There was some such malicious air about the whole theatre.  Above, in the circle, the little empty boxes were dim and shadowy, and one fancied figures moved there, and then saw that there was no one.  Someone up in the gallery laughed, and the laugh went echoing up and down the empty spaces.  A few people came in and sat nervously about, and no one spoke except in a low whisper, because voices sounded so loud and impertinent.

Then again the man in the gallery laughed, and every one looked up frowning.  The play began.  It was, I think, Les Idees de Francoise, but of that I cannot be sure.  It was a farce of the regular French type, with a bedroom off, and marionettes who continually separated into couples and giggled together.  The giggling to-night was of a sadly hollow sort.  I pitied and admired the actors, spontaneous as a rule, but now bravely stuffing any kind of sawdust into the figures in their hands, but the leakage was terrible, and the sawdust lay scattered all about the stage.  The four of us sat as solemn as statues—­I don’t think one of us smiled.  It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed.  I don’t know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal of fun from our situation.  There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the audience thinking of their safety, and the players thinking of their salaries, and Protopopoff at home thinking of his victory, and the Czar in Tsarskoe thinking of his Godsent autocracy, and Europe thinking of its ideals, and Germany thinking of its militarism—­all self-justified, all mistaken, and all fulfilling some deeper plan at whose purpose they could not begin to guess.  And how intermingled we all were!  Vera and Nina, M. Robert and Mdlle.  Flori on the other side of the footlights, Trenchard and Marie killed in Galicia, the Kaiser and Hindenburg, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the postmaster of my village in Glebeshire.

The curtain is coming down, the fat husband is deceived once again, the lovers are in the bedroom listening behind the door, the comic waiter is winking at the chamber-maid....

The lights are up and we are alone again in the deserted theatre.

Towards the end of the last interval I went out into the passage behind the stalls to escape from the chastened whispering that went trembling up and down like the hissing of terrified snakes.  I leaned against the wall in the deserted passage and watched the melancholy figure of the cloak-room attendant huddled up on a chair, his head between his hands.

Suddenly I saw Vera.  She came up to me as though she were going to walk past me, and then she stopped and spoke.  She talked fast, not looking at me, but beyond, down the passage.