The White Terror and The Red Part 43

Toward five o'clock, when the crimson sunlight was playing on the gold steeple of the Church of Our Saviour and the dazzling blue and white of hussars' uniforms, a small crowd of men and boys came running to the square in front of the sacred structure.

"We want to carry out the holy vessels and banners," said a spokesman to an officer. "We hear the Jews have decided to set fire to G.o.d's temple."

"We won't let them, you may be sure of that," the hussar officer answered. "You can safely go home."

The crowd was slowly dispersing, when a man in a red shirt shouted:

"Boys, I know a Jewish cellar where twenty-five Christian corpses are kept in empty vodka casks. Come on!"

The officer did not interfere, and the crowd followed the red-shirt round the corner to a closed drink-shop. Half an hour later the streets in that locality rang with a drunken sing-song: "Death to the Jews!

Death to the Christ-killers!"

The shop was the property of a Jew, who was hiding with his family somewhere, but the street was inhabited by Gentiles. Meanwhile on a little square near Nicholas Street, the best street running through the Jewish quarter, a mob of five hundred men and boys, mostly from the sc.u.m of the population, had seemingly dropped from the sky. A savage "Hee-hee-hee!" broke loose, scattered itself, died away, and was taken up again with redoubled energy. All over the district Jews, men and women, most of them with children clasped in their arms, were running along the middle of the streets as people run at the sound of a volcano.

Some were fleeing from their shops to their homes and some from their homes to the hiding places which they had prepared for themselves. The eyes of most of them had the hollow look of mortal fear. They ran in family groups, holding close to each other. Here and there a man, his feet giving way under him, sick and dizzy with fright, would slacken pace for a minute, as if giving himself up for lost; then, wiping the cold sweat from his face, he would break into a fresh run, more desperate than before. Some simply walked quickly, a look of grim determination on their faces. Here and there an aged man or woman, too feeble to run, were making a pitiful effort to keep up with the younger members of their families, who were urging them on with a look of ghastly impatience. Often a frail little woman with two or three children in her arms could be seen running as she might down a steep hill.

Christians stood on the sidewalks, jeering and mimicking their fright and making jokes.

Pavel watched the spectacle in a singular state of mental agitation. His heart leaped at sight of that chaotic mob as it paraded through the streets. Visions of the French Revolution floated through his brain, quickening his pulse. "So our people are _not_ incapable of rising!" he felt like exclaiming. "The idea of a revolution is _not_ incompatible with the idea of Russia!" It was as if all the sacrifices he had been making during the past few years had finally been indorsed by life itself, as if they were once for all insured against proving to be the senseless sacrifices of a modern Don Quixote. He could have embraced this ma.s.s of human dregs. And while his mind was in this state, the panic-stricken men, women and children with oriental features who were running past him were stranger than ever to him. He simply could not rouse himself to a sense of their being human creatures like himself at this moment. It was like a scene on a canvas. Clara did not seem to belong to these people; and when it came fully home to him that she did, and how these scenes were apt to stand between him and her, his heart grew faint within him; whereupon he felt like a traitor to his cause, and at the same time he was overcome with a sense of his inward anarchy and helplessness.

Within the Jewish houses and on their courtyards there was a rush for sub-cellars, garrets, barrels. As they ran, clambered, tiptoed, scrambled, they smothered the cries of their frightened babies with several cases of unconscious infanticide as a result. Christians hastened to a.s.sert the immunity of their houses by placing the image of the Virgin (a Jewess!) in their windows; and so did many a Jew who had procured such images for the purpose. Some smashed their own windows and piled up fragments of furniture in front of their doors, to give their homes or shops the appearance of having already been visited by mob fury. Here and there a man was chalking crosses on his gate or shutters.

While this was in progress several hundred Jews burst from gateways on and about Nicholas Street and bore down on the enemy with frantic yells in Russian and in Yiddish. They were armed with crowbars, axes, hammers, bra.s.s knuckles, clubs and what-not. As to the rioters they were mostly unarmed. Following the established practice of the crusade, they had expected to begin with some hardware store and there to arm themselves with battering rams and implements of devastation--an intention which they had not yet had time to carry out. At sight of this armed mult.i.tude, therefore, they were taken aback. Resistance was not what they had antic.i.p.ated. Indeed, for some seconds many of them were under the impression that the crowd now descending on them was but another horde of hoodlums. They wavered. A crowd of Jewish butchers, lumberers, blacksmiths, truck-drivers--the advance guard of the Defence--made a dash at them, jeering and howling at the top of their lungs, in Yiddish:

"Let's hack them to pieces! Lively boys! Let's drive right into their lungs and livers! Let's make carrot-pudding of them! Bravely, fellows, they're drunk as swine!"

