CHAPTER XX
KARLOV moodily touched the shoulder of the man on the cot. Stefani Gregor puzzled him. He came to this room more often than was wise, driven by a curiosity born of a cynical philosophy to discover what it was that reënforced this fragile body against threats and thirst and hunger. He knew what he wanted of Gregor—the fiddler on his knees begging for mercy. And always Gregor faced him with that silent calm which reminded him of the sea, aloof, impervious, exasperating. Only once since the day he had been locked in this room had Gregor offered speech. He, Karlov, had roared at him, threatened, baited, but his reward generally had been a twisted wintry smile.
He could not offer physical torture beyond the frequent omissions of food and water; the body would have crumbled. To have planned this for months, and then to be balked by something as visible yet as elusive as quicksilver! Born in the same mudhole, and still Boris Karlov the avenger could not understand Stefani Gregor the fiddler. Perhaps what baffled him was that so valiant a spirit should be housed in so weak a body. It was natural that he, Boris, with the body of a Carpathian bear, should have a soul to match. But that Stefani, with his paper body, should mock him! The damned bourgeoisie!
The quality of this unending calm was understandable: Gregor was always ready to die. What to do with a man to whom death was release? To hold the knout and to see it turn to water in the hand! In lying he had overreached. Gregor, having accepted as fact the reported death of Ivan, had nothing to live for. Having brought Gregor here to torture he had, blind fool, taken away the fiddler's ability to feel. The fog cleared. He himself had given his enemy this mysterious calm. He had taken out Gregor's soul and dissipated it.
No. Not quite dissipated. What held the body together was the iron residue of the soul. Venom and blood clogged Karlov's throat. He could kill only the body, as he had killed the fiddle; he could not reach the mystery within. Ah, but he had wrung Stefani's heart there. There were pieces of the fiddle on the table where Gregor had placed them, doubtless to weep over when he was alone. Why hadn't he thought to break the fiddle a little each day?
"Stefani Gregor, sit up. I have come to talk." This was formula. Karlov did not expect speech from Gregor.
Slowly the thin arms bore up the torso; slowly the legs swung to the floor. But the little gray man's eyes were bright and quick to-night.
"Boris, what is it you want?"
"To talk"—surprised at this unexpected outburst.
"No, no. I mean, what is it all about—these killings, these burnings?"
Karlov was ready at all times to expound the theories that appealed to his dark yet simple mind—humanity overturned as one overturned the sod in the springtime to give it new life.
"To give the proletariat what is his."
"Ha!" said the little man on the cot. "What is his?"
"That which capitalism has taken away from him."
"The proletariat. The lowest in the human scale—and therefore the most helpless. They shall rule, say you. My poor Russia! Beaten and robbed for centuries, and now betrayed by a handful of madmen—with brains atrophied on one side! You are a fool, Boris. Your feet are in strange quicksands and your head among chimeras. You write some words on a piece of paper, and lo! you say they are facts. Without first proving your theories correct you would ram them down the throat of the world. The world rejects you."
"Wait and see, damned bourgeoisie!" thundered Karlov, not alive to the fact that he was being baited.
"Bourgeoisie? Yes, I am of the middle class; the rogue on top and the fool below. I see. The rogue and the fool cannot combine unless the bourgeoisie is obliterated. Go on. I am interested."
"Under the soviet the government shall be everything."
"As it was in Prussia."
Karlov ignored this. "The individual shall never again become rich by exploiting the poor."
Karlov strove to speak calmly. Gregor's willingness to discuss the aims of the proletariat confused him. He suspected some ulterior purpose behind this apparent amiability. He must hold down his fury until this purpose was in the open.
"Well, that is good," Gregor admitted. "But somehow it sounds ancient on my ear. Was there not a revolution in France?"
"Fool, it is the world that is revolting!" Karlov paused. "And no man in the future shall see his sister or his daughter made into a loose woman without redress."
"Your proletariat's sister and daughter. But the daughter of the noble and the daughter of the bourgeoisie—fair game!"
Sometimes there enters a man's head what might be called a sick idea; when the vitality is at low ebb and the future holds nothing. Thus there was a grim and sick idea behind Gregor's gibes. It was in his mind to die. All the things he had loved had been destroyed. So then, to goad this madman into a physical frenzy. Once those gorilla-like hands reached out for him Stefani Gregor's neck would break.
"Be still, fiddler! You know what I mean. There will be no upper class, which is idleness and wastefulness; no middle class, the usurers, the gamblers of necessities, the war makers. One great body of equals shall issue forth. All shall labour."
"For what?"
"The common good."
