The White Terror and The Red Part 17

"Master of the universe! You get no sleep at all."

The girl kissed her mother gayly. "You know what papa says," she rejoined, "'sleep is one sixtieth of death.' Life is better, mamma dear."

"I have not studied any of your Gentile books, yet I know enough to understand that to be alive is better than to be dead," the tall, erect old woman said without smiling. "But if you want to be alive you must sleep. Go to bed, go to bed."

There were between them relations of quizzical comradeship, implying that each treated the interests of the other with patronising levity, with the reservation of a common ground upon which they met on terms of equality and ardent friendship.

"By the way," the old woman added, yawning, "Volodia was here. He wants to see you."

"I know. I found him at the gate."

"Very well, then, go to bed, go to bed."

"Is father asleep?"

At this a red-bearded little man in yellow drawers and a white shirt open at the neck and exposing a hairy breast, burst from an open side door.

"How can one sleep when one is not allowed to?" he fired out. "May she sink into the earth, her unG.o.dly books and all. I'll break every unclean bone in you. Who ever heard of a girl roaming around as late as that?"

"Hush," his wife said with a faint smile, as she urged him back to their bed-room, much as she would a child.

The family occupied one large bas.e.m.e.nt room, the better part of which was used as a trunk-maker's shop and a kitchen, two narrow strips of its s.p.a.ce having been part.i.tioned off for bed-rooms. It was Hannah, Clara's mother, who conducted the trunk business. The bare wooden boxes came from a carpenter's shop and she had them transformed into trunks at her house. Clara's father spent his days and evenings in a synagogue, studying the Talmud "for its own sake." There were other such scholars in Miroslav, the wife in each case supporting the family by engaging in earthly business, while her husband was looking after their common spiritual welfare in the house of G.o.d. Clara's mother was generally known as "Hannah the trunk-maker," or "Hannah the Devil." In her very humble way she was a shrewd business woman, tireless, scheming, and not over-scrupulous, but her nickname had originated long before she was old enough to be a devil on Cuc.u.mber Market. She was a little girl when there appeared in the neighbourhood what Anglo-Saxons would call "Jack the Window-Smasher." Window-pane after window-pane was cracked without there being the remotest clue to the source of the mischief. The bewigged old women said it was an evil spirit, and engaged a "master of the name" to exorcise it from the community; but the number of broken windows continued to grow. The devil proved to be Hannah, and the most startling thing about the matter, according to the bewigged women of the neighbourhood, was this, that when caught in the act, she did not even cry, but just lowered her eyes and frowned saucily.

Rabbi Rachmiel, as Clara's father was addressed by strangers, was innocent of "things of the world" as an infant--a hot-tempered, simple-minded scholar, with the eyes and manner of a tiger and the heart of a dove. His wife tied his shirt-strings, helped him on with his socks and boots, and generally took care of him as she might of a baby. When he spoke of worldly things to her, she paid no heed to his talk. When he happened to drop a saying from the Talmud she would listen reverently for more, without understanding a word of what he said.

Had Clara been a boy her father would have sooner allowed her to be burned alive than to be taught "Gentile wisdom." But woman is out of the count in the Jewish church, so he neither interfered nor tried to understand the effect that Gentile education was having on her.

Father, mother and daughter represented three distinct worlds, Clara being as deeply engrossed in her "Gentile wisdom" as Rabbi Rachmiel was in his Talmud, or as her mother in her trunks. That the girl belonged to a society that was plotting against the Czar the old people had not the remotest idea, of course.

Besides Clara and her married sister the old couple had two sons, one of them a rabbi in a small town and the other a merchant in the same place.

Clara put out the smoky light of a crude chimneyless little lamp (with a piece of wire to work the wick up and down), which had been left burning for her. A few streaks of raw daylight crept in through the shutters, falling on a pair of big rusty shears fastened to the top of a wooden block, on a heap of sheet-iron, and on several rows of old Talmudic folios which lined the stretch of wall between Clara's part.i.tion and one of the two windows.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE COUNTESS' DISCOVERY.

As Pavel mounted the majestic staircase of his mother's residence he became aware that an abstract facial expression was all his memory retained of Mlle. Yavner's likeness. He coveted another glance at her much as a man covets to hear again a new song that seems to be singing itself in his mind without his being able to reproduce it.

He found his mother sitting up for him, on the verge of a nervous collapse. She took him to a large, secluded room, the best in the vast house for _tete-a-tete_ purposes. It was filled with mementoes, the trophies of her father's diplomatic career, with his proud collection of rare and costly inkstands, and with odds and ends of ancient furniture, each with a proud history as clear-cut as the pedigree of a high-born race-horse.

Anna Nicolayevna had planned to lead up to the main question diplomatically, but she was scarcely seated on a huge, venerable couch (which made her look smaller than ever) than she turned pale and blurted out in a whisper:

"Did you cross the bridge this afternoon?"

"No. Why?" He said this with fatigued curiosity and looking her full in the face.

She dropped her glance. "I thought I saw you there."

"You were mistaken, then, but what makes you look so uneasy? I did not go in that direction at all, but suppose I did. Why, what has happened?"

