 to soothe an angry baby. Hannah’s curses were an accompaniment to further interrogations and 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 of human 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 “the People” 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 required far 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 of Sophia 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 not the 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? I won’t rot 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.