as mentioned. The name of the evening was "Meyerhold," the gentleman
responsible for the production. At last the Event that had been brewing
ceaselessly for the last ten years--ever since the last Revolution in
fact--was to reach creation. The moment of M. Meyerhold's life had
arrived--the moment, had we known it, of many other lives also; but we
did not know it. We buzzed and we hummed, we gasped and we gaped, we
yawned and we applauded; and the rustle of gold tissue, the scent of
gold leaf, the thick sticky substance of gold paint, filled the air,
flooded the arena, washed past us into the street outside. Meanwhile M.
Meyerhold, white, perspiring, in his shirt-sleeves with his collar
loosened and his hair damp, is in labour behind the gold tissue to
produce the child of his life... and Behold, the Child is produced!

And such a child! It was not I am sure so fantastic an affair in reality
as in my rememberance of it. I have, since then, read Lermontov's play,
and I must confess that it does not seem, in cold truth, to be one of
his finest works. It is long and old-fashioned, melodramatic and
clumsy--but then it was not on this occasion Lermontov's play that was
the thing. But it was a masquerade, and that in a sense far from the
author's intention. As I watched I remember that I forgot the bad acting
(the hero was quite atrocious), forgot the lapses of taste in the colour
and arrangement of the play, forgot the artifices and elaborate
originalities and false sincerities; there were, I have no doubt, many
things in it all that were bad and meretricious--I was dreaming. I saw,
against my will and outside my own agency, mingled with the gold
screens, the purple curtains, the fantasies and extravagances of the
costumes, the sudden flashes of unexpected colour through light or dress
or backcloth--pictures from those Galician days that had been, until
Semyonov's return, as I fancied, forgotten.

A crowd of revellers ran down the stage, and a shimmering cloud of gold
shot with red and purple was flung from one end of the hall to the
other, and behind it, through it, between it, I saw the chill light of
the early morning, and Nikitin and I sitting on the bench outside the
stinking but that we had used as an operating theatre, watching the
first rays of the sun warm, the cold mountain's rim. I could hear
voices, and the murmurs of the sleeping men and the groans of the
wounded. The scene closed. There was space and light, and