She cowed before the insistence of his interrogations and beat a retreat.

"I am not uneasy at all. I must have been mistaken, then. It is about Kostia I have been wanting to speak to you. It is quite a serious matter. You see he is too delicate for the military schools. So I was thinking of putting him in the gymnasium, but then many of the boys there are children of undesirable people. One can't be too careful these days." She was now speaking according to her carefully considered program, and growing pale once more, she fixed him with a searching glance, as she asked: "You must have heard of the man the gendarmes caught, haven't you?"

"Oh, you mean the fellow who would not open his mouth," he said with a smile. "Quite a sensation for a town like this. In St. Petersburg or Moscow they catch them so often it has ceased to be news."

She went on to speak of the evil of Nihilism, Pavel listening with growing interest, like a man who had given the matter some consideration. Poor Anna Nicolayevna! She was no match for him.

Finally he got up. "Well, I don't really know," he said. "It seems to me the trouble lies much deeper than that, _mamman_. Those fellows, the Nihilists, don't amount to anything in themselves. If it were not for that everlasting Russian helplessness of ours they could do no more harm than a group of flies. Our factories and successful farms are all run by Germans; we simply can't take care of the least thing."

"But what have factories and farms to do with the pranks of demoralised boys?"

He smiled. "But if we were not a helpless, shiftless nation a handful of boys couldn't frighten us, could they?"

"Very well. Let us suppose you are a minister. What would you do?"

"What would I do? I shouldn't let things come to such a pa.s.s, to begin with."

He was tempted to cast circ.u.mspection to the winds and to thunder out his real impeachment of existing conditions. This, however, he could not afford; so he felt like a boat that is being rowed across stream with a strong current to tempt her downward. He was sailing in a diagonal direction. Every now and then he would let himself drift along, only presently to take up his oars and strike out for the bank again. He spoke in his loud rapid way. Every now and again he would break off, fall to pacing the floor silently and listening to the sound of his own voice which continued to ring in his ears, as though his words remained suspended in the air.

Anna Nicolayevna--a curled-up little heap capped by an enormous pile of glossy auburn hair, in the corner of a huge couch--followed him intently. Once or twice she nodded approval to a severe attack upon the government, without realising that he was speaking against the Czar. She was at a loss to infer whether he was opposed to the new advisers of the Emperor in the same way in which her brother-in-law and the ultra-conservative Slavophiles were opposed to them or whether he was some kind of liberal. He certainly seemed to tend toward the Slavophiles in his apparent hatred of foreigners.

"They'll kill him, those murderous youngsters, they are sure to kill him," he shouted at one point, speaking of the Czar. "And who is to blame? Is such a state of things possible anywhere in Western Europe?"

Anna Nicolayevna's eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as she shrank deeper into the corner of the couch.

She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Her pity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom and glint of martyrdom on his face--the face of Alexander II. Quite apart from this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasy of thought and feeling--of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. She was in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be a weightier personage than ever. The haze that enveloped him was thickening. Nevertheless his strictures upon Russia's incapacity left her rankling with a desire to refute them. That national self-conceit which breeds in every child the conviction that his is the greatest country in the world and that its superiority is cheerfully conceded by all other nations, rea.s.serted itself in the countess with resentful emphasis. To be sure, all the skill, ingenuity and taste of the refined world came from abroad, but this did not lessen her contempt for foreigners any more than did the fact that all acrobats and hair-dressers were Germans or Frenchmen. Her childhood had been spent in foreign countries and she knew their languages as well as she did her own; nevertheless her abstraction of a foreigner was a man who spoke broken Russian--a lisping, stammering, cringing imbecile. She revolted to think of Russia as being inferior to wretches of this sort, and when the bridge incident swept back upon her in all the clearness of fact, her blood ran chill again. "He is the man I saw in the waggon after all," she said to herself, in dismay.

She went to bed, but tossed about in an agony of restlessness. When the darkness of her room began to thin and the brighter objects loomed into view, she slipped on a wrapper and seated herself at a window, courting composure in the blossom-scented air that came up from the garden; but all to no purpose. Ever and anon, after a respite of tranquillity she would be seized with a new rush of consternation. Pasha was the man she had seen on the bridge, disguised as an artisan; he was a Nihilist.

While Anna Nicolayevna was thus harrowed with doubt, Pavel was pacing his room, his heart on the point of bursting with a desire to see his mother again and to make a clean breast of it. The notion of her being outwitted and made sport of touched him with pity. Come what might, his poor n.o.ble-hearted mother must be kept in the dark no longer. She would appreciate his feelings. He would plead with her, with tears in his eyes he would implore her to open her eyes to the appalling inhumanity of the prevailing adjustment of things. And as he visioned himself making this plea to her, his own sense of the barbarity of the existing regime set his blood simmering in him, and quickened his desire to lay it all before his mother.

Presently somebody rapped on his door. It was Anna Nicolayevna.

"I must speak to you, Pasha; I can't get any sleep," she said.

They went into a newly-built summer house. The jumble of colour and redolence was invaded with light that a.s.serted its presence like a great living spirit. The orchard seemed to be worlds away from itself.

As a precaution, they spoke in French.