It was his habit of an evening to play the flute; and he was playing
it faithfully, with the score propped up against a pile of books on
his table, when the noises from the street reached him, and
interrupted his music. With the silver-dotted flute in his hand he
moved to the window and put aside the curtains to look out.
The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had
mildness for a chief quality. At the age of thirty-five, in the high
noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly,
unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant.
The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main
qualification for the post he now held--that of representative of a
firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov. He spoke
Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a
tanyard; these facts entitled him to a livelihood.
To right and left, as he looked forth, the cobbled street was dark;
but opposite, in the silversmith's shop, there were lights, and,
below, a small crowd had gathered. He watched wonderingly. He knew
the silversmith well enough to nod as he passed his door--a young,
laborious man with a rapt, uncertain face and a tumbled mane of black
hair. There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and
these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive
nods, and always returned them. The hide-sellers and tanners were,
for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have
nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and
he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague
friends. He pressed his face closer to the glass of the double
casement to see more certainly.
The little shop seemed to be full of lights and people, and outside
its door there was a press of folk. The murmur of voices was audible,
though he could distinguish nothing that was said. But now and again
there was laughter. It was the laughter that held him gazing and
apprehensive; it had a harsher note than mirth. It seemed to him,
too, that some of the men in the doorway were in uniform; he could
see them only in outline, mere black silhouettes against the interior
lights; but there was about them the ominous cut of the official,
that Russian bird of ill-omen. And then, while yet he doubted, there
sounded the very keynote of disaster. From somewhere within the
silversmith's shop a woman screamed, sudden and startling.
"Now, now!" said Robert Lucas, at his window, grasping his flute
nervously. And, as though in answer to his remonstrance, there was
again that guttural, animal laughter. He frowned.
"I must see into this," he told himself very seriously.
He turned from the window. His pleasant room, with the bright lamp on
the table and the music leaning beside it, seemed to advise him to
proceed with caution. He and his life were not devised for situations
in which women screamed on that tense note of anguish and terror; he
had never done a violent thing in all his days. There was no clear
purpose in his mind as he pulled open his door to go out--merely an
ill-ease that forced him to go nearer to the cause of those screams.
He had descended the stairs and was fumbling at the latch of the
street-door before he realized that he was still holding the flute.
"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed, in extreme exasperation when the
instrument proved too long for his pocket, and went out carrying it
like some remarkable and ornate baton.
The small crowd before the silversmith's shop numbered, perhaps, a
hundred people, and even before his eyes were acclimatized to the
darkness he smelt sheepskin coats and tan-bark. He touched one big
man on the arm and asked a question. The lights in the shop lit up
the fellow's hairy face and loose grin as he turned to answer.
"Eh?" said the man. "Why, it's a Jew that the police are clearing
out. Did you hear the Jewess squeal?"
"Yes, I heard," said Lucas, and moved away.
He was cut off from the door of the shop by the backs of the crowd,
and passed along the street to get round them. Inside the lighted
house the baby had begun to cry, but there was no more screaming. He
had a sense that unless he hurried he might be too late for what was
in preparation. The crowd seemed to be waiting for some culminating
scene, with more than screams in it. A touch of nervous excitement
came to fortify him, and he thrust in between two huge slaughterers,
whose clothes reeked of the killing sheds.
"Make way!" he said breathlessly, as they turned on him.
One of them swore and would have shoved him back, and others looked
round at the sound of strife. Lucas put up an uncertain hand to guard
the blow. It, was the hand that held the flute, whose silver keys
flashed in the lights from the shop.
"Ha!" grunted the slaughterer, arrested by that sight. He looked at
Lucas doubtfully, his neat clothes, his general aspect of a superior.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
"Make way!" repeated Lucas.
It seemed to confirm the slaughterer in his suspicion that this was a
personage to be deferred to.
"Hi, there!" he bellowed helpfully. "Give room for his Excellency.
Let his Excellency come through! Don't you see what he's got in his
hand? Make way, will you?"
He bent his huge, unclean shoulder to the business of clearing a
path, and drove through like a snow-plough. Lucas followed along the
lane that he made, and came to the pavement close by the shop.
It was fortunate that events marched sharply from that point, and
forced him to act without thinking. He had some vague notion of
finding the officer in charge of the police and speaking to him. But
before he could move to do so there was a fresh activity of the
people within the bright windows; he saw something that had the look
of a struggle. Voices babbled, and the crowd pressed closer; and
suddenly, from the open doorway, two figures reeled forth, clutching
and thrusting. One was in uniform, the other was a woman. For a
couple of seconds they wrenched and fought, staged before the crowd
on the lighted doorstep; and then the woman broke away and ran
blindly towards the spot where Lucas stood. She had, he saw suddenly,
a child in her arms that cried unceasingly.
The uniformed man who had tried to hold her came plunging after her;
his face was creased in clownish and cruel smiles. Lucas saw the
thing stupidly; his mind prompted him to nothing; he stood where he
was, empty of resource. He was directly in the flying woman's path,
and she rushed at him as to a refuge. He was the sole thing in that
narrow arena of dread which she did not recognize as a figure of
oppression; and she floundered to her knees at his-feet and held
forth the terrified child to him in an agony of appeal. Her tormented
and fearful face was upturned to him; he knew her for the Jewess, the
wife of the silversmith.
"Father!" she breathed, in the pitiful idiom of that land of orphans.
"Ye-es," said Robert Lucas vaguely, and put a hand on her head.
Never before, in all the orderly level of his life, had a human being
chosen him for champion and savior. He was aware of something within
him that surged, some spate of force and potency in his blood; he
stood upright with a start to confront the policeman who was on the
woman's heels. The man was grinning still, fatuously and consciously,
like a buffoon who knows he will be applauded; Lucas fronted his
smiling security with a still fury that wiped the mirth from his face
and left him gaping.
"Get back!" said Lucas. He spoke in a low tone, and the crowd jostled
nearer to hear.
The policeman stared at him, amazed and uncomprehending.
"Sir," he stammered; "Excellency--this Jewess she----"
He stopped. Lucas was pointing at him with the flute across the bowed
head of the woman, who crouched over her child at his feet.
"You shall report the matter to the Governor," said Lucas, in the
same tone of icy anger. "And I will report it to the Minister."