The White Terror and The Red Part 15

"Yes," the seminarist chimed in, "and when they hear the tocsin of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity--"

"Liberty, Equality and Fiddlesticks!" Clara mimicked him, mildly, signing to him not to interrupt the speaker.

Pavel went on. He spoke at length, looking mostly at her. He was making an effort to convince her that in the event of a revolution the high officials would turn cowards, and her face seemed to be saying: "He's the nephew of a governor, so he ought to know."

When the yard windows were thrown open the bewhiskered captain sat down to the piano and struck up an old national tune, to the accompaniment of two male voices. The others continued their talk under cover of the music. Pavel made up his mind that the judge and Clara were the most level-headed members of the Circle, and decided to seek their cooperation in the business which had brought him to Miroslav. Only the judge was the more reposeful of the two, as well as incomparably the better informed. As a rule he was absorbed in his own logic, while Mlle.

Yavner was jarred by every false note in others, nervously sensitive to all that went on about her, so that when Cyclops, for example, got tangled in his own verbosity her eyes would cloud up with vexation and she would come to his rescue, summing up his argument in a few clear, un.o.btrusive sentences. There was a glow of enthusiasm in her look which she was apparently struggling to suppress. Indeed, she was struggling to suppress some feeling or other most of the time. Her outward calm seemed to cover an interior of restlessness.

Pavel's unbounded faith in the party instilled new faith into her. The great point was that he was a member of the aristocracy. If a man like him had his whole heart in the struggle, the movement was certainly not without foundation. Moreover, Boulatoff was close to the revolutionary centre, and he obviously spoke from personal knowledge. All sorts of questions worried her, many of which were answered at the present gathering, partly by herself, partly by others. The new era, when there would be neither poverty nor oppression, the enchanted era which had won her heart, loomed clearer than ever. At one moment as she sat listening, her blond hair gleaming golden in the lamplight, her face lit up by a look of keen intelligence, Pavel said to himself: "And this Jewish girl is the one who had the feeling and the courage to make that rumpus over Pievakin! If I became a revolutionist it was the result of gradual development, through the help of conditions, books, people; whereas this girl acted like one, and in the teeth of grave danger, too, purely on the spur of the moment and long before she knew there was any such thing as a revolutionary movement; acted like one while I was still a blind, hard-hearted milksop of a drone." In the capital he knew a number of girls who were continually taking their lives in their hands and several of whom were like so many saints to him, but then Mlle. Yavner belonged to the realm of his home and his boyhood. What he regarded as an act of heroism on her part was hallowed by that sense of special familiarity and comprehensibility which clings to things like the old well that witnessed our childish games.

She made a very favourable impression on him. If he had been a formal candidate for her hand, come "bride-seeing," he could not have studied her more closely than he did now. Indeed, so absorbed was he in her that once while she was speaking to him laughingly her words fell on a deaf ear because at that moment he was remarking to himself: "She laughs in a little rising scale, breaking off in a rocket."

"There must be something in her, then," he thought "which was the source of that n.o.ble feeling and of that courage." He took to scanning her afresh, as though looking for a reflection of that something in her face, and as he looked at her and thought of the Pievakin "demonstration" it gave him pleasure to exaggerate her instrumentality in his own political regeneration.

Olga had relieved her fiance at the piano, and later on when she, too, rose from the keyboard, Clara eagerly took her place. There was no life in Mlle. Yavner's tones, but the impa.s.sioned sway of her head and form as she played told of a soul touched with ecstasy; told of the music which her fingers failed to evoke from the instrument. And the eyes of half a dozen love-stricken men added their rapture to the sounds.

Pavel listened to her melody and breathed the scented night air that came in from the little garden in the yard. He reflected that Clara might visit the warden's house as a piano teacher. At this it came home to him that Makar was in prison, and that unless he escaped he was a lost man. He was seized with terror. The piano sang of a lonely s.h.i.+p, blue waves, and a starlit night, but to Pavel it spoke of his imprisoned friend and his own anguish. He joined in the chorus with ferocious ardour. His heart was crying for Makar's liberation and for a thousand other things. When she left the piano stool he leaped up to her.

"Allow me to grasp your hand, Clara Rodionovna," he said, as though thanking her for the merit of her playing. And then, all unmindful of comment, he drew her into a secluded corner and said vehemently:

"I wish also to tell you, Clara Rodionovna, that I have a special reason to be glad of knowing you; for if I have a right to be among good people it is you whom I have to thank for it." A thick splash of crimson came into her face; but before she had time to put her surprise into words, he poured forth the story of his awakening and how he had all these five years been looking forward to a meeting with her. As he spoke his face bore an expression of ecstatic, almost amorous grimness. The girl was taken by storm. She was literally dazed. An overwhelming, unspoken intimacy established itself between them on the spot.

