“The ghost knows what she is thinking of while people talk to her.”
Clara went out for a long walk over the old macadamised road that ran through the White-Russian town on its way to St. Petersburg. She loved to watch the peasant wagons, and, early in the morning and late in the evening, the incoming and outgoing stage-coaches. She knew that she was going to stay in the thick of the struggle, come what might. Yet the riots—more definitely the one of Miroslav—lay like a ruthless living reproach in her heart. She wanted to be alone with this Reproach, to plead with it, to argue with it, to pick it to pieces. She walked through the shabby, narrow streets and along the St. Petersburg highway, thinking a thousand thoughts, but she neither pleaded with that Reproach, nor argued with it, nor tried to pick it to pieces. Her mind was full of Pavel and of Sophia and of her other comrades, living or dead. “It is all very well for me to think of going to America and be free from danger,” she said to herself. “But can Sophia go there? or Hessia?”
At one moment it flashed through her brain that to be true to the people was to work for it in spite of all its injustices, even as a mother did for her child, notwithstanding all the cruelties it might heap on her. The highest bliss of martyrdom was to be mobbed by the very crowd for whose welfare you sacrificed yourself. To be sure, these thoughts were merely a reassertion of the conflict which she sought to settle. They offered no answer to the question, Why should she, a Jewess, stake her life for a people that was given to pillaging and outraging, to mutilating and murdering innocent Jews? They merely made a new statement of the fact that she was bent upon doing so. Yet she seized upon the new formulation of the problem as if it were the solution she was craving for. “I shall bear the cross of the Social Revolution even if the Russian people trample upon me and everybody who is dear to me,” she exclaimed in her heart, feeling at peace with the shade of Sophia.
She walked home in a peculiar state of religious beatitude, as though she had made a great discovery, found a golden key to the gravest problem of her personal life. Then, being in this uplifted frame of mind, she saw light breaking about her. Arguments were offering themselves in support of her position. When Russia was free and the reign of fraternity and equality had been established the maltreatment of man by man in any form would be impossible. Surely there would be no question of race or faith then. Anti-Jewish riots were now raging? All the more reason, then, to work for Russia’s liberty. Indeed, was not the condition of the Jews better in free countries than in despotic ones? And the Russian peasant, would he in his blind fury run amuck the way he did if it were not for the misery and darkness in which he was kept by his tyrants? Her heart went out to the mob that was so ignorant as to attack people who had done them no harm. And then, once the great Reproach had been appeased in her mind, the entire Jewish question, riots, legal discriminations and all, appeared a mere trifle compared to the great Human Question, the solution of which constituted the chief problem of her cause.
The next time her mother indulged in an attack upon Gentiles in general and Clara’s “Gentile friends” in particular the young woman begged her, with tears in her voice, to desist:
“Look at her! I have touched the honour of the Impurity,” the old woman said, sneering.
“Oh, they are not the Impurity, mamma darling,” Clara returned ardently. “They are saints; they live and die for the happiness of others. If you only knew what kind of people they were!”
“She has actually been bedeviled, as true as I am a daughter of Israel. Jews are being torn to pieces by the Gentiles; a Jew isn’t allowed to breathe, yet she——”
“Oh, they are a different kind of Gentiles, mamma. When that for which they struggle has been realised the Jew will breathe freely. Our people have no trouble in a country like England. Why? Because the whole country has more freedom there. Besides, when the demands of my ‘Gentile friends’ have been realised the Christian mobs won’t be so uneducated, so blind. They will know who is who, and Jew and Gentile will live in peace. All will live in peace, like brothers, mamma.”