Her lover would sit, legs astraddle on a hard chair, arms folded on the back of it, watching her with a cold sarcastic smile, waiting to see what she would do.
She did not value what she knew had cost her parents nothing enough to return them: but dedicated all these things, and the money, to "the cause."
Her lover was indifferent. That they eat anything pleasant, wear anything attractive, care about being warm or comfortable, seemed to him contemptible. He and his cronies discussed her, her class position, her economic position, her psychology, at length, shuffling and reshuffling the jargon of the left-wing phrase books. She listened feeling unworthy, but: taken seriously.
He demanded of her that at the next "demo" she should seriously assault a policeman. She did it without question: never had she felt so fulfilled. She was three months in prison, where her lover visited her once. He visited others more often. Why? she humbly wondered. Not all of them were of the poor and the ignorant; one of his associates was in fact quite well off, and educated. But she was very rich, yes, that must be it. They were all more worthy than she was. In prison, among the other prisoners, most of them unpolitical, she radiated a smiling unalterable conviction which manifested itself as humility. She was always doing things no one else would do. Dirty tasks and punishment were food and drink to her. The prisoners christened her, disgusted, the Saint; but she took it as a compliment. "I am trying to be worthy to become a real member of - " and she supplied the name of her political group. "To become a real socialist one has to suffer and aspire."
When she came out, her man was living with another woman. She accepted it: of course it was because she was not good enough. She served them. She waited on them. She crouched on the floor outside the room her lover and the woman were wrapped together in, comparing herself to a dog, glorying in her abasement, and she muttered, like the phrases of a rosary, I will be worthy, I will overcome, I will show them, I will... and so on.
She took a kitchen knife to the next "demo" and did not even look to see if it was sharpened: the gesture of carrying it was enough. Intoxicated, lifted above herself, she fought and struggled, a Valkyrie with flying dirty blond hair, reddened blue eyes, a fixed, ugly smile. (In her family she had been noticed for her "sweet gentle look.") She attacked policemen with her fists, and then took out the - as it happened - blunt knife, and hacked about her with it. But she was not being arrested. Others were. There was such a disproportion between the atmosphere, and even the purpose, of this demonstration, and her appearance and her frenzy, that the police were puzzled by her. A senior official sent the word around that she was not to be arrested: she was clearly unbalanced. Ecstatic with renewed effort, she yelled and waved the knife about, but perceived that the demonstration was ending and people streaming home. She was not being taken seriously. She was standing watching the arrested being piled into the police vans like a child turned away from a party, the knife held in her hand as if she were intending to chop meat or vegetables with it.
A group of people had been watching her: not only this day, but at previous demonstrations.
A girl standing like a heroic statue on the edge of the pavement with the knife at the ready in her hand, hair falling bedraggled round a swollen and reddened face, weeping tears of angry disappointment, saw in front of her a man waiting for her to notice him. He had a smile which she thought kind. His eyes were "stern" and "penetrating": he understood her emotional type very well.
"I think you should come with me," he suggested.
"Why?" said she, all belligerence, which nevertheless suggested a readiness to obey.
"You can be of use."
She automatically took a step towards him, but stopped herself, confused.
"What to?"
"You can be of use to socialism."
Briefly on to her face flitted the expression that means: You can't get me as easily as that! while phrases from the vocabulary whirled through her brain.
"Your particular capacities and qualities are just what are needed," he said.
She went with him.
This group was in a large shabby flat on the outskirts of the city, a workman's home, one of the refuges of these twelve young women and men whose leader had accosted her. While the circumstances - poverty made worse, and emphasised - of her previous living place had been of emotional necessity to the work of self-definition of her previous group, these people were indifferent to how they lived, and moved from opulence, to discomfort, to middle-class comfort in the space of a day, as necessary, without making anything of what they were surrounded by. The girl adapted herself at once. Although she had been lying, exulting in her misery, outside the door of her lover and his new woman, for days, now she hardly thought of that life - where she had not been appreciated. She did not immediately see what was to be asked of her, but was patient, obedient, gentle, doing any task that suggested itself.
These new comrades were engaged in planning some coup, but she was not told what. Soon she was taken to yet another flat, where she had not been before, and told that she was to strip and examine a young woman brought in for "questioning." This girl was in fact an accomplice, but just before the "examination" began, Individual Seven was told that "this one was a particularly hard case" and that "there was no point in using kid gloves on her."
Alone with her victim, who seemed dazed and demoralised, the girl felt herself uplifted by the same familiar and longed-for elation of her combats with the police, the atmosphere of danger. She "examined" the captive, who, it seemed to her, had every mark of disgusting stupidity and corruption. It was not far off torture, and she enjoyed it. She was complimented on the job she had done by this group of severe, serious, responsible young revolutionaries. Thus they described themselves. But she had not yet heard them define their particular creed or commitment. And in fact she was never to hear it.
She was told not to go out, to keep herself hidden: she was too valuable to risk. When the group moved, she was always blindfolded. She accepted this with a humble joy: it must be necessary.
This group added to the kidnapping of rich or well-known individuals a refinement, which was the kidnapping and torture, or threat of torture, of their relatives - mistresses, sisters, wives, daughters. Always women. The girl was given the task of torturing, first in minor ways, and then comprehensively, one young woman after another.
She looked forward to it. She had accepted her situation. Moments of disquiet were silenced with: They have more experience than I have, they are better than I am, and it must be necessary.
Reflecting that she did not know their allegiances, she was comforted by the phrases she was familiar with, and had been ever since - as she put it - she had become politically mature.
At moments when sharp pleasure held her in its power either because of some encounter just over or one promised her, she wondered if perhaps she had been physically drugged: whether these new friends of hers were feeding her stimulants, so alive did she feel, so vital and full of energy.
This group lasted three years before it was taken by the police, and the girl committed suicide when it was evident she could not avoid arrest. The impulse behind this act was a continuation of their dictate that she must not ever be visible - go out, be seen, or even know where she was. She felt that under torture - she now lived in her mind in a world where torture was not merely possible but inevitable - she would "betray them." Her suicide was, therefore, in her own eyes, an act of heroism and self-sacrifice in the service of socialism.