The great opera house filled slowly. There was splendor in it—the splendor put on for the occasion in the cheaper seats, and every-day splendor taking its place later and more expensively because it did not know how to be anything else but splendid.
Women's dresses that summer were made as much as possible to resemble underclothes. From the waist upwards filmy specimens of petticoat bodices appeared; there were wonderful jewels to be seen above them: immemorial family jewels, collars of rubies and pearls. The older the woman, the finer the jewels, and the more they looked like ancient mosaics glimmering archaically in early Roman churches.
The safety curtain was lowered reassuringly before a bored audience that was not afraid of danger.
Some one on the left of Stella remarked that there was a rumor that the Crown Prince and Princess of Austria had been assassinated in Serbia. It did not sound very likely. The Russian music began—fiery melancholy music, drunk with sorrow. Then the real curtain rose.
Eurydice flung herself forward; she hung over the ledge, poised like an exultant Fury. She dared life to disappoint her.
Stella leaned back in her seat with a little thrill of excitement. Everything felt so safe, and sorrow sounded beautiful, and far away.
CHAPTER II
The curtain lifted, and civilization swung back. They were in Russia in the twelfth century—or any other time. It hardly mattered when; the music was the perpetual music of the Slav, tragic and insecure. The people were a restless barbaric crowd, beyond or beneath morality; religious, incalculably led by sensation. They could be unimaginably cruel or sweep magnificently up the paths of holiness. The steep ascent to heaven was in their eyes, and they got drunk to attain it.
The English audience watched them as if they were looking at a fairy-tale. They were a well-fed, complacent audience. If they got drunk, it was an accident, and none of them had ever been holy. They had never been under the heels of tyranny or long without a meal. They took for granted food, water, light, and fuel. They began to live where the Russian peasant planted his dreams of heaven. Death was their only uncertainty, and it was hidden behind the baffling insincerities of doctors and nurses. It did not take them on the raw.