They were all particularly dear to her because they were a handful of survivors of an epidemic of arrests that had swept away so many of their prominent comrades. The notion of these people thinking of her as a renegade was too horrible to be indulged in for a single moment.
Besides, who would have had the heart to desert the party now that its ranks had been so decimated and each member was of so much value? Still more revolting was such an idea to Clara when she thought of the Nihilists who had died on the scaffold or were dying of consumption or scurvy or going insane in solitary confinement. Sophia, strangled on the gallows, was in her grave. Would she, Clara, abandon the cause to which that n.o.ble woman had given her life?
The long and short of it is that it would have required far more courage on her part to go to America and be safe from the Russian gendarmes than to live under constant fire as an active "illegal" in her native country.
This was the kind of thoughts that were occupying her mind at this minute. While her mother was urging her to go to America, she exclaimed mutely: "No, Sophia, I shan"t desert the cause for which they have strangled you. I, too, will die for it." It seemed easy and the height of happiness to end one"s life as Sophia had done. She saw her dead friend vividly, and as her mind scanned the mysterious, far-away image, the dear, familiar image, her bosom began to heave and her hand clutched her mother"s arm in a paroxysm of suppressed tears.
"Water! Water!" Hannah cried into the open doorway. When the water had been brought and Clara had gulped down a mouthful of it and fixed a faint, wistful smile on her mother, Hannah remarked fiercely:
"The ghost knows what she is thinking of while people talk to her."
Clara went out for a long walk over the old macadamised road that ran through the White-Russian town on its way to St. Petersburg. She loved to watch the peasant wagons, and, early in the morning and late in the evening, the incoming and outgoing stage-coaches. She knew that she was going to stay in the thick of the struggle, come what might. Yet the riots--more definitely the one of Miroslav--lay like a ruthless living reproach in her heart. She wanted to be alone with this Reproach, to plead with it, to argue with it, to pick it to pieces. She walked through the shabby, narrow streets and along the St. Petersburg highway, thinking a thousand thoughts, but she neither pleaded with that Reproach, nor argued with it, nor tried to pick it to pieces. Her mind was full of Pavel and of Sophia and of her other comrades, living or dead. "It is all very well for me to think of going to America and be free from danger," she said to herself. "But can Sophia go there? or Hessia?"
At one moment it flashed through her brain that to be true to the people was to work for it in spite of all its injustices, even as a mother did for her child, notwithstanding all the cruelties it might heap on her.
The highest bliss of martyrdom was to be mobbed by the very crowd for whose welfare you sacrificed yourself. To be sure, these thoughts were merely a rea.s.sertion of the conflict which she sought to settle. They offered no answer to the question, Why should she, a Jewess, stake her life for a people that was given to pillaging and outraging, to mutilating and murdering innocent Jews? They merely made a new statement of the fact that she was bent upon doing so. Yet she seized upon the new formulation of the problem as if it were the solution she was craving for. "I shall bear the cross of the Social Revolution even if the Russian people trample upon me and everybody who is dear to me," she exclaimed in her heart, feeling at peace with the shade of Sophia.
She walked home in a peculiar state of religious beat.i.tude, as though she had made a great discovery, found a golden key to the gravest problem of her personal life. Then, being in this uplifted frame of mind, she saw light breaking about her. Arguments were offering themselves in support of her position. When Russia was free and the reign of fraternity and equality had been established the maltreatment of man by man in any form would be impossible. Surely there would be no question of race or faith then. Anti-Jewish riots were now raging? All the more reason, then, to work for Russia"s liberty. Indeed, was not the condition of the Jews better in free countries than in despotic ones? And the Russian peasant, would he in his blind fury run amuck the way he did if it were not for the misery and darkness in which he was kept by his tyrants? Her heart went out to the mob that was so ignorant as to attack people who had done them no harm. And then, once the great Reproach had been appeased in her mind, the entire Jewish question, riots, legal discriminations and all, appeared a mere trifle compared to the great Human Question, the solution of which const.i.tuted the chief problem of her cause.
The next time her mother indulged in an attack upon Gentiles in general and Clara"s "Gentile friends" in particular the young woman begged her, with tears in her voice, to desist:
"Look at her! I have touched the honour of the Impurity," the old woman said, sneering.
"Oh, they are not the Impurity, mamma darling," Clara returned ardently.
"They are saints; they live and die for the happiness of others. If you only knew what kind of people they were!"
"She has actually been bedeviled, as true as I am a daughter of Israel.
Jews are being torn to pieces by the Gentiles; a Jew isn"t allowed to breathe, yet she----"
"Oh, they are a different kind of Gentiles, mamma. When that for which they struggle has been realised the Jew will breathe freely. Our people have no trouble in a country like England. Why? Because the whole country has more freedom there. Besides, when the demands of my "Gentile friends" have been realised the Christian mobs won"t be so uneducated, so blind. They will know who is who, and Jew and Gentile will live in peace. All will live in peace, like brothers, mamma."
