But it was a masquerade, and that in a sense far from the
author's intention. As I watched I remember that I forgot the bad acting
(the hero was quite atrocious), forgot the lapses of taste in the colour
and arrangement of the play, forgot the artifices and elaborate
originalities and false sincerities; there were, I have no doubt, many
things in it all that were bad and meretricious--I was dreaming. I saw,
against my will and outside my own agency, mingled with the gold
screens, the purple curtains, the fantasies and extravagances of the
costumes, the sudden flashes of unexpected colour through light or dress
or backcloth--pictures from those Galician days that had been, until
Semyonov's return, as I fancied, forgotten.
A crowd of revellers ran down the stage, and a shimmering cloud of gold
shot with red and purple was flung from one end of the hall to the
other, and behind it, through it, between it, I saw the chill light of
the early morning, and Nikitin and I sitting on the bench outside the
stinking but that we had used as an operating theatre, watching the
first rays of the sun warm, the cold mountain's rim.
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