He glanced at the picture ensemble of the Square, one eye half closed to catch the light-and-shade effect and found a hindrance suddenly to his enjoyment of life. Sauntering across the street and into the park entrance was the Bulgarian. He paused to drink at the little iron fountain, and Dmitri leaned forward, giving a low, peculiar whistle. The boy lifted his head with a jerk and stared about him. He forgot his thirst. The crafty, self-contained air fell from him. Dmitri laughed down at him and waved his hand, beckoning him to come up. The other shook his head and waited.
“Another sparrow,” Dmitri said to himself as he closed the studio and went to join him. “He is too thin, much too thin.”
CHAPTER X
When Ames returned to the studio twenty minutes later, it was still empty. In his own room over on East Twenty-Eighth Street, Dmitri sat on a couch, smoking and listening to the boy Steccho talk of Sofia, of his mountain home, of Maryna his sister, and the little smiling mother who cooked so excellently.
“The last time we met, we dipped in the same drinking-bowl, remember?” Dmitri smiled across at him. “You are too young to come here in these times. Who has sent you? Do not tell me if you dare not. I am not afraid. I will still open wide the door every time you care to visit me, my friend. Are the little mother and sister quite safe, you are sure?”
“Oh, absolutely.” Steccho’s dark face glowed with enthusiasm. “Before I come here I see to that, and they will have more still, much more.”
“So? Then you are doing well. That is good. The times are changing about, eh? Are there any of the others here? I have met no one since I came. I was wounded and in the hospital for months, so I have lost track of the old friends.”
“You did not return, then, afterwards?” Steccho’s glance was uneasy.
“No,” replied Dmitri, lying on his back, and blowing long, uneven ovals into the air. “I do not like it all, frankly, my boy. They compromise and barter first with this faction, then with the other. Each is afraid to trust the other. It has become a great struggle for self-preservation now that the masters twist the torture screws of starvation. Life, after all, once you desert nature, becomes merely a struggle for the dear old bread and butter in one form or another. Commerce is built upon the necessities of human existence under modern conditions. Personally, I am very radical on one point. I would kill without mercy the man who gambles for his own profit on the necessities of his brother man, his food, his fuel, his clothing. And I do not believe in killing, as you know. I regard war as a subterfuge, an exploitation of power. I object to persons infusing into my mind hatred of my brother man merely because he happens to live on a different spot of earth than I do, and belongs to a different branch of the same human race.”
“There are robbers and murderers in the brotherhood as well as in the privileged classes.”