The White Terror and The Red Part 39

The bailiff burst into a horse-laugh and slapped his knees violently.

The priest's face bore a look of despair.

"Can it be that you believe such foolishness?" he said.

"What do we know? We are only common people. All we do know is that whatever happens it is our skin that is peeled off. If we can't get the paper we'll do our duty without it."

"That's it, without it!" the others chimed in in excited chorus.

Further parleying made it clear that many of them had no inclination to do any personal harm to the Jews or to their property. They were on friendly terms with their Jewish neighbours, and all they wanted was to get rid of a disagreeable duty. The rest, about half of the entire crowd, had had their heads turned with stories of lakes of vodka and fabulous piles of loot, but even these proved susceptible to argument.

"Here," Yossl shouted at the top of his voice and with great fervour. "I have a scheme, and what will you lose by it if you hear me out? If you don't like it, I'll take it back and it won't cost you a cent." The intensity of his manner took them by storm. He was allowed to finish.

"My scheme amounts to this: The Jews will sign a paper taking upon themselves all responsibility for your failure to smash their shops and houses, so that if the authorities call you to account for violating the imperial ukase, we will answer and you will come out clear."

First there was perplexed stillness, then a murmur of distrust, and finally a tumult of rejection.

"Crafty Jew! There must be some trick in it!" they yelled sneeringly.

The priest was wiping the perspiration from his forehead. Finally he shouted huskily:

"Very well, I'll sign such a paper."

After some more arguing, the plan, in its amended form, was adopted. The older men flaunted their experience by insisting upon a formal "certificate" bearing the priest's official seal and signature, so that when the Czar's inspectors arrived the peasants might have something tangible to present. When all this had been complied with, there was some portentous talk about the Jews sprinkling the bargain with vodka; but having followed the "little father's" advice in the main point the peasants were now in a yielding mood toward him generally, and the vodka shops being closed, he had no difficulty in getting them to go home sober.

A large number of them had to cross the river. To occupy their minds while they were waiting for the ferry--a small antediluvian affair which could only accommodate about one-fifth of the crowd at a time--the priest asked them for a song. And then the quiet evening air resounded with those pensive, soulful strains which for depth of melancholy have scarcely an equal in the entire range of folk-music. Thus the men who might now have been frenzied with the work of pillage, devastation and, perhaps, murder, stood transfixed with the poetry of anguish and pity.

Race distinctions and ukases--how alien and unintelligible these things were to the world in which their souls dwelt at this minute! The glint of the water grew darker every second. The men on the ferry continued their singing. Then somebody on the other side joined in and the melody spread in all directions. The fresh ringing treble of a peasant girl, peculiarly doleful in its high notes, came from across the water. A choir of invisible choirs, scattered along both banks, sang to the night of the sadness of human existence.

The Jews returned from their hiding-places, but very few of them went to bed that night. The tragedy in many houses was intensified by the circ.u.mstance that the heads of these families were absent from the town, having gone to the Good Jew for prayer and advice as to the spreading calamity. Weinstein's s.p.a.cious rooms were full of neighbours and their families. The presence of the man whom one had been accustomed to regard as a monument of worldly power had a special attraction for the poorer Pietists this evening. Besides, one dreaded the hallucinations of solitude and in Weinstein's house one was sure to find company. Most of them sat in the large prayer room, keeping close to each other, conversing in subdued, melancholy voices, comfortable in the community of their woe, as though content to remain in this huddle until the end of time. Yossl was curling his black side-locks morosely. The other people in the room importuned him for details of the scene in front of the bailiff's office, but he was not in the mood for speaking. Weinstein was snapping his fingers at his own florid neck, as he walked backward and forward. Presently Maria, his Gentile servant, who spoke good Yiddish, addressed him, with sad, sympathetic mien:

"Master dear," she said in Yiddish. "Will you let me break a couple of windows?"

He did not understand.

"You see," she explained bursting into tears. "If they get at me because I did not smash things in your house, I'll be able to swear that I did."

For an instant he stood surveying her, then, in a spasm of rage and misery, he shrieked out:

"Why, certainly! Go ahead! Break, smash, everything you set your eye on.

You are the princess, we are only Jews. Go smash the whole house." And in his frenzy he went breaking windows and chairs, shrieking as he did so:

"Here! Look and let your heart rejoice."

"Madman," Yossl said calmly, "you'll alarm the town. They'll think it's a riot and the Gentiles will join in."

Weinstein sat down pale and panting. "Go and tell your people to come and delight in the sight of a Jew's broken windows," he said to the Gentile woman.

She put her hands to her face and left the room sobbing.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

THE DEFENCE COMMITTEE.

