“Of course,” Pavel resumed, “the pamphlet means we should keep agitating until we are sure of our ground. There is a large liberal-minded class that does not stir merely because it is made up of a lot of cowards. These fellows will rally around our banner the moment the government begins to totter. As to the bureaucracy, it is so decayed, so worm-eaten, that all it knows at present is how to bend double for an increase of salary or promotion in rank. A lot of back-boneless flunkeys, that’s what they are. You don’t actually think they serve the Czar from principle?” he asked, addressing himself to Mlle. Yavner.
“The only principle they care for,” Elkin interposed, “is, ‘To the devil with all principles!’”
“Exactly,” Pavel assented, with some irritation.
“Yes,” the seminarist chimed in, “and when they hear the tocsin of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity—”
“Liberty, Equality and Fiddlesticks!” Clara mimicked him, mildly, signing to him not to interrupt the speaker.
Pavel went on. He spoke at length, looking mostly at her. He was making an effort to convince her that in the event of a revolution the high officials would turn cowards, and her face seemed to be saying: “He’s the nephew of a governor, so he ought to know.”
When the yard windows were thrown open the bewhiskered captain sat down to the piano and struck up an old national tune, to the accompaniment of two male voices. The others continued their talk under cover of the music. Pavel made up his mind that the judge and Clara were the most level-headed members of the Circle, and decided to seek their coöperation in the business which had brought him to Miroslav. Only the judge was the more reposeful of the two, as well as incomparably the better informed. As a rule he was absorbed in his own logic, while Mlle. Yavner was jarred by every false note in others, nervously sensitive to all that went on about her, so that when Cyclops, for example, got tangled in his own verbosity her eyes would cloud up with vexation and she would come to his rescue, summing up his argument in a few clear, unobtrusive sentences. There was a glow of enthusiasm in her look which she was apparently struggling to suppress. Indeed, she was struggling to suppress some feeling or other most of the time. Her outward calm seemed to cover an interior of restlessness.
Pavel’s unbounded faith in the party instilled new faith into her. The great point was that he was a member of the aristocracy. If a man like him had his whole heart in the struggle, the movement was certainly not without foundation. Moreover, Boulatoff was close to the revolutionary centre, and he obviously spoke from personal knowledge. All sorts of questions worried her, many of which were answered at the present gathering, partly by herself, partly by others. The new era, when there would be neither poverty nor oppression, the enchanted era which had won her heart, loomed clearer than ever. At one moment as she sat listening, her blond hair gleaming golden in the lamplight, her face lit up by a look of keen intelligence, Pavel said to himself: “And this Jewish girl is the one who had the feeling and the courage to make that rumpus over Pievakin! If I became a revolutionist it was the result of gradual development, through the help of conditions, books, people; whereas this girl acted like one, and in the teeth of grave danger, too, purely on the spur of the moment and long before she knew there was any such thing as a revolutionary movement; acted like one while I was still a blind, hard-hearted milksop of a drone.” In the capital he knew a number of girls who were continually taking their lives in their hands and several of whom were like so many saints to him, but then Mlle. Yavner belonged to the realm of his home and his boyhood. What he regarded as an act of heroism on her part was hallowed by that sense of special familiarity and comprehensibility which clings to things like the old well that witnessed our childish games.
She made a very favourable impression on him. If he had been a formal candidate for her hand, come “bride-seeing,” he could not have studied her more closely than he did now. Indeed, so absorbed was he in her that once while she was speaking to him laughingly her words fell on a deaf ear because at that moment he was remarking to himself: “She laughs in a little rising scale, breaking off in a rocket.”
“There must be something in her, then,” he thought “which was the source of that noble feeling and of that courage.” He took to scanning her afresh, as though looking for a reflection of that something in her face, and as he looked at her and thought of the Pievakin “demonstration” it gave him pleasure to exaggerate her instrumentality in his own political regeneration.