“Here, my darling! Taste it, precious one, so that when you grow up you may say you remember the day when the ill-gotten wealth of Jews was smashed by people of the True Faith.”
Women and children were serving vodka to the soldiers in cans, teapots, saucers, ladles, paper boxes.
Orlovsky mounted a cask and began to shout, wildly:
“Don’t drink too much, boys! Don’t befog your minds! For this is a great historical moment! Only why attack Jews alone? Behold, the Czar is at the head of all the blood-suckers in the land!”
Scarcely anybody listened to him. The crowd was too deeply absorbed in its orgy. His voice was drowned by a thousand other sounds; his flashing eyes and his air-pounding fists were part of a nightmare of brutalised faces, attitudes of greed, gesticulations of primitive humanity run amuck. Presently, however, a group of belated rowdies came along in search of drink. They stopped in front of Orlovsky, eyeing the cask under his feet hopefully, the appearance of the bung showing that its contents were still intact.
“Who are you, anyhow?” one of them said to the speaker. “It must be the Jews who sent you here to talk like that to good Christian people.”
“It isn’t true. You’re mistaken, old boy,” Orlovsky answered hoarsely and breathing hard, but with a kindly, familiar smile on his flushed, perspiring face. “I am one of the best friends you and all the people ever had, I mean the good of all of you fellows. What’s the use attacking Jews only, I say. We had better turn upon the authorities, the flunkeys of the Czar——”
“Do you hear what he says?” one of his listeners said, in perplexity, nudging the fellow by his side.
“He wants to get us in trouble, the sly fox that he is,” somebody remarked.
“Sure, he does. And it was by the Jews he was hired to come here. I know what I am talking about,” growled the man who had spoken first. “Down with him, boys!”