"Sharper! More energetically!" he whispered, stamping his foot, but no one paid any attention to his exhortations.
Suddenly, a smile flitted over his lips, for he saw Janina entering the stage. She caught that smile and that saved her, for her voice had died in her breast. She was trembling from stage fright so that she did not see the stage, nor the actors, nor the public; it seemed to her that she was engulfed in a sea of light. When she saw that friendly smile she immediately recovered her calm and courage.
Janina was merely to grasp a broom, take her drunken husband by the collar, shout a few lines of imprecation and complaint and then drag him out forcibly through the door. She did all this a trifle too violently, but with such realism that she gave the impression of an infuriated peasant woman.
Glogowski went to Janina. She stood on the stairs leading to the dressing-room; her eyes beamed with a certain deep satisfaction.
"Very good! . . . that was a real peasant woman. You have a temperament and a voice and those are two first-rate endowments!" said Glogowski, and tip-toed back to his seat.
"Perhaps we ought to give an encore of that scene?" whispered
Cabinski into his ear.
"Dry up and go to the devil!" answered Glogowski in the same quiet whisper and felt a great desire to strike Cabinski. But just then, a new thought occurred to his mind, for he saw the nurse standing nearby.
"Nurse!" he called to her.
The nurse unwillingly approached Glogowski.
"Tell me, nurse, what do you think of that comedy?" he asked her curiously.