Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

different and therefore, of course, inferior sorts of women. So, after all had arrived, and our guests had, with great diligence and perfect indifference, observed each unusual detail of all the costumes, how many yards of taffeta would be in suttens cut like Nur-ulNessa's, how much real gold braid was in the banker's daughter-in-law's kurta, the peculiar design of the ruby necklace the Lahore lady wore, the depth of the barrister's wife's embroidered cuffs, the fact that the Rai Sahib's wife's feet looked large in Pashawari shoes,after all this had been done carefully and perfectly, the doctor started a game.

It was Bilquis who got things going. The doctor showed her a little earthenware water-pot on the ground, blindfolded her, without crushing the dainty bamboos, turned her round and round, gave her a big stick, and told her to break the jar. Her frantic drives in the air were so funny that presently even our more portly guests, forgetting the dignity of their ancestors, clamored for their turn. Then eight of the younger women began badminton, a game which is to tennis what a Ford is to a Cadillac. Such a batting of shuttlecocks backward and forward through the air; such flapping of sandals that had neither heels below nor leather above the soles; such dancing about on slippers of leather tinted in peacock feathers' color and design; such tinkling of anklets and bracelets; such frantic efforts to keep yards of veils over patrician heads even in our chaste seclusion; such sudden thrusts of slender white arms up into the air; such fluttering of full skirts, and hurried shaking of sutten folds; such grace of free lithe bodies unused to haste!

No wonder we watched them breathlessly until they were too hot to play longer!

In the lull that followed, when, a

little apart, I was praising God for the variety of beautiful eyelids, a very tall woman entered, and without removing her burqua, sat down in the chair nearest the door. We were all wondering who she was, and why she had not taken her veil off, when Bilquis, with a little cry of recognition, went to her and removed her veil. It was the doctor, dressed in the Indian clothes that had been given her.

We all crowded around her, laughing, examining her lavender and white suttens, her white kurta, and her pink chiffon veil dotted all over with little gold

crescents.

Presently the laughter grew more hilarious. Doctor's suttens were on backwards! We laughed more when she stoutly refused to put them right. The women were much amused, and full of admiration. How beautiful she looked, they said. Akhbar's mother took off her jewelry and decorated ner. Then they were satisfied! If only she would work in the hospital so arrayed! 'Look at her now, and consider how she looks in her uniform,' said one, sighing.

When the first stars were showing above the ragged banana trees, and twilight was falling from the great sheshem branches high up in the air above us, we had refreshments. The Hindus were served by Hindu women of their own caste with the sweets we dare not touch. The Moslem women ate ice-cream with us at least, they tasted it suspiciously, and put it down. We understood that was their politeness, and continued to eat without them.

After the refreshments, with all their loveliness discreetly swallowed up in their ugly burquas, our friends took their leave.

The ladies from the rajah's household were the last to go, because, as Bilquis explained, they were awaiting the return of a woman servant she had sent

home on an errand. When she returned, Bilquis unwrapped the china bowl she had brought, and gave it to the doctor.

'Here are the foreign sweets from Delhi,' she said with a wicked little smile.

'What sweets?' said doctor.

"Those that Akhbar ate the other night,' she answered; and she snickered for pure joy.

'She ought to be thoroughly punished,' put in her mother, laughing, half-vexed. 'Akhbar ate only two or three of them.'

"Yes. But he was ill,' Bilquis explained. 'We wanted his father to go for you in the evening, but he was very kingly. Said he did n't care whether you came or not.'

'He was going to call the assistant from the government dispensary. He knows we don't allow that man to put

his hands on Akhbar,' interrupted the boy's mother.

'So, when he went out out of the room, I emptied the sweets into this bowl, and when he saw the box empty, he jumped at the conclusion that Akhbar had eaten them.'

Bilquis was enjoying herself through and through.

'And she told him Akhbar had eaten even the papers,' said her sister-in-law admiringly.

'I was sorry afterward that you had to get up at night. It was well you came, though, was n't it? We've had an awfully nice time. That wife of Mohammed Khan's looks like a stick with a rag tied about it! I'll tell my brother so.'

And so they swaddled themselves up, and we put them in their closed carriage.

A RUSSIAN EXPERIENCE

BY RUTH PIERCE

July 30 [1915].

TO-DAY I went to the Jewish detention camp in Kieff, with the wife of the French Consul here. She called for me in her limousine. As I think of it now, it was all so strange - the smoothrunning car with two men on the box, and ourselves in immaculate white summer dresses. The heat was intense, but we were well protected. Through the windows we saw others sweating and choking in the dust of the hot streets.

