The White Terror and The Red Part 19

While they sat talking, her mother came in, an elderly Jewess, tall and stately, with a shrewd, careworn look, her hair carefully hidden beneath a strip of black satin.

"Is that you, Tamara?" she asked without taking notice of the stranger.

She said something to Motl, made for the door, but suddenly returned, addressing herself to her daughter again. She wanted to know something about the law of chattel-mortgages, but neither Clara nor her visitor could furnish her the desired information.

"Always at those books of theirs, yet when it comes to the point they don't know anything," she said, with a smile, as she bustled out of the room.

"Are these Talmud books?" Pavel asked, pointing at Rabbi Rachmiel's library.

"Yes," Clara nodded with an implied smile in her voice.

"Can you read them?"

"Oh, no," she answered, smiling.

He told her that Makar was a deep Talmudic scholar and talked of the Jewish religion, but she offered him no encouragement. She was brimful of questions herself. Her inquiries were concerned with the future destinies of the human race. With all her practical common sense, she had a notion that the era of undimmed equality and universal love would dawn almost immediately after the overthrow of Russian tyranny. This, as she had been taught by revolutionary publications, was to come as the logical continuation of Russia's village communes, once the development of this survival of prehistoric communism received free scope. What she wanted was a clear and detailed account of life in Future Society.

Her questions and his answers had the character of a theoretical discussion. Gradually, however, he mounted to a more animated tone, portraying the future with quiet fervour. She listened gravely, her eyes full upon his, and this absorbed look spurred him on. But presently her mother came in again, this time with a peasant customer, and they went out to continue their talk in the open air. There were plenty of deserted lanes and bits of open country a short distance off. There was a vague gentle understanding between them that it was the golden idealism of their talk which had set them yearning for the unhidden sky and the aromatic breezes of spring. This upheld their lofty mood while they silently trudged through the outskirts of the market place. They could not as yet continue their interrupted conversation, and to speak of something else would have seemed profanation. At last they emerged on a lonely square, formed by an orchard, some houses and barns and the ruin of an old barrack. The air was excellent and there was n.o.body to overhear them. Nevertheless when Pavel was about to resume he felt that he was not in the mood for it. Nor did she urge him on with any further questions.

From the old barracks they pa.s.sed into a dusty side lane and thence into a country road which led to a suburb and ran parallel to the railway tracks.

The sun was burning by fits and starts, as it were. In those spots where ma.s.ses of lilacs and fruit blossoms gave way to a broader outlook, the road was so flooded with light that Clara had to shield her eyes with her hand. Now and again a clump of trees in the distance would fall apart to show the snow-crested top of a distant hill and the blueish haze of the horizon-line.

Their immediate surroundings were a scrawny, frowzy landscape. The lawns in front of the huts they pa.s.sed, the homes of washerwomen, were overspread with drying linen.

"Delightful, isn't it?" Pavel said, inhaling a long draught of the rich, animating air and glancing down a ravine choked with nettle. The remark was merely a spoken sigh of joy. She made no reply.

They were both hungry, and presently they began to feel tired as well.

Yet neither of them was disposed to halt or to break silence except by an occasional word or two that meant nothing.

At last he said:

"You must be quite fatigued. It's cruel of me."

"I am, but it isn't cruel of you," she answered, stopping short, and drawing a deep, smiling breath.

He ran into a washerwoman's hovel, startling a brood of ducklings on his way, and soon came back with the information that milk was to be had in a trackman's hut beyond a spa.r.s.e grove to the right.

A few minutes later they sat at a rude table in a miniature garden between the shining steel rails of the track and a red-painted cabin. It was the fourth track-house from the Miroslav railroad station and was generally known as the Fourth Hut. Besides milk and eggs and coa.r.s.e rye bread they found sour soup. They ate heartily, but an echo of their exalted dream was still on them. To Pavel this feeling was embodied in an atmosphere of femininity that pervaded his consciousness at this moment. He was sensible of sitting in front of a pretty, healthy girl full of modest courage and undemonstrative inspiration. The lingering solemnity of his mood seemed to have something to do with the shimmering little hairs which the breeze was stirring on Clara's neck, as she bent over her earthen bowl, with the warm colouring of her ear, with the elastic firmness of her cheek, with the airiness of her blouse.

A desire stirred in him to speak once more of the part she had unconsciously played in his conversion, and at this he felt that if he told her the story he would find a peculiar pleasure in exaggerating the importance of the effect which her "speech" had produced on his mind.

