But Kostovsky already felt the inspiration of the decorator. He turned away from his superiors, no longer even aware of their presence, and, standing in the centre of the stage, he shouted in a powerful, imperious voice:
“Here, Pavel, hurry there! Vanka, here with you! Lively there, you sons of the devil, Kostovsky means to work now!”
The stage-workman Pavel and the apprentice Vanka, a nimble, slouchy fellow, passionately devoted to the stage, came rushing in and immediately began to bustle about, spreading the enormous canvas and bringing forward the paints and brushes.
“Well,” said the business-manager to the stage-manager, “thank God, he has come to his senses at last; we will not be compelled now to revoke the play! Let us go and have our dinner. He must not be interfered with now.”
The whole night the stage was brightly illuminated, and in the empty theatre reigned the quiet of the grave. Only the tread of Kostovsky could be heard as, with his long brush in his hand, he continually approached and retreated from his canvas; all around stood pails and pots of paint.
He made rapid strides in his work. With a blue mark under his eye, dirty with paint, with bristling hair and mustaches, he accomplished with his enormous brush a titanic kind of work. His eyes were ablaze and his face looked inspired. He created.
At eleven o’clock in the morning the whole company, which had gathered for the rehearsal, stood agape before the creation of Kostovsky. The actors, chorus-singers, male and female, and the ballet-dancers gazed at the enormous canvas from the stage and afterward from the orchestra, and freely expressed their opinions. The whole background of the stage was occupied by the gigantic picture. It was the steppe. On the edge it was overgrown with tall, dense burdocks and other steppe-grass, farther could be seen a desolate-looking steppe-grave, thickly overgrown with grass, and still farther unrolled the cheerless, dull steppe with a wonderful, immeasurable perspective, a steppe out of the fairy-tales, out of the times of knighthood—pathless and unpeopled. It seemed to the onlookers that suddenly the famous Knight of the Russian fairy-tale, Ilia Muromets, would appear from behind the mound and would bawl out: “Is there a live man in this field?” But the bleak steppe was silent, terribly, gloomily silent; looming up against the sky were dark grave-mounds, and sinister, black, bushy clouds were gathering. There was no end to these clouds and grave-mounds, and the measureless vista of this steppe. The whole picture breathed gloom and oppressed the soul. It seemed as if something terrible would immediately take place, that the grave-mounds and the clouds had a symbolic meaning, that they were in a way animated. True, when one stepped up too close to Kostovsky’s scenery he could not make out anything: he saw before him a mere daub and splash made with the large brush—hasty, bold strokes, and nothing more. But the farther the spectator retreated from the canvas the clearer appeared the picture of the enormous steppe, spiritualized by a powerful mood, and the more attentively he looked at it, all the more was he possessed by the feeling of uncanny dread.
“Well, what do you say to this!” hummed the crowd. “Devilish fellow, Kostovsky! A real talent! Just see what deviltry he has let loose!”
“Well, that is nothing!” he replied naively. “We are simple workmen: when we work we work, but when once we are bent on having a good time we take our fill—that is how we are!”
They all laughed at him, but they spoke about him the whole day: he had never succeeded so well as at this time.