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.
[Illustration: A proclamation was read by a great person from a
bedizened balcony]
Stella knew no Russian; she had no idea that anything worse could happen
to this seriously broken people ruled by knouts. But there was still
something that could happen: this proclamation touched their religion.
It seemed that they actually had a possession that they weren't prepared
to let go. They could let their daughters and sons go, their houses and
their lives; but there was something they held on to and refused to
renounce.
This was enough to irritate any tyrant. The bare existence of anything
that is uncontrollable always annoys a tyrant. There was a power in
these people still unsubdued, so the proclamation said that unless they
gave up their religion and became orthodox they would be killed. Then
Chaliapine entered.
Eurydice gave a long gasp of emotion, and sank silently into her dream;
no more could be expected of her as a companion. Stella endeavored to be
more critical. She felt at once that Chaliapine's power wasn't his
voice. It was a fine, controlled voice, it seemed more resonant and
alive than any other in the company, and vastly easier; but his genius
was behind his voice. It was not merely his acting, though immediately
every one else on the stage appeared to be acting, and Chaliapine alone
was real.
It consisted in that very uncontrollable something that tyrants cannot
kill, that circumstances do not touch, that surmounts every stroke of
fate, and is the residuum which faces death. There was a little more of
it in Chaliapine than there is in most people.
She tried to follow the score of "Boris Goudonoff"; it was not easy
music, and the story hardly seemed to matter.
Chaliapine was the leader of the religious sect that the Czar was going
to stamp out. Everything was against him; was he going to conquer?
The English audience expected him to conquer. It understood conquests.
First, you started all wrong, because you hadn't taken the trouble not
to, because you hadn't measured your antagonist, and because you did not
think that preparation was necessary.
The audience allowed for things going wrong to begin with, and sat
cheerfully expecting the miracle.
The opera went on, and it became apparent to Stella that Chaliapine was
not going to get his people out of their difficulties.
They sank deeper and deeper into them. Tyranny was behind and in front
of them; they were being steadily hemmed in and beaten down. What they
held on to did them no apparent good; it didn't comfort them or relieve
their necessities or hold out a helping hand to them. It did nothing
against their enemies. It simply burned in them like a flame. It didn't
even consume them; it left them to be consumed by the Czar.
The English audience listened breathlessly and a little surprised, but
not troubled, because they felt quite sure that everything would come
out all right in the last act.
Religion would triumph, it always did, even when you took no notice of
it.
You didn't, as a rule, notice the police either, and yet when burglars
broke in to steal your plate, they were caught climbing over the back
fence by a policeman. Religion was there, like the police, to catch your
troubles and restore your spiritual silver plate.
The melancholy minor Russian music couldn't mean that you weren't going
to get anything out of it. It would wake up soon and be triumphant.
In the pauses between the acts Eurydice sat in a trance. Stella amused
herself with picking out the kind of people she would have liked to
know. One in particular in a box to the right of them, she found herself
liking. His frosty-blue eyes had the consciousness of strength in them;
the line of his jaw and the ironic, well-chiseled mouth spoke of a will
that had felt and surmounted shocks. He was still a young man in the
early thirties, but he had made his place in the world. He looked as
secure as royalty. With a strange little thrill that was almost
resentment Stella realized that she knew the woman beside him. Marian
sat there very straight and slim in the guarded radiance of her youth,
as intact as some precious ivory in a museum. She was Stella's greatest
friend; that is to say, she gave to her the greatest amount of pleasure
procurable in her life.
Stella couldn't have told why her heart sprang to meet Marian Young's.
She had nothing in common with her. They had met at a course of lectures
on the Renaissance, and out of a casual meeting had grown a singular,
unequal, relationship.
Marian saw Stella very rarely, but she told her everything. She hadn't,
however, told her of this new man. His strong, clever face had in it
something different, something unnecessarily different, from Marian's
other young men.
He lifted his head, and looked up toward the balconies above him. His
eyes did not meet Stella's, but she took from them the strangest
sensation of her life. A pang of sheer pity shot through her. There was
no reason for pity; he looked aggressively strong and perfectly sure of
himself. He even looked sure of Marian, and not without reason. He was
all the things Marian liked best in a man, courageous, successful,
handsome. Providence had thrown in his brains. That was the unnecessary
quality.
Stella wondered a little wistfully what it must be like to talk to a
really clever man. Her father was very clever, but he was not socially
pliable, and he didn't exactly talk to Stella; he merely expressed in
her presence conclusions at which he had arrived. It clarified his
ideas, but it didn't do anything particular to Stella's.
Sir Richard Verny was taking trouble to talk to Marian; he bent his
powerful head toward the girl and told her about Siberia. He knew
Siberia well; he had often started from there upon important Arctic
explorations. Marian wondered when he was going to propose. Siberia did
as well as anything else till then. She knew he was going to propose;
she didn't know anything at all about Siberia. She did not see Stella;
it had not occurred to her that any one she knew could be sitting in the
gallery.
The curtain rose again, and the last act began.
Chaliapine did not turn defeat into victory; no rabbit rose
triumphantly, to satisfy the British public, out of a top-hat.
Chaliapine led his people into a fire, and they were burned to death.
Some of them were frightened, and he had to comfort them, to hold them,
and sustain them till the end. He had nothing at all to do it with, but
he did sustain them. They all went into the flames, singing their
disheartening music till the smoke covered them. Chaliapine sang
longest, but there was nothing victorious in his last notes. They were
very beautiful and final; then they weakened and were still.
The stillness went on for some time afterward. Everybody had been
killed, and life had been so unendurable that they had faced death
without much effort to avoid it. They could have avoided it if they had
given up their faith. Their faith had vanished off the face of the
earth, but they hadn't given it up.
Stella gave a long sigh of relief; she felt as if she had been saved
from something abominable that might have happened.
Applause broke out all round them, a little uncertainly at first,
because it was difficult for the audience to realize that the heavens
weren't going to shoot open and do something definitely successful about
it; but finally sustained and prolonged applause. Chaliapine had taken
them all by storm. It was not the kind of storm that they were used to,
but it was a storm.
"I love Russians," a lady exclaimed to Stella. "Such delightful people,
don't you think, so full of color and what d' you call it?"
Eurydice shook herself impatiently like a dog after a plunge through
water.
"Hurry! Let's get out of this," she said to Stella, "or I shall be rude
to somebody. Idiots! Idiots! Don't they see that we've been listening to
the defeat of the soul?"
"No, no," whispered Stella half to herself; "we've been listening to how
it can't be defeated, how nothing touches it, not even death, not even
despair, not even flames. The end of something that has never given in
is victory."
They passed behind Marian outside the opera house, but Stella did not
speak to her. She heard Sir Julian saying in a determined, resonant
voice: "Well, of course I'm glad you liked it. Chaliapine is a good
workman, but personally I don't think much of Russian music. It has a
whine in it like a beggar's, sounds too much as if it had knocked under.
My idea, you know, is not to knock under."
And Stella, slipping into the crowd, was aware again of a sharp pang of
pity for him, as if she knew that, after all, his strength would meet
and be consumed by fire.