“No … not now,” answered Maria Nikolaevna, and she laughed.
It struck seven. The waiter announced that the carriage was ready. Polozov saw his wife out, and at once waddled back to his easy-chair.
“Mind now! Don’t forget the letter to the overseer,” Maria Nikolaevna shouted to him from the hall.
“I’ll write, don’t worry yourself. I’m a business-like person.”
XXXIX
In the year 1840, the theatre at Wiesbaden was a poor affair even externally, and its company, for affected and pitiful mediocrity, for studious and vulgar commonplaceness, not one hair’s-breadth above the level, which might be regarded up to now as the normal one in all German theatres, and which has been displayed in perfection lately by the company in Carlsruhe, under the “illustrious” direction of Herr Devrient. At the back of the box taken for her “Serenity Madame von Polozov” (how the waiter devised the means of getting it, God knows, he can hardly have really bribed the stadt-director!) was a little room, with sofas all round it; before she went into the box, Maria Nikolaevna asked Sanin to draw up the screen that shut the box off from the theatre.
“I don’t want to be seen,” she said, “or else they’ll be swarming round directly, you know.” She made him sit down beside her with his back to the house so that the box seemed to be empty. The orchestra played the overture from the Marriage of Figaro. The curtain rose, the play began.
It was one of those numerous home-raised products in which well-read but talentless authors, in choice, but dead language, studiously and cautiously enunciated some “profound” or “vital and palpitating” idea, portrayed a so-called tragic conflict, and produced dulness … an Asiatic dulness, like Asiatic cholera. Maria Nikolaevna listened patiently to half an act, but when the first lover, discovering the treachery of his mistress (he was dressed in a cinnamon-coloured coat with “puffs” and a plush collar, a striped waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons, green trousers with straps of varnished leather, and white chamois leather gloves), when this lover pressed both fists to his bosom, and poking his two elbows out at an acute angle, howled like a dog, Maria Nikolaevna could not stand it.
“The humblest French actor in the humblest little provincial town acts better and more naturally than the highest German celebrity,” she cried in indignation; and she moved away and sat down in the little room at the back. “Come here,” she said to Sanin, patting the sofa beside her. “Let’s talk.”
Sanin obeyed.