CHAPTER XVI.
CLARA AT HOME.
AT Boyko’s Court the chilly dawn lit up a barricade of wheels, axles, and bodies of peasant waggons. Through wide cracks of a fence came the shifting light of a lantern and the sleepy cackling of geese. At the far end of the deep narrow court hung the pulley chains and bucket of a roofed well. Clara went through a spacious subterranean passage, dark as a pocket and filled with the odour of paint. It was crowded with stacks of trunks, finished and unfinished, but she steered clear of them without having to feel her way.
A door swung open, revealing a dimly lighted low-ceiled interior. The odour of sleep mingled with the odours of paint and putty.
“Is that you, Tamara?” asked a tall, erect, half-naked old woman in Yiddish, Tamara being the Jewish name which had been arbitrarily transformed, at Vladimir’s instance, into Clara.
“Yes, mamma darling,” Clara replied.
“Master of the universe! You get no sleep at all.”
The girl kissed her mother gayly. “You know what papa says,” she rejoined, “‘sleep is one sixtieth of death.’ Life is better, mamma dear.”
“I have not studied any of your Gentile books, yet I know enough to understand that to be alive is better than to be dead,” the tall, erect old woman said without smiling. “But if you want to be alive you must sleep. Go to bed, go to bed.”