"A check for Minority?" she echoed, with joyful surprise. "Well, it would be accepted with thanks, of course, but you would first have to withdraw the libel 'the commonplace business man.' Another condition is that you must promise to read the magazine." As I was making out the check I told her that I had read some issues of it and that I "solemnly swore" to read it regularly now. That I had found it an unqualified bore I omitted to announce. Shortly after that opera night Tevkin provided a box at one of the Jewish theaters for a play by Jacob Gordin
I was quite chummy with the girls. They would jokingly call me
"Mr.
Capitalist" and, despite their father's protests, "bleed" me for all sorts of contributions. One of these came near embroiling me with Moissey. It was for a revolutionary leader, a Jew, who had recently escaped from a Siberian prison in a barrel of cabbage and whose arrival in New York (by way of Japan and San Francisco) had been the great sensation of the year among the socialists of the East Side. The new-comer was the founder of a party of terrorists and had organized a plot which had resulted in the killing of an uncle of the Czar and of a prime minister. Now, Moissey, in his rabid, uncompromising way, sympathized with another party of Russian revolutionists, with one that was bitterly opposed to the theories and methods of the terrorists. So when he learned that Anna was collecting funds for the man who had been smuggled out of jail in a barrel, and that I had given her a check for him, he flared up and called her "busybody."
"You had better mind your own affairs, Moissey," she retorted, coloring
She essayed to defend her position, contending that the methods of the Russian Government rendered terrorism not only justifiable, but inevitable
"The question is not whether it is justifiable, but whether there is any sense to it," Moissey replied, sneeringly. "Revolutions are not made by plotting or bomb-throwing. They must take the form of an uprising by the masses."
"As if the Russian terrorists did not have the masses back of them!
The peasantry and the educated classes are with them."
"How do you know they are?" Moissey asked, with a good-natured, but patronizing, smile
He spoke of the Russian working class as the great element that was destined to work out the political and economic salvation of the country, and at this he tactlessly dwelt on the Russian trade-unions, on what he termed their revolutionary strikes, and upon the aid Russian capitalists gave the Government in its crusade upon the struggle for liberty
I felt quite awkward. I wondered whether he was not saying these things designedly to punish me for the check I had given Anna for the terrorists.