The White Terror and The Red Part 20

She joined him and they went on picking together, each with a thistle leaf for a saucer.

"Why, it's literally teeming with them," she said, in a preoccupied voice, deeply absorbed in her work. "One, two, three, and four, and--seven; why, bless me,--and eight and nine. What a pity we have nothing with us. We could get enough to treat the crowd at Orlovsky's."

Pavel made no reply. Whenever he came across a berry that looked particularly tempting he would offer it to her silently and resume his work. He was oppressively aware of his embarra.s.sment in her presence and the consciousness of it made him feel all the more so. He was distinctly conscious of a sensation of unrest, both stimulating and numbing, which had settled in him since he made her acquaintance. It was at once torture and joy, yet when he asked himself which of the two it was, it seemed to be neither the one nor the other. Her absence was darkness; her presence was light, but pain and pleasure mingled in both. It made him feel like a wounded bird, like a mutely suffering child. At this moment it blent with the flavour and ruddiness of the berries they were both picking, with the pine-breeze that was waiting on them, with the subdued lyrics of spring.

And he knew that he was in love.

He had never been touched by more than a first timid whisper of that feeling before. It was Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St. Petersburg, whose image had formerly--quite recently, in fact--invaded his soul. He had learned immediately that she belonged to Zachar and his dawning love had been frightened away. Otherwise his life during these five years had been one continuous infatuation of quite another kind--the infatuation of moral awakening, of a political religion, of the battlefield.

From the Beak they proceeded by the railroad track, now walking over the cross-ties, now balancing along the polished top of one rail. She was mostly ahead of him, he following her with melting heart. By the time they reached the trackman's place, the shadows had grown long and solemn. Pavel had no appet.i.te. He ate because Clara did. "Here I am watching her eat again," he thought. But the spectacle was devoid of the interest he had expected to find in it.

Nevertheless the next morning, upon waking, it burst upon him once more that seated within him was something which had not been there about a month ago. When he reflected that he had no appointment with Clara for these two days, that disquieting force which was both delicious and tantalising, the force which enlivened and palsied at once, swelled in his throat like a malady. But no, far from having such a bodily quality, it had spiritualised his whole being. He seemed unreal to himself, while the outside world appeared to him strangely remote, agonisingly beautiful, and agonisingly sad--a heart-rending elegy on an unknown theme. The disquieting feeling clamoured for the girl's presence--for a visit to the scene of their yesterday's berry-picking, at least. He struggled, but he had to submit.

To the Beak, then, he betook himself, and for an hour he lay on the gra.s.s, brooding. Everything around him was in a subdued agitation of longing. The welter of gold-cups and clover; the breeze, the fragrance and the droning of a nearby gra.s.shopper; the sky overhead and the town at his feet--all was dreaming of Clara, yearning for Clara, sighing for Clara. Seen in profile the gra.s.s and the wild-flowers acquired a new charm. When he lay at full length gazing up, the sky seemed perfectly flat, like a vast blue ceiling, and the light thin wisps of pearl looked like painted cloudlets upon that ceiling. There were moments in this reverie of his when the Will of the People was an echo from a dim past, when the world's whole struggle, whether for good or for evil, was an odd, incomprehensible performance. But then there were others when everything was listening for the sound of a heavenly bugle-call; when all nature was thirsting for n.o.ble deeds and the very stridulation of the gra.s.shopper was part of a vast ecstasy.

"That won't do," he said in his heart. "I am making a perfect fool of myself, and it may cost us Makar's freedom." As he pictured the Janitor, Zachar and his other comrades, and what they would say, if they knew of his present frame of mind, he sprang to his feet in a fury of determination. "I must get that idiot out of the confounded hole he put himself into and get back to work in St. Petersburg. This girl is not going to stand in my way any longer." He felt like smashing palaces and fortresses. But whatever he was going to do in his freedom from Clara, Clara was invariably a looker-on. When he staked his life to liberate Makar she was going to be present; after the final blow had been struck at despotism, she would read in the newspapers of his prominent part in the fight.

The next time he saw her he felt completely in her power.

Clara was in a hurry, but an hour after they had parted he found an honest excuse for seeing her again that very day. The appointment was made through Mme. Shubeyko, and in the afternoon he called at the trunk shop once more.

"We have been ignoring a very important point, Clara Rodionovna," he said solicitously. "Since the explosion at the Winter Palace the spies have been turning St. Petersburg upside down. They literally don't leave a stone unturned. Now, Makar went away before the examinations at the Medical Academy and he disappeared from his lodgings without filing notice of removal at the police station."

"And if they become curious about his whereabouts the name of the Miroslav Province in his papers may put the authorities in mind of their Miroslav prisoner," Clara put in, with quick intelligence.

He nodded gloomily and both grew thoughtful.

"They would first send word to Zorki, his native town, though," Pavel then said, "to have his people questioned, and I shouldn't be surprised if they brought his father over here to be confronted with him."

"That would be the end of it," Clara remarked, in dismay.

The next day Pavel telegraphed it all over to Makar, by means of his handkerchief, from the hill which commanded the prisoner's window.

