The Torrents Of Spring

XXXIX
In the year 1840, the theatre at Wiesbaden was a poor affair even externally,
and its company, for affected and pitiful mediocrity, for studious
and vulgar commonplaceness, not one hair’s-breadth above the level,
which might be regarded up to now as the normal one in all German
theatres, and which has been displayed in perfection lately by the company
in Carlsruhe, under the ‘illustrious’ direction of Herr Devrient. At
the back of the box taken for her ‘Serenity Madame von Polozov’ (how
the waiter devised the means of getting it, God knows, he can hardly
have really bribed the stadt-director!) was a little room, with sofas all
round it; before she went into the box, Maria Nikolaevna asked Sanin to
draw up the screen that shut the box off from the theatre.
‘I don’t want to be seen,’ she said, ‘or else they’ll be swarming round
directly, you know.’ She made him sit down beside her with his back to
the house so that the box seemed to be empty. The orchestra played the
overture from the Marriage of Figaro. The curtain rose, the play began.
It was one of those numerous home-raised products in which wellread
but talentless authors, in choice, but dead language, studiously and
cautiously enunciated some ‘profound’ or ‘vital and palpitating’ idea,
portrayed a so-called tragic conflict, and produced dulness … an Asiatic
dulness, like Asiatic cholera. Maria Nikolaevna listened patiently to half
an act, but when the first lover, discovering the treachery of his mistress
(he was dressed in a cinnamon-coloured coat with ‘puffs’ and a plush
collar, a striped waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons, green trousers
with straps of varnished leather, and white chamois leather gloves),
when this lover pressed both fists to his bosom, and poking his two elbows
out at an acute angle, howled like a dog, Maria Nikolaevna could
not stand it.
‘The humblest French actor in the humblest little provincial town acts
better and more naturally than the highest German celebrity,’ she cried
in indignation; and she moved away and sat down in the little room at
the back. ‘Come here,’ she said to Sanin, patting the sofa beside her.
‘Let’s talk.’
Sanin obeyed.
Maria Nikolaevna glanced at him. ‘Ah, I see you’re as soft as silk! Your
wife will have an easy time of it with you. That buffoon,’ she went on,
pointing with her fan towards the howling actor (he was acting the part
of a tutor), ‘reminded me of my young days; I, too, was in love with a
teacher. It was my first … no, my second passion. The first time I fell in
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