Читать книгу The Second Fiddle - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 4

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The curtain lifted, and civilization swung back. They were in Russia in the twelfth century—or any other time. It hardly mattered when; the music was the perpetual music of the Slav, tragic and insecure. The people were a restless barbaric crowd, beyond or beneath morality; religious, incalculably led by sensation. They could be unimaginably cruel or sweep magnificently up the paths of holiness. The steep ascent to heaven was in their eyes, and they got drunk to attain it.

The English audience watched them as if they were looking at a fairy-tale. They were a well-fed, complacent audience. If they got drunk, it was an accident, and none of them had ever been holy. They had never been under the heels of tyranny or long without a meal. They took for granted food, water, light, and fuel. They began to live where the Russian peasant planted his dreams of heaven. Death was their only uncertainty, and it was hidden behind the baffling insincerities of doctors and nurses. It did not take them on the raw.

The crowd upon the stage became suddenly shaken into movement. Fires were lighted, bells rang, food was carried about in processions. Cossacks with long knouts struck back the dazzled, scattering people. A proclamation was read by a great person from a bedizened balcony.