“Nobody is to blame, and there is no estrangement. Why use such words?”
“Is it only a matter of words? They are accustomed to look upon you and me as brother and sister. Do you deny that our roads have parted?”
“If they have, then, what need is there of writing at the bottom of the picture: ‘This is a lion?’” she asked testily. “If it’s a lion it’s a lion.”
“Would it be better to shut one’s eyes to the truth? As for me, common ordinary mortal that I am, I try to call a spade a spade.”
He spoke with venom, but it was all perfunctory and they were both aware of it. Then he described, with exaggerated ardour, the successes achieved by the Pupils’ Aid Society in which he was now actively interested.
Since their talk on the bench in front of Boyko’s Court he had been longing for some humanitarian cause, for one unassociated with the hazards of the revolutionary movement. He would prove to Clara that he was no inferior creature. Her taunt that he had seized upon the Jewish question, in the course of their debate, merely as a drowning man seizes at a straw, and the implication that no phase of the problem of human suffering made the slightest appeal to him had left a cruel sting in his heart. Since then his thoughts had often turned upon the Jewish question, until he found his “cause” in the dissemination of Russian culture among his people. Formerly he had been contented with being “assimilated” himself. Now he was going to dedicate his best energies to the work of lessening that distance between Jew and Gentile, which was, so he argued, the source of all the woes of his race. As good luck would have it, there was such a thing as difference of opinion. “It is not anxiety about my ‘precious skin,’” he would picture himself saying to Clara, “that keeps me from reading underground prints. Did I believe in them I should do as you do. But if you think I live for myself only you don’t know me. I have another cause, one to which my convictions call me and to which I am going to give all that is in me.”
“And you?” he asked. “Still planting a paradise on earth?”
She smiled.
“Well, as for me, I content myself with working on such a humble beginning as a little bridge across the gap between Jew and Gentile.”
He consciously led the way past a Gentile of enormous bulk, who stood in the doorway of a furrier’s shop. It was Rasgadayeff, the landlord of the Vigdoroffs’ residence, he himself occupying the inner building on the same courtyard. He was a wealthy merchant with the figure of a barrel and arms that looked as though they had been hung up to dry, an impetuous Great-Russian, illiterate and good-hearted, shrewd in making money, but with no sense of its value when it came to spending it. Every other week he went off on a hideous spree, and then, besides smashing costly mirrors, which is the classical sport of the drunken Great-Russian merchant, he would indulge in such pastimes as offering a prize to every ten-year-old boy who would drain a tumbler of vodka, setting fire to live horses or wrecking the furniture in his own house. On such days his wife often sought shelter with the Vigdoroffs for fear of being beaten to death. Until a few years ago he had stood at the head of the fur trade. Since then a Jewish dealer, who went off on no sprees, had been a formidable competitor to him. Rasgadayeff now hated Jews in general as he had never done before. The Vigdoroffs were an exception. He was sincerely fond of the whole family, and entrusted the old man with some of his most important business secrets.