The White Terror and The Red. Abraham Cahan

is a hypocrite and a rogue!”

      In the commotion the gendarmes lost sight of the girl they were about to arrest. She could not have left the room, but then it was not easy to tell her from any of the other girls. The gendarmes had seen her at a distance, and all they could say was that she was blonde. In their eagerness to pick her out, they were rudely scanning every young woman in the waiting-room. Had she been arrested it would have gone hard with her. As good luck would have it, however, Major Safonoff, the officer in command of the railroad gendarmes, was the brother of one of the girls present. He was a plump, good-natured bachelor, and his devotion to his sister, who had been under his care since she was a year old, was a source of jests and anecdotes. When it occurred to him that the conflict, which was beginning to look like a serious affair, was likely to cause trouble to his sister, he hastened to make light of it.

      “Go home, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, in a remonstrative amicable voice, taking the matter in his own hands.

      His friendly tone and his smiling fat face, added to the tacit understanding that the girl who had made the speech was not to be persecuted, acted as a balm; but the flattering notion that the gendarmes had surrendered kindled new fighting blood.

      “Your men have hit ladies. They’ve no right to hit anybody. They’re a lot of brutes. All we wanted was to say good-bye to Alexandre Alexandrovich.”

      “But that’s impossible, so what’s the use getting excited, gentlemen? Better go home.”

      The pupils obeyed, in a leisurely way, as though leaving of their own accord.

      During the following few weeks this “victory” over the gendarmes was the great topic of discussion. The personality of the girl who “started the demonstration” was emblazoned with the halo of heroism. The curious part of it was that only a minority of those who had participated in the scene had any idea who she was. When the crowd at the railroad station had dispersed, the handful that knew her whispered her name to some of those who did not, so that the number of pupils in the secret was by now comparatively large, but it was a “revolutionary” secret, so it was guarded most zealously against unreliable pupils as well as against the authorities.

      One of the page-proofs of the Miroslav Messenger that were sent to the censor at midnight contained the following paragraph:

      “Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin, for many years instructor of History and Geography at our male gymnasium, left for his new place of service yesterday afternoon. A large number of gymnasium pupils were at the railway station.”

      The entire paragraph was stricken out, so that the Messenger next morning contained not the remotest reference to the departure of the old teacher.

      When Pasha heard what had happened at the railway station his heart sank.

      “I must speak to you, mother,” he gasped out, bursting into her room, after school time. When her companion, a dried-up little Frenchwoman with a thriving streak of black moustache, had withdrawn, he said: “Mother, I am a miserable egoist and a scoundrel.” He told her the story of Pievakin’s departure. His dear old teacher was in trouble, the victim of a cruel injustice, yet he, Pasha, had not even thought of going to see him off. Everybody had been there except him. But what tantalised him more than anything else was the fact that a girl was the only person who had taken a brave noble stand in the old man’s behalf. This hurt his knightly sense of honour cruelly. He should have been on the scene and done exactly what that girl had done.

      “I’m an egoist and a coward, mamman. I hate myself. Oh, I do hate myself!”

      Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red. She had an impulse to fold him in her arms and to offer to take him to Pievakin’s new place so that he might protest his sympathy and affection for the old man, but her instinct told her that this would be improper. Oh, there were so many things that made a strong appeal to one’s better feelings which were considered improper. So she emitted a sigh of resignation and said nothing.

      Pavel was pacing the floor so vehemently that he came near running into and knocking down the life-sized Diana. He walked with rapid heavy steps until his brain grew dizzy and his despair was dulled as from the effect of drink. Suddenly the situation rushed back upon him.

      “I tell you what, mother, he’s too good for them,” he said, stopping in front of her. “He is better than uncle, anyhow.”

      “Hush, you mustn’t say that.”

      “The devil I mustn’t. It’s true.”

      “You are impossible, Pasha. Can’t you calm down?”

      “I’ll tell you calmly, then: uncle is a bribe-taker and a heartless egoist. There.”

      “Dear me,” she said, in consternation.

      “But you know he is, mother. And do you call that loyalty to the Czar? Pievakin is pure as an infant. If the Czar knew the real character of both, he would know that the poor man could give uncle points in loyalty.”

      A few days after this conversation the governor dined at “The Palace,” as Countess Varoff’s residence was known among the common people of Miroslav. Pavel refused to leave his room. When Anna Nicolayevna pleaded his uncle’s affection for him, he said:

      “His affection be hanged. Who wants the affection of a bribe-taker who will let an honest man perish? Look here, mother, you have no business to tell him I have a headache. I want him to know the truth. Tell him it’s men like himself, bribe-takers, cowards, who spread sedition, not men like Pievakin. ‘Living poison,’d! Tell him he is a lump of living poison himself. Oh, I hate him, I do hate him.”

      His brain was working feverishly. The image of Pievakin with three gendarmes between him and a crowd of pupils haunted him. Why could he not be pardoned? Was there no mercy in this world? His sense of the cruelty of the thing and of his own helplessness seized him as with a violent clutch again and again.

      Once, as he was reviewing the situation for the thousandth time, a voice in him exclaimed: “Pardoned? What was Pievakin to be pardoned for? What had he done? Why should it be wrong to dwell on the vital features of parliamentary government? Such governments existed, didn’t they? And if they did, then why should one be forbidden to explain their essence?” For the first time did his attention fix itself on this point, and questions came crowding upon him. Where was the sense of having such terms as “limited monarchy” in the text-book at all, if the pupils were not to be told what this meant? Above all, why should the government be afraid of such explanations? There seemed to be something cowardly, sneaking, about all this which jarred on Pavel’s sense of the knightly magnificence of the Czar and left him with a bad taste in the mouth, as the phrase is.

      Alexandre Alexandrovich, then, had done no wrong, and yet he had been banished as “living poison,” treated by everybody as a criminal, until he came to believe himself one. Why, of course he was better than Novikoff. Novikoff was a self-seeking, posing wretch, and all the other teachers were cringing and crouching before him; and these insects turned their backs upon Alexandre Alexandrovich! Corruption passed for loyalty, and a really good man was persecuted, hunted down like a wild beast, trampled upon. “Trampled upon, trampled upon, trampled upon!” Pavel whispered audibly, stamping his foot and gnashing his teeth as he did so.

      The only gleam of light was the veiled figure of that gymnasium girl. She alone had had sympathy and courage enough to raise her voice for the poor man. “Why, she is a perfect heroine,” he said in his aching heart.

      At the gymnasium he felt his loneliness more keenly than ever. Wherever he saw a cluster of boys, he felt sure they were whispering about the gendarmes and the girl who had made the “speech” at the railroad station. His pride was gone. He now saw himself an outcast, shut out of the most important things life contained.

      The leader of the “serious-minded” boys in Pavel’s class was an underfed Jewish youth, with an anæmic chalky face and a cold intelligent look, named Elkin.