Yasha was playing Scriabine softly.
The sounds, so familiar, so reminiscent of the past, made Dasha's head swim.
Time vanished.
The silver brocade on her bosom rose and fell, the blood pulsated in her ears.
Zhirov was whispering something to her, but she did not hear him.
She was excited, conscious of the joy of freedom, the ease of youth.
She felt as if she were flying like a toy balloon released from a child's perambulator, higher and higher, to dizzying heights....
The leading man was stroking her bare arm, booming out in velvety accents:
"Don't look at him so tenderly, darling, you'll be blinded.... There is undoubtedly something satanic about Mamont...."
The folding doors suddenly flew back, revealing four heads in caps: four hands emerging from leather sleeve? and tightly grasping hand grenades, appeared over the top of the screen.
The four anarchists shouted threateningly:
"Don't move!
Hands up!"
"Drop that! All is in order," boomed out Dalsky imperturbably.
"Thanks, Comrades!"
Walking up to them, and bending over the screen, he explained something to them in undertones.
The caps nodded and their owners departed.
A few minutes later there was the sound of voices, and a muffled shriek.
The walls «hook perceptibly from the dull thud of an explosion.
"Those puppies must have their cheap effects," said Mamont.
He rang the bell.
The waiter, pale, his teeth chattering, bounced into the room.
"Clear all this away, and bring fresh glasses," ordered Mamont.
"Yasha, spare my nerves! Play something jolly!"
Hardly had the waiter laid a clean cloth, when the anarchists reappeared, laden with bottles.
Placing bottles of brandy, whiskey, liqueurs and champagne on the carpet, they vanished as silently as they had come.
Cries of admiration and delight came from those seated round the table.
"I gave orders for only 50% of the drinks they found in the hotel rooms to be expropriated," explained Mamont.
"The other half has been left to the owners.
You can, be quite easy in your consciences, all is in order."
Yasha played a flourish on the piano.
Champagne corks popped.
Mamont seated himself next to Dasha.
In the light of the lamp on the table the chiselled lines of his face seemed more significant than ever.
"I saw you in the Luxe today, you were asleep. Who are you?"
Laughing out of sheer dizziness, she replied:
"Nobody! A toy balloon."
He laid a large, hot hand on her bare shoulder and looked into her eyes.
Dasha did not care, all she felt was the warm weight of his hand on her cool shoulder.
She picked up her champagne glass by its slender stem and tossed off the contents.
"So you're nobody's?" he asked.
"Nobody's!"
Mamont intoned in Dasha's ear with tragic intensity:
"Live, my child, live with all the forces of your nature.... It is your good fortune that you have met me.... Fear not, I shall not sully your youth with love.... The free neither love, nor demand love.... Othello is a medieval auto-da-fe, the Inquisition, a grimace of the devil.... Romeo and Juliet.... I know you—in your soul that's what you crave for.... But that's all old-fashioned rubbish.... We are smashing everything up, from top to bottom. We will burn all the books, destroy the museums.... Man must learn to forget the centuries.... Freedom consists in one thing only: divine anarchy.... The immense conflagration of the passions.... Oh, no!
Never expect peace or love from me, pretty one! I will emancipate you.... I will strike the chains of your innocence asunder.... I will give you all you can ask, between two embraces.... Ask.... Ask now.... Tomorrow may be too late."
Beneath these ravings Dasha could feel with her whole being the heavily seething passion at her side.
She was seized with horror, as in a nightmare, when one is unable to move, and the fiery-eyed monster emerges from the darkness of dreams, to knock one down, to trample, crush out one's life.... Most terrible of all was the sensation that unfamiliar, searing, suffocating desires were rising in response within her.... She felt she was woman through and through. She was so beautiful in her agitation that the leading man reached out to her, and, clinking glasses with her, said jealously:
"Mamont, you're torturing the child!"
Dalsky jumped up as if he had been shot, and banged on the table, so that the glasses danced and fell.
"I'll shoot anyone down who dares to lay a finger on this woman!"