XX
THE BLOW
PETER, alone once more in his room, found that a strange calmness had come to him once the secret of his purpose in returning to the Valley of Despair was in the keeping of two other persons. There was for him in that fact something of the relief of the confessional. For twenty years he had nursed in his soul the grievance of his father’s death, and his own imprisonment—nursed it most secretly, pent it up within his consciousness, till it seemed that his body had become a kind of culture tube of germinating hate.
For the first time since he had left Chita as a boy, he found an easement of his soul burden. These people to whom he had told his story, understood his deepest emotions regarding his father. No American could ever have understood fully, Peter was well aware. Prison to an American implies disgrace, some sort of stain upon the character which is never fully lived down. But to this old exile, as Peter supposed Kirsakoff to be, Peter’s story was an honor to him. For the old man had suffered the horrors of the exile system, mixing, as it did, the highest type of Russian with the lowest—the thinker with the cutthroat.
Peter knew he stood better in Katerin’s regard than before, now that she knew his story. He had seen in her face a deep and profound pity for him. What he mistook for pity was her alarmed concern when she discovered that Peter sought to slay her father. Peter could not know that she had suffered torture while he had sat looking into the lamp—that she knew how a look, a word or some turn of the head might betray her father.
Peter had always thought that the first assurance of a successful end to his quest for Kirsakoff would mean a delirious joy. Yet here he was coldly calm, a calm which was a steadiness that he ascribed to his own efforts to control all outward indications of his grim satisfaction. His brain was singing, over and over, in an endless refrain—“I shall find Kirsakoff.”
He turned the light in such way that he could see himself in the big mirror between the windows, and smiled at himself. His face was slightly flushed from the emotions and memories roused by telling how his father had been killed before the post-house, and how he himself had endured and escaped from the prison on the hill.
His eyes burned with a feverish light. In fact, he was drugged with elation, strangely soothed, much as a man is lulled with wine till his senses are subdued by the poison and his reasoning faculties are benumbed. Yet his alertness was in no whit deadened. On the contrary, he was well aware of what was before him, and he was alive to the necessities of the situation. He was approaching his long-waited moment of triumph, and he knew that he must hold himself against the slightest rashness in thoughts or actions. He must, he thought as he surveyed himself in the mirror, avoid the look of craftiness which was coming into his face—he must feign a bland innocence, and dispel everything which savored of eagerness, impatience, impulsive haste. He had days, weeks, in which to carry out his purpose, and at last he was on the right track. Besides, it would avail nothing unless he could accomplish the destruction of Kirsakoff without leaving the hint of a clew to the identity of the slayer.
He left off studying himself in the mirror, and began pacing the floor, head down and hands behind his back. There was a strange sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that Vashka knew his secret. He felt that it constituted a bond between them, a mutual sympathy such as is known only among exiles, or the children of exiles.
In fact, Peter had created in his own mind a vision of Vashka that went beyond the time when he would have killed Kirsakoff. It was sort of an unformed, inchoate dream which consisted of nothing more tenuous than mental flits into the future in which he always saw Vashka. As she knew the secret of his coming back to Chita, she would also hold his secret about who had killed Kirsakoff. She would always understand, as she understood now. Only a Russian, a Russian girl who knew as Vashka knew the terrors of the Valley of Despair, fitted his idea of a confidant in this affair. Katerin, as “Vashka,” had done her work well!