The White Terror and The Red Part 48

"n.o.body is going to try to persuade you to leave the movement," he said, levelling a meek, longing look at her. "The Russian people act like wild beasts toward our poor Jews, Clara; yet they and the Russian revolution will ever be dear to our hearts. We appreciate that it is their blindness which makes such brutes of them. We shall always think of those who are in the fight here; we shall adore you; we shall wors.h.i.+p you, Clara; and perhaps, too, we shall be able to do something for Russian liberty from there. But if you condemn us for joining the emigrants, I wish to say this, that if you had been in Miroslav during the riot you would perhaps take a more indulgent view of our step. So many Jewish revolutionists have sacrificed their lives by 'going to the people'--to the Russian people. It's about time some of us at least went to our own people. They need us, Clara."

"Look here, Elkin," she said with ardent emphasis, striving to deaden the consciousness of his love-lorn look that was breaking her heart, "you must not think I am so soulless as to take no interest in the victims of those horrors, for I do. I do. I can a.s.sure you I do. I have been continually discussing this question in my mind. I have studied it.

My heart is bleeding for our poor Jews, but even if it were solely a question of saving the Jews, even then one's duty would be to work for the revolution. How many Russian Jews could you transport to America and Palestine? Surely not all the five million there are. The great majority of them will stay here and be baited, and the only hope of these is a liberated Russia. All history tells us that the salvation of the Jews lies in liberty and in liberty only. England was the first country to grant them the right to breathe because she was the first country where the common people wrested rights for themselves. The French revolution emanc.i.p.ated the Jews, and so it goes. If there were no parliamentary governments in Western Europe, the Jews of Germany, Austria, or Belgium would still be treated as they are in Russia. When Russia has some freedom at least, her Jews, too, will be treated like human beings."

"But we are not like the Palestinians, Clara. We don't propose to estrange ourselves from the revolutionary movement. We shall support it with American money, and we hope to fit out expeditions to rescue important prisoners from Siberia, and to take them across the Pacific Ocean to our commune."

"Dreams!" she said, laughing good-naturedly.

The discussion lasted about an hour longer. He had not the strength to get up, and she had not the heart to cut him short. They listened to each other's arguments with rapt attention, yet they were both aware of the unspoken other discussion--on the pathos of his love--that went on between them all the while they talked of the great exodus.

And while she commiserated Elkin and felt flattered by her power over him, her heart was full of yearning tenderness for her husband, of joy in him and in her honeymoon with him.

When Elkin rose from his seat at last he said:

"By the way, I came near forgetting it--your cousin wants to see you."

"Volodia? Volodia Vigdoroff? I thought he would dread to come near me."

Time being short, the meeting was set for an early hour the very next morning. Elkin had made his adieux, but he still lingered. There was an extremely awkward stillness which was broken by the appearance of Olga.

Then he left.

Disclosing the location, or, indeed, the existence, of a "conspiracy house" to one uninitiated into underground life was impossible.

Accordingly, Vladimir was to meet Clara in a scanty pine grove near the Nihilists' bas.e.m.e.nt. On his way thither Vladimir was continually looking over his shoulder, lest he was being followed by spies. He was flurried and the sight of every policeman he met gave him a moment or two of abject terror. But the part he had taken in the fight of the Defence Guard had left him with a sense of his own potential courage; so he was trying to live up to it by keeping this appointment with his "illegal"

cousin, whom he was so thirsting to see. That she was married he did not know. He was going to persuade her to join his American party. At this minute, in the high-strung state of his mind, the result of recent experiences, he felt as though she were not merely his "second sister,"

which is Russian for cousin, but a real one. His chief object for seeking this interview, however, had been to celebrate his own vindication. By her enthusiasm for the revolutionary movement from which he stayed away she had formerly made him feel like a coward and a nonent.i.ty; now, however, that in his judgment the riots plainly meant the moral bankruptcy of that movement, so far at least as it concerned revolutionists of Jewish blood, he mentally triumphed over her.

The meeting had been fixed for an early hour. The air in the woods was cold and piquant with the exhalations of young evergreens. The gra.s.s, considerably yellowed and strewn with cones, was still beaded with dew, save for a small outlet of the clearing which was being rapidly invaded by the sun.

They met with warm embraces and kisses.

"Clara, my sister! If you only knew what we have gone through!" he said, with the pa.s.sion of heartfelt tragedy in his subdued voice.

"How is uncle? How is auntie?" she asked with similar emotion.

His kiss and embrace had left an odd sensation in him. He had never had an occasion to kiss her before; and now that he had not seen her for about a year the contact of his lips with the firm, though somewhat faded, cheek of this interesting young woman had revealed to him what seemed to be an unnatural and illicit fact that she was not a sister to him, but--a woman.

They seated themselves in a sunny spot.

"Are you really going to America, Volodia?" she inquired with a familiar smile, carefully hiding her grief.

"I certainly am, and what is more, I want you to come along with us," he answered, admiring her figure and the expression of her face as he had never done before. "Oh, I am quite in earnest about it, Clara. You see, the fist of the rioter has driven it home to me that I am a Jew. I must go where my people go. Come, Clara, you have staked your life for the Russians long enough, and how have they repaid you? Come and let us do something for our own poor unfortunate Jews."

She listened with the attention of one good-naturedly waiving a discussion.

"And what has become of that bridge you were building?" she asked.

