“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.
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 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?