Lydia went on as though Charley had said nothing.
“He hardly looks upon us as human beings, he despises us and yet he seeks our company.
He’s at ease with us.
I think he feels that our degradation is so great, he can be himself, whereas in the outside world he must always wear a mask.
He’s strangely insensitive.
He thinks he can permit himself anything with us and he asks us questions that put us to shame and never sees how bitterly he wounds us.”
Charley was silent.
He knew well enough how Simon, with his insatiable curiosity, could cause people profound embarrassment and was only surprised and scornful when he found that they resented his inquiries.
He was willing enough to display the nakedness of his soul and it never occurred to him that the reserves of others could be due, not to stupidity as he thought, but to modesty.
Lydia continued: “Yet he’s capable of doing things that you’d never expect of him.
One of our girls was suddenly taken ill.
The doctor said she must be operated on at once, and Simon took her to a nursing home himself so that she shouldn’t have to go to the hospital, and paid for the operation; and when she got better he paid her expenses to go away to a convalescent home.
And he’d never even slept with her.”
“I’m not surprised.
He attaches no importance to money.
Anyhow it shows you that he’s capable of a disinterested action.”
“Or do you think he wanted to examine in himself what the emotion of goodness exactly was?”
Charley laughed.
“It’s obvious that you haven’t got much use for poor Simon.”
“He’s talked to me a great deal.
He wanted to find out all I could tell him about the Russian Revolution, and he wanted me to take him to see Alexey and Evgenia so that he could ask them.
You know he reported Robert’s trial.
He tried to make me tell him all sorts of things that he wanted to know.
He went to bed with me because he thought he could get me to tell him more.
He wrote an article about it.
All that pain, all that horror and disgrace, were no more to him than an occasion to string clever, flippant words together; and he gave it me to read to see how I would take it.
I shall never forgive him that.
Never.”
Charley sighed.
He knew that Simon, with his amazing insensitiveness to other people’s feelings, had shown her that cruel essay with no intention of hurting, but from a perfectly honest desire to see how she reacted to it and to discover how far her intimate knowledge would confirm his fanciful theory.
“He’s a strange creature,” said Charley.
“I daresay he has a lot of traits which one would rather he hadn’t, but he has great qualities.
There’s one thing at all events that you can say about him: if he doesn’t spare others, he doesn’t spare himself.
After not seeing him for two years, and he’s changed a lot in that time, I can’t help finding his personality rather impressive.”
“Frightening, I should have said.”
Charley moved uneasily on his plush seat, for that also, somewhat to his dismay, was what he had found it.
“He lives an extraordinary life, you know.
He works sixteen hours a day.
The squalor and discomfort of his surroundings are indescribable.
He’s trained himself to cat only one meal a day.”
“What is the object of that?”
“He wants to strengthen and deepen his character.
He wants to make himself independent of circumstances.
He wants to prepare himself for the role he expects one day to be called upon to play.”
“And has he told you what that role is?”
“Not precisely.”
“Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?”
“No.”
“Simon has talked to me about him a great deal.
Alexey was a lawyer in the old days, a clever one with liberal principles, and he defended Dzerjinsky at one of his trials.