'Then don't you want the Holy Land?' asked the astonished David.

'Merely as a centre of Cultur. Merely as a University where Herbert Spencer may be studied in the tongue of the Psalmist. All the rest is bourgeois Zionism. Political Zionism? Economic Zionism? Pah! Mere tawdry imitations of heathen politics!'

'Then you agree with the Chovevi Zionists!'

'Not at all. Zion is less a place than a state of mind. We want Culture—not Agriculture; we want the evolutionary efflorescence of Israel's inner personality——'

David fled, only to stumble upon a Nationalist who declared that Zionism was a caricature of true Nationalism, and Territorialism a cheap philanthropic substitute for it.

'Then why not join in the Self-Defence of our nation?' David asked.

'I will—when we are on our own soil. Your corps is a mere mockery of the military concept.'

David found no more comfort in his interview with the member of the L.A.E.R., who was convinced that only in the League for the Advancement of Equal Rights lay the Jew's true security. It was the one party whose success was sure, the only one based upon an unconditional historic necessity.

David's morning was not, however, to pass without the discovery of a man of no Party. And, strangely enough, he owed his find to the headache these innumerable Parties caused him. For, going into a chemist's shop for a powder, he was served by a red-bearded Jew whose genial face emboldened him to solicit a stock of bandages and antiseptics—in view of a possible pogrom.

'But the pogroms are over,' cried the chemist. 'They were but the expiring agonies of the old order. The reign of love is at hand, the brotherhood of man is beginning, and all races and creeds will henceforth live at peace under the new religion of science.'

David's headache rose again triumphant over the powder. Even a partisan would be easier to convince than this sort of seer.

'Why, a pogrom is planned for Milovka!'

'Impossible! Europe would not permit it. America would prohibit it. Did you not see the protest even in the Australian Parliament? Look on your calendar; we have reached the twentieth century, even according to the Christian calculation.'

David returned hopelessly to his inn.

Here he saw a burly Jew warming himself at the great stove. Before even ordering dinner, he made a last desperate attempt to save his morning.

'Me join a Jewish Self-Defence!' The burly Jew laughed loud and heartily. 'Why, I'm a True Believer!'

'A Meshummad!' David gasped. Modern as he was, the hereditary horror at the baptized apostate overcame him.

'Yes—I'm safe enough,' the Convert laughed. 'I've taken the cold-water cure. Besides, I'm the censor of Milovka!'

'Eh?' David looked like a trapped animal. The censor smiled on. 'Don't scowl at me like the other pious zanies. After all, you're an enlightened young man—a violinist, they tell me; you can't take your Judaism any more seriously than I take my baptism. Come—have a glass of vodka.'

'Then, you won't inform?' David breathed.

'Not unless you publish seditious Yiddish. Keep your pistols out of print. If my own skin is safe, that doesn't mean I'm made of stone like these Tartar devils. Landlord, the vodka. We'll drink confusion to them.'

'I—I have none,' stammered the landlord. 'I haven't the right.'

'There are no rights in Russia,' said the censor good-humouredly.

The landlord furtively produced a big bottle.

'But the idea of asking me to join the Self-Defence!' chuckled the burly Jew. 'You might as well ask me to play the violin!' he added with a wink.

David felt this was the first really sympathetic hearer he had met that morning.

VII

The vodka and a good three-course dinner (Plotki for fish, Lockschen for soup, and Zrazy for joint) brought David new courage, and again he sallied out to recruit.

This time he sought the market-place—a badly-paved square, bordered with small houses and congested with stalls and a grey, kaftaned crowd, amid which gleamed the blue blouses of the ungodly younger generation. He had hitherto addressed himself to the classes—he would hear the voice of the people.

On every side the voice babbled of the Duma—babbled happily, as though the word was a new religious charm or a witch's incantation. Crude political conversations broke out amid all the business of the mart. He had only to listen to know how he would be answered:

A blacksmith buying a new hammer stayed to argue with the vendor.

'We must put our trust in the Constitutional Democrats.'