But it came over him that Makar was still behind the prison gate and that this was not the time to enjoy oneself.

CHAPTER XIX.

STRAWBERRIES.

That walk to the trackman's hut had kindled a new light in Pavel's soul.

He often found himself craving for a repet.i.tion of the experience--not merely for Clara's companionship, but for another occasion to walk through the fields with her, to sit by her side in the breeze, and, above all, for the intimacy of seeing her fatigued and eating heartily.

She dwelt in his mind as a girl comrade, self-possessed and plucky, gifted with grit, tact and spirit; at the same time she lingered in his consciousness as a responsive pupil, glowing with restrained enthusiasm over his talk, eagerly following him through an ecstasy of lofty dreams.

These two aspects of her were merged in the sight and odour of healthy, magnificently complexioned girlhood between the glint of steel rails and the dusty geranium in a trackman's window.

They had another appointment. When he called at the trunkmaker's shop Clara greeted him with a hearty handshake. He blushed. His love seemed to be gaining on him by leaps and bounds.

"How are things?" he asked.

"First rate, Pavel Va.s.silyevich. The vegetable man will do it. He's a trump, I tell you." She went into details. She was in unusually good spirits. They talked business and of the adjustment of things under socialism. Pavel, too, was in good humour, yet floating in his mind was the same old question: And what if all fails and Makar is removed to St.

Petersburg?

They met again and again. One day, after they had arrived at certain conclusions regarding Makar, Pavel said:

"Shall we take a walk?"

She nodded a.s.sent.

"I am again full of questions."

"Again worrying about the future fate of humanity?"

"Yes, I seem to have no end of questions about it. I wonder whether I shall remember all those that have occurred to me since I last saw you.

I ought to have jotted them down."

"You don't want to pump me dry in one day, do you?"

"Well, if the truth must be told, I rather do. You will soon be leaving us, I suppose, so I am anxious to strike the iron while it is hot."

The personal question as to the length of his stay sent a little wave of warmth through his blood. They set out in the direction of the trackman's hut as a matter of course. Instead of following their former route, however, they chose, upon a motion from Clara, who was more familiar with these suburbs than Pavel, a meandering, hilly course that offered them a far better view as well as greater privacy. A stretch of rising ground took them to the Beak, a promontory so called for the shape of a cliff growing out of its breast. The common people had some pretty stories to tell of a gigantic bird of which the rocky beak was a part and whose petrified body was now asleep in the bosom of the hill that had once been its nest.

Pavel and Clara sat down to rest on the freshly carpeted slope. The town cl.u.s.tered before them in a huddle of red, white, green and grey, shot with the glitter of a golden-domed cathedral, the river flashing at one end like the fragment of an immense sabre. It was warm and quiet. There was not a human soul for a considerable distance around. Now and again the breeze would gently stir the weeds and the wild-flowers, lingering just long enough to scent the hillside with pine odours and then withdrawing, on tiptoe, as it were, like a thoughtful friend taking care that the two young people were kept supplied with the bracing aroma without being disturbed more than was necessary. Once or twice Clara held out her chin, sniffing the enchanted air.

"Isn't it delightful!" she said.

"It's a specimen of what life under Society of the Future will feel like," Pavel jested, with a wistful smile.

At one point when she addressed him as Pavel Va.s.silyevich, as she usually did, he was tempted to ask her to dispense with his patronymic.

In the light of the hearty simplicity of manners which prevailed in the revolutionary movement they were well enough acquainted to address each other by their first names only. Yet when he was about to propose the change the courage failed him to do so. Whereupon he said to himself, with a deep inward blushing, that the cause of this hesitancy and confusion of his was no secret to him.

"h.e.l.lo there! A strawberry!" she called out, with a childish glee which he had not yet seen in her. And flinging herself forward she reached out her white girlish hand toward a spot of vivid red. The berry, of that tiny oblong delicious variety one saucerful of which would be enough to fill a fair-sized room with fragrance, lay ensconced in a bed of sun-lit leaves--a pearl of succulent, flaming colour in a setting of green gold.

"Oh, I haven't the heart to pick it," she said, staying her hand and cooing to the strawberry as she would to a baby: "Won't touch you, berry darling. Won't touch you, sweetie."

"Spare its life then," he answered, "I'll see if I can't find others."

And sure enough, after some seeking and peeping and climbing, Pavel came upon a spot that was fairly jewelled with strawberries.

"Quite a haul," he shouted down.