"I congratulate you!" said Kotlicki, pressing Glogowski's hand. "The play is too severe and brutal, but it is something new!"
"Which means neither fish nor flesh!" answered Glogowski with a forced smile.
"We'll see how it will be further on. . . . The public is surprised to see a folk play without dances. . . ."
"What the devil do they want! It is not a ballet!" muttered
Glogowski impatiently.
"But you know they dote on songs and dances."
"Then let them go to a vaudeville show!" retorted Glogowski. And he walked away.
After the second act the applause was louder and more prolonged.
In the dressing-rooms the humor of the actors began to rise to its usual level.
Cabinski had already twice sent Wicek to the box office to find out how things were going there. Gold's first reply was: "Good," and his second: "Sold out."
Glogowski continued to torment himself, but now in a different way, for having heard the applause for which he had so feverishly waited, he had calmed himself a bit and sat behind the scenes watching the play. Now he became pale with anger, kicked his hat with his foot and hissed with impatience, for he could no longer endure what he saw. Out of his peasant characters, which were in every inch true to life, they were making banal figures of the sentimental melodrama, puppets dressed in folk costumes. The playing of the men actors was at least to some extent bearable, but the women, with the exception of Majkowska and Mirowska, who acted the part of an old beggar woman, played abominably. Instead of speaking their parts, they rattled them off in a singsong voice, and over-emphasized hatred, love, and laughter. Everything was done so mechanically, artificially, and thoughtlessly, without a grain of truth or sincerity that Glogowski fairly choked with despair. It was merely a masquerade.