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By Root 2463 0

Sasha had sent to me a friend whom he called “Chum.” His name was John Martin, I learned, and he was socialistically inclined. [ ... ] John Martin broached a new appeal to the Pardon Board, to get the year in the workhouse set aside. He could not bear to think that Alex, as he called Sasha, after so many years in one hell should have to go to another. I was deeply touched by Martin’s beautiful spirit, but we had failed in our previous attempts to rescue Sasha and I was sure that we could expect no better success now. Moreover, I knew that he himself would not want it tried. He had endured thirteen years and I was certain he would prefer to stand the additional ten months rather than have to go begging again. My attitude was justified by a letter from Sasha. He wanted nothing from the enemy, he wrote.

The sickening anxiety of the days preceding his transfer was finally over. Two days later I received his last note from the penitentiary. It read:

DEAREST GIRL:

It’s Wednesday morning, the 19th, at last!

Geh stiller, meines Herzens Schlag

Und schliesst euch alle meine alten Wunden,

Denn dieses ist mein letzter Tag,

Und dies sind seine letzten Stunden!a

My last thoughts within these walls are of you, dear friend, the Immutable.

SASHA

Only ten months more to the 18th of May, the glorious day of liberation—the day of your triumph, Sasha, and mine! [...]

CHAPTER XXIX

The news of the Russian revolution of October 1905 was electrifying and carried us to ecstatic heights. The many tremendous events that had happened since the massacre in front of the Winter Palace had kept us in far-away America in constant tension. Kalayev and Balmashov, members of the Fighting Organization of the Social Revolutionary Party, had taken the lives of Grand Duke Sergius and Shipiaghin in retaliation for the butchery of January 22. Those acts had been followed by a general strike throughout the length and breadth of Russia, participated in by large sections from every stratum in society. Even the most insulted and degraded human beings, the prostitutes, had made common cause with the masses and had joined the general strike. The ferment in the Tsar-ridden land had finally come to a head; the subdued social forces and the pent-up suffering of the people had broken and had at last found expression in the revolutionary tide that swept our beloved Matushka Rossiya.1 The radical East Side lived in a delirium, spending almost all of its time at monster meetings and discussing these matters in cafes, forgetting political differences and brought into close comradeship by the glorious events happening in the fatherland.

It was at the very height of those events that Orleneff and his troupe made their first appearance in the little theatre on Third Street. Who cared if the place was ugly, the acoustics unspeakably bad, the stage too small to move about on, the scenery atrociously painted, the incongruous properties borrowed from a dozen different friends? We were too full of new-born Russia, too inspired by the thought of the great artists that were to depict for us the dreams of life. When the curtain rose for the first time, triumphant joy rolled like thunder from the audience to the people on the stage. It raised them to heights of artistic expression that surpassed anything they had done before. [ ... ]

The Russian Revolution had barely begun to flower when it was thrust back into the depths and stifled in the blood of the heroic people. Cossack terror stalked through the land, torture, prison, and the gallows doing their deadly work. Our bright hopes turned to blackest despair. The whole East Side profoundly felt the tragedy of the crushed masses.

The renewed massacres of Jews in Russia brought tears and sorrow to numerous Jewish homes in America. In their disappointment and bitterness, even advanced Russians and Jews turned against everything Russian, and as a result the audience at the little theatre began to dwindle. And then, out of the darkness of some slimy corner, came hideous whispers that Orleneff had members of the Black