The declaration made an exceedingly pleasant impression on Clara.
“Bravo! Bravo!” she called out to her husband, as she peered into the inside pages of the paper.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her from the next room, distractedly, choking with the smoke of his freshly lit samovar.
She made no answer. The same issue of her party’s organ devoted several columns to the anti-Jewish riots. She began to read these with acute misgivings, and, sure enough, they were permeated by a spirit of anti-Semitism as puerile as it was heartless. A bitter sense of resentment filled her heart. “As long as it does not concern the Jews they have all the human sympathy and tact in the world,” she thought. “The moment there is a Jew in the case they become cruel, short-sighted and stupid—everything that is bad and ridiculous.”
“What’s that you said, Clanya?” Pavel demanded again.
She had difficulty in answering him. “He is a Gentile after all,” she said to herself. “There is a strain of anti-Semitism in the best of them.” She was in despair. “What is to be done, then?” she asked herself. “Is there no way out of it?” The answer was: “I will bear the cross,” and once again the formula had a soothing effect on her frame of mind. And because it had, the cross gradually ceased to be a cross.
She warmed to her husband with a sense of her own forgiveness, of the sacrifices she was making. She felt a new glow of tenderness for him. And then, by degrees, things appeared in milder light. Pavel’s rapture over her was so genuine, his devotion so profound, and the general relations between Jew and Gentile in the movement were marked by intimacies and attachments so sincere, that the anti-Semitic article could not have sprung from any personal taste or sentiment in the author. It was evidently a mere matter of revolutionary theory. Justly or unjustly, the fact was there: in the popular mind the Jews represented the idea of economic oppression. Now, if the masses had risen in arms against them, did not that mean that they were beginning to attack those they considered their enemies? In the depth of her heart there had always lurked some doubt as to whether the submissive, stolid Russian masses had it in them ever to rise against anybody. Yet here they had! Misguided or not, they had risen against an element of the population which they were accustomed to regard as parasites. Was not that the sign of revolutionary awakening she had fervently been praying for?
She went so far as to charge herself with relapsing into racial predilections, with letting her feelings as a Jewess get the better of her devotion to the cause of humanity. She was rapidly arguing herself into the absurd, inhuman position into which her party had been put by the editor of its official organ.
And to prove to herself that her views were deep-rooted and unshakable, she said to herself: “If they think in Miroslav I am the only person who could restore harmony to their circle, I ought to go there and try to persuade Elkin to give up those foolish notions of his.” What they were saying about her in that town flattered her vanity. The thought of appearing in her revolutionary alma mater, in the teeth of the local gendarmes and police, an “illegal” known to underground fame, was irresistible. Her thirst of adventure in this connection was aroused to the highest pitch.