“Oh, I see, you are afraid I’ll send spies to this house, are you? Well, there is less danger of that than that you should take a hand in the slaughter of Jewish shoemakers, blacksmiths or water-bearers as a bit of practical ‘equality and fraternity,’ I can assure you. But then, after all, you may be right. Good-bye, comrades! Don’t judge me hard.”
Tears stood in Orlovsky’s eyes. He, the judge, and Mlle. Andronoff, the judge’s fiancée, were for running after him, but the others stopped them.
Left to themselves, the group of Nihilists began to discuss the coming outbreak. Everyone felt, in view of Elkin’s charge, that whatever else was done, no effort should be spared to keep the mob from attacking the Jewish poor. Much was said about “directing the popular fury into revolutionary channels,” and “setting the masses upon the government,” but most of those who said these things knew in their hearts that they might as well talk of directing the ocean into revolutionary channels or of setting a tornado upon the Russian government. Orlovsky alone took it seriously:
“It begins to look something like, by Jove,” he said beamingly. “We’ll go out, and when the mob gets going, when the revolutionary fighting blood is up in them, we’ll call out to them that Jewish usurers are not the only enemies of the toiling people; that the Czar is at the head of all the enemies of the nation. And then, by Jove, Miroslav may set the pace to all Russia. See if it doesn’t.”
The son of the usurer called attention to the extreme smallness of their number, but he thought it enough to keep the mob from assaulting working people. He knew that his own relatives were all safe personally. As to his father’s property, he said he would be glad if it was all destroyed by the “revolutionary conflagration,” and he meant it.
Pavel took no hand in the discussion. Instead, he was pacing to and fro mopingly.
At last, after some more speeches, including one by the gawky seminarist, who came late and who disagreed with everybody else, it was decided that in case of a riot every Gentile member of the Circle should be out in the streets, “on picket duty,” watching the mob, studying its mood and “doing everything possible to lend the disturbance a revolutionary character.”
Eight Jewish women, including three little girls, were brought to the Jewish hospital of Miroslav from a neighbouring town, where they had been outraged in the course of an anti-Semitic outbreak. The little girls and the prettiest of the other five died soon after they arrived. The next day the Gentile district bubbled with obscenity. To be sure, there were expressions of horror and pity, too, but the bulk of the Christian population, including many an educated and tender-hearted woman, treated the matter as a joke. Where a Jew was concerned the moral and human point of view had become a reeling blur. The joke had an appalling effect. While the stories of pillaged shops kindled the popular fancy with the image of staved vodka barrels and pavements strewn with costly fabrics, the case of the eight Jewish women gave rise to a hideous epidemic of lust. There were thousands of Gentiles for whom it became no more possible to pass a pretty Jewish woman than to look into the display window of a Jewish shop without thinking of an anti-Semitic outbreak.