The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [124]
“That you would have to discuss with Comrade Andrew, wouldn’t you?”
“But he’s not here. When is he coming back?”
“I don’t know. If he doesn’t come, there will be someone else.” And, since Alice remained obstinately confronting her, she defined the situation as she saw it: “Alice, you are either with us or against us.”
“I’d be with you—with Comrade Andrew—without the money, wouldn’t I?”
“Or do you simply want to go on being one of the useful idiots?”
Alice did not react to this, remained in her stance of infinitely patient, dogged enquiry.
“Lenin,” said Muriel. “A useful idiot: vague and untutored enthusiasm for communism. For the Soviet Union. Fellow travellers. You know.”
Alice had in fact hardly read Lenin. She felt for him a kind of bowing down of her whole person, like a genuflexion, as to the Perfect Man. That such a giant can have lived! was her feeling, and it was enough. If it came to that, she had read not much more of Marx than the Communist Manifesto. She had always said of herself, “Well, I am not an intellectual!”—with a feeling of superiority.
Now she felt that the goose-girl was being irrelevant, as well as offensive.
“I do not believe that Comrade Lenin despised people who sincerely admired the achievements of the working class in the communist countries,” said Alice, every bit as decisively, as authoritatively, as Comrade Muriel. Who was silent, gazing at Alice with slightly protuberant, light-blue eyes.
She then remarked, “Comrade Andrew thinks highly of your potential.”
The flash of delight that went through Alice made her impervious to anything Muriel might be thinking. She said humbly, “I’m glad.”
“Well, that’s it, I think,” said Muriel, and picked up her case.
“You’re off to start your career of crime, then?” said Alice, and laughed heartily at what she’d said. Muriel politely smiled, but she was furious.
“I expect it is the BBC,” said Alice thoughtfully. “Or something like that,” she added hastily.
At this, Muriel stood for a moment, with her case in her hand, then she set it down, came a step nearer to Alice, and said deliberately, “Alice, you do not ask such questions. You—do—not—ask—such—questions. Do you understand?”
Alice felt herself in the grip of the dreamy knowing state that she had trusted in all her life. “But first I suppose you are off to one of those spy schools in Czechoslovakia or Lithuania,” she remarked.
Muriel gasped, and went red. “Who told you?”
“No one told me. If you are off somewhere, looking like that, then I suppose … I suppose that’s it,” she ended lamely, wondering at herself.
Muriel was looking at her very carefully, her eyes like guns.
“If you have such brilliant inspirations, you should keep them to yourself.”
“I don’t see what you are making such a fuss about; everyone knows that’s where the Soviet spy schools are.”
“Yes, but …” The goose-girl seemed quite wild with exasperation. She was looking at Alice as Alice often found herself being looked at. As though she were, quite simply, not to be credited, not possible! As with Jasper, in such moments, she said stubbornly, “I don’t see it. There’s something perfectly obvious going on, I say something, and then people get upset. I think it is childish,” insisted Alice.
“Then I suppose Andrew told you,” concluded Muriel. “He shouldn’t have.” She stood reflecting for a moment, and then said, “I am quite relieved to be moving out of his sphere. I’ll be happier with someone on a higher level.”
“Isn’t he on a high level?”
“If he were, he wouldn’t be dealing with people like us,” said Muriel, with a sudden, unexpected, intense sentimentality.
Alice laughed in astonishment that Muriel could admit, even in a maudlin moment, she was on a lower level than anyone at all.
“No,” said Muriel, “he’s off for more training, too. And in my view he could do with it. There’s something a good deal wrong with his judgement, sometimes.”
With this, she again grasped her case, lifted it, and went to the door, saying, “Well, good-bye. I don’t suppose we shall see each other again. Unless