"Your Lenine offered peace, bread, and work for the overthrow of Kerensky. What you have given—murder and famine and idleness. Can there be common good that is based upon the blood of innocents? Did Ivan ever harm a soul? Have I?"
"You!" Karlov trembled. "You—with your damned green stones! Did you not lure Anna to dishonour with the promise to show her the drums, the sight of which would make all her dreams come true? A child, with a fairy story in her head!"
"You speak of Anna! If you hadn't been spouting your twaddle in taverns you would have had time to instruct Anna against guilelessness and superstition."
"How much did they pay you? Did you fiddle for her to dance? … But I left their faces in the mud!"
A madman, with two obsessions. A pitiable Samson with his arms round the pillars of society to drag it down upon his head because society had defiled his sister! Ah, how many thousands in Russia like him! A great yearning filled Gregorys heart, because he understood; but he suppressed expression of it because the sick idea was stronger.
"Yes, yes! I loved those green stones because it was born in me to love beautiful things. Have you forgotten, Boris, the old days in Moscow, when we were students and I made you weep with my fiddle? There was hope for you then. You had not become a pothouse orator on the rights of the proletariat—the red-combed rooster on the smouldering dungheap! Beauty, no matter in what form, I loved it. Yes, I was mad about those emeralds. I was always stealing in to see them, to hold them to the light, simply because they were beautiful." Gregor's hands flew to his throat, which he bared. "I lured her there! 'Twas I, Boris! … Those beautiful hands of yours, fit for the butcher's block! Kill me! Kill me!"
But Karlov shrank back, covering his eyes. "No! I see now! You wish to die! You shall live!" He rushed toward the far wall, a huge grotesque shadow rising to meet him—his own, thrown upon the wall by the wavering candlelight. He turned shaking, for the temptation had been great.
At once Gregor realized his failure. The tenseness went out of him. He spoke calmly. "Yes, I wanted to die. I no longer possess anything. I lied, Boris; but it is useless to tell you that. I knew nothing of Anna until it was too late. I wanted to die."
Karlov began to pace furiously, the candle flame springing after him each time he passed it.
There was a question in Gregor's mind. It rushed to his lips a dozen times but he dared not voice it. Olga. Since Karlov could not be tempted to murder, it would be futile to ask for an additional burden of mental torture. Perhaps it had not happened—the terrible picture he drew in his mind—since Karlov had not boasted of it.
"Come, Boris. There is blood on your hands. What is one more daub of it?"
Karlov stopped, scowled, and ran his fingers through his hair. Perhaps some ugly memory stirred the roots of it. "You wish to die!"
Gregor bent his head to his hands and Karlov resumed his pacing. After a while Gregor looked up.
"Private vengeance. You begin your rule with private vengeance."
"The vengeance of a people. All the breed. Did France stop at Louis? Do we tear up the roots of the poisonous toadstool that killed someone we loved and leave the other toadstools thriving?"
"To cure the world of all its ills by tearing up the toadstools and the flowers together—do you call that justice? The proletariat shall have everything, and he begins by killing off noble and bourgeoisie and dividing up the loot! Even with his oppression the noble had a right to live. The bourgeoisie must die because of his benefactions to a people. The world for the proletariat, and damnation for the rest!"
"Let each become one of us," cried Karlov, hoarsely. "We give them that right."
"You lie! You have done nothing but assassinate them when they surrendered. But tell me, have not you, Lenine, and Trotzky overlooked something?"
"What?" Karlov was vaguely grateful for this diversion. The lust to kill was still upon him and he was fighting it. He must remember that Gregor wished to die. "What have we overlooked?"
"Human nature. Can you tear it apart and reconstruct it, as you would a clock? What of creative genius in this proletariat millennium of yours?"
"The state will carefully mother that."
Gregor laughed sardonically. "Will there be creative genius under your rule? Will you not suffocate it by taking away the air that energizes it—ambition? You will have all the present marvels of invention to start with, but will you ever go beyond? Have you read history and observed the inexorable? I doubt it. What is progress? A series of almost imperceptible steps."
"Which capitalism has always obstructed," flung back Karlov.
"Which capitalism has always made possible. Curb it, yes; but abolish it, as you have done in unhappy Russia! Why do you starve there? Poor fool, because you have assassinated those forces which created food—that is to say, put it where you could get it. Three quarters of Russia are against you. You read nothing in that? The efficient and the inefficient, they shall lie down together as the lion and the ass, to paraphrase. They shall become equal because you say so. What is, fundamentally, this Bolshevism? The revolt of the inefficient. The mantle of horror that was Germany's you have torn from her shoulders and thrown upon yours. Fools!"
