And the “mermaids” swam over the “sea-bottom.”
But it was no longer the former radiant, poetic light which shone upon them; the light which the decorator threw upon them now was a sad, pale light, and under its rays they seemed inanimate, sickly, and half-dead.
But when Julia appeared—swimming as formerly lower than the rest—sinister, dark-blue rays came pouring upon her, and she looked more like a fury than a mermaid. Her face was blue, horrible, with black lips and black cavities instead of eyes, and the slippery fish-body was as if covered with a loathsome slime.
A mutter of disgust ran through the theatre.
And the decorator also lit up with the same light the “sea-bottom” with all its monsters; and like a symbol of nightmare and sadness the green-eyed devil-fish came out of the darkness, and the noxious medusas began to move around.
The blue body of Julia seemed to swim in this loathsome mass, and at last blended with it into one living, monstrous, deformed creature.
The scene-painter slowly turned the glasses of the reflector, gazed upon the work of the light he had created, and it seemed to him that he had destroyed forever the former charm of the woman—that she whom he had loved had never been beautiful; and it seemed to him that now only he saw her in her real light, and that she only became divinely beautiful when lighted by the bright rays of his love.
VALIA
BY LEONID ANDREIEV
