When Volodia had told his father of his experience at the house of the lame princess, the old man said:
“I see you are quite excited over it. As for me, that penniless spendthrift reminds me of the pig that mistook the nobleman’s backyard for the interior of his mansion. The backyard was all the pig had seen of the place, and money-lenders are the only kind of Jews that lame drone has ever had an occasion to know. That she should mistake a handful of usurers for the whole Jewish people is the most natural thing in the world.”
“Oh, but they are all like that, father. Unfortunately the Jewish people are just the opposite of women in this respect. Women have a knack of flaunting all that is prepossessing and of concealing that which is unattractive in them. If the Gentiles see none but the worst Jews there are we have ourselves to blame.”
“But they don’t care to see any other Jews. As a rule, the good Jew has no money to lend. They have no use for him. More than half of our people are hard-working mechanics on the verge of starvation. Do you expect an ornament like your Princess Chertogoff and her precious sons to make their acquaintance? Of the rest the great majority are starving tradesmen, teachers, Talmudists, dreamers. Would you have a Gentile reprobate go to these for a loan?”
Vladimir sat silent awhile, gazing through the open window at the thickening dusk. Then he said, listlessly at first, but gathering ardour from the relish he took in his own point:
“You are as unjust to the good Gentiles as they are to the good Jews. What is needed is more understanding between the two. If the dreamers and scholars you refer to could speak Russian and looked less antediluvian than they do the prejudice that every Jew is a money-lender would gradually disappear. As it is, Jew and Gentile are like two apples that come in mutual contact at a point where they are both rotten.”
“The Jewish apple was originally sound, Volodia. It’s through association with their Gentile neighbours that they have been demoralised—at the point of contact; our faults are theirs; our virtues are our own.”
“Oh, this is a very one-sided view to take of it, father,” Volodia rejoined, resentfully. What he coveted was consolation, not an attack on everything that he held dear, that was the soul of his best years and ambitions. His father’s light-hearted derision of the entire Russian people irritated him. “If some Jews become demoralised through contact with Gentile knaves, other Jews are uplifted, ennobled, sanctified by coming under the influence of the great Russian thinkers, poets, friends of the people,” he went on, emphasising his words with something like a feeling of spite. “Yours is an extremely one-sided view to take, father.”
The elder Vigdoroff was cowed. He felt himself convicted of narrow-mindedness, of retrogression, of fogyism, and by way of disproving the charge he put up a defence that was disguised in the form of an attack. Vladimir replied bitterly, venting his misery on his father. The two found themselves on the verge of one of those feuds which sometimes divided them for days without either having the courage to take the first step toward a reconciliation, but their discussion was broken by the appearance of a servant carrying a lamp. She was followed by Vladimir’s mother, a mountain of shapeless, trembling flesh with a torpid, wide-eyed look. In the yellow light the family likeness between father and son came pleasingly into view. Only the face of the one had a touch of oriental quaintness in it, while the other’s was at once mellowed and intensified by the tinge of modern culture. Clara’s mother was a sister of the elder Vigdoroff, but she resembled him only slightly. The girl’s features suggested her uncle far more than they did her mother.
“Never mind the lamp,” the Arbitrator said somewhat irately.