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 a gorgeous figure, stiff with the splendour of his robes, talked in a dark garden with his lady.  Their voices murmured, a lute was played, some one sang, and through the thread of it all I saw that moment when, packed together on our cart, we hung for an instant on the top of the hill and looked back to a country that had suddenly crackled into flame.  There was that terrific crash as of the smashing of a world of china, the fierce crackle of the machine-guns, and then the boom of the cannon from under our very feet... the garden was filled with revellers, laughing, dancing, singing, the air was filled again with the air of gold paint, the tenor’s voice rose higher and higher, the golden screens closed—­the act was ended.

It was as though I had received, in some dim, bewildered fashion, a warning.  When the lights went up, it was some moments before I realised that the Baron was speaking to me, that a babel of chatter, like a sudden rain storm on a glass roof, had burst on every side of us, and that a huge Jewess, all bare back and sham pearls, was trying to pass me on her way to the corridor.  The Baron talked away:  “Very amusing, don’t you think?  After Reinhardt, of course, although they say now that Reinhardt got all his ideas from your man Craig.  I’m sure I don’t know whether that’s so....  I hope you’re more reassured to-night, Mr. Durward.  You were full of alarms the other evening.  Look around you and you’ll see the true Russia....”