Olga's face was a blend of beaming triumph and tense perplexity. The men were making an effort to treat Boulatoff's sally with discretion, as if it were a bit of revolutionary conspiracy and they knew enough to mind their own business.

CHAPTER XV.

A WARNING.

It was one o'clock when the a.s.semblage broke up. They scattered over various sections of the town, Pavel going to his home in the Palace, while Clara, accompanied by Elkin and Orlovsky, set off in the direction of Paradise Town. But whatever the character of the district one was bound for, in their hearts there was the same feeling that they belonged to a higher life than did those who slept behind the closed shutters they were pa.s.sing. This feeling made them think of their group as a world within a world. Their Circle was a magic one. Somewhere in St.

Petersburg, Moscow, Kieff, Odessa, Siberia, men and women were being slowly tortured, dying on the gallows; a group of brave people still at large--the mysterious Executive Committee--was doing things that thrilled the empire; and they, members of the Miroslav Circle, were the kin of those heroes. As they dispersed through the sleeping town each unconsciously remembered the organisation as so many superior beings dotting a population of human prose.

"He must be quite close to the Centre," Orlovsky said.

The other two made no answer. It struck Clara as sacrilege to talk of Boulatoff, whose fervent face was vivid before her at this minute.

Particularly unbearable was the allusion to the prince to her because it was Orlovsky who made it. The stout government clerk was one of the men in love with her, while she often disliked him to abhorrence. She felt a sincere friends.h.i.+p for him, yet sometimes when he spoke she would be tempted to shut her ears and to gnash her teeth as people do when they hear a window pane scratched. This was one of her causeless hatreds with which she was perpetually struggling.

Orlovsky construed their irresponsiveness as a rebuke for his speaking of the revolutionary "centre" in the street; so he started to tell them about his mother. With Clara by his side his tongue would not rest. Not so Elkin, who nursed his love in morose silence. When they heard the whistle of a distant policeman and the answer of a watchman's rattle by way of showing that he had not fallen asleep on his post, Orlovsky raised his voice.

"She is getting more pious every day," he said, as though defying the invisible policeman to find anything seditious in his words.

Clara's mind was on Boulatoff. The strange avowal of the man whom she had never seen before save through the window of a princely carriage tingled through her veins in a medley of new-born exaltations. Boulatoff did seem to be close to the Executive Committee, and the sentiments of that wonderful body, voiced by this high-born young man, the nephew of the governor of Miroslav, had lit stirring images in her consciousness.

Pavel stood out amid the other revolutionists of her acquaintance even as the whole Miroslav Circle did in the midst of the rest of her native town.

The interchange of signals between policeman and watchman which now and then sounded through the stillness of the night reminded her of the unknown man the gendarmes had arrested, of the hard glint of chains, of gallows. She wondered whether Elkin or Boulatoff knew anything about that man. She saw herself rapidly marching toward something at once terrible and divine. She was not the only one who followed this course--that was the great point. The kindest and best people in Miroslav, the best and the wisest in the land, and among them children of governors, of n.o.blemen, were consecrated to that same something which was both terrible and luring. Her heart went out to her comrades known and unknown, and as she beheld a sleepy watchman curled up in the recess of his gateway, she exclaimed without words: "I'm going to die for you--for you and all the other poor and oppressed people in the world."

Here and there they pa.s.sed an illuminated window or an open street door, through which they saw Jewish artisans at work. They saw the bent forms of Jewish tailors, they heard the hammer sounds of Jewish carpenters, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, silversmiths; yet all these made no impression upon her. There were about 50,000 Jews in Miroslav and as many as three-fourths of them were pinched, half-starved mechanics, working fourteen hours a day, and once or twice a week all night, to live on rye bread and oatmeal soup; yet they made no appeal to her sympathies, while the Gentiles who were huddled up in front of the gates she was pa.s.sing did. The great Russian writers whose stories and songs had laid the foundation to her love of the ma.s.ses dealt in Gentiles, not in Jews.

Nekrasoff bewailed the misery of the Russian moujik, not of the common people of her own race. Turgeneff's sketches breathe forth the poetry of suffering in a Great-Russian village, not the tragedy and spiritual beauty of life among the toiling men and women of her own blood. She had never been in Great Russia, in fact; she had never seen those moujiks in the flesh. Those she had seen were the Little-Russian peasants, who came to Miroslav from the neighbouring villages. Her peasants, therefore, were so many literary images, each with the glamour which radiates from the pages of an adored author. This was the kind of "people" she had in mind when she thought of the _Will of the People_.

The Jewish realities of which her own home was a part had nothing to do with this imaginary world of hers.

