“I see. It needed a little girl to make a convert of a great man like you. Well, well. That’s interesting,” Elkin remarked, with a lozenge-shaped sneer; but he hastened to atone for it by adding, ardently: “You’re right. She should be in the circle. I’ll make it my business to see her next time I am there. I’ll go there on purpose, in fact.”
He was always trying to be clever, for the most part with venom in his attempts. Friend or foe, whatever humour was his was habitually coloured by an impulse to sting. “For the sake of a pretty word he would not spare his own father,” as a Russian proverb phrases it, and his pretty words or puns were usually tinctured with malice.
He painted the Miroslav girl in the most attractive colours. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to whet Pavel’s curiosity and to be able to say mutely: “Indeed, she is even more interesting than you suppose, yet while you are so crazy to know her, I, who do know her, have not even thought of getting her into my Circle.”
When Pavel was making his speech Elkin, whose natural inclination was to disapprove, listened with an air of patronising concurrence. Pavel’s oratory was of the unsophisticated, “hammer-and-tongs,” fiery type, yet its general effect, especially when he assailed existing conditions, was one of complaint. In spite of the full-throated buzz of his voice and the ferocious rush of his words, he conveyed the impression of a schoolboy laying his grievance before his mother.
Before he took leave from his former classmate the two had another talk of the “heroine of the Pievakin demonstration.” It was Elkin who brought up the subject, which took them back to the time when, from a Nihilist point of view, he was Pavel’s superior. He found him a ready listener. The student girls of the secret movement, their devotion to the cause, their pluck, the inhuman sufferings which the government inflicted on those of them who fell into its hands,—all this was the aureole of Pavel’s ecstasy. His heart had remained spotless, the wild oats he had sown during the first weeks of his stay in the capital notwithstanding. The word Woman would fill him with tender whisperings of a felicity hallowed by joint sacrifices, of love crowned with martyrdom, and it was part of the soliloquies which the sex would breathe into his soul to tell himself that he owned his conversion to a girl. But these were sentimentalities of which the Spartan traditions of the underground movement had taught him to be ashamed. Moreover, there was really no time for such things.
During the following summer and fall mines were laid in several places under railway tracks over which the Emperor was expected to pass. The revolutionists missed their aim, but the Czar’s narrow escape, coupled with the gigantic scope of the manifold plot, with the skill and the boldness it implied, and with the fact that the digging of these subterranean passages had gone on for months without attracting notice, made a profound impression. Such a display of energy and dexterity on the part of natives in a country where one was accustomed to trace every bit of enterprise to some foreign agency, could not but produce a fascinating effect. The gendarmes were apparently no match for the Nihilists.