The Second Class Passenger | Page 9

an atmosphere till the curtain went up and the play began to shape itself.
Audiences, like other assemblies of people, have their racial
characteristics; it was the task of Truda to get the range, as it were--to
find the measure of their understanding; and before the first act was
over she had their sympathy. The rest was but the everyday routine of
the stage, that grotesque craft wherein delicate emotions are handled
like crowbars, and only the crude colors of life are visible. It was a
success--even a great success, and nobody save Truda had an inkling
that there was yet something to discover in the soul of a Russian
audience.
At her coming forth, the square was thick with people under the lights,
and those nearest the stage-door cheered her as she passed to her
carriage. But Truda was learned in the moods of crowds, and in her
reception she detected a perfunctory note, as though the people who
waved and shouted had turned from graver matters to notice her. She
saw, as the carriage dashed away, that the crowd was strongly leavened
with uniforms of police; there was not time to see more before a corner
was turned and the square cut off from view. She sat back among her
cushions with a shrug directed at those corners in her affairs which
always shut off the real things of life.
The carriage went briskly towards her hotel, traversing those wide
characterless streets which are typical of a Russian town. The
pavements were empty, the houses shuttered and dark; save for the
broad back of the coachman perched before her, she sat in a solitude.
Thus it was that the sound which presently she heard moved her to
quick attention, the noise of a child crying bitterly in the darkness. She
sat up and leaned aside to look along the bare street, and suddenly she
called to the coachman to halt. When he did so, the carriage was close
to the place whence the cry came.
"What is it? What is it?" called Truda, in soft Russian, and stepped

down to the ground. Only that shrill weeping answered her.
She picked her way to the pavement, where something lay huddled
against the wall of the house, and the coachman, torpid on his box
behind the fidgety horses, started at her sharp exclamation.
"Come here!" she called to him. "Bring me one of the lamps. Here is a
horrible thing. Be quick!"
He was nervous about leaving his horses, but Truda's tone was
compelling. With gruntings and ponderously he obeyed, and the
carriage-lamp shed its light over the matter in hand. Under the wall,
with one clutching hand outspread as though to grip at the stones of the
pavement, lay the body of a woman, her face upturned and vacant. And
by it, still crying, crouched a child, whose hands were closed on the
woman's disordered dress. Truda, startled to stillness, stood for a space
of moments staring; the unconscious face on the ground seemed to look
up to her with a manner of challenge, and the child, surprised by the
light, paused in its weeping and cowered closer to the body.
"Murder?" said Truda hoarsely. It was a question, and the coachman
shuffled uneasily.
"I think," he stammered, while the lamp swayed in his gauntleted hand
and its light traveled about them in wild curves--"I think, your
Excellency, it is a Jew."
"A Jew!" Truda stared at him. "Yes." He bent to look closer at the dead
woman, puffing with the exertion. "Yes," he repeated, "a Jew. That is
all, your Excellency."
He seemed relieved at the discovery. Truda was still staring at him, in a
cold passion of horror.
"My God!" she breathed; then turned from him with a shudder and
knelt beside the child. "Go back to the carriage! Wait!" she bade him,
with her back turned, and he was fain to obey her with his best speed.
There, ere his conventional torpor claimed him again, he could hear her

persuading and comforting the child in a voice of gentle murmurs, and
at last she returned, carrying the child in her arms, and bade him drive
on. As he went, the murmuring voice still sounded, gentle and very
caressing.
Truda paused to make no explanations at all when the hotel was
reached, but passed through the hall and up to her own rooms with the
frightened child in her arms. But what the coachman had to say, when
questioned, presently brought her manager knocking at her door. He
was hot and nervous, and Truda met him with the splendid hauteur she
could assume upon occasion to quell interference with her actions.
Behind her, upon a couch, the child was lying wrapped in a shawl,
looking on the pair of