Kitty came home at nine that night, dreadfully tired. She had that day been rocked by so many emotions. She had viewed the parade from the windows of a theatrical agency, and she had cheered and cried like everybody else. Her eyes still smarted, and her throat betrayed her every time she recalled what she had seen. Those boys!
Loneliness. She had dined downtown, and on the way home the shadow had stalked beside her. Loneliness. Never before had these rooms seemed so empty, empty. If God had only given her a brother and he had marched in that glorious parade, what fun they two would be having at this moment! Empty rooms; not even a pet.
Loneliness. She had been a silly little fool to stand so aloof, just because she was poor and lived in a faded locality. She mocked herself. Poor but proud, like the shopgirl in the movies. Denied herself companionship because she was ashamed of her genteel poverty. And now she was paying for it. Silly little fool! It wasn't as if she did not know how to make and keep friends. She knew she had attractions. Just a senseless false pride. The best friends in the world, after a series of rebuffs, would drop away. Her mother's friends never called any more, because of her aloofness. She had only a few girl friends, and even these no doubt were beginning to think her uppish.
She did not take off her hat and coat. She wandered through the empty rooms, undecided. If she went to a movie the rooms would be just as lonely when she returned. Companionship. The urge of it was so strong that there was a temptation to call up someone, even someone she had rebuffed. She was in the mood to confess everything and to make an honest attempt to start all over again—to accept friendship and let pride go hang. Impulsively she started for the telephone, when the doorbell rang.
Immediately the sense of loneliness fell away. Another chapter in the great game of hide and seek that had kept her from brooding until to-night? The doorbell carried a new message these days. Nine o'clock. Who could be calling at that hour? She had forgotten to advise Cutty of the fact that someone had gone through the apartment. She could not positively assert the fact. Those articles in her bureau she herself might have disturbed. She might have taken a handkerchief in a hurry, hunted for something under the lingerie impatiently. Still she could not rid herself of the feeling that alien hands had been rifling her belongings. Not Bernini, decidedly.
Remembering Cutty's advice about opening the door with her foot against it, she peered out. No emissary of Bolshevisim here. A weary little messenger boy with a long box in his arms called her name.
“Miz Conover?”
“Yes.”
The boy thrust the box into her hands and clumped to the stairhead. Kitty slammed the door and ran into the living room, tearing open the box as she ran. Roses from Cutty; she knew it. The old darling! Just when she was on the verge of breaking down and crying! She let the box fall to the floor and cuddled the flowers to her heart, her eyes filling. Cutty.
One of those ideas which sometime or another spring into the minds of all pretty women who are poor sprang into hers—an idea such as an honest woman might muse over, only to reject. Sinister and cynical. Kitty was at this moment in rather a desperate frame of mind. Those two inherent characteristics, which she had fought valiantly—love of good times and of pretty clothes—made ingress easy for this sinister and cynical idea. Having gained a foothold it pressed forward boldly. Cutty, who had everything—strength, comeliness, wisdom, and money. To live among all those beautiful things, never to be lonely again, to be waited on, fussed over, made much of, taken into the high world. Never more to add up accounts, to stretch five-dollar bills across the chasm of seven days. An old man's darling!
“No, no, no!” she burst out, passionately. She drew a hand across her eyes. As if that gesture could rub out an evil thought! It is all very well to say “Avaunt!” But if the idea will not? “I couldn't, I couldn't! I'd be a liar and a cheat. But he is so nice! If he did want me!... No, no! Just for comforts! I couldn't! What a miserable wretch I am!”
She caught up the copper jug and still holding the roses to her heart, the tears streaming down her cheeks, rushed out to the kitchen for water. She dropped the green stems into the jug, buried her face in the buds to cool the hot shame on her cheeks, and remembered—what a ridiculous thing the mind was!—that she had three shirt waists to iron. She set the jug on the kitchen table, where it remained for many hours, and walked over to the range, to the flatiron shelf. As she reached for a flatiron her hand stopped in midair.
A fat black wallet! Instantly she knew who had placed it there. That poor Johnny Two-Hawks!