"And what has become of that gallows, of the martyr's scaffold, which you said united Jew and Gentile? Has _that_ done anybody any good? As to the bridge I was building across the chasm that divides us from the Christians, I admit that it has been wrecked to splinters; wrecked unmercifully by that same fist of the rioter. I dreamed of the brotherhood of Jew and Gentile and that fist woke me. The only point of contact between Jew and Gentile possible to-day is this"--pointing at a scar slightly back of his ear, his badge of active service as a member of the Defence Committee.

"Why, did you get it in the riot?" she asked with a gesture of horror.

"It's a trifle, of course. Others have been crippled for life, but such as this bit of a scar is it will stand me in good stead as a reminder that I am a Jew. The fact is now everlastingly engraven on my flesh.

There is no effacing it now. But joking aside, Clara, I love the Russian people as much as I ever did. My heart breaks at the thought of leaving Russia. I don't think the Russians themselves are capable of loving their people as I do. But it can't be helped. There is an impa.s.sable chasm between us."

He was conscious of being on his mettle, as though the fiascoes he had sustained in his last year's talks with her were being retrieved. As to her, there was a look of curiosity and subtle condescension in her eye as she listened. But she was thoroughly friendly and warm-hearted, so for the moment he saw nothing but encouragement to his flow of conversation. From time to time he would be seized with mortal fear lest they should be pounced upon by gendarmes, but he never betrayed it.

At one point, when he had put a question to her and paused, she said, instead of answering it:

"Really, Volodia, I somehow can't get it into my head that you are actually going to America."

"Oh, I am, I am. I am going to that land 'where one's wounded feelings are sure of shelter.' Come along, Clara. Haven't you taken risks enough in Russia? Come and serve your own people, your poor, trodden people.

Have not the riots been enough to open your eyes, Clara?"

"As if those were the only riots there were," she returned, pensively.

"All humanity is in the hands of rioters."

"But our homes are being destroyed, Clara," he urged in an impa.s.sioned undertone. "Our people are being plundered, maimed, their every feeling is outraged, their daughters are a.s.saulted."

"Is there anything new in that?" she asked, in the same pensive tone.

"Are not the ma.s.ses robbed of the fruit of their toil? Are they not maimed in the workshops or in the army? Are not their daughters reduced to dishonour by their own misery and by the l.u.s.t of the mighty? Are not the cities full of human beings without a home? All Russia is riot-ridden. The whole world, for that matter. The riots that you are dwelling upon are only a detail. Do away with _the_ riot and all the others will disappear of themselves."

A note of animation came into her melancholy voice.

"What you 'Americans' propose to do," she continued, "is to clasp a handful of victims in your arms and to flee to America with them. Well, I have no fault to find with you, Volodia. I wish you and your party success. But the great, great bulk of victims, Gentiles as well as Jews, remain here, and the rioters--the throne, the bureaucracy, the drones--remain with them."

She struck him as amazingly beautiful this morning and she seemed to speak as one inspired. He listened to her with a feeling of reverence.

"But you have done enough, Clara," he said when she finished. "You have faced dangers enough. Sooner or later you will be taken, and then--" (he threw up his hands sadly). "You have a perfect right to save your life and liberty now."

She shook her head.

"You are a wonderful woman, Clara. By George, you are! Therefore, if you are arrested, it will be a great loss not only to your relatives, but to all the Jews. Haven't the Gentiles robbed us enough?"

"Would you have them rob us of our sacred principles, too?" she retorted, with a faint smile. "Indeed, the right to die for liberty is the only right the government cannot take away from the Jew."

"Come to America, Clara."

"Oh, that's utterly impossible, Volodia," she answered, gazing at the cones.

The discovery that Prince Boulatoff was prominently connected with the underground movement, which originated in the confession of one of his revolutionary pupils, had created considerable excitement in St.

Petersburg. The secret service had no difficulty in securing his photograph, and when it was shown to the little man who had acted as an errand boy at the celebrated cheese-shop he at once identified him as one of those who dug the mine. That Pavel had recently been in Miroslav was known to the whole town. Accordingly, the central political detective office at St. Petersburg despatched several picked men there to scent for his underground trail. These practically took the matter out of the hands of the local gendarmes, whom they treated with professional contempt. They gradually learned that Pavel had been a frequent visitor at Orlovsky's house, and then they took to shadowing Orlovsky and those in whose company he was seen. They made discovery after discovery.

One of these imported spies was the fellow who once shadowed Clara in St. Petersburg--the tall man with the swinging arm and the stiff-looking neck whom she met on the day when the revolutionist with the Greek name was arrested.

It was about 8 o'clock in the evening, some ten minutes before train time, when this spy saw an uneducated Jewish woman in blue spectacles crossing the square in front of the station. She seemed familiar to him, yet not enough so to attract serious attention.

It was Clara. Her disguise, in addition to the blue spectacles, consisted of a heavy Jewish wig, partly covered by a black kerchief, and an old-fas.h.i.+oned cloak. To spare her the risk of facing the gendarmes of the station, her ticket had been bought for her by somebody else, her intention being to slip into her car at the last moment. Having reached the place too early, however, she was now trying to kill the interval by sauntering about. This time the spy escaped her notice, but a little later, less than a minute before the third bell was sounded and while she was scurrying through the third cla.s.s restaurant, she caught sight of him, as he stood half leaning against the counter drowsily.