"Will you give me that one!"
Zhirov glanced at the commandant, who simply inflated his cheeks.
Zhirov took down the necklet and threw it across his shoulder.
Dasha bent over a huge open trunk—for one moment the idea of other people's clothes was hateful to her—and plunged her arm up to the elbow in a heap of lingerie.
"And shoes, Darya Dmitrevna?
And take a pair of boots for wet weather!
The ball dresses are in that wardrobe.
Comrade Commandant, may we have the key? Ball dresses are an actress's stock in trade, you know."
"Take what you like—what do I care!" said the commandant.
Dasha, followed closely by Zhirov carrying the clothes, went up to the second storey, to a small room with a bullet-shattered mirror in it.
Peering into the network of cracks on the murky surface of the glass, Dasha saw another woman, slowly drawing on silk stockings.
She next slipped on a chemise of the finest lawn, and over it lace-trimmed drawers, moving her old, mended underclothes aside with the points of her shoes.
She threw the fur over her slender, bare shoulders.... What do you consider yourself, old girl?
A prostitute?
A plunderer?
A thief?
You're mighty pretty, whatever you are.... So there's a good time coming!
Let it come—there'll be time enough to think it all out afterwards....
The big restaurant in the Hotel Metropole was closed on account of damage during the October bombardment, but food and drink was still served in the private rooms, for a part of the hotel was occupied by foreigners, mostly Germans, and by such pertinacious speculators as had succeeded in furnishing themselves with foreign passports—Lithuanian, Polish, Persian, and so on.
The carousals held in the private rooms were comparable to those in Florence during the plague.
The genuine Moscow-dwellers (largely actors, firmly convinced that the Moscow theatres would not even last out the season, and that both theatres and actors were doomed) were also admitted—with personal recommendations and through the back entrance.
These drank in good earnest.
Mamont Dalsky, a tragedian whose name had recently been scarcely less famous than that of the great Rossi, was the soul of these nocturnal revelries.
He was a man of unbridled passions, an Apollo, a gambler, a calculating madman, dangerous, majestic, wily.
He was seldom seen on the stage of recent years, and then only as guest actor, but he was frequently to be met with in the gambling dens of Petersburg and Moscow, in the south, or in Siberia.
Fantastic tales were told of his losses.
He was beginning to show his years, and talked about leaving the stage.
During the war he had been mixed up in extremely dubious speculations in army supplies.
After the revolution broke out he turned up in Moscow.
Sensing its dramatic potentialities, he longed to play on its vast stage the leading role in a new version of Schiller's
"Robbers."
With the persuasive powers of an actor of genius, he spoke of divine anarchy, of absolute freedom, of the relativeness of moral principles, and of the right of each to take whatever he needed.
He sowed spiritual unrest in Moscow.
When certain groups of Moscow youths, their numbers swollen by criminal types, began requisitioning private mansions, he consolidated these scattered anarchical groups, took the Merchants' Club by force, and renamed it the House of Anarchy, confronting the Soviet authorities with a fait accompli.
He had not, so far, declared war against the Soviet power, but, it was obvious that, with his imagination, he would not stop at the storerooms of the Merchants' Club, or at those nocturnal revelries, during which, from a window in the
"House," he harangued the crowd assembled in the courtyard, his classical gesture followed by a shower of trousers, boots, stuff-lengths and bottles of brandy. The first thing Dasha saw When she and Zhirov entered the private room in the Metropole, was the set, sombre face of this man, his mouth and jaw set in resolute lines, his neck encircled by a grimy soft collar. It was like a face cast in bronze, on which passions and dissipation, like a skilful sculptor, had chiselled folds and wrinkles.
The lid of the grand piano was raised.
A frail, clean-shaven man in a velvet jacket, a cigarette between his teeth, his glazed eyes half concealed by the lashes, his head thrown back, was striking sepulchral chords.
A handful of "celebrities" were seated at a table around innumerable empty bottles.
One of them, a snub-nosed man, his prominent chin propped against the palm of his hand, so that his pudgy face was squashed into a sort of pancake, was singing the tenor part of the church service.
The others—a "heavy father" with a juglike countenance, a melancholy comic actor with a sagging underlip, a jeune premier with a three-days' growth of beard and a pointed nose, a stage lover, drunk as a lord, and a great leading man, with a lofty brow marked by deeply-engraved wrinkles, who seemed perfectly sober— came in all together with the refrains.
The archdeacon from the Church of the Saviour, a handsome, greying man in massive gold-rimmed glasses presented to him by the merchants of Moscow, was walking up and down the carpet intoning the responses, the flowing sleeves of his cassock swinging.
The glasses on the tables vibrated to his deep, velvety bass.
The walls of the private room were upholstered in dark-red silk, and there were brocade curtains at the door, before which stood a small three-leaved screen.
Mamont Dalsky stood with his elbow on the top of the screen, a pack of cards held in one hand.
He was dressed in a kind of pseudomilitary uniform—a norfolk jacket, check breeches with a leather seat, and black cavalry boots.
As Dasha entered he was listening to the requiem with a grim smile.
"What a beautiful woman—enough to drive one mad!" said the man at the piano.
Dasha halted timidly.
Everyone but Dalsky turned to look at her.