Kitty lifted out the wallet from behind the flatirons. No doubt of it, Johnny Two-Hawks had placed it there when she had gone to the speaking tube to summon the janitor. Not knowing if he would ever call for it! Preferring that she rather than his enemies should have it. And without a word! What a simple yet amazing hiding place; and but for the need of a flatiron the wallet would have stayed there until she moved. Left it there, with the premonition that he was heading into trouble. But what if they had killed him? How would she have explained the wallet's presence in her apartment? Good gracious, what an escape!
Without direct consciousness she raised the flap. She saw the edges of money and documents; but she did not touch anything. There was no need. She knew it belonged to Johnny Two-Hawks. Of course there was an appalling attraction. The wallet was, figuratively, begging to be investigated. But resolutely she closed the flap. Why? Because it was as though Two-Hawks had placed the wallet in her hands, charging her to guard it against the day he reclaimed it. There was no outward proof that the wallet was his. She just knew, that was all.
Still, she examined the outside carefully. In one corner had been originally a monogram or a crest; effectually obliterated by the application of fire.
Who he was and what he was, by a simple turn of the wrist. It was Cutty's affair now, not hers. He had a legal right to examine the contents. He was an agent of the Federal Government. The drums of jeopardy and Stefani Gregor and Johnny Two-Hawks, all interwoven. She had waited in vain for Cutty to mention the emeralds. What signified his silence? She had indirectly apprised him of the fact that she knew the author of that advertisement offering to purchase the drums, no questions asked. Who but Cutty in New York would know about them? The mark of the thong. Johnny Two-Hawks had been carrying the drums, and Karlov's men had torn them from their victim's neck during the battle. Was there any reason why Cutty should not have taken her completely into his confidence? Palaces looted. If Stefani Gregor had lived in a palace, why not his protege? Still, it was possible Cutty was holding back until he could tell her everything.
But what to do with it? If she called him up and made known her discovery, Cutty would rush up as fast as a taxicab could bring him. He had peremptorily ordered her not to come to his apartment for the present. But to sit here and wait, to be alone again after he had gone! It was not to be borne. Orders or no orders, she would carry the wallet to him. He could lecture her as much as he pleased. To-night, at least, she would lay aside her part as parlour maid in the drama. It would give her something to do, keep her mind off herself. Nothing but excitement would pull her out of this semi-hysterical doldrum.
She hid the wallet in the pocket of her underskirt. Already her blood was beginning to dance. She ran into her bedroom for two veils, a gray automobile puggree and one of those heavy black affairs with butterflies scattered over it, quite as effectual as a mask. She wound the puggree about her hat. When the right moment came she would discard the puggree and drop the black veil. Her coat was of dark blue, lined with steel-gray taffeta. Turned inside out it would fool any man. She wore spats. These she would leave behind when she made the change.
Someone might follow her as far as the Knickerbocker, but beyond there, never. She was sorry, but she dared not warn Bernini. He might object, notify Cutty, and spoil everything.
By the time she reached the street exhilaration suffused her. The melancholia was gone. The sinister and cynical idea had vanished apparently. Apparently. Merely it had found a hiding place and was content to abide there for the present. Such ideas are not without avenues of retreat; they know the hours of attack. Kitty was alive to but one fact: The game of hide and seek was on again. She was going to have some excitement. She was going into the night on an adventure, as children play at bears in the dark. The youth in her still rejected the fact that the woof and warp of this adventure were murder and loot and pain.
En route to the Subway she never looked back. At Forty-second Street she detrained, walked into the Knickerbocker, entered the ladies dressing room, turned her coat, redraped her hat, checked her gaiters, and sought a taxi. Within two blocks of Cutty's she dismissed the cab and finished the journey on foot.
At the left of the lobby was an all-night apothecary's, with a door going into the lobby. Kitty proceeded to the elevator through this avenue. Number Four was down, and she stepped inside, raising her veil.
“You, miss?”
“Very important. Take me up.”
“The boss is out.”
“No matter. Take me up.
“You're the doctor!” What a pretty girl she was. No come-on in her eyes, though. “The boss may not get back until morning. He just went out in his engineer's togs. He sure wasn't expecting you.
“Do you know where he went?”
“Never know. But I'll be in this bird cage until he comes back.”
“I shall have to wait for him.”
“Up she goes!”
As Kitty stepped out into the corridor a wave of confusion assailed her. She hadn't planned against Cutty's absence. There was nothing she could say to the nurse; and if Johnny Two-Hawks was asleep—why, all she could do would be to curl up on a divan and await Cutty's return.