Hannah listened attentively, so that Clara, elated by the apparent effect of her plea, went on, going over aloud the answer that she gave her own conscience. When she paused, however, Hannah said with a shrug of her shoulders and a mournful nod of her head:
"So you are bound to rot away in prison, aren"t you?"
"Don"t talk like that, mamma, dear, pray."
"Why shouldn"t I? Has somebody else given birth to you? Has somebody else brought you up?"
"But why should you make yourself uneasy about me? I _won"t_ rot away in prison, and if I do, better people than I have met with a fate of that kind. I wish I were as good as they were and died as they did."
"A rather peculiar taste," Hannah said with another shrug which seemed to add: "She has gone clear daft on those Gentile books of hers, as true as I live."
Clara remained in the White-Russian town two days longer than her parents. At the moment of parting her mother clung to her desperately.
"Will I ever see you again?" Hannah sobbed. "Daughter mine, daughter mine! Will my eyes ever see you again?"
The old Talmudist was weeping into a blue bandanna.
As Clara walked back to her lodging alone the streets of the strange town gave her an excruciating sense of desolation.
CHAPTER XLI.
PAVEL BECOMES "ILLEGAL."
A month had elapsed. Clara was in a train, bound for Moscow, where her lover was awaiting her arrival. The nearer she drew to her destination the more vivid grew his features in her mind and the more violent was her fidget. "I am madly in love with him," she said to herself, and the very sound of these words in her mind were sweet to her. The few weeks of separation seemed to have convinced her that the power of his love over her was far greater than she had supposed. Things that had preyed upon her mind before now glanced off her imagination. She wept over the fate of Hessia and her prison-born child, yet she felt that if Pavel asked her to marry him at once she would not have the strength to resist him. Nay, to marry him was what her heart coveted above all else in the world.
Being an "illegal," she had to slip into the big ancient city quietly.
As she pa.s.sed through the streets, alone on a droshky, she made a mental note of the difference in general pictorial effect between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but she was too excited to give her mind to anything in particular.
Her first meeting with Pavel took place in a large cafe, built something like a theatre, with two tiers of stalls, a gigantic music box sending up great waves of subdued sound from the main floor below. He waited for her in front of the building. When she came they just shook hands smilingly, and he led the way up one flight of stairs to one of the stalls--a fair-sized, oblong private room, its walls covered with red plush, with upholstered benching to match.
"I am simply crazy, Clanya!" he whispered, pressing her to him tremulously.
At first they both experienced a sense of desuetude and awkwardness, so that in spite of his stormy demonstrations he could not look her full in the face. But this soon wore off. They were overflowing with joy in one another.
A waiter, all in white, suave and hearty as only Great-Russian waiters know how to be, brought in "a portion of tea," served in attractive teapots of silver, with a gla.s.s for the man and a cup for the lady, and retired, shutting the door behind him, which subdued the metallic melody that filled the room still further and added to the sense of mystery that came from it. They talked desultorily and brokenly, of her parents and of the revolutionists gathered in Moscow. The subject of the Miroslav riot was tactfully broached by Clara herself, but she strove to give this part of their incoherent conversation the tone in which people usually discuss some sad but long-forgotten event, and she pa.s.sed to some other topic as quickly and imperceptibly as she could. That he had seen that riot he did not tell her, though he once caught himself on the point of blurting it all out.
When she asked him about the general state of the movement he gradually warmed up. The outlook was brilliant, he said.
Urie, the tall blond n.o.bleman with the strikingly Great-Russian features, who had played the part of cheesemonger on Little Garden Street, St. Petersburg, was in Moscow now, mending the shattered organisation. He was the centre of a busy group of revolutionists, Jews as well as Slavs. Several well-known veterans of both nationalities, who had been living in foreign countries during the past year or two, were expected to return to Russia. Everybody was bubbling with enthusiasm and activity.
"And your fiery imagination is not inclined to view things in a rather roseate light, is it?" she asked, beaming amorously.
"Not a bit," he replied irascibly. "Wait till you have seen it all for yourself. The reports from the provinces are all of the most cheerful character. New men are springing up everywhere. The revolution is a hydra-headed giant, Clanya."
"But who says it isn"t?" she asked, with a laugh.
She got up, shot out her arms, saying:
"Now for something to do. I feel like turning mountains upside down.
Indeed, the revolution is a hydra-headed giant, indeed it is. And you are a little dear," she added, bending over him and pressing her cheek against his.
They had been married less than a month when he learned from a ciphered letter from Masha Safonoff that the gendarmes were looking for him.
"Well, Clanya," he said facetiously, as he entered their apartment one afternoon, "you are a princess no longer."
Her face fell.
"Look at her! Look at her! She is grieving over the loss of her t.i.tle."
"Oh, do stop those silly jokes of yours, Pasha. Must you become illegal?"