“No, no, mamma! I have not become a Christian, and I never will. I swear I won’t. As to him, he is the best man in the world. That’s all I can tell you for the present. Oh, the young generation is so different from the old, mamma!” she snuggled to her, nursing her cheek against hers and finding intense pleasure in a conscious imitation of the ways of her own childhood; but she was soon repulsed.
“Away from my eyes! May the Black Year understand you. I don’t,” the old woman said. Her face wore an expression of horrified curiosity. Had Clara faced her fury with a pugnacious front, it might have led to an irretrievable rupture; but she did not. While her mother continued to curse, she went on fawning and pleading with filial self-abasement, although not without an effect of trying to soothe an angry baby. Hannah’s curses were an accompaniment to further interrogations and gradually became few and far between. Her daughter’s engagement and her whole mysterious life appealed to an old-fashioned sense of romance and adventure in the elderly Jewess; also to a vague idea of a higher altruism. Her motherly pride sought satisfaction in the fact that her daughter was so kind-hearted as to stake her life for the poor and the suffering, and so plucky that she braved the Czar and all his soldiers. “It’s from me she got all that benevolence and grit,” Hannah said to herself. As to Rabbi Rachmiel, he asked no questions and his wife was not going to disturb his peace of mind.
“There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile among us,” Clara said in the course of her plea.
“No, there is not,” her mother returned. “Only the Gentiles tear the Jews to pieces.” And at this Clara remembered that circumstance which lay like a revolting blemish on her conscience—the attitude of the revolutionists toward the riots.
However, these matters got but little consideration from her now. She was taken up with her parents. The peculiar intonation with which her father chanted grace interested her more than all the “politics” of the world. She recognised these trifles with little thrills of joy, as though she had been away from home a quarter of a century. When her mother took out a pair of brass-rimmed spectacles on making ready to read her prayers, Clara exclaimed, with a gasp of unfeigned anguish:
“Spectacles! Since when, mamma darling, since when?”
“Since about six months ago. One gets older, foolish girl, not younger. When you are of my age you’ll have to use spectacles, too, all your Gentile wisdom notwithstanding.”
Another day or two and her communions with her mother and the odour of apples and pears began to pall on her. She missed Pavel. Her mind was more frequently given over to musings upon that atmosphere amid which he and she were a pair of lovers than to the fascination of being with her father and mother again. She felt the centuries that divided her world from theirs more keenly every day. Once, after a long muse by the side of her mother, who sat darning stockings in her spectacles, she roused herself, with surprise, to the fact that Sophia was no more, that she had been hanged. It seemed incredible. And then it seemed incredible that she, Clara, was by her mother’s side at this moment. She took solitary walks, she sought seclusion indoors, she was growing fidgety. The change that had come over her was not lost upon her mother.
“You have been rather quick to get tired of your father and mother, haven’t you?” Hannah said to her one day. “Grieving for your Christian fellow? A break into your bones, Tamara!”