LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.
Clara was with her parents in a White-Russian town. The inn at which
they were stopping was entered through a vast yard, partly occupied by
fruit-barns. It was the height of the fruit season. The barns and part
of the yard were lined with straw upon which rose great heaps of apples
and pears of all sizes and colours. Applewomen, armed with baskets, were
coming and going, squatting by the juicy mounds, sampling them,
haggling, quarrelling mildly. Now and then a peasant waggon laden with
fruit would come creaking through the open gate, attracting general
attention. A secluded corner of the yard was Clara's and her mother's
favourite spot for their interminable confidences, a pile of large bulky
logs serving them as a sofa. The people they saw here and in the streets
were much shabbier and more insignificant-looking than those of their
native town and the south in general. The Yavners lived here
unregistered, as did most of the guests at the inn, the local police
being too lazy and too "friendly" with the proprietor to trouble his
patrons about having their passports vised at the station house.
The town was a stronghold of Talmudic learning, and Rabbi Rachmiel felt
as a passionate art student does on his first visit to Italy. When the
first excitement of the meeting was over the local scholars were of
more interest to him than his daughter. His joy was marred by his fear
of being sent to Siberia in case Clara's (to her parents she was still
Tamara) identity was discovered by the local police; but he had a rather
muddled idea of the situation and his wife assured him that there was no
danger. As to Hannah, she was not the woman to flee from her daughter
for fear of the police. She could not see enough of Clara. She
catechised her on her political career and her personal life, and Clara,
completely under the spell of the meeting and in her mother's power,
told her more than she had a mind to. What she told her was, indeed, as
foreign to Hannah's brain as it was to her husband's; but then, in her
practical old-fashioned way, she realised that her daughter was working
in the interests of the poor and the oppressed, though she never
listened to Clara's expositions without a sad, patronising smile.
One day, during one of their intimate talks on the wood-pile, the old
woman demanded:
"Tell me, Clara, are you married?"
"What has put such an idea in your mind?" Clara returned, reddening. "If
I were I would have told you long ago."
"Tamara, you are a married woman," Hannah insisted, looking hard at her
daughter.
"I tell you I am not," Clara said testily.
"Then why did you get red in the face when I said you were? People don't
get red without reason, do they?"
The young woman's will power seemed to have completely deserted her. "I
am engaged," she said, "but I am not married, and--let me alone, mamma,
will you?"
"If you are engaged, then why were you afraid to say so? Is it anything
to be ashamed of to be engaged? Foolish girl that you are, am I a
stranger to you? Why don't you tell me who he is, what he is?"
"He is a nice man and that's all I can tell you now, and pray don't ask
me any more questions, mamma darling."
After a pause the old woman gave her daughter a sharp look and said in a
whisper: "He must be a Christian, then. Else you wouldn't be afraid to
tell me who he is."
"He is not," Clara answered lamely, her eyes on a heap of yellow apples
in the distance.
"He _is_ a Christian, then," Hannah said in consternation. "May the
blackest ill-luck strike you both."
"Don't! Don't!" Clara entreated her, clapping her hand over her mother's
mouth, childishly.
"What! You _are_ going to marry a Christian? You _are_ a
convert-Jewess?" Hannah said in a ghastly whisper.
"No, no, mamma! I have not become a Christian, and I never will. I swear
I won't. As to him, he is the best man in the world. That's all I can
tell you for the present. Oh, the young generation is so different from
the old, mamma!" she snuggled to her, nursing her cheek against hers and
finding intense pleasure in a conscious imitation of the ways of her own
childhood; but she was soon repulsed.
"Away from my eyes! May the Black Year understand you. I don't," the old
woman said. Her face wore an expression of horrified curiosity. Had
Clara faced her fury with a pugnacious front, it might have led to an
irretrievable rupture; but she did not. While her mother continued to
curse, she went on fawning and pleading with filial self-abasement,
although not without an effect of trying to soothe an angry baby.
Hannah's curses were an accompaniment to further interrogations and
gradually became few and far between. Her daughter's engagement and her
whole mysterious life appealed to an old-fashioned sense of romance and
adventure in the elderly Jewess; also to a vague idea of a higher
altruism. Her motherly pride sought satisfaction in the fact that her
daughter was so kind-hearted as to stake her life for the poor and the
suffering, and so plucky that she braved the Czar and all his soldiers.
"It's from me she got all that benevolence and grit," Hannah said to
herself. As to Rabbi Rachmiel, he asked no questions and his wife was
not going to disturb his peace of mind.
"There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile among us," Clara said
in the course of her plea.
"No, there is not," her mother returned. "Only the Gentiles tear the
Jews to pieces." And at this Clara remembered that circumstance which
lay like a revolting blemish on her conscience--the attitude of the
revolutionists toward the riots.
However, these matters got but little consideration from her now. She
was taken up with her parents. The peculiar intonation with which her
father chanted grace interested her more than all the "politics" of the
world. She recognised these trifles with little thrills of joy, as
though she had been away from home a quarter of a century. When her
mother took out a pair of brass-rimmed spectacles on making ready to
read her prayers, Clara exclaimed, with a gasp of unfeigned anguish:
"Spectacles! Since when, mamma darling, since when?"
