Within the Jewish houses and on their courtyards there was a rush for sub-cellars, garrets, barrels. As they ran, clambered, tiptoed, scrambled, they smothered the cries of their frightened babies with several cases of unconscious infanticide as a result. Christians hastened to assert the immunity of their houses by placing the image of the Virgin (a Jewess!) in their windows; and so did many a Jew who had procured such images for the purpose. Some smashed their own windows and piled up fragments of furniture in front of their doors, to give their homes or shops the appearance of having already been visited by mob fury. Here and there a man was chalking crosses on his gate or shutters.
While this was in progress several hundred Jews burst from gateways on and about Nicholas Street and bore down on the enemy with frantic yells in Russian and in Yiddish. They were armed with crowbars, axes, hammers, brass knuckles, clubs and what-not. As to the rioters they were mostly unarmed. Following the established practice of the crusade, they had expected to begin with some hardware store and there to arm themselves with battering rams and implements of devastation—an intention which they had not yet had time to carry out. At sight of this armed multitude, therefore, they were taken aback. Resistance was not what they had anticipated. Indeed, for some seconds many of them were under the impression that the crowd now descending on them was but another horde of hoodlums. They wavered. A crowd of Jewish butchers, lumberers, blacksmiths, truck-drivers—the advance guard of the Defence—made a dash at them, jeering and howling at the top of their lungs, in Yiddish:
“Let’s hack them to pieces! Lively boys! Let’s drive right into their lungs and livers! Let’s make carrot-pudding of them! Bravely, fellows, they’re drunk as swine!”
At this point Orlovsky and the seminarist instinctively joined the rioters. Elkin and Vigdoroff were on the other side. Pavel was looking on from the sidewalk.
The Defence was mistaken. The rioters were almost as sober as they, for, indeed, it was another part of the stereotyped program of anti-Semitic riots that drink-shops should be among the very first targets of attack, so that the invaders might fit themselves for the real work of the riot by filling themselves full of Jewish vodka. But the Jews, as we have seen, descended upon them before they had torn down a single door. What the outcome would have been had the two opposing crowds been left to themselves is unknown, for a troop of hussars whose commander had been watching the scene charged on both when they were a few inches apart, and dispersed them both. Some fifty arrests were made, more than two-thirds of the prisoners being Jews. The arrested Gentiles went to police headquarters singing an anti-Semitic refrain and mimicking the frightened cry of Jewish women. Bystanders, some of the Nihilist “pickets” among them, shouted:
“Don’t fear, boys. You’ll soon go home.” And the answer was:
“Sure we will, and then we’ll give them a shaking-up, the scurvy Jews, won’t we?”
On another business street some boys threw a few tentative stones at a shop window. There being no interference on the part of the military, a mob of grown men sprang up. Doors were burst in and rolls of silk and woollen stuffs came shooting to the pavement.
“Don’t, boys; you had better go home,” said a handsome young lieutenant, affecting the basso of a general.
The raiders did not desist. While some went on emptying the shop into the street others were slashing, tearing or biting at the goods. They did it without zest and somewhat nervously, as if still in doubt as to the attitude of the authorities. A servant girl unrolled a piece of blue velvet over a filthy spot on the cobblestones before a lieutenant of the hussars, saying: