“Are you really going to America, Volodia?” she inquired with a familiar smile, carefully hiding her grief.
“I certainly am, and what is more, I want you to come along with us,” he answered, admiring her figure and the expression of her face as he had never done before. “Oh, I am quite in earnest about it, Clara. You see, the fist of the rioter has driven it home to me that I am a Jew. I must go where my people go. Come, Clara, you have staked your life for the Russians long enough, and how have they repaid you? Come and let us do something for our own poor unfortunate Jews.”
She listened with the attention of one good-naturedly waiving a discussion.
“And what has become of that bridge you were building?” she asked.
“And what has become of that gallows, of the martyr’s scaffold, which you said united Jew and Gentile? Has that done anybody any good? As to the bridge I was building across the chasm that divides us from the Christians, I admit that it has been wrecked to splinters; wrecked unmercifully by that same fist of the rioter. I dreamed of the brotherhood of Jew and Gentile and that fist woke me. The only point of contact between Jew and Gentile possible to-day is this”—pointing at a scar slightly back of his ear, his badge of active service as a member of the Defence Committee.
“Why, did you get it in the riot?” she asked with a gesture of horror.
“It’s a trifle, of course. Others have been crippled for life, but such as this bit of a scar is it will stand me in good stead as a reminder that I am a Jew. The fact is now everlastingly engraven on my flesh. There is no effacing it now. But joking aside, Clara, I love the Russian people as much as I ever did. My heart breaks at the thought of leaving Russia. I don’t think the Russians themselves are capable of loving their people as I do. But it can’t be helped. There is an impassable chasm between us.”
He was conscious of being on his mettle, as though the fiascoes he had sustained in his last year’s talks with her were being retrieved. As to her, there was a look of curiosity and subtle condescension in her eye as she listened. But she was thoroughly friendly and warm-hearted, so for the moment he saw nothing but encouragement to his flow of conversation. From time to time he would be seized with mortal fear lest they should be pounced upon by gendarmes, but he never betrayed it.
At one point, when he had put a question to her and paused, she said, instead of answering it:
“Really, Volodia, I somehow can’t get it into my head that you are actually going to America.”