His first dawn of consciousness as he opened his eyes next morning was of something exceedingly important and solemn which somehow had the flavour of herring. The active participation of a man like Elkin in the work of the Defence Committee was a source of disappointment to him. He usually kept out of Elkin’s way, as much for his venomous pleasantry as for his revolutionary affiliations which he divined from his friendship with Clara. He wondered whether he meant to give the affair a revolutionary character. “He must have warned the other members against me as a silk stocking and a coward,” Vigdoroff said to himself bitterly. “That’s probably the way Clara describes me.”
The next morning he was surprised by a visit from Elkin himself. The revolutionist frowned as he spoke, but this was clearly a disguise for his embarrassment.
“Look here, Vigdoroff,” he said. “There has not been much love lost between you and me, but that’s foolish—at a time like this anyhow. We must all work together. We are all Jews. I understand you have organised a number of good fellows. Let them join the others.”
Vigdoroff’s heart beat fast, with emotion as well as with a sense of flattered pride. He would never have expected Elkin capable of such soulful talk. Moreover his speaking of himself as a Jew seemed to imply that he had abandoned Nihilism. “So we ‘cowards’ were not so very wrong after all,” he thought to himself triumphantly.
“In the first place,” he answered, “it wasn’t I who organised them. It was just the other way, in fact.”
“Well, anyhow, let them join the rest.”
“Of course we will. Only look here, Elkin. You have been frank with me——”
“I know what you mean, but you need not worry. I won’t get you in trouble,” Elkin replied with his usual venom in his lozenge-shaped sneer. And then, kindly: “It is not as a Russian revolutionist that I have gone into this thing. I am one, as much as ever; I have not changed my views a bit, in fact. But that’s another matter. All I want to say is that in this thing I am as a Jew, as a child of our unhappy, outraged, mud-bespattered people.”