BUST OF ZINOVIEV.
September 27th.
Things begin to move more rapidly now, and my patience is being rewarded. To-day Dzhirjinsky came. He is the President of the Extraordinary Commission, or as we should call it in English, the organiser of the Red Terror. He is the man Kameneff has told me so much about. He sat for an hour and a half, quite still and very silent. His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness. His face is narrow, with high cheek bones and sunk in. Of all his features his nose seems to have the most character. It is very refined, and the delicate bloodless nostrils suggest the sensitiveness of over-breeding. He is a Pole by origin.
As I worked and watched him during that hour and a half he made a curious impression on me. Finally, overwhelmed by his quietude, I exclaimed: “You are an angel to sit so still.” Our medium was German, which made fluent conversation between us impossible, but he answered: “One learns patience and calm in prison.”
I asked how long he was in prison. “A quarter of my life, eleven years,” he answered. It was the Revolution that liberated him. Obviously it is not the abstract desire for power or for a political career that has made Revolutionaries of such men, but a fanatical conviction of the wrongs to be righted for the cause of humanity and national progress. For this cause men of sensitive intellect have endured years of imprisonment.
Being Monday there is no theatre, as that is the night the artists have free—on Sundays they work for the enjoyment of the people—so I dined with Mr. Vanderlip, who told me many things which I may not at this juncture write down or repeat. I have not sought his confidence, so I thought it rather unjustifiable when at the end of the evening, having found me a sympathetic listener, he said: “You know too much now, I shall see that you do not leave the country before I do.” Although he likes the people with whom he has come in business contact, he is frankly a capitalist, and glories in it. He is like the Englishman abroad who is conscious of being different to everyone else, and derives from it a smug feeling of superiority.