'I'm afraid I've brought you here on a very hot morning,' said Mme. C- apologetically.

VOL. 121-NO. 1

In spite of my curiosity I believe that I felt a distaste of the detention camp on such a day. A crowd is always depressing, and doubly so in the heat. But we stopped at a door cut in a high board-fence, and passed the sentinel into the enclosure where the Jews were penned while awaiting the next stage of their journey.

Hundreds of faces turned toward us; hundreds of eyes watched our approach. There were old men with long white patriarchical beards flowing over their dirty black gowns; there were younger men with peaked black caps

and long black beards; and there were women who had pushed back their black shawls for air, and who held soreeyed, whining babies listlessly on their knees. Bits of old cloth stretched over poles afforded shade to some. Others tried to get out of the burning sun by huddling against the walls of the tenements that enclosed the yard on three sides. The ground was baked hard as iron and rubbed smooth by the shuffle of numberless feet.

As we approached, the Jews rose and bowed low. Then they settled back into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible subservience. If we brushed 'close to one, he cringed like a dog who fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like faces, all with the high-bridged curving noses and the black animal-like eyes. I was as definitely separated from them as though there were tangible iron bars between us. We seemed to be looking at each other across a great gulf.

"They are human beings,' I said to myself. 'I am one with them.' But their isolation was complete. I could not even begin to conceive the persecution and suffering of ages that separated us. All people are born free and equal," indeed!'

666

I turned away.

"This camp is run on communistic principles,' Mme. C was explain

ing. The Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Society provides a certain amount of meat and vegetables and bread, which is cooked and served by the Jews themselves. Here is the kitchen.' We spoke French among ourselves, which seemed to put us further away from the dumb, watchful Jews behind us. 'If it was n't for us, they would starve. The government allows them eight kopeks a day. But who could live on that? Besides, most of the Jews here

pay the eight kopeks to the overseer, to avoid his displeasure. He makes a good revenue.'

Two rooms in one of the houses had been converted into a kitchen. A dozen or so Jewish women were paring and cutting up potatoes and cabbages and meat into huge soup-boilers. They were stripped to their shirts, and their bodies were drenched with perspiration. They curtsied to us and went on preparing dinner.

A blast of scorching heat puffed out from an open oven. Two women, with long, wooden handles, pulled out big round loaves of black bread and laid them on a shelf to cool.

The warm fragrance of cooking attracted some white-faced Jewish children. They edged into the kitchen and looked up at the food, their eyes impenetrable and glittering like mica. A woman cut up some bread and gave them each a piece, and they slunk outdoors again, sucking their bread.

"The food is scientifically proportioned to give the greatest possible nutriment,' Mme. C- - said.

We went out. After the kitchen heat the air of the courtyard was cool.

"This is the laundry. A certain number of the Jews here wash and iron the others' clothes. They are kept as clean as possible.'

The laundry was gray with steam. A dozen or so women were bending over wash-tubs. Like the women in the kitchen, they were stripped to their shirts. The wet cloth stuck to their sweating bodies and outlined their ribs and the stretch of muscles as they scrubbed and wrung out the clothes. When the water became too black, some young boys threw it out-of-doors, and the women waited for the tubs to be filled again, their red parboiled hands resting on their hips, in the way of washerwomen the world over.

We crossed the mud before the wash

house, on planks, and went into a house again, at the apathetic faces of the across the courtyard.

"This is the tailoring establishment,' Mme. C continued. "The tailors among them mend and cut over old clothes that we collect for them, so that every Jew may start on the next stage of his journey in perfectly clean and whole clothes. My husband and son complain that they will have to stay in bed soon, I have taken so many of their suits. And here are the shoemakers.'

We looked into the adjoining room, where the cobblers sat cross-legged, sewing and patching and pegging shoes.

'It's very hard to find the leather. But it is so important. If you could see how they come here — their feet bleeding and swollen and their shoes in tatters. And many of them were rich bankers and professors in Galicia and Poland, used to their own automobiles like the rest of us. I think I would steal leather for them.'

The workers were different from the waiting Jews in the courtyard. Perhaps it was work that gave them importance in their own eyes, and took away that dreadful degrading subserviency degrading to us as much as to themselves. The whirring noise of the sewing-machines, the click of the shears, the bent backs of the workers, and the big capable hands, formed by the accustomed work! The trade of every man could have been known by his hands! My heart was warm toward them.