The nurse appeared. “You, Miss Conover?”
“Yes.” Kitty realized at once that she must take the nurse into her confidence. “I have made a really important discovery. Did Cutty say when he would return?”
“No. I am not in his confidence to that extent. But I do know that you assumed unnecessary risks in coming here.”
Kitty shrugged and produced the wallet. “Is Mr. Hawksley awake?”
“He is.”
“It appears that he left this wallet in my kitchen that night. It might buck him up if I gave it to him.”
The nurse, eyeing the lovely animated face, conceded that it might. “Come, I've been trying futilely to read him asleep, but he is restless. No excitement, please.”
“I'll try not to. Perhaps, after all, you had better give him the wallet.”
“On the contrary, that would start a series of questions I could not answer. Come along.”
When Kitty saw Hawksley she gave a little gasp of astonishment. Why, he was positively handsome! His dark head, standing out boldly against the bolstering pillows, the fine lines of his face definite, the pallor—he was like a Roman cameo. Who and what could he be, this picturesque foundling?
His glance flashed into hers delightedly. For hours and hours the constant wonder where she was, why no one mentioned her, why they evaded his apparently casual questions. To burst upon his vision in the nadir of his boredom and loneliness like this! She was glorious, this American girl. She made him think of a golden scabbard housing a fine Toledo blade. Hadn't she saved his life? More, hadn't she assumed a responsibility in so doing? Instantly he purposed that she should not be permitted to resign the office of good Samaritan. He motioned toward the nurse's chair; and Kitty sat down, her errand in total eclipse.
“Just when I never felt so lonely! Ripping!”
His quick smile was so engaging that Kitty answered it—kindred spirits, subconsciously recognizing each other. Fire; but neither of them knew that; or that two lonely human beings of opposite sex, in touch, constitute a first-rate combustible.
Quietly the nurse withdrew. There would be a tonic in this meeting for the patient. Her own presence might neutralize the effect. She had not spent all those dreadful months in base hospitals without acquiring a keen insight into the needs of sick men. No harm in letting him have this pretty, self-reliant girl alone to himself for a quarter of an hour. She would then return with some broth.
“How—how are you?” asked Kitty, inanely.
“Top-hole, considering. Quite ready to be killed all over again.”
“You mustn't talk like that!” she protested.
“Only to show you I was bucking up. Thank you for doing what you did.”
“I had to do it.”
“Most women would have run away and left me to my fate.”
“Not my kind.”
“Rather not! Your kind would risk its neck to help a stray cat. I say, what's that you have in your hand?”
“Good gracious!” Kitty extended the wallet. “It is yours, isn't it?”
“Yes. I wanted you to bring it to me the way you have. If I hadn't come back—out of that—it was to be yours.”
“Mine?”—dumfounded. “But——”
“Why not? Gregor gone, there wasn't a soul in the world. I was hungry, and you gave me food. I wanted that to pay you. I'll wager you've never looked into it.”
“I had no right to.”
“See!” He opened the wallet and spread the contents on the counterpane. “I wasn't so stony as you thought. What? Cash and unregistered bonds. They would have been yours absolutely.”
“But I don't—I can't quite,” Kitty stammered—“but I couldn't have kept them!”
“Positively yes. You would have shown them to that ripping guardian of yours, and he would have made you see.”
“Indeed, yes! He would have been scared to death. You poor man, can't you see? Circumstantial evidence that I had killed you!”
“Good Lord! And you're right, too! So it goes. You can't do anything you want to do. The good Samaritan is never requited; and I wanted to break the rule. Lord, what a bally mix-up I'd have tumbled you in! I forgot that you were you, that you would have gone straight to the authorities. Of course I knew if I pulled through and you found the wallet you would bring it to me.”
Kitty no longer had a foot on earth. She floated. Her brain floated, too, because she could not make it think coherently for her. A fortune—for a dish of bacon and eggs! The magnificence, the utter prodigality of such generosity! For a dish of bacon and eggs and a bottle of milk! Had she left home? Hadn't she fallen asleep, the victim of another nightmare? A corner of the atmosphere cleared a little. A desire took form; she wanted the nurse to come back and stabilize things. In a wavering blur she saw the odd young man restore the money and bonds and other documents to the wallet.