"I have a scheme," Makar's handkerchief flashed back.

"For G.o.d's sake don't run away with yourself," Pavel returned. "It's a serious matter. Consider it maturely."

"Do you know anybody in Paris or any other foreign city you could write to at once?"

"I do. Why?" Pavel replied.

"Get me some foreign paper. I shall write two letters, one to my father and one to my wife, both dated at that place. If these letters were sent there and that man then sent them to my people at Zorki, it would mean I am in Paris. Understand?"

"I do. You are crazy."

"Why? Father will let bygones be bygones. I should tell him the whole truth. He is all right."

"He won't fool the gendarmes."

"He will!" the white speck behind the iron bars flicked out vehemently.

"He'll do it. Provided he is prepared for it."

"You are impossible. If an order came from St. Petersburg your Zorki gendarmes would not dare think for themselves. They would just hustle him off to Miroslav."

"Then get father away from there."

"They would take your wife, anybody who could identify you."

"Father is better after all. He would look me in the face and say he does not know me. He could do it."

"And later go to Siberia for it?"

"You are right. But I don't think the order will be to take him here at once. They'll first examine him there. He'll have a chance to fool them."

Clara offered to go to Zorki at once, but Makar was for a postponement of her "conspiracy trip." Sat.u.r.day of Comfort was near at hand, and then the little Jewish town would be crowded with strangers, so that Mlle. Yavner might come and go without attracting attention even in the event the local gendarmes had already been put on the case.

CHAPTER XX.

A "CONSPIRACY TRIP."

Zorki was in a state of joyous excitement. The "Good Jew" of Gornovo, accompanied by a retinue of beadles, secretaries, "reciters,"

attendants, scribes and hangers on, was pleased to grace the little community with his annual visit; so the Pietists had left their workshops and places of business to drink in religious ecstasy and to scramble for advice, miracles and the blessed leavings from the holy man's table. The population of the little town was rapidly increasing by an influx of Pietists from neighbouring hamlets.

Clara, with a kerchief round her head, which gave her the appearance of an uneducated "daughter of Israel," was watching a group of men and boys who stood chattering and joking in front of one of the best houses in town, at the edge of the market place. It was in this house where the Good Jew made his headquarters every time he came to Zorki and where he was now resting from his journey. The sun stood high. A peasant woman was nursing her baby in a waggon, patiently waiting for her husband. Two elderly peasants in coa.r.s.e, broad-brimmed straw-hats, one of them with an interminable drooping moustache, were leaning against the weight-house, smoking silently. For the rest, the market place, enclosed by four broken rows of shops, dwellings and two or three government offices--squatting one-story frame structures--was almost deserted; but one of the two streets bounding it, the one on which we find Clara at this minute, was quite alive with people. An opening at one side of the square showed a sloping stretch of road and a rectangular section of the river, the same as that which gleamed in Miroslav. The knot of men which Clara was watching all wore broad flat-topped caps, and, most of them, long-skirted coats. A man of fifty-five, short and stocky, with ma.s.sive head and swarthy face, the image of Makar, was the centre of the crowd.

"If you were a Pietist and a decent man," he said, in subdued accents, to a red-bearded "oppositionist" with gloomy features, "you would not wear that long face of yours. Come, cheer up and don't be a kill-joy!"

And he slapped him on the back with all his might.

"Stop!" the Oppositionist said, reddening from the blow. "What's got into you? What reason have you to be so jolly anyhow?" And addressing himself to the bystanders: "He has not had a drop of vodka, yet he will make believe he's in his cups."

"What's that?" the swarthy man protested in a soft, mellow ba.s.so, "Can't a fellow be jolly without filling himself full of vodka? If you were a respectable man and a Pietist and not a confounded seek-sorrow of an Oppositionist you would not think so. Drink! Why, open the Pentateuch, and wherever your eye falls there is drink to make you happy. 'In the beginning G.o.d created heaven and earth!' Isn't that reason enough for a fellow to be jolly?"

The bystanders smiled, some in partisan approbation, others with amused superiority, still others with diplomatic ambiguity.

The heavy-set, swarthy man was Makar's father, Yossl Parmet. He bore striking resemblance to his son. Clara stood aghast. If he were confronted with the Miroslav prisoner, the ident.i.ty of the Nihilist would be betrayed, whether the old man admitted the relationship or not.

The only way out of it was to avoid such a confrontation by getting Yossl away for a few months. But then, once the Miroslav gendarmerie learned that a man named Parmet whose home was at Zorki was missing, the secret could not last for any length of time. In compliance with Makar's wish, Clara decided to take him into her secret. Accordingly, she mingled with the men, took part in the joking, and by the time the crowd dispersed she and Yossl were talking on terms of partial familiarity.

Finding an opportune moment, she said to him, with intentional mysteriousness:

"There is something I want to speak to you about, Reb Yossl. I have seen your son."

The old man gave her a startled, scrutinising glance. Then, his face hardening into a preoccupied business-like expression, he said aloud:

"Where are you stopping?"