At this point Orlovsky and the seminarist instinctively joined the rioters. Elkin and Vigdoroff were on the other side. Pavel was looking on from the sidewalk.

The Defence was mistaken. The rioters were almost as sober as they, for, indeed, it was another part of the stereotyped program of anti-Semitic riots that drink-shops should be among the very first targets of attack, so that the invaders might fit themselves for the real work of the riot by filling themselves full of Jewish vodka. But the Jews, as we have seen, descended upon them before they had torn down a single door. What the outcome would have been had the two opposing crowds been left to themselves is unknown, for a troop of hussars whose commander had been watching the scene charged on both when they were a few inches apart, and dispersed them both. Some fifty arrests were made, more than two-thirds of the prisoners being Jews. The arrested Gentiles went to police headquarters singing an anti-Semitic refrain and mimicking the frightened cry of Jewish women. Bystanders, some of the Nihilist "pickets" among them, shouted:

"Don't fear, boys. You'll soon go home." And the answer was:

"Sure we will, and then we'll give them a shaking-up, the scurvy Jews, won't we?"

On another business street some boys threw a few tentative stones at a shop window. There being no interference on the part of the military, a mob of grown men sprang up. Doors were burst in and rolls of silk and woollen stuffs came shooting to the pavement.

"Don't, boys; you had better go home," said a handsome young lieutenant, affecting the ba.s.so of a general.

The raiders did not desist. While some went on emptying the shop into the street others were slashing, tearing or biting at the goods. They did it without zest and somewhat nervously, as if still in doubt as to the att.i.tude of the authorities. A servant girl unrolled a piece of blue velvet over a filthy spot on the cobblestones before a lieutenant of the hussars, saying:

"Here, sir! Why dirty the dear little feet of your horse? Here is Jewish velvet for them."

"Thank you, my dear girl, but you had better go home," the lieutenant answered, smiling. A crumpled ma.s.s of unrolled fabrics, silk, woollen, velvet, satin, cotton, lay in many-coloured heaps on the pavement and in the gutter. The rioters, whose movements were still amateurish and lacked snap, soon wearied of the job. Several of them then broke into a grocery store and brought forth a barrel of kerosene.

"What are you going to do?" asked the lieutenant.

"We'll pour it over the stuff and set fire to it, your high n.o.bleness."

"That you can't do," the officer returned decisively. "You'll have to go home now."

The rioters obeyed at once, many of them taking rolls of silk or velvet along.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

THE RIOT.

The next morning the Police Master, "in order to avoid bloodshed,"

issued a proclamation forbidding Jews to leave their houses. The order was copied from one that had been issued in other riot-ridden towns where, as the Miroslav Police Master knew but too well, it meant that the Jews were prevented from uniting for their self-defence and forced to await the arrival of the mob, each family in its own isolated lodgings. At the same time every soldier of the Jewish faith was called back to barracks, none of their number being included in the patrol, "for fear of embittering the Christian population."

A peculiar air hung about the city, an air at once of festive idleness and suppressed bustle. It looked as it might on the eve of some great fair. Gentile workmen, staying away from their shops, were parading the streets, many of them shouldering axes, sledge-hammers, bores, chisels--their tools of useful toil to be turned to weapons of demolition and pillage; peasants from neighbouring villages were arriving with sacks, pails, tubs, spades, axes, pitchforks, their waggons otherwise empty and ready to be laden with booty. Among the people in the streets were gangs of trained rioters, come from towns where their work was at an end. The Jews were in their hiding places where they had pa.s.sed the night. Pavel went about alone, avoiding company, asking himself questions to which his mind had no answer. He was filled with the excitement of a sportsman a few minutes before the beginning of a great race; with mental chaos and anxiety.

At one corner of Cuc.u.mber Market a group of peasants took off their coa.r.s.e straw hats and bowed to two policemen.

"We are only ignorant peasants," they said. "Will your High n.o.bleness tell us when his Excellency the Police Master will give the order to start in?"

"There won't be any order to start in," answered one of the policemen.

"Move along, move along."