'And why in the Cadets? Give me the Democrats.'

'Nay, we must put our trust only in the Czar.' (This came from the Rabbi's wife, who was cheapening fish at the next stall.)

'For shame, Rebbitzin! Put not your trust in Princes.'

The bystanders hushed down the text-quoter—a fuzzy-headed butcher-boy.

'Miserable Monarchists!' he sneered. 'We Jews will have no peace till the Republicans——'

'A Republic without Socialism!' interrupted a girl with a laundry basket. 'What good's that? Wait till the N.S.'s——'

'The D.R.'s are the only——' interrupted a phylactery-pedlar.

'And who but the Labour group promises equal rights to all nationalities?' interrupted a girl in spectacles. 'Trust the Trudowaja——'

'To the devil with the Labour Parties!' said an old-clo' man. 'Look how the Bundists have betrayed us. First they were bone of our bone; now it is they who by their recklessness provoke the pogroms.'

The blacksmith brought his hammer down upon the stall. 'There is only one party to trust, and that's the C.D.'s,' he repeated.

'Bourgeois!' simultaneously hissed the Republican youth and the Socialist lass.

'My children!' It was the bland voice of Moses the Shamash (beadle). 'Violence leads to naught. Even the Viborg Manifesto was a mistake. As a member of the Party of Peaceful Regeneration——'

'Peaceful Regeneration?' shouted the blacksmith. 'A Jew ally himself with the Reactionary Right, with the——!'

A Cossack galloped recklessly among the serried stalls. The Jews scattered before him like dogs. The member of the P.P.R. crawled under a barrow. Even the blacksmith froze up. David drew the moral when the Cossack had disappeared.

'Peaceful Regeneration!' he cried. 'There will be no Regeneration for you till you have the courage to leave Russian politics alone and to fight for yourselves.'

'Ah, you're a Maximalist,' said the beadle.

'No, I am only a Minimalist. I merely want the minimum—that we save our own lives.'

It was asking too little. The poor Russian Jews, like the rich Russian Jews, were largely occupied in saving the world, or, at least, Holy Russia. Crushed by such an excess of Christianity, David wandered round the market-place, looking into the bordering houses. In one of the darkest and dingiest sat a cobbler tapping at shoes, surrounded by sprawling children.

'Peace be to you,' called David.

'Peace have I always,' rejoined the cobbler cheerily.

David looked at the happy dirty children; he had seen their like torn limb from limb. 'But have you thought of the danger of a pogrom?' he said.

'I have heard whispers of it,' said the cobbler. 'But we Chassidim have no fear. Our wonder-rabbi, who has power over all the spheres, will utter a word, and——'



'A Tsaddik (wonder-rabbi) was killed in the last pogrom,' said David brutally. 'You must join a Self-Defence band.'

The cobbler ceased to tap. 'What! Go for a soldier! When the Rebbe caused me to draw a high number!'

'Our soldiering is not for Russia, but to save us from Russia. We must all join together!'

'Me join the Misnagdim!' cried the cobbler in horror. 'Never will I join with those who deny the Master-of-the-Name.'

David sighed. Suddenly he perceived a stalwart Jew lounging at a neighbouring door. He moved towards him, and broached the subject afresh. The lounger shook his head. 'You may persuade that foolish Chassid,' said he, 'but you cannot expect the rest of us to join with these heretics, these godless, dancing dervishes, who are capable even of saying the afternoon prayer in the evening!'

In the next house lived a Maskil (Intellectual), who looked up from his Hebrew newspaper to ask how he could be associated with a squad of young ignoramuses. His neighbour was a Karaite, drifted here from another community. The Karaite pointed out that Self-Defence was unnecessary in his case, as his sect was scarcely regarded by the authorities as Jewish. There were other motley Jews living round the market-place—a Lithuanian, who refused to co-operate with the Polish 'sweet-tooths,' and who was in turn stigmatized by a Pole as 'peel-barley,' in scarification of his reputedly stingy diet. A man from Odessa dismissed them both as 'cross-heads.' It was impossible to unite such mutually superior elements. Again weary and heart-sick, he returned towards the inn.

