The White Terror and The Red Part 16

He made a grimace of repugnance, and seating himself on the bench he went on in nervous Russian.

"You have fallen into company that will do you no good, Clara. If you are arrested it will break the heart of two families. Is there no soul left in you?"

"What put it into your mind that I should be arrested?" she returned, lugubriously. "And is that all one ought to be concerned about? All Russia is in prison."

"I expected something of that sort. Alluring phrases have made you deaf and blind. It is my duty to try to save you before it is too late."

He had come for friendly remonstrance, for an open-hearted explanation, but that mood had been shattered the moment he saw her approaching with two of her new friends. He persisted in using the didactic tone he had been in the habit of taking with her, and he could not help feeling how ridiculously out of place it had become. He chafed under a sense of his lost authority, and the impotent superiority of his own manner impelled him to bitterness.

"Is that what you have come for--to rescue me from empty phrases and bad company?"

"Yes, to rescue you from the intoxication of bombast and dangerous company, whether you are in a sarcastic mood or not."

"And how are you going to do it, pray?" she asked with rather good-natured gaiety.

"Laugh away. Laugh away. Since you took up with those scamps----"

"Scamps! I can't let you speak like that, Volodia. I don't know what you mean by 'taking' up with them, but if by 'scamps' you mean people who are sacrificing themselves----"

"You misunderstand me----"

"If by scamps you mean people who will be tortured or hanged for opposing the tyranny that is crus.h.i.+ng us all rather than feather their own nests, then it is useless for us to continue this talk."

"Be calm, Clara. You don't wish to misjudge me, do you? Of course, I needn't tell you that what you say about sacrificing oneself and all that sort of business is no news to me. Some other time, when you are not excited, I may have something to say about these things----"

"That everlasting 'something to say!' People are being throttled, butchered and you--you have 'something to say.' We are speaking in two different languages, Volodia."

"Maybe we are. And I must say you have picked up that new language of yours rather quickly. I am not going to enter into a lengthy discussion with you to-night. All I will say now is this: You know that four Jewish revolutionists have been hanged within the last few months--in Odessa, Nicolayeff, Kieff and St. Petersburg. If you think that does the Jewish people any good I am very sorry."

"What else would you have Jews do? Roll on feather-beds and collect usury? Would that do 'the Jewish people' good?"

"You talk like an anti-Semite, Clara."

"There is no accounting for tastes. You may call it anti-Semitism. You may be ashamed of four men who die bravely in a terrible struggle against despotism."

He cast an uneasy look in the direction of the police booth, but his courage failed him to urge her to lower her voice.

"As for me," she went on, "I certainly am proud of them. I hold their names sacred, yes, sacred, sacred, sacred, do you understand? And if you intend to continue calling such people scamps then there is nothing left for us to say to each other. And, by the way, since when have _you_ been a champion of 'the Jewish people'--you who have taught me to keep away from everything Jewish; you who are shocked by the very sound of Yiddish, by the very sight of a wig or a pair of side-locks; you who are continually boasting of the Gentiles you are chumming with; you who would give all the Jews in the world for one handshake of a Christian?"

"Well, I am prepared to take abuse, too, to-night. As to my hatred of Yiddish and side-locks, that does no harm to anybody. If all Jews dropped their antediluvian ways and became a.s.similated with the Russian population half of the unfortunate Jewish question would be solved."

"Oh, this kind of talk is really enough to drive one mad. The whole country is choking for breath, and here you are worrying over the Jewish question. But then--since when have _you_ been interested in the Jews and their 'question?'"

"Whether I have or not, I never helped to aggravate it as those 'heroes'

of yours do. If there are some few rights which the Jew still enjoys, they, too, will be taken away from him on account of that new-fangled heroism which has turned your head."

"n.o.body has any 'rights.' Everybody is trampled upon, everybody. That's what those 'scamps' are struggling to do away with."

"Everybody has to die for that matter, yet who cares to die an unnatural death? If the Jews were oppressed like all others and no more, it would be another matter, but they are not. Theirs is an unnatural oppression."

"Well, that's what those 'scamps' are struggling for: to do away with every sort of oppression. Would you have the Jews keep out of that struggle? Would you have them take care of their own precious skins, and later on, when life becomes possible in Russia, to come in for a share of the fruit of a terrible fight that they carefully stayed away from?"

"Those are dreams, Clara. Dreams and phrases, phrases and dreams. That's all you have learned of your new friends. Do you deny the existence of a Jewish question?"

She scrutinised his face in the grey half-tones of the gathering dawn and said calmly:

"Look here, Volodia, you know you are seizing at this 'Jewish question'

as a drowning man does at a straw. You know you have no more interest in it than I have."

"I am certainly not delighted to see it exist, if that's what you mean."

"May I be frank with you, Volodia? All the Jews of the world might cease to exist, for all you care."

"It isn't true. All I want is that they should become Russians, cultured Russians."

"Well, as for me there is only one question--the question of plain common justice and plain elementary liberty. When this has been achieved there won't be any such thing as a Jewish, Polish or Hottentot question.

Yes, those 'scamps' are the only real friends the Jews have."

"But one cannot live on the golden mist of that glorious future of yours, Clara. It takes a saint to do that. Every-day mortals cannot help thinking of equal rights before the law in the sordid present."

"Think away! Much good will it do the Jews. The only kind of equal rights possible to-day is for Jew and Gentile to die on the same gallows for liberty. That's the 'scamps" view of it." At this the word struck her in conjunction with the images of Boulatoff, Olga, the judge, and the other members of the Circle, whereupon she burst out, with a stifled sob in her voice: "How dare you abuse those people?"

Not only had she broken loose from his tutelage, but he had found himself on the defensive. They had changed roles. The pugnacious tone of conviction, almost of inspiration, with which she parried his jibes nonplussed him. Usually a bright talker, he was now colourless and floundering. And the more he tried to work himself back to his old-time mastery the more helplessly at a disadvantage he appeared.

"I don't recognise you, Clara," he said. "They have mesmerised you, those phrase-makers."

She leaped to her feet. "I don't intend to hear any more of this abuse,"

she said. "And the idea of you finding fault with phrase-makers! you of all men, you to whom a well-turned phrase is dearer than all else in the world! If they make phrases they are willing to suffer for them at least."

"Oh well, they have made a perfect savage of you," he retorted under his breath. "Good night."

She was left with a sharp twinge of compunction, but she had barely dived under the wicket chain when her thoughts reverted to Boulatoff and what he had said to her.

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 s.h.i.+fting 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 s.p.a.cious subterranean pa.s.sage, 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.