"Since about six months ago. One gets older, foolish girl, not younger.
When you are of my age you'll have to use spectacles, too, all your
Gentile wisdom notwithstanding."
Another day or two and her communions with her mother and the odour of
apples and pears began to pall on her. She missed Pavel. Her mind was
more frequently given over to musings upon that atmosphere amid which he
and she were a pair of lovers than to the fascination of being with her
father and mother again. She felt the centuries that divided her world
from theirs more keenly every day. Once, after a long muse by the side
of her mother, who sat darning stockings in her spectacles, she roused
herself, with surprise, to the fact that Sophia was no more, that she
had been hanged. It seemed incredible. And then it seemed incredible
that she, Clara, was by her mother's side at this moment. She took
solitary walks, she sought seclusion indoors, she was growing fidgety.
The change that had come over her was not lost upon her mother.
"You have been rather quick to get tired of your father and mother,
haven't you?" Hannah said to her one day. "Grieving for your Christian
fellow? A break into your bones, Tamara!"
Clara blushed all over her face. She was more than grieving for Pavel.
She pictured him in the hands of the gendarmes or shot in a desperate
fray with them; she imagined him the victim of the ghastliest
catastrophes known to the movement, her heart was torn by the wildest
misgivings.
One afternoon, when her mother was speaking to her and she was making
feeble efforts to disguise her abstraction, Hannah, losing patience,
flamed out:
"But what's the use talking to a woman whose mind has been bedeviled by
a Gentile!"
"Don't, then," Clara snapped back, with great irritation.
"The Black Year has asked you to arrange this meeting. Why don't you go
back to your Gentile? Go at once to him or your heart will burst."
Clara was cut to the quick, but she mastered herself.
When she read in the newspapers and in a letter from her sister accounts
of the Miroslav outbreak, her agony was far keener than that of her
father and mother. The most conspicuous circumstance in every report of
the riot was the bestial ferocity with which the mob had let itself
loose on the homes of the poorest and hardest working population in
those districts of Miroslav known as Paradise and Cucumber Market. She
knew that neighbourhood as she knew herself. She had been born and bred
in it. The dearest scenes of her childhood were there. Tears of
homesickness and of a sense of guilt were choking her.
For the first time it came home to her that these thousands of Jewish
tailors, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, lumber-drivers, capmakers, coopers,
labourers, who toiled from fourteen to fifteen hours a day and lived
literally on the verge of starvation, were as much at least entitled to
that hallowed name, "The People," as the demonised Russians who were now
committing those unspeakable atrocities upon them. Yet the organ of her
party had not a word of sympathy for them! Nay, it treated all Jews,
without distinction, as a race of fleecers, of human leeches! Russian
literature of the period was teeming with "fists," or village usurers,
types of the great Russian provinces in which Jews were not allowed to
dwell. Drunkenness in these districts was far worse than in those in
which the liquor traffic was in Jewish hands. And the nobility--was it
not a caste of spongers and land-robbers? Yet who would dare call the
entire Russian people a people of human sharks, liquor-dealers and
usurers, as it was customary to do in the case of the Jews? A Russian
peasant or labourer was part of the People, while a Jewish tailor,
blacksmith or carpenter was only a Jew, one of a race of profit-mongers,
sharpers, parasites.
And this "People," for whose sake she was staking her liberty and her
life, was wreaking havoc on Jews because they were Jews like her father,
like her mother, like herself.
People at the inn were talking of the large numbers of Jews that were
going to America. "America or Palestine?" was the great subject of
discussion in the three Russian weeklies dedicated to Jewish interests.
One day Hannah said, gravely:
"I tell you what, Tamara. Drop your Gentile and the foolish work you are
doing and let us all go to America."
Clara smiled.
"Will it be better if you are caught and put in a black hole?"
Clara smiled again. There was temptation in what her mother said. Being
in Russia she was liable to be arrested at any moment; almost sure to
perish in a solitary cell or to be transported to the Siberian mines for
twenty years. And were not the riots enough to acquit her before her own
conscience in case she chose to retire from a movement that was
primarily dedicated to the interests of an anti-Semitic people; from a
movement that rejoiced in the rioters and had not a word of sympathy for
their victims?
But an excuse for getting out of the perils of underground life was not
what she wanted. Rather did she wish for a vindication of her conduct in
remaining in the Party of the Will of the People in spite of all "the
People" did against her race. She was under the sway of two forces, each
of them far mightier than any temptation to be free from danger. One of
these two forces was Pavel. The other was Public Opinion--the public
opinion of underground Russia. According to the moral standard of that
Russia every one who did not share in the hazards of the revolutionary
movement was a "careerist," a self-seeker absorbed exclusively in the
feathering of his own nest; the Jew who took the special interests of
his race specially to heart was a narrow-minded nationalist, and the
Nihilist who withdrew from the movement was a renegade. The power which
this "underground" public opinion exerted over her was all the greater
because of the close ties of affection which, owing to the community of
the dangers they faced, bound the active revolutionists to each other.
Pavel and Clara were linked by the bonds of love, but she would have
staked her life for every other member of the inner circle as readily as
she would for him.
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 noble 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 reassertion 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 beatitude, 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 constituted 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.