VIII

But his way was blocked by a turbulent stream of Jewish boys pouring out of the primary school. They seemed to range in years between eight and twelve, but even the youngest face wore a stamp of age, and though the air vibrated with the multiplex chatter which accompanies the exodus of cramped and muted pupils, the normal elements of joyousness, of horse-play, of individual freakishness, were absent. It was a common agitation that loosed all these little tongues and set all these little ears listening to the passionate harangues of ringleaders. Instead of hurrying home, the schoolboys lingered in knots round their favourite orators. A premature gravity furrowed all the childish foreheads.

With one of these orators David dimly felt familiar, and after listening for a few minutes to the lad's tirade against the 'autocracy of the school director' and the 'bureaucratic methods of the inspector,' it dawned upon him that the little demagogue was his own landlord's son.

'Hullo, Kalman!' he cried in surprise.

'Hullo, comrade!' replied the boy graciously.

'So you're a revolutionary, eh?' said David, smiling.

'All my class belongs to the Junior Bund,' replied the boy gravely.

'Then you're not so peaceful as papa!'

The lad's aplomb and dignity deserted him. He blushed furiously, and hung his head in shame of his Moderate parent.

'Never mind, Comrade Kalman,' said another boy, slapping his shoulder consolingly. 'We've all got some shady relative or another.'

A shrill burst of applause relieved the painful situation. Turning his head, David found all the childish eyes converged upon a single figure, a bulging-headed lad who had sprung into a sudden position of eminence—upon an egg-box. He was clothed in the blue blouse of Radicalism and irreligion, and the faint down upon his upper lip suggested that he must be nearing fifteen.

'Comrades!' he was crying. 'In my youth I myself was head boy at this school of yours, but even in those old days there was the same brutal autocracy. Your only remedy is a general strike. You must join the Syndical Anarchists.'

More shrill cheers greeted this fiery counsel. The members of the Junior Bund waved their satchels frenziedly. Only the landlord's son stood mute and frowning.

'You don't agree with him,' said David.

'No,' answered the little Bundist gravely. 'I follow Comrade Berl. But this fellow is popular because he was expelled from the Warsaw gymnasium as a suspect.'

'You must strike!' repeated the juvenile agitator. 'A strike is the only way of impressing the proletarian psychology. You must all swear to attend school no more till your demands are granted.'

'We swear!' came from all sides in a childish treble. But the frown on the brow of the landlord's son grew darker.

'It is well, comrades,' said the orator. 'Your success will be a lesson to your elders, too. Only by applying the Marxian philosophy of history can we upset the bourgeois Weltanschauung.'

The landlord's son reached the roof of the egg-box with one angry bound and stood beside the agitator. 'Marx is an old fogey!' he shouted. 'What's the good of a passive strike? Let us make a demonstration against the director; let us——'

'Who told you that?' sneered the orator. 'Comrade Berl or Comrade Schmerl?'

The boy missed the sarcasm of the rhyme. 'You know Schmerl's a mere milk-blooded "Attainer,"' he said angrily.

'Believe me,' was the soothing reply, 'even beyond the Five Freedoms the boycott is a better "Attainer" than the bomb.'

'Traitor! Bourgeois!' And a third boy jumped upon the egg-box. He had red hair and flaming eyes. 'If Russia is to be saved,' he shrieked, 'it will be neither by the Fivefold Formula of Freedom nor by the Fourfold Suffrage, but by the Integralists, who alone maintain the purity of the Social Revolutionary programme, as it was before the party degenerated into Maximalists and Mini——'

Here the egg-box collapsed under the weight of the three orators, and they sprawled in equal ignominy. But the storm was now launched. A score of the schoolboys burst into passionate abstract discussion. The unity necessary to the school strike was shattered into fragments.

