Charley gave him a startled look.
That was the name Lydia had mentioned.
“Yes, oddly enough I have.”
“He was a gentleman.
His family had been landowners in Poland since the seventeenth century.
He was a cultivated, well-read man.
Lenin and the Old Guard made the revolution, but without Dzerjinsky it would have been crushed within a year.
He saw that it could only be saved by terror.
He applied for the post that gave him control of the police and organized the Cheka.
He made it into an instrument of repression that acted with the precision of a perfect machine.
He let neither love nor hate interfere with his duty.
His industry was prodigious.
He would work all night examining the suspects himself, and they say he acquired so keen an insight into the hearts of men that it was impossible for them to conceal their secrets from him.
He invented the system of hostages which was one of the most effective systems the revolution ever discovered to preserve order.
He signed hundreds, nay, thousands of death warrants with his own hand.
He lived with spartan simplicity.
His strength was that he wanted nothing for himself.
His only aim was to serve the revolution.
And he made himself the most powerful man in Russia.
It was Lenin the people acclaimed and worshipped, but it was Dzerjinsky who ruled them.”
“And is that the part you wish to play if ever revolution comes to England?”
“I should be well fitted for it.”
Charley gave him his boyish, good-natured smile.
“It’s just possible that I’d be doing the country a service if I strangled you here and now.
I could, you know.”
“I daresay.
But you’d be afraid of the consequences.”
“I don’t think I should be found out.
No one saw me come in.
Only Lydia knows I was going to see you and she wouldn’t give me away.”
“I wasn’t thinking of those consequences.
I was thinking of your conscience.
You’re not tough-fibred enough for that, Charley, old boy.
You’re soft.”
“I daresay you’re right.”
Charley did not speak for a while.
“You say Dzerjinsky wanted nothing for himself,” he said then, “but you want power.”
“Only as a means.”
“What to do?”
Simon stared at him fixedly and there was a light in his eyes that seemed to Charley almost crazy.
“To fulfil myself.
To satisfy my creative instinct.
To exercise the capacities that nature has endowed me with.”
Charley found nothing to say.
He looked at his watch and got up.
“I must go now.”
“I don’t want to see you again, Charley.”
“Well, you won’t.
I’m off to-morrow.”
“I mean, ever.”