The White Terror and The Red Part 26

"I did not know you were so much of a Russian patriot. Quite an unusual thing in an educated young man these days. I certainly agree with you that Turgeneff is a good writer. He is perfectly charming."

Later on she asked, with lazy curiosity and in her pampered enunciation:

"Do you really think our novelists greater than the great writers of France?"

"I certainly do."

"That's interesting," she said, preparing to get rid of him.

"You see, the average Russian represents a remarkable duality. He is simple-hearted and frank, like a child, yet he is possessed of an intuitive sense of human nature that would be considered marvellous in a sage. In addition, he is the most soulful fellow in the world, and to turn his soul inside out, to himself as well as to others, is one of his ruling pa.s.sions. That accounts for the inimitable naturalness and the ardent human interest of our literature. Whether Russia knows how to construct machinery or not, she certainly knows how to write."

"You do love Russia, and literature, too"--yawning demonstratively. "I had an idea Hebrews were only interested in money matters." She smiled, an embarra.s.sed smile in which there was as much malice as apology, and dismissed him quite unceremoniously.

He got into the street with his face on fire. It was as if he had been subjected to some brutal physical indignities. "'I didn't know you were so much of a Russian patriot,'" he recalled in his agony. "Of course, I'm only a Jew, not a Russian. It makes no difference how many centuries my people have lived and suffered here. And I, idiot that I am, make a display of my love for Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoyevski, as if I, 'a mere Jew,' had a right to them! She must have thought it was all affectation, Jewish cunning. As if a Jew could care for anything but 'money matters.'

The idea of one of my race caring for books, and for Gentile books, too!"

He was as innocent of the world of money as was Clara's father. As to the great Russian writers, they were not merely favourite authors with him. They were saints, apostles, of a religion of which he was a fervent devotee. This, in fact, was the real "cause" which he had mutely served for the past six or seven years. Their images, the swing and rhythm of their sentences, the flavour of their style, the odour of the pages as he had first read them--all this was a sanctuary to him. Yet he had always felt as if he had no right to this devotion, as if he were an intruder. This was the unspoken tragedy of his life.

Since a boy of ten, when he entered the gymnasium, he had been crying out to Russia, his country, to recognise a child in him--not a step-child merely. And just because he was looked upon as a step-child he loved his native land even more pa.s.sionately than did his fellow-countrymen of Slavic blood.

Alexander, or Sender, Vigdoroff, Vladimir's father, was known among his co-religionists as Sender the Arbitrator. His chief source of income was pet.i.tion-writing and sundry legal business, but the Jews of Miroslav often submitted their differences to him. These he settled by the force of an imperturbable and magnetic disposition rather than through any special gift of judgment and insight. He was full of anecdotes and inaggressive humour. It was said of him that people who came to his house obdurate and bitter "melted like wax" in his sunny presence. As a rule, indeed, it was the contending parties themselves who then found a way to an amicable solution of the point at issue, but the credit for it was invariably given to Sender the Arbitrator, and his reputation for wisdom brought him some Gentile patrons in addition to his Jewish clientele. His iron safe always contained large sums in cash or valuables entrusted to him by others. When a young couple were engaged to be married the girl's marriage-portion was usually deposited with Sender the Arbitrator. When security was agreed upon in connection with some contract the sum was placed in the hands of Sender the Arbitrator.

His stalwart figure, blond, curling locks and toothless smile; his frilled s.h.i.+rt-front, everlasting brown frock-coat and huge meerschaum cigar-holder--all this was as familiar to the Jews of Miroslav as the public buildings of their town. The business of pet.i.tion-writing was gradually pa.s.sing into the hands of younger and better educated men, graduated lawyers regularly admitted to the bar, and his income was dwindling. "I could arbitrate any misunderstanding under the sun except the one between Luck and myself," he used to say, smiling toothlessly.

Still, he made a comfortable income, and money was spent freely not only on his household but on all sorts of hangers-on. Vladimir's education cost him more than his means warranted. Besides keeping him at the gymnasium and then at the university he had hired him private teachers of French, German and music. "There are a thousand Gentiles to every Jew," was one of his sayings. "That's why every Jew should possess as much intelligence as a thousand Gentiles. Else we shall be crushed." He was something like a connecting link between the old world and the new.

