CHAPTER XL.
LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.
CLARA was with her parents in a White-Russian town. The inn at which they were stopping was entered through a vast yard, partly occupied by fruit-barns. It was the height of the fruit season. The barns and part of the yard were lined with straw upon which rose great heaps of apples and pears of all sizes and colours. Applewomen, armed with baskets, were coming and going, squatting by the juicy mounds, sampling them, haggling, quarrelling mildly. Now and then a peasant waggon laden with fruit would come creaking through the open gate, attracting general attention. A secluded corner of the yard was Clara’s and her mother’s favourite spot for their interminable confidences, a pile of large bulky logs serving them as a sofa. The people they saw here and in the streets were much shabbier and more insignificant-looking than those of their native town and the south in general. The Yavners lived here unregistered, as did most of the guests at the inn, the local police being too lazy and too “friendly” with the proprietor to trouble his patrons about having their passports vised at the station house.
The town was a stronghold of Talmudic learning, and Rabbi Rachmiel felt as a passionate art student does on his first visit to Italy. When the first excitement of the meeting was over the local scholars were of more interest to him than his daughter. His joy was marred by his fear of being sent to Siberia in case Clara’s (to her parents she was still Tamara) identity was discovered by the local police; but he had a rather muddled idea of the situation and his wife assured him that there was no danger. As to Hannah, she was not the woman to flee from her daughter for fear of the police. She could not see enough of Clara. She catechised her on her political career and her personal life, and Clara, completely under the spell of the meeting and in her mother’s power, told her more than she had a mind to. What she told her was, indeed, as foreign to Hannah’s brain as it was to her husband’s; but then, in her practical old-fashioned way, she realised that her daughter was working in the interests of the poor and the oppressed, though she never listened to Clara’s expositions without a sad, patronising smile.
One day, during one of their intimate talks on the wood-pile, the old woman demanded:
“Tell me, Clara, are you married?”
“What has put such an idea in your mind?” Clara returned, reddening. “If I were I would have told you long ago.”
“Tamara, you are a married woman,” Hannah insisted, looking hard at her daughter.