David ploughed his way sadly through the mimetic mob of youngsters, who were yet not all apes and parrots, he reflected. Just as Jewry had always had its boy Rabbis, its infant phenomenons of the pulpit, prodigies of eloquence and holy learning, so it now had its precocious politicians and its premature sociologists. He was tempted for a moment to try his recruiting spells upon the juvenile Integralist, whose red hair reminded him of his girl cousin's, but it seemed cruel to add to the lad's risks. Besides, had not the boy already proclaimed—like his seniors—that Russia, not Jewry, was to be saved?

It was an hour of no custom when he got back to the inn, so that he was scarcely surprised to find host and hostess alike invisible. He sat down, and began to write a melancholy Report to Headquarters, but a mysterious and persistent knocking prevented any concentration upon his task. Presently he threw down his pen, and went to find out what was the matter. The noises drew him downwards.

The landlord, alarmed at the footsteps, blew out his light.

'It's only I,' said David.

The landlord relit the candle. David saw a cellar strewn with iron bars, instruments, boxes, and a confused heap of stones.

'Ah, hiding the vodka,' said David, with a smile.

'No, we are widening and fortifying the cellar—also provisioning the loft.'

'Samooborona?' said David.

'Precisely—and a far more effective form than yours, my young hot-head.'

'Perhaps you are right,' said David wearily. He went back to his Report. He was glad to think that the little Bundist had an extra chance. After all, he had achieved something, he would save some lives. Perhaps he would end by preaching the landlord's way—passive Samooborona was better than none.

IX

But the Report refused to write itself. It was too dismal to confess he had not collected a kopeck or one recruit. He picked up a greasy fragment of a Russian newspaper, and read with a grim smile that the Octobrists had excluded Jews from their meetings. That reminded him of Erbstein the Banker, who had bidden him put his trust in them. Would the Banker be more susceptible now, under this disillusionment? Alas! the question was, could a Banker be disillusioned? To be disillusioned is to admit having been mistaken, and Bankers, like Popes, were infallible.

David bethought himself instead of the owlish Mizrachi, his visit to whom had been left unfinished.

He threw down his pen, and repaired again to the house with the Ark and the telephone.

But as he reached Cantberg's door it opened suddenly, and a young man shot out.

'Never, father!' he was shrieking—'Never do I enter this house again.' And he banged the door upon the owl, and rushed into David's arms.

'I beg your pardon,' he said.

'It is my fault,' murmured David politely. 'I was just going to see your father.'

'You'll find him in a fiendish temper. He cannot argue without losing it.'

'I hope you've not had a serious difference.'

'He's such a bigoted Zionist—he cannot understand that Zionism is ein ueberwundener Standpunkt.'

'I know.'

'Ah!' said the young man eagerly. 'Then you can understand how I have suffered since I evolved from Zionism.'

'What are you now, if I may ask?'

'The only thing that a self-respecting Jew can be—a Sejmist, of course!'

'A Jewish Party?' asked David eagerly. After all the enthusiasm for Russian politics and world politics he was now pleased with even this loquacious form of Self-Defence.

'Come and have a glass of tea; I will tell you all about it,' said the young man, soothed by the prospect of airing his theories. 'We will go to Friedman's inn—the University Club, we call it, because the intellectuals generally drink there.'

'With pleasure,' said David, sniffing the chance of recruits. 'But before we talk of your Party I want to ask whether you can join me in a branch of the Samooborona.'

The young man's face grew overclouded.

'Our Party cannot join any other,' he said.

'But mine isn't a Party—a corps.'

'Not a Party?'

'No.'

'But you have a Committee?'

'Yes—but only——'

'And Branches?'

'Naturally, but simply——'

'And a Party-Chest?'

'The money is only——'

'And Conferences?'

'Of course, but merely——'

'And you read Referats——'

'Not unless——'

'Surely you are a Party!'

'I tell you no. I want all Parties.'

'I am sorry. But I'm too busy just now to consider anything else. Our Party-Day falls next week, and there's infinite work to be done.'

'Work!' cried David desperately. 'What work?'