The little man who played the part of errand boy at the cheese shop and who was arrested before the work on the mine was well advanced had ultimately turned state's evidence. Among the revolutionists he betrayed was Pavel, but the prince was known to him under a false name. Still, the information furnished by his man, added to some addresses found on other captured Nihilists, led to a series of new arrests. The ranks of the Will of the People were being rapidly decimated. Grisha, the dynamiter, and several other members of the innermost circle were seized shortly after the killing of the Czar. The few surviving leaders withdrew to the provinces, in some cases only immediately to fall into the hands of the police there. Thus in April, after a Jewish student girl was arrested in Kieff, the "trap" at her lodgings caught a woman and a man who proved to be Baska, the "wife" of the "cheesemonger"

couple, and her real husband, "the German." Urie (the "cheesemonger"), Makar and several other active revolutionists were in Moscow.

One late afternoon Clara was slowly pacing the painted floor of her room, her hands clasped behind her, while her lover lay on the lounge, watching her through the gathering dusk.

"St. Petersburg is too hot now," he said, breaking a long silence.

"Everybody is going away."

"There is really no use staying here just at present," she a.s.sented, sadly, without pausing.

They grew silent again. The gloom of the little parlour was thickening so rapidly that it seemed as though the outline of Clara's face, as she walked back and forth, became vaguer every time she turned in Pavel's direction.

Presently, with a burst of amorous tenderness, he got up, saying:

"Clanya! Let us go for a rest somewhere. You know you need it."

"You need it even more than I do, poor boy," she replied, stepping up close to him. "I do wish you would go home for a month or two--or somewhere else. As to myself, I should first like to see my parents. The riots may strike Miroslav at any moment. If any harm came to them, I should never forgive myself. I must get them away from there. That's all I can think of." There was an obvious blank in her words. She left something unsaid, and the consciousness of it made him uncomfortable.

"But that's easily arranged," he urged. "You can send them money and invite them to some safe place."

"That's what I have been thinking of. I am so restless I wish I could start to-morrow. It couldn't be arranged too soon. There are persistent rumors that a riot is coming there. I shan't be gone long, dearest."

He had it at the tip of his tongue to force a discussion of their party's att.i.tude toward the riots and to have it out once for all. In his imagined debates with her on the subject he had often exclaimed: "I happen to belong to a cla.s.s of land-robbers and profligates; now, suppose the revolution breaks out and my cla.s.s is attacked by the people, will that affect me? A nice revolutionist I should be if it did!" This and other arguments were all ready; what he lacked, however, was the courage to bring up the topic. As to her promise to marry him when the great conspiracy was out of the way, her redeeming it now, while she was so tremulously absorbed in the question of her parents'

safety, could not be thought of.

He gathered her to him and kissed her, at once sympathetically and appealingly.

"Go home, Pasha," she besought. "But not to Miroslav. You won't rest there. Go to some of your mother's country places, or, perhaps some other place would be safer for you. Go and take good care of yourself.

It would be too terrible if I found you arrested when I got back."

"Will you marry me then?" he asked, impersonating a pampered child.

She nodded, in the same playful spirit, and again her reticence brought disquiet to his heart. "Something tells me she'll never be mine," he thought with a sigh.

While the government was actively fomenting the riots, making an electric rod of the Jews, the Nihilists persisted in mistaking them for revolutionary kindling wood. While the "Chronicle of Arrests" in the revolutionary organ included a large number of Jewish names, several of them of persons conspicuous in the movement and noted for their pluck, another page of the same issue contained a letter from the riot-ridden district that was strongly flavoured with anti-Semitism. Moreover, a proclamation, addressed to the peasantry, was printed on an "underground" press, naming the Czar, the landlords and the Jews as enemies of the people. This proclamation met with a storm of disapproval, however, on the part of Gentiles and Jews alike, and was withdrawn from circulation. Chaos reigned in the minds of the Nihilists.

Their party was disorganised, their thinkers for the most part buried, dead or alive, the editorial management of their publications in the hands of the weakest man on the Executive Committee, of one who several years later sent, from Paris, a most servile pet.i.tion to the Czar, abjuring his former views and begging permission to return home as an advocate of unqualified absolutism and panslavism.

The att.i.tude of the Nihilists toward the Jewish population in general was thus anything but sympathetic; and yet, so far as the higher strata of the movement were concerned, the personal relations between Jew and Gentile were not affected by this circ.u.mstance in the slightest degree.

The feeling of intimate comrades.h.i.+p and mutual devotion between the two elements was left unmarred, as if one's views on the Jewish question were purely a matter of abstract reasoning without any bearing on the Jew of flesh and blood one happened to know.

More than this, in their blind theorising according to preconceived formulas, most of the active Jewish Nihilists shut their eyes to the actual state of things and joined their Gentile comrades in applauding the riots as an encouraging sign of the times, as "a popular revolutionary protest."

Pavel longed to discuss the riots with Makar. When he saw him, however, he found him far more interested in the "new revolutionary program" upon which he was engaged than in the anti-Semitic crusade.