The large market place became white with country people. They were getting restive. Their sacks and tubs were hungry for the goods of "Christ-killers." Four years ago many of these very people, dressed like soldiers, had been driven to the Balkans by a force known to them as the Czar, to fire at Turks without having the least idea what sort of creatures those people called Turks were or what they had done to be fired at. Now they had come here, in obedience to the same force, to rob and do violence to Jews. Among the out-of-town looters were two tramps who had it whispered about that they were two well-known generals in disguise, personal emissaries of the Emperor sent to direct the attack upon the Jews. These two were soon put in gaol, but that which they personified, the idea that the anti-Jewish riots met with the Czar's approval, was left at large. It seized upon soldier and civilian alike.

People who usually kept at a timid distance from everything in the shape of a uniform, were now bandying jests with army lieutenants and police captains. The question this morning was not whether one wore the Czar's uniform or citizen's clothes, but whether one was a Jew or not. An unusual feeling of kinship linked them all together, and the source of that feeling was the consciousness that they were not Jews.

It was about nine o'clock when a large seedy-looking man with a bloated, sodden face, stepped out of a vast crowd on Cuc.u.mber Market, and walked jauntily up to a deserted fruit stand. s.n.a.t.c.hing a handful of hickory nuts, he flung it high in the air, then thrust his two index fingers into his mouth and blew a loud piercing blast, puffing himself up violently as he did so. The sound was echoed by similar sounds in many parts of the crowded market place.

"Hee-ee-eeee!" came from a thousand frantic throats.

A long stick was raised with a battered hat for a flag, a hundred human swarms rushed in all directions, rending the air with their yells, and pandemonium was loose.

There was a scramble for hardware shops, vodka shops and places where Jewish women were said to be secreted. Another few minutes and the streets were streaming with spirits. The air was filled with the odour of alcohol, with the din of broken gla.s.s, with the clatter of feet, with the impact of battering rams against doors; and coming through this general clang, thud and crash of destruction, were smothered groans of agony, shrieks of horror and despair, the terror-stricken cry of children, the jeers of triumph and l.u.s.t. Here a row of shops, their doors burst in, was sending forth a shower of sugar, kerosene, flour, spices, coats, bonnets, wigs, dry goods, crockery, cutlery, toys; there a bevy of men were tearing up the street, piling up the cobble-stones which others were hurling at shop windows. Some men and women were carrying away bucketsful of vodka. Others were bending over casks, scooping out the liquid with their caps, hands or even boots; others were greedily crouching before barrels, their mouths to the bungholes.

Here and there a man leaning over a broken cask was guzzling at its contents in a torpor of drunkenness. One rioter, holding a sealed bottle in his hand and too impatient to look for a corkscrew, smashed its neck against the sidewalk, while another man, by his side, broke two similar bottles against each other, and then cursed the Jews as he licked wine mixed with his own blood off his fingers. Nearby a woman carrying a shoe full of vodka toward a four-year-old boy who was seated on a pile of logs, yelled frantically:

"Here, my darling! Taste it, precious one, so that when you grow up you may say you remember the day when the ill-gotten wealth of Jews was smashed by people of the True Faith."

Women and children were serving vodka to the soldiers in cans, teapots, saucers, ladles, paper boxes.

Orlovsky mounted a cask and began to shout, wildly:

"Don't drink too much, boys! Don't befog your minds! For this is a great historical moment! Only why attack Jews alone? Behold, the Czar is at the head of all the blood-suckers in the land!"

Scarcely anybody listened to him. The crowd was too deeply absorbed in its orgy. His voice was drowned by a thousand other sounds; his flashing eyes and his air-pounding fists were part of a nightmare of brutalised faces, att.i.tudes of greed, gesticulations of primitive humanity run amuck. Presently, however, a group of belated rowdies came along in search of drink. They stopped in front of Orlovsky, eyeing the cask under his feet hopefully, the appearance of the bung showing that its contents were still intact.

"Who are you, anyhow?" one of them said to the speaker. "It must be the Jews who sent you here to talk like that to good Christian people."

"It isn't true. You're mistaken, old boy," Orlovsky answered hoa.r.s.ely and breathing hard, but with a kindly, familiar smile on his flushed, perspiring face. "I am one of the best friends you and all the people ever had, I mean the good of all of you fellows. What's the use attacking Jews only, I say. We had better turn upon the authorities, the flunkeys of the Czar----"

"Do you hear what he says?" one of his listeners said, in perplexity, nudging the fellow by his side.