“I want you to give this to your guardian when he comes in. I want him to understand. I say, you know, I'm going to love that old thoroughbred! He's fine. Fancy his carrying me on his shoulders and eventually bringing me up here among the clouds! Americans.... Are you all like that? And you!”
Kitty's brain began to make preparations to alight, as it were. Cutty. That gave her a touch of earth. She heard herself say faintly: “And what about me?”
“You were brave and kind. To help an unknown, friendless beggar like that, when you should have turned him over to the police! Makes me feel a bit stuffy. They left me for dead. I wonder—”
“What?”
“If—it wouldn't have been just as well!”
“You mustn't talk like that! You just mustn't! You're with friends, real friends, who want to help you all they can.” And then with a little flash of forced humour, because of the recurrent tightening in her throat—“Who could be friendless, with all that money?” Instantly she felt like biting her tongue. He would know nothing of the sad American habit of trying to be funny to keep a wobbly situation on its legs. He would interpret it as heartlessness. “I didn't mean that!” With the Irish impulsiveness which generally weighs acts in retrospection, she reached over and gripped his hand.
“I say, you two!” Hawksley closed his eyes for a second. “Wanting to buck up a chap because you re that sort! All right. I'll stick it out! You two! And I might be the worst scoundrel unhung!”
He drew her hand toward his lips, and Kitty had not the power to resist him. She felt strangely theatrical, a character in a play; for American men, except in playful burlesque, never kissed their women's hands. The moment he released the hand the old wave of hysteria rolled over her. She must fly. The desire to weep, little fool that she was! was breaking through her defences. Loneliness. The two of them all alone but for Cutty. She rose, crushing the wallet in her hand.
Ah, never had she needed that darling mother of hers so much as now. Tears did not seem to afford relief when one shed them into handkerchiefs and pillows. But on that gentle bosom, to let loose this brimming flood, to hear the tender voice consoling!
“Oh, I say, now! Please!” she heard Johnny Two-Hawks cry out.
But she rushed on blindly, knocking against the door jamb and almost upsetting the nurse, who was returning. Somehow she managed to reach the living room, glad it was dark. Alter sundry reaching about she found the divan and flung herself upon it. What would he think? What would the nurse think? That Kitty Conover had suddenly gone stark, raving crazy! And now that she was in the dark, alone, the desire to weep passed over and she lay quietly with her face buried in the pillow. But not for long.
She sat up. Music—violin music! A gay waltz that made her think of flashing water, the laughter of children. Tschaikowsky. Thrilled, she waited for the finale. Silence. Scharwenka's “Polish Dance,” with a swing and a fire beyond anything she had ever heard before. Another stretch of silence—a silence full of interrogation points. Then a tender little sketch, quite unfamiliar. But all at once she understood. He was imploring her to return. She smiled in the dark; but she knew she was going to remain right where she was.
“Miss Conover?” It was the voice of the nurse.
“Yes. I'm over here on the divan.”
“Anything wrong?”
“Good gracious, no! I'm overtired. A little hysterical, maybe. The parade to-day, with all those wounded boys in automobiles, the music and colour and excitement—have rather done me up. And the way I rushed up here. And not finding Cutty—”
“Anything I can get for you?”
“No, thanks. I'll try to snatch a little sleep before Cutty returns.”
“But he may be gone all night!”
“Will it be so very scandalous if I stay here?”
“You poor child! Go ahead and sleep. Don't hesitate to call me if you want anything. I have a mild sedative if you would like it.”
“No, thanks. I did not know that Mr. Hawksley played.”
“Wonderfully! But does it bother you?”
“It kind of makes me choky.”
“I'll tell him.”
Kitty, now strangely at peace, snuggled down among the pillows. Some great Polish violinist, who had roused the bitter enmity of the anarchist? But no; he was Russian. Cutty had admitted that. It struck her that Cutty knew a great deal more than Kitty Conover; and so far as she could see there was no apparent reason for this secrecy. She rather believed she had Cutty. Either he should tell her everything or she would run loose, Bolshevik or no Bolshevik.
Sheep. She boosted one over the bars, another and another. Round somewhere in the thirties the bars dissolved. The next thing she knew she was blinking in the light, Cutty, his arms folded, staring down at her sombrely. There was blood on his face and blood on his hands.
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 reenforced 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 Gregor's 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!”