'There will be many great speeches. I myself shall not speak beyond an hour, but that is merely impromptu in the debate. Our Referat-speakers need at least two hours apiece. We did not get through our last session till five in the morning. And there were scenes, I tell you!'

'But what is there to discuss?'

'What is there to discuss?' The Sejmist looked pityingly at David. 'The great question of the Duma elections, for one thing. To boycott or not to boycott. And if not, which candidates shall we support? Then there is the question of Jewish autonomy in the Russian Parliament—that is our great principle. Moreover, as a comparatively new Party, we have yet to thresh out our relations to all the existing Parties. With which shall we form blocs in the elections? While most are dangerous to the best interests of the Jewish people and opposed to the evolution of historic necessity, with some we may be able to co-operate here and there, where our work intersects.'

'What work?' David insisted again.

'Doesn't our name tell you? We are the Vozrozhdenie—the Resurrectionists—our work is an unconditional historic necessity springing from the evolution of——!'

The door of the inn arrested the Sejmist's harangue. As he pushed it open, a babel of other voices made continuance impossible. The noise came entirely from a party of four, huddled in a cloud of cigarette-smoke near the stove. In one of the four David recognised the tea-merchant of the morning, but the tea-merchant seemed to have no recollection of David. He was still expatiating upon the Individuality of Israel, which, it appeared, was an essence independent of place and time. He nodded, however, to the young Sejmist, observing ironically:

'Behold, the dreamer cometh!'

'I a dreamer, forsooth!' The young man was vexed to be derided before his new acquaintance. 'It is you Achad-Haamists who must wake up.'

The tea-merchant smiled with a superior air. 'The Vozrozhdenie would do well to study Achad-Haam's philosophy. Then they would understand that their strivings are bound to lead to self-constriction, not self-expression. You were saying that, too, weren't you, Witsky?'

Witsky, who was a young lawyer, demurred. 'What I said was,' he explained to the Sejmist, 'that in your search for territorial-proletariat practice you Sejmists have altogether lost the theory. Conversely the S.S.'s have sacrificed territorial practice to their territorial theory. In our party alone do you find the synthesis of the practical and the ideal. It alone——'

'May I ask whom you speak for?' intervened David.

'The newest Jewish Social Democratic Artisan Party of Russia!' replied Witsky proudly.

'Are you the newest?' inquired David drily.

'And the best. If we desire Palestine as the scene of our social regeneration, it is because the unconditional historic necessity——'

The Sejmist interrupted sadly: 'I see that our Conference will have to decide against relations with you.'

'Pooh! The S.D.A.'s will only be the stronger for isolation. Have we not of ourselves severed our relations with the D.K.'s? In the evolution of the forces of the people——'

'It is not right, Witsky, that you should mislead a stranger,' put in his sallow, spectacled neighbour. 'Or perhaps you misconceive the genetic moments of your own programme. What evolution is clearly leading to is a Jewish autonomous party in Parliament.'

'But we also say——' began the other two.

The sallow, spectacled man waved them down wearily. 'Who but the P.N.D.'s are the synthesis of the historic necessities? We subsume the Conservative elements of the Spojnia Narodowa National League and of the Party of Real Politics with the Reform elements of the Democratic League and the Progressive Democrats. Consequently——'

'But the true Polish Party——' began Witsky.

'The Kolo Polskie (Polish Ring) is half anti-Semitic,' began the Sejmist. The three were talking at once. Through the chaos a thin piping voice penetrated clearly. It came from the fourth member of the group—a clean-shaven ugly man, who had hitherto remained silently smoking.

'As a philosophic critic who sympathizes with all Parties,' he said, 'allow me to tell you, friend Witsky, that your programme needs unification: it starts as economic, and then becomes dualistic—first inductive, then deductive.'

'Moj Panie drogi (my dear sir),' intervened David, 'if you sympathize with all Parties, you will join a corps for the defence of them all.'

'You forget the philosophic critic equally disagrees with all Parties.'

