Dasha's poor, poor head!
You've come rather late to political questions, Dasha dear!
"Wait a minute!" she exclaimed. "Wait a minute!"
Her hands behind her back, she paced up and down the room, her eyes on the ground.
"What could be nobler than to give one's life for the oppressed and insulted?
But Kulichok had said that it was the Bolsheviks who were ruining Russia, and everyone said the same...." Dasha closed her eyes, trying to see Russia as a thing she ought to love more than herself.
She remembered a picture of Serov's: two horses on a hillside, clouds banked across the sunset, a ragged straw thatch....
"But that's only how Serov sees it...." Now it was the young fellow with the gleaming teeth who appeared inside her closed eyelids, smiling his gay, free smile.
Dasha started pacing the room again....
"What then is Russia?
Why are people pulling it different ways?
I'm only a silly woman, of course, I don't understand a thing.... My God, my God!"
Dasha began smiting her bosom with bunched fingertips.
But that didn't help, either....
"Go and ask Lenin?
Oh, dear, I forgot I was in the other camp...."
All these alarming contradictions and soul-searchings ended in Dasha cramming her cap over her eyes at six o'clock and setting off for the Gogol monument.
The man with the tiepin immediately emerged from behind a tree.
"You're three minutes late. Well?
Were you there?
Did you hear Lenin?
Let me have the most important facts. How did he get there? Who was with him? Was there a guard on the platform?"
Dasha tried to gather up her thoughts before replying.
"Tell me, in the name of what is he to be killed?"
"What!
What! Where did you get that from?
Nobody has any intention.... Ha! He made an impression on you!
That's natural.... That's what makes him so dangerous."
"But what he says is true."
Craning his neck, and smiling his thin, gleaming smile right into Dasha's face, he said in insinuating tones:
"Hadn't you better give it up—eh?"
Dasha shrank away.
His neck seemed to be stretching like rubber, and the twinkling reflections in his glasses danced before Dasha's eyes.
"I don't know a thing," she whispered. "I don't understand anything any more.... I must be convinced, I must...."
"Lenin is an agent of the German general staff," hissed the man with the tiepin.
He spent almost half-an-hour explaining to Dasha the infernal plan of the Germans: they were sending over Bolsheviks, hired at enormous sums, in sealed carriages; and these Bolsheviks were undermining the army, gulling the workers, destroying the country's industry and agriculture.... in another month or so the Germans would be able to take Russia without firing a shot.
"The Bolsheviks are now stirring up civil war, declaring that there is a grain blockade, and at the same time killing off the private traders, our saviours. They are deliberately organizing famine.... Today you have seen thousands of imbeciles hanging on Lenin's lips... it's infuriating, maddening.... He is deceiving the masses, the entire nation.... On the physical plane he is the 'Great Provocateur'... on the other...." (He swayed up to Dasha's ear and whispered all in one breath)—"he is the Antichrist!
Remember the prophecies?
Everything coincides.
The north will go to war with the south.
The iron horsemen of death will appear—that's the tanks.... An evil star will drop into the source of waters—that's the five-pointed star of the Bolsheviks.... And he addresses the multitude as Christ did, only in reverse.... Today he even tried to seduce your mind, but we won't give you up.... I'll have you transferred to some other work."
Dasha's third question remained unanswered. (She was back in her room, lying on her bed, her eyes hidden against the crook of her elbow.) Suddenly she felt sick of all this thinking....
"Anyone would think I was a hundred years old!
Am I so hideous, after all?
I'll do just as I like.... Why shouldn't I go to the Metropole, if that's what I want? Why try to hide things that won't be hidden, to stifle the cries of joy in one's bosom?
Why tie one's self up in agonizing knots?
For whose dear sake?
Fool, fool, coward! Let yourself go! Relax! What does anything matter? To hell with love, to hell with self...."
She had known all along that she was going to the Metropole.
If she had pretended to hesitate, it was only because the time appointed had not yet come, and because it was dusk, when there is no escape from one's thoughts.