'It's splendid, I think,' I said to Mme. C.

As though she guessed my thoughts, she replied, "They are grateful for being allowed to work.'

'For being allowed to work.' Those words damn much in the world. What hindrances we erect in the way of life! And I looked out into the courtyard

waiting Jews. Waiting for what? The white dead faces, with the curved noses and hard bright eyes, all turned toward us. Were they submissive or expectant, or simply hating us? They say the Galician Jews turn traitors and act as spies for the Austrians. But surely not these! What could these broken creatures do? How near to death they seemed!

The courtyard burned like a furnace. The shade was shrinking from moment to moment. The heat rose in blinding waves. I was sickened. The courtyard smelled of dirt and waste and sickness. It was unreal the whole thing unreal. Those working at usual, necessary tasks as well as those furtive, watchful ones in the burning sunlight! Death was in them all!

I went out into the courtyard, walking slowly in the scorching heat. There was no shade or coolness anywhere. My attention was drawn to a pregnant woman who had evidently been sitting in a thin strip of shade by the fence, but now the sun was beating down on her bare head. She sat with her arms hanging along her sides, the palms of her hands turned upwards. A baby hardly a year old twisted fretfully on her lap, fumbling at her breast with a little red hand. But she looked steadily over the baby's round head, a curiously intent expression in her dark eyes, as though she were looking at something so far away that she must concentrate all of herself in it so as not to lose it from view.

Under a canopy made from an old blue skirt lay a sick boy. His face was like a death-mask already, the yellow skin stretched tightly over the bones of his face, and his mouth unnaturally wide, with parched, swollen lips. From his hollow eye-sockets his eyes looked out unwinking, as though the lids had been cut off. He held himself

halfway between a reclining and an upright position. No normal person could hold himself that way for long, but the sick boy kept himself motionless with maniacal strength. The flies hung over him like a cloud of black cinders. One of his friends attempted to keep them away with a leafy branch which he had found, Heaven knows where! I could see no other sign of green in the place. As we passed, I noticed the branch sweep back and forth over the sick boy's face, touching the skin. And still the fixed stare continued, uninterrupted that blind gaze straight out into emptiness!

At the farther end, an opening between two of the tenements led into a garden. This space, too, was crowded with waiting Jews.

'But where do they sleep?' I asked. 'Is there room for all those people in the houses?'

'No,' Mme. C

replied; 'not when

so many come through as came this last time. But fortunately, these summer nights are fine; earlier, we had much rain, and you can picture the suffering. Then there was no shelter for them at all. They were simply herded into a pen, and many died from the exposure. Now, however, we have made conditions better for them.'

There was more reality here in the garden, where there was a suggestion of growing grass and a thin leaf shade. The Jews lay on the ground as if trying to get some coolness out of the earth. Up and down the paths walked a number of spectacled men, who were brought up to me and introduced as Professors So-and-so, and Doctors Soand-so. They were constantly trying to get in touch with friends in Kieff or Moscow or Petrograd, or colleagues in medicine or other sciences, or relatives who could help them. They worked through the society. By the payment of certain amounts they could bribe

the overseers to let them stay on in the Kieff detention camp, or even have the liberty of the city. One man, a rich banker from Lvov, had been officially 'sick' for several months, but as his money had almost given out he was in danger of being sent on to Tomsk in the near future. He lived in the hospital, where he had better quarters and food. These professors and doctors, men of wide learning and reputation, who are recognized as leaders in their professions, and are constructive, valuable forces in society, were herded together with the others, allowed to disappear into Siberia, where their minds and bodies will be wasted, and their possible future activity will count as nothing.

A man in a soiled white coat came up, looked us over with little blinking pig eyes, and addressed a few words to Mme. C in Polish.

"That is the overseer,' Professor A said to me in English. 'He takes every kopek away from us. But he is no worse than the rest. All along the way it is the same thing. One is bled to death.' He shrugged indifferently. 'We most of us could have gathered together a little money. But what will you? It was all so sudden. We had no time. Here we are, en tout cas. And after all, in the end

I might have been talking with the professors on the campus of their own university. They exerted themselves to be attentive and entertaining, as if they were our hosts.

One doctor said to me in French, 'I have seen your wonderful country. It is amazing. I would like to see it again. I have been asked to lecture. Perhaps, after the war

He broke off abruptly. In a flash the end of his life came up to me. His work and ambitions, then the cleavage in his career; the sharp division in his life; the preparation of years, and then,

« AnkstesnisTęsti »