He had a large library, mostly made up of German and Hebrew books. His house was the haunt of "men of wisdom," that is, people who wrote or thought upon modern topics in the language of Isaiah and Jeremiah, free-thinkers whose source of inspiration were atheistic ideas expounded in the Holy Tongue; yet on Sat.u.r.day nights his neighbours would gather in his drawing room to discuss foreign politics and to chant psalms in the dark. He had the head of an agnostic and the heart of an orthodox Jew.

It was late in the afternoon when Vladimir reached home. His father was in the library, which was also his office, conversing with his copyist--a dapper little man whom his employer described as "an artistic penman and an artistic fool." The windows were open. The room was filled with twilight and with warm air that seemed to be growing softer and more genial every minute.

"Is that you, Volodia?" the old man asked.

Volodia only nodded. It was easy to see that he was dejected. His father became interested and dismissed the clerk.

"Anything the matter, Volodia?" he asked.

"Nothing is the matter." An answer of this sort usually indicated that the young man was burning to unbosom himself of something or other and that he needed some coaxing to do so. Intellectually the mutual relations of father and son were of a rather peculiar nature. Each looked up to the other and courted his approbation without the other being aware of it. Their discussions often had the character of an epigram-match.

When Volodia had told his father of his experience at the house of the lame princess, the old man said:

"I see you are quite excited over it. As for me, that penniless spendthrift reminds me of the pig that mistook the n.o.bleman's backyard for the interior of his mansion. The backyard was all the pig had seen of the place, and money-lenders are the only kind of Jews that lame drone has ever had an occasion to know. That she should mistake a handful of usurers for the whole Jewish people is the most natural thing in the world."

"Oh, but they are all like that, father. Unfortunately the Jewish people are just the opposite of women in this respect. Women have a knack of flaunting all that is prepossessing and of concealing that which is unattractive in them. If the Gentiles see none but the worst Jews there are we have ourselves to blame."

"But they don't care to see any other Jews. As a rule, the good Jew has no money to lend. They have no use for him. More than half of our people are hard-working mechanics on the verge of starvation. Do you expect an ornament like your Princess Chertogoff and her precious sons to make _their_ acquaintance? Of the rest the great majority are starving tradesmen, teachers, Talmudists, dreamers. Would you have a Gentile reprobate go to these for a loan?"

Vladimir sat silent awhile, gazing through the open window at the thickening dusk. Then he said, listlessly at first, but gathering ardour from the relish he took in his own point:

"You are as unjust to the good Gentiles as they are to the good Jews.

What is needed is more understanding between the two. If the dreamers and scholars you refer to could speak Russian and looked less antediluvian than they do the prejudice that every Jew is a money-lender would gradually disappear. As it is, Jew and Gentile are like two apples that come in mutual contact at a point where they are both rotten."

"The Jewish apple was originally sound, Volodia. It's through a.s.sociation with their Gentile neighbours that they have been demoralised--at the point of contact; our faults are theirs; our virtues are our own."

"Oh, this is a very one-sided view to take of it, father," Volodia rejoined, resentfully. What he coveted was consolation, not an attack on everything that he held dear, that was the soul of his best years and ambitions. His father's light-hearted derision of the entire Russian people irritated him. "If some Jews become demoralised through contact with Gentile knaves, other Jews are uplifted, enn.o.bled, sanctified by coming under the influence of the great Russian thinkers, poets, friends of the people," he went on, emphasising his words with something like a feeling of spite. "Yours is an extremely one-sided view to take, father."

The elder Vigdoroff was cowed. He felt himself convicted of narrow-mindedness, of retrogression, of fogyism, and by way of disproving the charge he put up a defence that was disguised in the form of an attack. Vladimir replied bitterly, venting his misery on his father. The two found themselves on the verge of one of those feuds which sometimes divided them for days without either having the courage to take the first step toward a reconciliation, but their discussion was broken by the appearance of a servant carrying a lamp. She was followed by Vladimir's mother, a mountain of shapeless, trembling flesh with a torpid, wide-eyed look. In the yellow light the family likeness between father and son came pleasingly into view. Only the face of the one had a touch of oriental quaintness in it, while the other's was at once mellowed and intensified by the tinge of modern culture. Clara's mother was a sister of the elder Vigdoroff, but she resembled him only slightly. The girl's features suggested her uncle far more than they did her mother.

