Savina relaxed, every instinct and nerve turned toward him, but they
were at the theatre.
The performance had been on, an usher told them, for almost three
quarters of an hour. Their seats were in the fifth row, the middle; and
there was an obscured resentful stirring as they took their places.
Plunged into darkness, their hands and shoulders and knees met. Savina,
scarcely above her breath, said "Ah!" uncontrollably; she was so
charged with emotion that her body seemed to vibrate, a bewildering
warmness stole through him from her; and once more, finally, he sank
into questionless depths. The brightness of the stage, at first, had no
more form nor meaning than the whirling pattern of a kaleidoscope,
against which the people around him were unsubstantial silhouettes,
blind to the ardor that merged Savina and him into one sentient form
alone in a world of shadows.
* * * * *
The spectacle on the stage, Russian in motive, was set in harmonized
barbaric color--violent movements under a diffused light: in the
background immobile peasant-like figures held tall many-branched
candlesticks; there were profane gold mitres, vivid stripes and morocco
leather; cambric chemises slipping from breasts and the revelation of
white thighs. It floated, like a vision of men's desire realized in
beautiful and morbid symbols, above the darkened audience; it took
what, in the throng, was imperfect, fragmentary, and spent, but still
strong, brutal, formless, and converted it into a lovely and sterile
pantomime.
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