“Will you marry me then?” he asked, impersonating a pampered child.
She nodded, in the same playful spirit, and again her reticence brought disquiet to his heart. “Something tells me she’ll never be mine,” he thought with a sigh.
While the government was actively fomenting the riots, making an electric rod of the Jews, the Nihilists persisted in mistaking them for revolutionary kindling wood. While the “Chronicle of Arrests” in the revolutionary organ included a large number of Jewish names, several of them of persons conspicuous in the movement and noted for their pluck, another page of the same issue contained a letter from the riot-ridden district that was strongly flavoured with anti-Semitism. Moreover, a proclamation, addressed to the peasantry, was printed on an “underground” press, naming the Czar, the landlords and the Jews as enemies of the people. This proclamation met with a storm of disapproval, however, on the part of Gentiles and Jews alike, and was withdrawn from circulation. Chaos reigned in the minds of the Nihilists. Their party was disorganised, their thinkers for the most part buried, dead or alive, the editorial management of their publications in the hands of the weakest man on the Executive Committee, of one who several years later sent, from Paris, a most servile petition to the Czar, abjuring his former views and begging permission to return home as an advocate of unqualified absolutism and panslavism.
The attitude of the Nihilists toward the Jewish population in general was thus anything but sympathetic; and yet, so far as the higher strata of the movement were concerned, the personal relations between Jew and Gentile were not affected by this circumstance in the slightest degree. The feeling of intimate comradeship and mutual devotion between the two elements was left unmarred, as if one’s views on the Jewish question were purely a matter of abstract reasoning without any bearing on the Jew of flesh and blood one happened to know.
More than this, in their blind theorising according to preconceived formulas, most of the active Jewish Nihilists shut their eyes to the actual state of things and joined their Gentile comrades in applauding the riots as an encouraging sign of the times, as “a popular revolutionary protest.”
Pavel longed to discuss the riots with Makar. When he saw him, however, he found him far more interested in the “new revolutionary program” upon which he was engaged than in the anti-Semitic crusade.
“As if it was the first time Jewish blood had been shed,” he said, answering a question from Pavel, half-heartedly. “The entire history of the Jews is one continuous riot. Indeed, the present outbreaks are a mere flea-bite to what they have undergone before. So, what has happened to make one revise one’s views on the movement? One might as well stay away from the Will of the People because, forsooth, Jews were burned by Gentiles in the 15th century. Nonsense.”
“Clara doesn’t seem to take it quite so easy,” Pavel thought to himself.
“Clara has gone to meet her parents,” he said, thirsting to talk of her.