"Never mind the lamp," the Arbitrator said somewhat irately.

"Never mind the lamp!" his wife said, fixing her torpid eyes on him.

"Are you crazy? Don't mind him"--to the servant girl. The servant girl set the lamp down on the table and withdrew, her big fleshy mistress taking a seat by her son's side.

"Go about your business," her husband said, good-naturedly. "You are disturbing our discussion. I was just getting started when you came in and spoiled the job. Go. There may be some beggar-woman waiting for you in the kitchen."

She made a mocking gesture without stirring, and her husband resumed his argument.

She was one of a very small number of Jewish women who attended divine service on week-days. She was the game of every woman pedlar and beggar in town, with whom she usually communed when her husband was out. When not thus occupied, buying useless bargains or listening to some poor woman's tale of woe, she would spend much of her time in her big easy chair, dozing over a portly psalter. Her husband was perpetually quizzing her on her piety and her surrept.i.tious bargains. On Fridays, when beggars came in troops for their pennies, the Arbitrator would sometimes divert himself by encouraging some of them to fall into line more than once.

CHAPTER XXV.

CLARA BECOMES "ILLEGAL."

Late the next afternoon Mme. Shubeyko called at the warden's house with a blue silk handkerchief round her face, apparently suffering from a swollen cheek or toothache.

An hour or more later, while she and Rodkevich were absorbed in a game of cards in the parlour and a solitary star shone out of the semi-obscurity of a colorless sky, Makar, clean-shaven and clad as a woman, with a blue handkerchief round his face, advanced toward the gate. Clara stood in the doorway of the warden's office, watching the scene. "Double Chin," the gateman, was still on duty, and as the disguised prisoner approached him the impersonation struck her as absurdly defective. Another second and all would be lost with a crash.

Her heart stood still. She shut her eyes with a sick feeling, but the next instant she sprang forward, bonnetless, addressing Makar by Mme.

Shubeyko's name.

"You must not forget to let us know, dear," she said aloud, placing herself between him and the gateman and shutting the disguised man from view. "A swollen gum is a dangerous thing to neglect, you know. Yes, figs and milk. I'll see you down the road, dear."

The heavy key groaned in the lock, the ponderous gate swung open and Makar and Clara walked out into the twilight of the street--he with a rush of joy, she in a turmoil of triumph and despair. It seemed as if he had never vividly hoped to see liberty, and now, suddenly, he had found himself breathing the very breath of it; while she who, a minute ago, could have walked freely through the streets, was now the quarry of that terrible force called government.

As soon as they reached the ditch, a short distance from the prison building, Makar pulled off his feminine attire, threw it under the little foot-bridge, and put on a government official's cap. Masha, the gendarme officer's sister, was to await him round the corner; her house was within easy reach from here, and Makar was to be taken there to change his disguise and then to be driven to the Palace; but it had all come about much sooner than they had expected, and she had not yet arrived.

"Never mind. Hire a cab to Cuc.u.mber Market," Clara said. "There you can cross some streets in the opposite direction and then take another cab direct for Theatre Square. A very short walk will bring you to the Palace. Don't forget the names: First Cuc.u.mber Market and then Theatre Square," she repeated, coolly.

He nodded with a rea.s.suring smile, shook her hand warmly, and they parted.

Double Chin was soon to be relieved. Had he left his post before the guards missed Makar, the connection existing between Mme. Shubeyko's toothache and Makar's escape would never have been discovered, and Clara would have come out uncompromised. But Clara was too slow in returning, and the fat gateman was an impressionable, suspicious man, so he presently made inquiry. He found that Mme. Shubeyko was still in the warden's parlour, nursing her cheek with one hand and holding her cards with the other.

In the commotion that followed the discovery Rodkevich wept hysterically and beat the gateman, while Mme. Shubeyko went about invoking imprecations upon the sly prisoner for stealing her new spring cloak, bonnet and parasol.

Meanwhile Clara stood at a point of vantage, watching developments. Had Double Chin left the building at the usual hour, without the prison betraying any signs of disquiet, she would have returned to her room in the warden's house at once, and thus saved her legal existence.