From a window in one of the vacant warehouses, twenty-odd feet away Cutty, from an oblique angle, had witnessed the peculiar drama without being able to grasp head or tail to it. For two hours he had crouched behind his window, watching the man on the cot and wondering if he would ever turn his face toward the candlelight. Then Karlov had entered. Gregor's ironic calm—with the exception of the time he had bared his throat—and Karlov's tempestuous exit baffled him. To the eye it had the appearance of a victory for Gregor and a defeat for Karlov, but Cutty had long ago ceased to believe his eyes without some corroborative evidence of auricular character.
He had recognized both men. Karlov answered to Kitty's description as an old glove answers to the hand. And no man, once having seen Gregor, could possibly forget his picturesque head. The old chap was alive! This fact made the night's adventure tally one hundred per cent. How to get a cheery word to him, to buck him up with, the promise of help? A hard nut to crack; so many obstacles. Primarily, this was a Federal affair. Yonder hid the werewolf and his pack, and it would be folly to send them scattering just for the sake of advising Gregor that he was being watched over.
Underneath the official obligation there was a personal interest in not risking the game to warn Gregor. Cutty was now positive that the drums of jeopardy were hidden somewhere in this house. To perform three acts, then: Save Gregor, capture Karlov and his pack, and privately confiscate the emeralds. Findings were keepings. No compromise regarding those green stones. It would not particularly hurt his reputation with St. Peter to play the half rogue once in a lifetime. Besides, St. Peter, hadn't he stolen something himself back there in the Biblical days; or got into a scrape or something? The old boy would understand. Cutty grinned in the dark.
Any obsession is a blindfold. A straight course lay open to Cutty, but he chose the labyrinthian because he was obsessed. He wanted those emeralds. Nothing less than the possession of them would, to his thinking, round out a varied and active career. Later, perhaps, he would declare the stones to the customs and pay the duty; perhaps. Thus his subsequent mishaps this night may be laid to the fact that he thought and saw through green spectacles.
The idea that the jewels were hidden near by made it imperative that he should handle this affair exclusively. Coles, the operative he had sent to negotiate with Karlov, was conceivably a prisoner upstairs or down. Coles knew about the drums, and they must not turn up under his eye. Federal property, in that event.
If ever he laid his hands upon the drums he would buy something gorgeous for Kitty. Little thoroughbred!
Time for work. Without doubt Karlov had cellar exits through this warehouse or the other. The job on hand would be first to locate these exits, and then to the trap on the roof. With his pocket lamp blazing a trail he went down to the cellar and carefully inspected the walls that abutted those of the house. Nothing on this side.
He left the warehouse and hugged the street wall for a space. The street was deserted. Instead of passing Karlov's abode he wisely made a detour of the block. He reached the entrance to the second warehouse without sighting even a marauding tom. In the cellar of this warehouse he discovered a newly made door, painted skillfully to represent the limestone of the foundation. Tiptop.
Immediately he outlined the campaign. There should be two drives—one from the front and another from the roof—so that not an anarchist or Bolshevik could escape. The mouth of the Federal sack should be held at this cellar exit. No matter what kind of game he played offside, the raid itself must succeed absolutely. Nothing should swerve him from making these plans as perfect as it was humanly possible. He would be on hand to search Karlov himself. If the drums were not on him he would return and pick the old mansion apart, lath by lath. Gay old ruffian, wasn't he?
Another point worth considering: He would keep his discoveries under cover until the hour to strike came. Some over-zealous subordinate might attempt a coup on his own and spoil everything.
He picked his way to the far end of the cellar, to the doors. Locks gone. He took it for granted that the real-estate agent would not come round with prospective tenants. These doors would take them into the trucking alley, where there were a dozen feasible exits. There was no way out of the house yard, as the brick wall, ten feet high and running from warehouse to warehouse, was blind. Now for the trap on the roof.
He climbed the three flights of stairs crisscrossed and festooned with ancient cobwebs. Occasionally he sneezed in the crook of his elbow, philosophizing over the fact that there was a lot of deadwood property in New York. Americans were eternally on the move.
The window from which he intended dropping to the house roof was obdurate. Only the upper half was movable. With hardly any noise at all he pulled this down, straddled it, balanced himself, secured a good grip on the ledge, and let himself down. The tips of his shoes, rubber-soled, just reached the roof. He landed silently.
