Vladimir and Clara passed on. He spoke of Rasgadayeff’s latest escapades and Clara listened with little bursts of merriment, but their voices did not ring true. Presently they exchanged greetings with Ginsburg, the notorious money-lender of Miroslav, a small, red-headed man with crumpled cheeks and big bulging eyes.
“Here is another treat for you!” Vladimir said, in high spirits. “Another specimen of moral perfection. Some gigantic hand must have grabbed him by the head, squeezing it like a paper ball till the eyes started from their sockets, and then thrown him into a waste basket. That’s the way he looks.” She smiled awkwardly.
He then called her attention to two bewigged old women, both of them apparently deaf, who were talking into each other’s ear, and then to the picturesque figure of a dumpy little shoemaker with a new, carefully-shined pair of topboots in his hand. Clara had never been interested in things of this sort, but this time, in her eagerness to get away, added to a growing sense of awkwardness, his observations literally grated on her nerves. At last, when they reached a crossing, she stopped, putting out her hand.
“Somebody is waiting for me,” she said. “Remember me to uncle and aunt, will you?”
“I will. Won’t you look in at all?” As she turned to take the side street, he added: “Our roads do part, then.”
Her appointment was with Orlovsky. She had not attended the gatherings of the Circle at his house for a considerable time. He conjectured that she was engaged in some revolutionary undertaking of importance. He had missed her so abjectly that he had finally decided to avow his love. This was what he had made the appointment for. When she came, however, he cowed before her rich complexion and intelligent eyes and talked of the affairs of the Circle. A similar attempt at a love declaration was made that evening by Elkin, with similar results. By way of opening the conversation he indulged in a series of virulent taunts upon her long absence and the great revolutionary secrets that he said were written on her face, after which his efforts to turn the conversation into romantic channels proved futile. He came away agonised with jealousy. He was jealous of the girl and he was jealous of the mysterious conspiracy in which she seemed to be engaged and into which he, her revolutionary sponsor, had not been initiated.
As to Vigdoroff, he was seized with a desire to avail himself of Princess Chertogoff’s invitation, not merely to gratify his personal ambition, but also, so he assured himself, as part of his “cause.” On his way thither he paused once or twice in front of shop windows to ascertain whether his face was not strikingly Semitic. “Not offensively so, anyhow,” he concluded before a mirror at the entrance to a furniture store. The mirror reflected a well-made, athletic-looking young man one could have told for a college man through a veil. The picturesque irregularity of his features, somewhat flat in the middle of the face, drew an image of culture, of intellectual interest. He felt on his mettle. He would make a favourable impression, and that impression was to be another step across the distance not only between Gentile society and himself, but between all Jews and all Gentiles. His visit to the noblewoman was a mission. He was in an exalted mood.
At the house of Princess Chertogoff he found a cavalry officer and an officer of the imperial guards. He was received with patronising urbanity. The hostess introduced the two young officers as her sons, come from St. Petersburg to take a glimpse at their old mother, and Vigdoroff as “one of the brilliant young intellects of our town.” This was her excuse before her sons for having invited a Jew to the house and Vigdoroff was not unaware of it. The cavalryman’s face was round and stern, while his brother’s was oblong and smiling. When they were drunk, which happened quite often, their faces would swap expressions. It was chiefly owing to their expensive escapades that their mother’s fortune had passed into the coffers of usurers. The two uniformed men left almost immediately, pleading a pressing engagement.
The welcome Vladimir found at this house was one extended by a patroness of the fine arts to a devotee of letters. It was not long before Vigdoroff found himself fully launched on a favourite subject. Russia’s supremacy in modern literature and her false modesty became clearer to him with every new work of fiction that came from the foreign masters. The best models of the German, French or English novel were tainted with artificiality. Russia alone produced stories that were absolutely free from powder and rouge. He dwelt on Zola’s L’Assommoir and Daudet’s Nabob, both of which had appeared a short time before, and each of which was looked upon as its author’s masterpiece. He saw that his hostess neither understood nor cared for these things; that he was making a fool of himself; yet, being too ill at ease to stop, he went sliding down hill. He spoke by heart as it were, the sound of his own voice increasing his embarrassment.