David lost his temper at last. 'Gentlemen,' he shouted ironically, 'one may sit and make smoke-rings till the Messiah comes, but I assure you there is only one unconditional historic necessity, and that is Samooborona.'

And without drinking his tea—which, indeed, the Resurrectionist had forgotten to order—he dashed into the street.

X

He was but a youth, driven into action by hellish injustice. He had hitherto taken scant notice of all these Parties that had sprung up for the confusion of his people—these hybrid, kaleidoscopic combinations of Russian and Jewish politics—but as he fled from the philosophers through the now darkening streets, his every nerve quivering, it seemed to him as if the alphabet had only to be thrown about like dice to give always the name of some Party or other. He had a nightmare vision of bristling sects and pullulating factions, each with its Councils, Federations, Funds, Conferences, Party-Days, Agenda, Referats, Press-Organs, each differentiating itself with meticulous subtlety from all the other Parties, each defining with casuistic minuteness its relation to every contemporary problem, each equipped with inexhaustible polyglot orators speechifying through tumultuous nights.

Well, it could not be helped. In the terrible nebulous welter in which his people found themselves, it was not unnatural that each man should grope towards his separate ray of light. The Russian, too, was equally bewildered, and perhaps all this profusion of theories came in both from the same lack of tangibilities. Both peoples possessed nothing.

Perhaps, indeed, the ultimate salvation of the Jews lay in identifying themselves with Russia. But then, who could tell that the patriots who welcomed them to-day as co-workers would not reject them when the cause was won? Perhaps there was no hope outside preserving their own fullest identity. Poor bewildered Russian Jew, caught in the bewilderments both of the Russian and the Jew, and tangled up inextricably in the double confusion of interlacing coils!

The Parties, then, were perhaps inevitable; he must make his account with them. How if he formed a secret Samooborona Committee, composed equally of representatives of all Parties? But, then, how could he be sure of knowing them all? He might offend one by omitting or miscalling it; they formed and re-formed like clouds on the blue. A new Party, too, might spring up overnight. He might give deadly affront by ignoring this Jonah's gourd. Even as he thus mused, there came to him the voices of two young men, the one advocating a P.P.L.—a new Party of Popular Liberty—the other insisting that the new Volksgruppe of all anti-Zionist Parties was an unconditional historic necessity. He groaned.

It seemed to him as he stumbled blindly through the ill-paved alleys that a plague of doctors of philosophy had broken out over the Pale, doctrinaires spinning pure logic from their vitals, and fighting bitterly against the slightest deviation from the pattern of their webs. But the call upon Israel was for Action. Was it, he wondered with a flash of sympathy, that Israel was too great for Action; too sophisticated a people for so primitive and savage a function; too set in the moulds of an ancient scholastic civilization, so that, even when Action was attempted, it was turned and frozen into Philosophy? Or was it rather that eighteen centuries of poring over the Talmud had unfitted them for Action, not merely because the habit of applying the whole brain-force to religious minutiae led to a similar intellectualization of contemporary problems—of the vast new material suddenly opened up to their sharpened brains—but also because many of these religious problems related only to the time when Israel and his Temple flourished in Palestine? The academic leisure and scrupulous discrimination that might be harmlessly devoted to the dead past had been imported into the burning present—into things that mattered for life or death.

Yes, the new generation chopped the logic of Zionism or Socialism, as the old argued over the ritual of burnt-offerings whose smoke had not risen since the year 70 of the Christian era, or over the decisions of Babylonian Geonim, no stone of whose city remained standing. The men of to-day had merely substituted for the world of the past the world of the future, and so there had arisen logically-perfect structures of Zionism without Zion, Jewish Socialism without a Jewish social order, Labour Parties without votes or Parliaments. The habit of actualities had been lost; what need of them when concepts provided as much intellectual stimulus? Would Israel never return to reality, never find solid ground under foot, never look eye to eye upon life?

