PAVEL BECOMES “ILLEGAL.”
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 subdued sound 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 cheesemonger on Little Garden Street, 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 revolution is a 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 the Will 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 Committee went 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, things appeared 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.”