The glare of the street lamp at the corner struck the warehouse, and this indirect light was sufficient to work by. He made the trap after a series of extra-cautious steps. The roof was slanting and pebbled, and the least turn of the foot might start a cascade and bell an alarm. A comfort-loving dress-suiter like himself, playing Old Sleuth, when he ought to be home and in bed! It was all of two-thirty. What the deuce would he do when there were no more thrills in life?
He stooped and caught hold of a corner of the trap to test it—and drew back with a silent curse. Glass! He had cut his hand. The beggars had covered the trap with cement and broken glass, sealing it. It would take time to cut round the trap; and even then he wouldn't be sure; they might have nailed it down from the inside. The worst of it was he would have to do the work himself; and in the meantime Karlov would have a fair wind for his propaganda gas, and perhaps the disposal of the drums to some collector who wasn't above bargaining for smuggled emeralds. Odd, though, that Karlov should have made a prisoner of Coles. What lay behind that manoeuvre? Well, this trap must be liberated; no getting round that.
Hang it, he wasn't going to be dishonest exactly; it would be simply a double play, half for Uncle Sam and half for himself. The idea of offering freely his blood and money to Uncle Sam and at the same time putting one over on the old gentleman had a novel appeal.
He stood up and wiped a tickling cobweb from his cheek. As the window from which he had descended came into range he stared, loose-jawed. Then be chuckled, as thoroughbred adventurers generally chuckle when they find themselves at the bottom of the sack, the mouth of which has simultaneously and automatically closed. Wasn't he the brainy old top? Wasn't he Sherlock Holmes plus? Old fool, how the devil was he going to get back through that window?
The drums of jeopardy—even to think of them was unlucky! Not to have planned a retreat; to have climbed down a well and cut the bucket rope! For in effect that was precisely what he had done. Only wings could carry him up to that window. With sardonic humour he felt of his shoulder blades. Not a feather in sight. Then he touched his ears. Ah, here was something definite; they had grown several inches during the past few hours. Monumental ass!
Of course there would be the drain. He could escape; but, dear Lord! with enough noise to wake the dead. And that would write “Finis” to this particular adventure. The quarry and the emeralds would be gone before he could return with help. When everything had gone so smoothly—a jolt like this!
A crowded day, and no mistake, as full of individual acts as a bill at a vaudeville, trained-animal act last. Was it possible that he had gone fiddle hunting that morning, netting an Amati worth ten thousand dollars? Hawksley—no, he couldn't blame Hawksley. Still, if this young Humpty-Dumpty hadn't been pushed off his wall he, Cutty, would not now be marooned upon this roof 'twixt the devil and the deep blue sea. To remain here until sunrise would be impossible; to slide down the drain was equally impossible—that is, if he ever wanted to see Boris Karlov again. The way of the transgressor was hard.
He sat on his heels and let his gaze rove four-square, permitting no object to escape. He saw a clothes pole leaning against the chimney. Evidently the former tenants had hung up their laundry here. There was no clothesline, however. Caught, jolly well, blooming well caught! If ever this got abroad he would be laughed out of the game. He wasn't going to put one over on Uncle Sam after all. There might be some kind of a fire escape on the front of the house. No harm in taking a look; it would serve to pass the time.
There was the usual frontal parapet about three feet in height. Upturned in the shadow lay a gift from the gods-a battered kitchen chair, probably used to reach the clothesline in the happy days when the word “Bolshevism” was known to only a select few dark angels.
Cutty waved a hand cheerfully if vaguely toward his guiding star, picked up the chair, commandeered the clothes pole, and silently manoeuvred to the wall of the warehouse. Standing on the chair he placed the tip of the pole against the top of the upper frame and pushed the frame halfway up. He repeated this act upon the obdurate lower half. He heaved slowly but with all his force. Glory be, the lower half went up far enough to afford ingress! He would eat his breakfast in the apartment as usual. To-morrow night he would establish his line of retreat by fetching a light rope ladder. There was sweat at the roots of his hair, however, when he finally gained the street. He was very tired. He observed mournfully that the vigour which had always recharged itself, no matter how recklessly he had drawn upon it, was beginning to protest. Fifty-two.
Well, his troubles were over for the night. So he believed. Arriving home, dirty and spent, he had to find Kitty asleep on the divan!