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.
After dinner he was sent for by Tchicherin, and I spent the evening with
Michael Borodin. Michael Markovitch, as Borodin is called, lives in our
house. He is a man with shaggy black hair brushed back from his
forehead, a Napoleonic beard, deep-set eyes, and a face like a mask. He
talks abrupt American-English in a base voice. I have not seen much of
him as he works half the day and all the night, like the other Foreign
Office officials. He is usually late for meals, eats hurriedly and
leaves before we have finished. As soon as Vanderlip had gone Borodin
switched out all the drawing-room lights that Vanderlip had put on,
except one. I asked him why he did this, and he looked round the garish
room and gave a slight shudder: “It is parvenu,” he said; then sinking
back into his chair he looked at me intently, and asked: “What is your
economic position in the world?” It is the first time he has talked to
me, and I found myself answering as if my life depended on my answers.
Happily no one in this country knows anything about my family,
up-bringing, or surroundings. I have not got to live down my wasted
years. I can stand on my own feet and be accepted on my own merits.
Borodin mystifies me, I cannot make out, when all his questions have
been answered, what he thinks.