On the evening of the same day the usual guests were assembled at the
Zasyekins’. I was among them.
The conversation turned on Meidanov’s poem. Zinaïda expressed genuine
admiration of it. “But do you know what?” she said to him. “If I were a
poet, I would choose quite different subjects. Perhaps it’s all
nonsense, but strange ideas sometimes come into my head, especially
when I’m not asleep in the early morning, when the sky begins to turn
rosy and grey both at once. I would, for instance … You won’t laugh at
me?”
“No, no!” we all cried, with one voice.
“I would describe,” she went on, folding her arms across her bosom and
looking away, “a whole company of young girls at night in a great boat,
on a silent river. The moon is shining, and they are all in white, and
wearing garlands of white flowers, and singing, you know, something in
the nature of a hymn.”
“I see—I see; go on,” Meidanov commented with dreamy significance.
“All of a sudden, loud clamour, laughter, torches, tambourines on the
bank…. It’s a troop of Bacchantes dancing with songs and cries. It’s
your business to make a picture of it, Mr. Poet;… only I should like
the torches to be red and to smoke a great deal, and the Bacchantes’
eyes to gleam under their wreaths, and the wreaths to be dusky. Don’t
forget the tiger-skins, too, and goblets and gold—lots of gold….”
“Where ought the gold to be?” asked Meidanov, tossing back his sleek
hair and distending his nostrils.
“Where? on their shoulders and arms and legs—everywhere. They say in
ancient times women wore gold rings on their ankles. The Bacchantes
call the girls in the boat to them. The girls have ceased singing their
hymn—they cannot go on with it, but they do not stir, the river carries
them to the bank. And suddenly one of them slowly rises…. This you must
describe nicely: how she slowly gets up in the moonlight, and how her
companions are afraid…. She steps over the edge of the boat, the
Bacchantes surround her, whirl her away into night and darkness…. Here
put in smoke in clouds and everything in confusion. There is nothing
but the sound of their shrill cry, and her wreath left lying on the
bank.”