“Seats in a box! Oh, Kate, how did you ever!” Elsie looked at Kate with sincerest admiration shining in her eyes, and Kate felt for ever repaid for all her effort. If Elsie had acquitted herself well at luncheon, Kate had surely acquitted herself well here. They were equals. Comrades?
An usher hurried toward them as they came out into the aisle. “The curtain is about to go up,” she warned. She felt, perhaps, that they had already made too much disturbance.
“Yes, but we have seats down in a box,” Kate said with composure. The usher reached her hand for the tickets. “This way, then. There are stairs behind these curtains. If you hurry you’ll be there before the lights go out.”
“Ha, ha, Mr. Detective!” Kate laughed to herself as she felt her way down the narrow, velvet-carpeted stairs. “You are losing us now. You’ll watch up there in vain.”
Their seats were quite perfect, almost on the stage, three chairs in the very front of the best box in the house, three throne-like chairs with gilded arms and cushioned backs!
“We ought to be more dressed,” Bertha whispered, a little uneasily, as in their conspicuous position she felt that the eyes of the whole great audience were upon them. But Elsie laughed softly. “Who cares!” she exclaimed. “And won’t Aunt Katherine be surprised when she hears of all this state!”
Music. The asbestos curtain rolling up, revealing night-coloured velvet curtains with a huge gold shield. Lights out. The two girls, recently so estranged, were for the hours of this play closest sisters. In Fairyland all are friends. They gripped hands. Soon they simply sat close together, arm-in-arm, entranced. The theatre, the huge audience, dissolved for them in mist. The stage was not a stage. They were moving with Mytil and Tyltyl through frightening or lovely or saddening scenes, all equally enthralling. They were moving bodiless. They were Tyltyl and Mytil.
Not until the very last minute of the play, when the night-coloured curtains had drawn together for the last time and the blue bird was at large again, perhaps somewhere in the upper reaches of the gilded theatre, did the girls again take up their habitations in their own minds and bodies. They looked at each other then and sighed, waking as from a dream they had shared. Bertha was quite pale with emotion and surreptitiously wiping away her tears.
The first waking thought that Kate had was gratefulness that Bertha had seen the play as it ought to be seen and not cut in two by a post, since she cared for it so much.
All three were almost silent on the journey to the station, wrapped in the afterglow of the play’s thraldom. But just outside the gates of the train shed Elsie looked all about and asked a question: “That young man in the polka-dotted tie seems to have disappeared,” she observed. “He was here when we came, outside of Madame Pearl’s in that taxi, in the hallway to the club and upstairs at the theatre. What’s happened to him now?”