Bertram tried to slip some money into his hand, but he shook his head.
“My father was an English gentleman,” he said simply.
There were tickets for sale in the theatre, according to the “New Economic Laws,” but it was plain that most of the people had passes, and it was explained to Christy by a young Jew who spoke French, that it was a “Trade Union” night.
It was a performance of “Carmen,” magnificently staged, and well played, but to Bertram and Christy the audience was of more interest than the performance. The immense and splendid theatre was packed with “the proletariat.” Nearly all of them wore the Russian blouse, belted round the waist, or the Red Army tunic. The women were dressed very much like an audience in one of the poorer suburbs of London, but here and there a few had ventured to put on a bit of “finery”—a little lace round the neck and wrists, a trinket or two. In the Imperial box sat a group of men with black hair over their foreheads, like women’s “fringes,” and grimy hands. Above their heads the Imperial Eagle had been covered with the Red Flag of Revolution.
Bertram thought of the pale-faced Czar sitting there with the Empress and their beautiful daughters, with high officers and ladies of the Court.
Then, by some curious association of ideas, he thought of Joyce, as he had sat with her in the boxes of London theatres, so beautiful, so exquisite in her evening frocks. The Emperor and Empress and all their family had been murdered. Joyce had disappeared from his life, by some act of revolution which had murdered him, killed his spirit, stone dead.
The body of Bertram Pollard sat in the stall of the Marinsky Theatre at Petrograd, but it was not the Bertram Pollard of Holland Street, Kensington, or “Somewhere in France.” He had changed. He was a different man. This visit to Russia was changing him still further. It made all other things seem trivial and insignificant—the things he had made such a fuss about. Ireland! It did not mean much to the world in progress or reaction. That guerrilla warfare was a Chinese cracker compared with the frightful things that had happened here in Petrograd. The Social Revolution in England—Holme Ottery up for sale! How laughable, how negligible, compared with the utter extinction of the Russian gentry!
Petrograd and Moscow put things in a different proportion. The agony of these people made private troubles, heart-breaks, love affairs, strangely small. Those dead bodies in the barracks—they too put things in a different proportion, made life itself of but little account, individually. What was this new sense of proportion going to mean to him?
Perhaps he would find the meaning at last for which his mind had been groping, like a man in a dark room. Perhaps he would get outside himself in service to these people who were so immensely stricken.
“A hundred thousand roubles for your thoughts,” said Christy.