“Volodia? Volodia Vigdoroff? I thought he would dread to come near me.”
Time being short, the meeting was set for an early hour the very next morning. Elkin had made his adieux, but he still lingered. There was an extremely awkward stillness which was broken by the appearance of Olga. Then he left.
Disclosing the location, or, indeed, the existence, of a “conspiracy house” to one uninitiated into underground life was impossible. Accordingly, Vladimir was to meet Clara in a scanty pine grove near the Nihilists’ basement. On his way thither Vladimir was continually looking over his shoulder, lest he was being followed by spies. He was flurried and the sight of every policeman he met gave him a moment or two of abject terror. But the part he had taken in the fight of the Defence Guard had left him with a sense of his own potential courage; so he was trying to live up to it by keeping this appointment with his “illegal” cousin, whom he was so thirsting to see. That she was married he did not know. He was going to persuade her to join his American party. At this minute, in the high-strung state of his mind, the result of recent experiences, he felt as though she were not merely his “second sister,” which is Russian for cousin, but a real one. His chief object for seeking this interview, however, had been to celebrate his own vindication. By her enthusiasm for the revolutionary movement from which he stayed away she had formerly made him feel like a coward and a nonentity; now, however, that in his judgment the riots plainly meant the moral bankruptcy of that movement, so far at least as it concerned revolutionists of Jewish blood, he mentally triumphed over her.
The meeting had been fixed for an early hour. The air in the woods was cold and piquant with the exhalations of young evergreens. The grass, considerably yellowed and strewn with cones, was still beaded with dew, save for a small outlet of the clearing which was being rapidly invaded by the sun.
They met with warm embraces and kisses.
“Clara, my sister! If you only knew what we have gone through!” he said, with the passion of heartfelt tragedy in his subdued voice.
“How is uncle? How is auntie?” she asked with similar emotion.
His kiss and embrace had left an odd sensation in him. He had never had an occasion to kiss her before; and now that he had not seen her for about a year the contact of his lips with the firm, though somewhat faded, cheek of this interesting young woman had revealed to him what seemed to be an unnatural and illicit fact that she was not a sister to him, but—a woman.
They seated themselves in a sunny spot.