Christian suddenly yawned. “I am tired—and depressed,” he said, wearily. “I think I will ask you to let me go home.”
“Nonsense!” said Dicky, promptly. “We’ll go to the club, and get a pick-up, and then you shall see something that won’t depress you. I grant you this is rather melancholy. God knows why we came.”
An hour or more later, emerging from a confusing sequence of narrow passages and winding ascents and descents, Christian followed Westland out through a groove of painted canvas to the stage of the Hanover Theater.
He had never seen a theater from this point of view, and the first few minutes of his scrutiny—here where he stood at the wings, while Dicky looked after the coats and hats—were full of pleased interest. The huge dusky space of the galleries overhead, strange and formidable in its dark bulk like some giant balloon, was very impressive. By contrast, the stage itself seemed to give out light. A long riband of a table stretched across the back, and down the two sides, and about this clustered many people; shining shirt-fronts and bald heads, pale shimmering dresses and white shoulders, the glitter of napery and plates and glasses—all was radiant under the powerful electric glow from above. He could see now, in the halfshadows down beyond the footlights, two or three rows of heads of people sitting in the front stalls. To his fancy these detached heads appeared to belong to an order of beings quite distinct from those on the stage. He wondered if actors felt their audiences to be thus remote and aloof from themselves.
“We can push our way in at the other end—there’s less of a crush there,” he heard Dicky say to him. He followed his guide across the stage, through groups of conversing guests who had brought out their sandwiches and glasses from the throng, and came eventually to the table itself. Some one held out a bottle toward him, and he lifted a glass to be filled. From under some other stranger’s arm he extricated a plate, containing something in gelatine, he knew not what. In straightening himself he pushed against a person unexpectedly close behind him.
Half turning, with the murmur of an apology upon his lips, his eyes encountered those of a lady, who seemed to know him, and to be smiling at him.
“How d’ye do?” this lady said to him. There could be no doubt about the cordiality of her tone. Her left hand was occupied with a champagne glass and a fan, but her right was being lifted to him, almost against his breast, in greeting. He gazed at her in smiling perplexity, the while he signed that both his own hands were filled.
“You don’t know me from Adam,” she said to him, cheerfully. “But I’m your cousin—Cora Torr, you know.”