But as the last patch of sunset faded out of the strip of wintry sky, David suddenly felt infinitely weary of reality; a great yearning came over him for that very unreality, that very 'dead past' in which pious Jewry still lived its happiest hours. Oh, to forget the Parties, the jangle of politics and philosophies, the tohu-bohu of his unhappy day! He must bathe his soul in an hour's peace; he would go back like a child to the familiar study-house of his youth, to the Beth Hamedrash where the greybeards pored over the great worm-eaten folios, and the youths rocked in their expository incantations. There lay the magic world of fantasy and legend that had been his people's true home, that had kept them sane and cheerful through eighteen centuries of tragedy—a watertight world into which no drop of outer reality could ever trickle. There lay Zion and the Jordan, the Temple and the Angels; there the Patriarchs yet hovered protectively over their people. Perhaps the Milovka study-house boasted even Cabbalists starving themselves into celestial visions and graduating for the Divine kiss. How infinitely restful after the Milovka market-place! No more, for that day at least, would he prate of Self-Defence and the horrible Modern.

He asked the way to the Beth Hamedrash. How fraternally the sages and the youths would greet him! They would inquire in the immemorial formula, 'What town comest thou from?' And when he told them, they would ask concerning its Rabbi and what news there was. And 'news,' David remembered with a tearful smile, meant 'new interpretations of texts.' Yes, this was all the 'news' that ever ruffled that peaceful world. Man lived only for the Holy Law; the world had been created merely that the Law might be studied; new lights upon its words and letters were the only things that could matter to a sensible soul. Time and again he had raged against the artificiality of this quietist cosmos, accusing it of his people's paralysis, but to-night every fibre of him yearned for this respite from the harsh reality. He rummaged his memory for 'news'—for theological ingeniosities, textual wire-drawings that might have escaped the lore of Milovka; and as one who draws nigh to a great haven, he opened the door of the Beth Hamedrash, and, murmuring 'Peace be to you,' dropped upon a bench before an open folio whose commentaries and super-commentaries twined themselves lovingly in infinite convolutions round its holy text. Immediately he was surrounded by a buzzing crowd of youths and ancients.

'Which Party are you of?' they clamoured eagerly.

XI

The pogrom arrived. But it arrived in a new form for which even David was unprepared. Perhaps in consequence of the Rabbi's warning to the Governor, Self-Defence was made ridiculous. No Machiavellian paraphernalia of agents provocateurs, no hooligans with false grey beards, masquerading as Jewish rioters or blasphemers. Artillery was calmly brought up against the Jewish quarter, as though Milovka were an enemy's town.

As the shells began to burst over the close-packed houses, David felt grimly that an economic Providence had saved him from wasting his time in training pistoliers.

The white-faced landlord, wringing his hands and saying his Vidui (death-bed confession), offered him and his violin-case a place in the cellar, but he preferred to climb to the roof, from which with the aid of a small glass, he had a clear view of the cordon drawn round the doomed quarter. A ricocheting cannon-ball crashed through the chimney-pots at his side, but he did not budge. His eyes were glued upon a figure he had espied amid the cannon.

It was Ezekiel Leven, his whilom lieutenant, with whom he had dreamed of Maccabean deeds. The new conscript, in the uniform of an artilleryman, was carefully taking sight with a Gatling gun.

'Poor Ezekiel!' David cried. 'Yours is the most humorous fate of all! But have you forgotten there is still one form of Samooborona left?' And with an ironic laugh he turned his pistol upon himself.

The great guns boomed on hour after hour. When the bombardment was over, the peace of the devil lay over the Ghetto of Milovka. Silent were all the fiery orators of all the letters of the alphabet; silent the Polish patriots and the lovers of Zion and the lovers of mankind; silent the bourgeois and the philosophers, the timber-merchants and the horse-dealers, the bankers and the Bundists; silent the Socialists and the Democrats; silent even the burly censor, and the careless Karaite and the cheerful Chassid; silent the landlord and his revolutionary infant in their fortified cellar; silent the Rabbi in his study, and the crowds in the market-place.

The same unconditional historic necessity had overtaken them all.

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.



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