The anarch's huge fists became knotted; wrinkles corrugated his forehead; but he did not stir. Gregor wanted to die.
Gregor pointed with trembling hand toward the brown litter on the table. "To destroy. You shattered a soul there. You tore mine apart when you did it. For what? To better humanity? No; to rend something, to obliterate something that was beautiful. Demolition. Go on. You will tear and rend until exhaustion comes, then some citizen king, some headstrong Napoleon, will step in. The French Revolution taught you nothing. You play 'The Marseillaise' in the Neva Prospekt and miss the significance of that song. Liberty? You choose license. Equality? You deny it in your acts. Fraternity? You slaughter your brothers."
"Be silent!" roared Karlov, wavering.
But Gregor continued with a new-found hope. He saw that his jeers were wearing down the other's control. Perhaps the weak side was the political. Karlov was a fanatic. There might yet be death in those straining fingers.
"To seize by confiscation, without justice, indiscriminately all that the group efficient laboriously constructed. I enter your house, kill your family and steal your silver. Are your acts fundamentally different from mine? Remember, I am speaking from the point of view as three quarters of Russia see it, and all the other civilized nations. There may be something magnificent in that soviet constitution of yours; but you have deluged it in blood and folly. Ostensibly you are dividing up the great estates, but actually you are parcelling them out and charging rent. You will not own anything. The state shall own all the property. What will be the patriotism of the man who has nothing? Why defend something that is only his government's, not his own? You are legalizing women as cows. The sense of motherhood will vanish when a woman may not select her mate. What is the greatest thing in the world? The human need of possession. To own something, however little. The spur of creative genius. Human beings will never be equal except in lawful privileges. The skillful will outpace the unskillful; the thrifty will take from the improvident; genius will overtop mediocrity. And you will change all this with a scrape of your bloody pen!"
Karlov's body began to rock and sway like an angry bear's; but still he held his ground. Gregor wanted to die, to cheat him.
"What of power?" went on his baiter. "Capitalism of might. Lenine and Trotzky; are they—have they been—honest? Has Russia actually voted them into office? They sit in the seats of the mighty by the capitalism of force. For the capitalism of money, which is progress physical and moral, you substitute the capitalism of force, which is terror. You speak of yourselves as internationalists. Bats, that is the judgment day of God—internationalism! For only on the judgment day will nations become a single people."
A short silence. Gregor was beginning to grow weak. Presently he picked up the thread of his diatribe.
"I have lived in England, France, Italy, and here. I am competent to draw comparisons. Where you went to distill poison I went to absorb facts. And I found that here in this great democracy is the true idea. But you will not read the lesson."
Sweat began to drop from Karlov's beetling eyebrows.
"You will fail miserably here. Why? Because the Americans are the greatest of individual property owners. The sense of possession is satisfied. And woe to the fool who suggests they surrender this. Little wooden houses, thousands and thousands of them, with a small plot of ground in the rear where a man in the springtime may dig his hands into the soil and say gratefully to God, 'Mine, mine!' I, too, am a Russ. I thought in the beginning that you would take this country as an example, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Wrongs? Yes. But day by day these wrongs are being righted. No lesson in this for Trotzky, a beer-hall orator like yourself. Ten million men drafted to carry arms. Did they revolt? Shoulder to shoulder the selected millions marched to the great ships, shoulder to shoulder they pressed toward the Rhine. No lesson in that!
"Capitalism, seeking to save its loans, you rant! Capitalism of blood and money that asked only for simple justice to mankind. The ideal of a great people—a mixture of all bloods, even German! No lessons in these tremendous happenings! And you babble about your damned proletariat who represents the dregs of Russia. What is he? The inefficient, whining that the other man has the luck, so kill him! Russia, the kindly ox, fallen among wolves! You cannot tear down the keystone of civilization—which took seven thousand years to construct—insert it upside down, and expect the arch to stand. You have your chance to prove your theories. Prove them in Petrograd and Moscow, and you will not have to go forth with the torch. And what is this torch but the hidden fear that you may be wrong? … To wreck the world before you are found out! You are idiots, and you have turned Russia into a madhouse! Spawns from the dung-heap!"
"Damn you, Stefani Gregor!" Karlov rushed to the cot, raised his terrible fists, his chest heaving. Gregor waited. "No, no! You wish to die!" The madman swung on his heels and dashed toward the door, sweeping the pieces of the violin to the floor as he passed the table.
Gregor feebly drew himself back upon his cot and laid his face in the pillow.
"Ivan—my violin—all that I knew and loved—gone! And God will not let me die!"