Clara's home was on a small square which was partly used as a cart-stand and in one corner of which, a short distance from Cuc.u.mber Market, squatted a policeman's hut. This was the district of a certain cla.s.s of artisans and small tradesmen; of harness-makers, trunk-makers, wheelwrights; of dealers in tar, salt, herring, leaf tobacco, pipes, accordions, cheap finery. The air was pungent with a thousand strong odours. The peasants who brought their produce to market were here supplied with necessaries and trinkets. The name of the big market-place extended to the entire locality, and Paradise Town was just beyond the confines of that locality.

The square for which Clara was bound was called Little Market. A gate in the centre of one of its four sides, flanked by goose-yards on one side and by a row of feed-shops and harness-shops on the other, led into a deep and narrow court, known as Boyko's. At this moment the gate was closed, its wicket, held ajar by a chain, showing black amid the grey gloom of the square.

As Clara and her two escorts came in sight of the spot they saw a man sitting on a low wooden bench near the gate.

"Somebody is waiting for me," she said gravely. She thanked them and bade them good-bye and they went their several ways.

The man on the bench rose and went to meet her. As he walked toward her he leaned heavily on his stout, knotty cane--a pose which she knew to be the result of embarra.s.sment. He was a tall, athletic fellow in a long spring overcoat, a broad-brimmed felt hat sloping backward on his head.

He bore striking resemblance to Clara; the same picturesque flatness in the middle part of the face, the same expression. Only his hair was dark, and his eyes and mouth were milder than hers. They looked like brother and sister and, indeed, had been brought up almost as such, but they were only cousins. His name was Vladimir Vigdoroff. His family was the better-to-do and the worldlier of the two. When he was a boy of four and he envied certain other two boys because each of them had a little sister, and he had not, he had made one of his cousin. It was his father who subsequently paid for Clara's education.

"You here?" Clara said quietly.

He nodded, to say yes, with playful chivalry. They reached the bench in silence, and then he said in a decisive, business-like voice which she knew to be studied:

"I expected to have a talk with you, Clara. That's why I waited so long.

But it's too late. Can I see you to-morrow?"

"Certainly. Will you drop in in the afternoon?"

He had evidently expected to be detained. He lingered in silence, and she had not the heart to say good-bye. From a neighbouring lane came the buzz-buzz of a candlestick-maker's lathe. They were both agitated. She had been looking forward to this explanation for some time. They divined each other perfectly. As they now stood awkwardly without being able either to speak or to part, their minds were in reality saying a good deal to each other.

Until recently she had made her home in her uncle's house more than she had in her father's. Her piano stood there, her uncle's gift, for which there was no room in the bas.e.m.e.nt occupied by her parents. She had kept her books there, received her girl friends and often slept there. But since her initiation into the secret society she had gradually removed her headquarters to her parents' house, and her visits at Vladimir's home had become few and far between. Clara had once offered him an underground leaflet, whereupon he had nearly fainted with fright at sight of it. He had burned the paper in terror and indignation, and then, speaking partly like an older brother and partly like the master of the house which she was compromising, he had commanded her never again to go near people who handled literature of that sort. Accustomed to look up to him as her intellectual guide and authority, as the most brilliant man within her horizon, she had listened to his attack upon Nihilism and Nihilists with meek reserve, but the new influences she had fallen under had proven far stronger than his power over her. To relieve him from the hazards of her presence in the house she had little by little removed her books and practically discontinued her visits. In the event of her getting into trouble with the gendarmes her own family was too old-fas.h.i.+oned and uneducated, in a modern sense, to be suspected of complicity. As to Vladimir, he missed her keenly, as did everybody else in the house, but her estrangement had a special sting to it, too, one unconnected with their mutual attachment as cousins who had grown up together. Clara's consideration for his safety, implying as it did that he was too timid and too jealous for his personal security to work for the revolution, an inferior being uninitiated into the world of pluck and self-sacrifice to which she, until recently his pupil, belonged, galled him inordinately.

At last he lost control over himself.

"You are playing with fire, Clara," he said, lingering by the bench.

"I suppose that's what you want to speak to me about," she answered with calm earnestness, "but this is hardly the place for a discussion of this sort, Volodia."[B]

[B] Affectionate diminutive of Vladimir.

"If you want me to go home you had better say so in so many words. The high-minded interests you are cultivating are scarcely compatible with shyness or lack of frankness, Clara."

"Don't be foolish, Volodia. You know you will make fun of yourself for having spoken like that."

"I didn't mean to say anything harsh, Clara. But this thing is scarcely ever out of my mind. It's a terrible fate you have chosen."

"How do you know I have?" she asked in a meditative tone that implied a.s.sent.

"How do I know? Can't we have a frank, honest talk for once, Clara? Let us go somewhere."

"We can talk here. To be on the safe side of it, let us talk in Yiddish."