"Come along with me, won't you? It will make me feel a little more at ease," said Wolska.
Janina willingly agreed.
They entered the restaurant "Under the Bridge" on Podwal St. It was a long and narrow garden with a few miserable trees. At the very entrance there was a well. A whitewashed fence on the left side of the garden divided it from the neighboring property which must have been a lumberyard, for piles of beams and boards could be seen looming above the fence. A few kerosene lanterns illuminated the place. A number of little white tables with varnished tops and around them three times that number of rough-hewn chairs constituted the entire furnishings of that summer restaurant. A small office on the ground floor and the top of the neighboring house enclosed the right side of the garden, while at the back there arose a high, rough brick wall with small, dirty, and barred windows; it was the rear of the former Kochanowski Palace, standing on the corner of Miodowa and Kapitulna Streets.
Near the fence, a small stage shaded by a canvas roof with its two open sides facing toward the audience, formed a sort of niche, the walls of which were covered with a cheap, blue paper dotted with silver stars. The smoking kerosene footlights on one side of the stage cast a drab light upon a musician with a disheveled gray beard and grease-stained coat, who was pounding away at the keyboard of a wretched piano with an automatic motion of his arms and head.
The garden was filled with a public of working-class people and those from the poorer section of the city.
Janina and Wolska pushed their way through the crowd to that little office building in which there was a dressing-room for the performers, divided into a men's and women's compartment by a red cretonne curtain.
"I am already waiting!" came a hoarse, drunken voice from behind the curtain.
"You can begin your part, I will come right away!" answered Wolska, dressing herself in feverish haste in a grotesque, red costume.
In a few minutes she was all ready for her appearance. Janina followed her out and took a seat facing the stage. Wolska, all flushed with hurrying and still closing the last buttons and hooks of her costume, appeared on the stage, greeting the public with a long bow. The musician struck the yellow keys and at the same moment there arose the tones of a song:
Once upon a stump among the hills, Between the oaks there sat two turtle-doves, And I know not for what sport of love's They kissed each other with their bills.