for
joy I was crying, not sorrow.' As her American was Germanic, so was
her German like the Yiddish of his remote youth, and this, adding to
the sweetness of her voice, dissolved the musician's heart within his
breast. He noted now with satisfaction that her fingers were bare of
rings.

'Then I am rejoiced too,' he ventured to reply.

She smiled pathetically, and began to walk back towards her cabin.
'With us Jews,' she said, 'tears and laughter are very close.'

'Us Jews!' He winced a little. It was so long since he had been thus
classed to his face by a stranger. But perhaps he had misinterpreted
her phrase; it was her way of referring to _her_ race, not necessarily
to _his_.

'It is a beautiful night,' he murmured uneasily. But he only opened
wider the flood-gates of race-feeling.

'Yes,' she replied simply, 'and such a heaven of stars is beginning
to arise over the night of Israel. Is it not wonderful--the
transformation of our people? When I left Russia as a girl--so young,'
she interpolated with a sad smile, 'that I had not even been
married--I left a priest-ridden, paralysed people, a cringing,
cowering, contorted people--I shall never forget the panic in our
synagogue when a troop of Cossacks rode in with a bogus
blood-accusation. Now it is a people alive with ideas and volitions;
the young generation dreams noble dreams, and, what is stranger, dies
to execute them. Our _Bund_ is the soul of the Russian revolution; our
self-defence bands are bringing back the days of Judas Maccabaeus. In
the olden times of massacre our people fled to the synagogues to pray;
now they march to the fight like men.'

They had arrived at her door, and she ended suddenly. The musician,
fascinated, feared she was about to fade away within.

'But Jews can't fight!' he cried, half-incredulous, half to arrest
her.

'Not fight!' She held up the Hebrew letter. 'They have scouts,
ambulance corps, orderlies, surgeons, everything--my cousin David Ben
Amram, who is little more than a boy, was told off to defend a large
three-story house inhabited by the families of factory-labourers who
were at work when the _pogrom_ broke out. The poor frenzied women and
children had barricaded themselves within at the first rumour, and
hidden themselves in cellars and attics. My cousin had to climb to
their defence over the neighbouring tiles and through a window in the
roof. Soon the house was besieged by police, troops, and hooligans in
devilish