"This is how matters stand.... Bolshevism is Lenin.
Get that?
We may crush the Red Army, but so long as Lenin is in the Kremlin there can never be victory for us.
Is that clear?
He's a theoretician, he's will incarnate— the greatest danger for the whole world, not just for us.... Think it over and tell me definitely: are you, or are you not, ready and willing?"
"To kill him?" asked Dasha, watching a half-naked infant which was staggering about bow-legged.
The young man shuddered convulsively, looked to the right, glanced from narrowed eyelids at the children, and once more began chewing at his beard.
"Nobody says that. Even if it's what you think, you needn't say so out loud. You have been admitted into our organization.... Didn't you understand what Savinkov said to you?"
"He never spoke to me...." (The young man laughed.) "Oh, so the one with the handkerchief was...."
"Sh! Yes—that was Boris Victorovich.... Extraordinary confidence has been placed in you. We need fresh blood.
There have been too many arrests.
You know of course that the Kazan mobilization plan has come to grief.... The work of our centre is being transferred elsewhere.... But an organization will be left here.... Your task will be to find out whenever Lenin makes speeches in public, to attend meetings, to get into factories.... You will not be working alone.... You will be informed of his departures from the Kremlin and where he is expected to speak.... The best thing for you to do would be to pick up acquaintances among the Communists, and try and get into the Party.
Read the papers and keep up with their publications. You will receive further instructions tomorrow morning, at the same place...."
After giving her a conspiratorial address to report to, a password, and the key to her room, he went away in the direction of Arbat Square.
Dasha pulled one of the photographs out of her bag and examined it for a long time.
But when in its stead she began to see another face, floating from behind the crimson curtains of the previous night, she closed her bag with a resolute snap, and got up, her brows knit, her lips compressed.
The tiny bow-legged boy tried to toddle after her, but collapsed on to the sand, hurting his flabby little body and crying bitterly.
Dasha's room turned out to be in Sivtsev-Vrazhek Street, in a small dilapidated mansion standing in a courtyard, and apparently untenanted.
Dasha had to knock a long time at the back door before it was opened to her by a heavy, dumpy old woman with eyelids turned back, exposing raw-looking flesh, her whole appearance suggesting some old nurse ending her days in the house of her employers.
It was a long time before she could understand what Dasha wanted, but at last she let her in, and conducted her to her room, muttering incoherently all the time.
"They've flown away, the proud falcons—Yuri Yurich has gone, and Mikhail Yurich, and Vasili Yurich ... and Vasenka only turned sixteen on the feast of St. Thomas. I've begun to pray for their souls now...."
Refusing the old dame's offer of tea, Dasha undressed and crept beneath the wadded quilt, weeping copiously in the darkness and stifling her sobs in the. pillow.
The next morning beneath the statue of Gogol, she received instructions and the order to be at a factory the day after.
Her first thought was to go home, but changing her mind she went instead to the Cafe Bom.
There she found Zhirov, who hung round her, asking where she had been all this time and why she had left without her things.
"I'm expecting Mamont to call—what shall I tell him about you?"
Dasha turned aside to conceal her mantling cheek. "After all, I have been instructed to keep in touch with him," she told herself, not for a moment deceived by her own lie. .
"I'll go and fetch my things," she said irritably, "and then we'll see."
She went back to her room bearing a parcel containing the valuable fur cape, the underclothes and the ball dress.
The sight of them, after she had unwrapped them and flung them on to her bed, threw her into a fit of trembling; her teeth chattered, and she once more felt on her shoulders the weight of his hand, the cold touch of his clenched teeth against hers.... She sank on to her knees beside the bed, burying her face in the perfumed fur.
"What is it? What is it?" she reiterated dully.
The next morning, in obedience to her instructions, after donning a dark print dress brought to her by the man with the death's-head tiepin, and tying up her head in a kerchief to look like a woman of the working class (she was to give herself out as a former housemaid in a rich family, whom the master had seduced), she took the tram to the factory.
She had no pass, but the old watchman at the gate only winked at her, saying:
"You've come for the meeting, lass, have you?
It's in the main building."
She picked her way over rotting planks, past heaps of rusty scrap iron and slag, past huge broken windows.
There was nobody about, and the chimney stacks smoked peacefully against the cloudless sky.
Somebody pointed to a grimy door in the wall.
Entering, she found herself in a long hall with walls of bare brick.
The murky light filtered through a smoke-blackened glass roof.
Everything was naked and exposed.
Chains hung from the platforms of overhead cranes.
Lower down were transmission shafts, their driving belts hanging motionless from the pulleys.
Her unaccustomed eye turned in astonishment from dark lathes to the squat, lanky or straddling forms of all sorts of planing, milling and mortising machinery, and the iron discs of friction clutches.
She discerned the outlines of a giant steam hammer, hanging lopsided in the semidarkness of a wide arch.
Here were made the machinery and mechanisms which supplied the life beyond the sombre walls of the factory with light, warmth, movement, significance and luxury.
There was a smell of iron filings, machine oil, earth, and home-grown tobacco.
A vast crowd of men and women were standing in front of a wooden platform, and many others perched on the side plates of machines and on the high window sills.
Dasha pushed her way up to the platform.
A tall young fellow, turning his head, opened his mouth in a broad smile, his teeth showing white against his be-grimed face; nodding towards a bench, he stretched out his hand, and Dasha climbed up beside him to the lathe beneath the window.