"Sell them? But--"
"Imbecile! What we must do is to find out who this man is. In the end he
may lead us to him."
"But it may be a trap!"
"Leave that to me. You have work of your own to do, and you had best be
about it. Do you not see beneath? Who but the man who harbours him would
know about the drums? The man in the evening clothes. I was too far away
to see his face. Get me all the morning newspapers. If the advertisement
is in all of them I will send a letter to each. We lost the young woman
yesterday. And nothing has been heard of Vladimir and Stemmler. Bad.
I do not like this place. I move to the house to-night. My old friend
Stefani may be lonesome. I dare not risk daylight. Some fool may have
talked. To work! All of us have much to do to wake up the proletariat
in this country of the blind. But the hour will come. Get me the
newspapers."
Karlov pushed his visitor from the room and locked and bolted the door.
He stepped over to the window again and stared down at the clutter of
pushcarts, drays, trucks, and human beings that tried to go forward
and got forward only by moving sideways or worming through temporary
breaches, seldom directly--the way of humanity. But there was no object
lesson in this for Karlov, who was not philosophical in the peculiar
sense of one who was demanding a reason for everything and finding
allegory and comparison and allusion in the ebb and flow of life. The
philosophical is often misapplied to the stoical. Karlov was a stoic,
not a philosopher, or he would not have been the victim of his present
obsession. The idea of live and let live has never been the propaganda
of the anarch. To the anarch the death of some body or the destruction
of some thing is the cornerstone to his madhouse.
Nothing would ever cure this man of his obsession--the death of Hawksley
and the possession of the emeralds. Moreover, there was the fanatical
belief in his poor disordered brain that the accomplishment of these
two projects would eventually assist in the liberation of mankind.
Abnormally cunning in his methods of approach, he lacked those
imaginative scales by which we weigh our projects and which we call
logic. A child alone in a house with a box of matches; a dog on one
side of Fifth Avenue that sees a dog on the other side, but not the
automobiles--inexorable logic--irresistible force--whizzing up and down
the middle of that thoroughfare. It is not difficult to prophesy what is
going to happen to that child, that dog.