The White Terror and The Red. Abraham Cahan

into a wall with their bare knuckles for a hammer. His dark-brown eyes shone meekly.

      “Have you learned it all by yourself?” Pavel asked.

      “Not altogether.”

      Pavel began with an air of lofty reluctance, but he was soon carried away by the niceties of the ancient syntax, and his stiffness melted into didactic animation. As to Parmet, his plump, dark face was an image of religious ecstasy. Pavel warmed to him. His Talmudic gestures and intonation amused him.

      “There’s no trouble about your Latin,” he said, familiarly; “no trouble whatever.”

      “Isn’t there? It was Pani Oginska’s son who gave me the first start,” the other said, blissfully, uttering the name in a lowered voice. “If it had not been for him I should still be immersed in the depths of darkness.”

      “ ‘Immersed in the depths of darkness!’ There is a phrase for you! Why should you use high-flown language like that?”

      Parmet smiled, shrugging his shoulders bashfully. “Will you kindly try me on Greek now?” he said.

      “One second. That must have been quite a little while ago when Pani Oginska’s son taught you, wasn’t it?”

      Parmet tiptoed over to the open door, closed it, tiptoed back and said: “Not quite two years. If you knew what a man of gold he was! They are slowly killing him, the murderers. And why? What had he done? He could not harm a fly. He is all goodness, an angel like his mother. He was of delicate health when they took him, and now he is melting like a candle. Why, oh why, should men like him have to perish that way?”

      “Isn’t it rather risky for you to be coming here?” Pavel demanded, looking him over curiously.

      Parmet smiled, a queer, outlandish smile, at once naïve and knowing, as he replied:

      “Risky? No. What does an old-fashioned Jew like myself care about politics? I am supposed to come here on business. Did you know Eugene?”

      “Who is Eugene? Pani Oginska’s son?”

      “Yes. I thought you knew him.”

      “I wish I had. People like him are the only ones worth knowing. Most of the others are scoundrels, humbugs, cold-blooded egoists; that’s what they are.”

      So talking, they gradually confided to each other the story of their respective conversions and tribulations. Parmet followed the prince’s tale first with a look of childlike curiosity and then with an air that betrayed emotion. As he listened he kept rubbing his hand nervously. When Pavel had concluded, the Jew took to tiptoeing up and down the room, stopped in front of him and said, with great ardour:

      “Don’t grieve, my dear man. I may be able to help you. I know a friend of Eugene’s who could put you in touch with the proper persons.”

      “Is he in St. Petersburg?”

      “No, but that’s no matter. He can arrange it. He knows somebody there. I’ll see him as soon as I can, even if I have to travel many miles for it.”

      Pavel grasped his hand silently.

      “Well,” the other said. “There was a time when I thought every Christian hard-hearted and cruel. Now I am ashamed of myself for having harboured such ideas in my mind. Every Christian whose acquaintance I happen to make turns out to be an angel rather than a human being.”

      “Why these compliments?” Pavel snarled. “Most of the Christians I know are knaves. The whole world is made up of knaves for that matter.”

      When Pani Oginska came home and saw them together, she said:

      “I knew I should find you two making love to each other.”

      A month or two after Pavel’s return to St. Petersburg a tall blond young man with typical Great-Russian features looked him up at the university.

      “I have received word from the south about you,” he said, without introducing himself.

      “I am pleased to meet you,” Pavel returned gruffly, “but I hope I won’t be kept on probation and be subjected to all sorts of humiliations.”

      “Why, why,” the other said, in confusion. “I’ll be glad to let you have any kind of literature there is and to introduce you to other comrades. That’s why I have been looking for you. Why should you take it that way?”

      Pavel’s face broke into a smile. “Dashed if I know why I should. Something possessed me to put on a harsh front. It was mere parading, I suppose. Don’t mind it. What shall I call you?”

      “Why—er—oh, call me anything,” the other answered, colouring.

      “Very well, then. I’ll call you Peter; or no, will ‘godfather’ do? That is, provided you are really going to be one to me,” Pavel said, in a vain struggle to suppress his exultation.

      “It’ll be all right,” his new acquaintance replied with bashful ardour.

      “Godfather, then?”

      Godfather introduced him to several other “radicals,” who gave him underground prints and a list of legitimate books for a course of “serious” reading. He would stay at home a whole week at a time without dressing or going down for his meals, perusing volume after volume, paper after paper. When he did dress and go out it was to get more books or to seek answers to the questions which disturbed his peace. He was in a state of vernal agitation, in a fever of lofty impulses. And so much like a conspirator did he feel by now, that he no longer even thought of opening his mind to his mother. Indeed, the change that had come over him was so complete that she was not likely to understand him if he had. To drive her to despair seemed to be the only result he could expect of such a confession. The secret movement appealed to him as a host of saints. He longed to be one of them, to be martyred with them. It was clear to him that some day he would die for the Russian people; die a slow, a terrible death; and this slow, terrible death impressed him as the highest pinnacle of happiness.

      When his mother came to see him, a year later, she thought he was in love.

      He was in the thick of the movement by that time. He was learning shoemaking with a view to settling in a village. He would earn his livelihood in the sweat of his brow, and he would carry the light of his lofty ideas into the hovels of the suffering peasantry. But his plans in this direction were never realized. The period of “going to the people” soon came to an end.

      The mothlike self-immolation of university students continued, but the spirit of unresisting martyrdom could not last. Violence was bound to result from it.

      The next year saw the celebrated “trial of 193,” mostly college men and college women. They were charged with political propaganda, and the bold stand they took thrilled the country. The actual number tried was, indeed, much less than 193, for of those who had been kept in prison in connection with that case as many as seventy had perished in their cold, damp cells while waiting to be arraigned. Of those who were tried many were acquitted, but instead of regaining their liberty a large number of these were transported to Siberia “by administrative order.” Moreover, hundreds of people were slowly killed in the dungeons or exiled to Siberia without any process of law whatsoever. School children were buried in these consumption breeding cells; whole families were ruined because one of their members was accused of reading a socialist pamphlet. Student girls were subjected to indignities by dissolute officials—all “by administrative order.”

      The Russian penal code imposes the same penalty for disfiguring the eyes of an imperial portrait as it does for blinding a live subject of the Czar. But political suspects were tortured without regard even to this code.

      It gradually dawned upon the propagandists that instead of being decimated in a fruitless attempt to get at the common people they should first devote themselves to an effort in the direction of free speech. By a series of bold attacks it was expected to extort the desired reforms from the government.