"When have I championed them?" I asked, backing.
"Your pardon," he said. "Of course I should have understood you are only putting in a word for them for argument's sake. But I confess I have no patience with any one who has any patience with these bloodsuckers of the State. Every true Russian must abhor them. They despise the true faith, and are indifferent to our ideals. They sneak out of the conscription. They live for themselves, and regard us as their natural prey. Our peasantry are corrupted by their brandy-shops, squeezed by their money-lenders, and roused to discontent by the insidious utterances of their peddlers, d——d wandering Jews, who hate the Government and the Tschinn and everything Russian. When did a Jew invest his money in Russian industries? They are a filthy, treacherous, swindling set. Believe me, batiushka, pity is wasted upon them."
"Pity is never spent upon them," I retorted. "They are what the Russians—what we Russians—have made them. Who has pent them into their foul cellars and reeking dens? They work with their brains, and you—we—abuse them for not working with their hands. They work with their hands, and the Czar issues a ukase that they are to be driven off the soil they have tilled. It is Æsop's fable of the wolf and the lamb."
"In which the wolf is the Jew," said Paul coolly. "The Jew can always be trusted to take care of himself. His cunning is devilish. Till his heart is regenerate, the Jew remains the Ishmael of the modern world, his hand against every man's, every man's against his."
"'Love thy neighbour as thyself,'" I quoted bitterly.
"Even so," said Paul. "The Jew must be cut off, even as the Christian must pluck out his own eye if it offendeth him. Christ came among us to bring not peace but a sword. If the Kingdom of Christ is delayed by these vermin, they must be poisoned off for the sake of Russia and humanity at large."
"Vermin, indeed!" I cried hotly, for I could no longer restrain myself. "And what know you of these vermin of whom you speak with such assurance? What know you of their inner lives, of their sanctified homes, of their patient sufferings? Have you penetrated to their hearths and seen the beautiful naïveté of their lives, their simple faith in God's protection, though it may well seem illusion, their unselfish domesticity, their sublime scorn of temptation, their fidelity to the faith of their ancestors, their touching celebrations of fast and festival, their stanchness to one another, their humble living and their high respect for things intellectual, their unflinching toil from morn till eve for a few kopecks of gain, their heroic endurance of every form of torment, vilification, contempt—?" I felt myself bursting into tears and broke from the breakfast table.
Paul followed me to my room in amazement. In the midst of all my tempest of emotion I was no less amazed at my own indiscretion.
"What is the matter with you?" he said, clasping his arm around my neck. "Why make yourself so hot over this accursed race, for whom, from some strange whim or spirit of perverseness, you stand up to-day for the first time in my recollection?"
"It is true; why indeed?" I murmured, striving to master myself. After all, the picture I had drawn was as ideal in its beauty as Paul's in its ugliness. "Nu, I only wanted you to remember that they were human beings."