A friend had given Josephine Ford a box at the opera for one evening; our story continues by night. The box was large and important, near the stage. Josephine and Julia were there, with Robert and Jim—also two more men. The women sat in the front of the box, conspicuously. They were both poor, they were rather excited. But they belonged to a set which looked on social triumphs as a downfall that one allows oneself. The two men, Lilly and Struthers, were artists, the former literary, the latter a painter. Lilly sat by Josephine in the front of the box: he was her little lion of the evening.
Few women can sit in the front of a big box, on a crowded and full-swing opera night, without thrilling and dilating. There is an intoxication in being thus thrust forward, conspicuous and enhanced, right in the eye of the vast crowd that lines the hollow shell of the auditorium. Thus even Josephine and Julia leaned their elbows and poised their heads regally, looking condescendingly down upon the watchful world. They were two poor women, having nothing to do with society. Half bohemians.
Josephine was an artist. In Paris she was a friend of a very fashionable dressmaker and decorator, master of modern elegance. Sometimes she designed dresses for him, and sometimes she accepted from him a commission to decorate a room. Usually at her last sou, it gave her pleasure to dispose of costly and exquisite things for other people, and then be rid of them.
This evening her dress was a simple, but a marvellously poised thing of black and silver: in the words of the correct journal. With her tight, black, bright hair, her arched brows, her dusky-ruddy face and her bare shoulders; her strange equanimity, her long, slow, slanting looks; she looked foreign and frightening, clear as a cameo, but dark, far off. Julia was the English beauty, in a lovely blue dress. Her hair was becomingly untidy on her low brow, her dark blue eyes wandered and got excited, her nervous mouth twitched. Her high-pitched, sing-song voice and her hurried laugh could be heard in the theatre. She twisted a beautiful little fan that a dead artist had given her.
Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began. The opera was Verdi—Aida. If it is impossible to be in an important box at the opera without experiencing the strange intoxication of social pre-eminence, it is just as impossible to be there without some feeling of horror at the sight the stage presents.
Josephine leaned her elbow and looked down: she knew how arresting that proud, rather stiff bend of her head was. She had some aboriginal American in her blood. But as she looked, she pursed her mouth. The artist in her forgot everything, she was filled with disgust. The sham Egypt of Aida hid from her nothing of its shame. The singers were all colour-washed, deliberately colour-washed to a bright orange tint. The men had oblong dabs of black wool under their lower lip; the beard of the mighty Pharaohs. This oblong dab shook and wagged to the singing.
The vulgar bodies of the fleshy women were unendurable. They all looked such good meat. Why were their haunches so prominent? It was a question Josephine could not solve. She scanned their really expensive, brilliant clothing. It was nearly right—nearly splendid. It only lacked that last subtlety which the world always lacks, the last final clinching which puts calm into a sea of fabric, and yet is the opposite pole to machine fixity.
But the leading tenor was the chief pain. He was large, stout, swathed in a cummerbund, and looked like a eunuch. This fattish, emasculated look seems common in stage heroes—even the extremely popular. The tenor sang bravely, his mouth made a large, coffin-shaped, yawning gap in his orange face, his little beard fluttered oddly, like a tail. He turned up his eyes to Josephine's box as he sang—that being the regulation direction. Meanwhile his abdomen shook as he caught his breath, the flesh of his fat, naked arms swayed.
Josephine looked down with the fixed gravity of a Red Indian, immovable, inscrutable. It was not till the scene was ended that she lifted her head as if breaking a spell, sent the point of her tongue rapidly over her dried lips, and looked round into the box. Her brown eyes expressed shame, fear, and disgust. A curious grimace went over her face—a grimace only to be expressed by the exclamation Merde! But she was mortally afraid of society, and its fixed institutions. Rapidly she scanned the eyes of her friends in the box. She rested on the eyes of Lilly, a dark, ugly man.
“Isn't it nasty?” she said.
“You shouldn't look so closely,” he said. But he took it calmly, easily, whilst she felt floods of burning disgust, a longing to destroy it all.
“Oh-ho-ho!” laughed Julia. “It's so fu-nny—so funny!”
“Of course we are too near,” said Robert.
“Say you admire that pink fondant over there,” said Struthers, indicating with his eyebrows a blond large woman in white satin with pink edging, who sat in a box opposite, on the upper tier.
“Oh, the fondant—exactly—the fondant! Yes, I admire her immensely! Isn't she exactly IT!” sang Julia.
Josephine was scanning the auditorium. So many myriads of faces—like beads on a bead-work pattern—all bead-work, in different layers. She bowed to various acquaintances—mostly Americans in uniform, whom she had known in Paris. She smiled to Lady Cochrane, two boxes off—Lady Cochrane had given her the box. But she felt rather coldly towards her.
The curtain rose, the opera wound its slow length along. The audience loved it. They cheered with mad enthusiasm. Josephine looked down on the choppy sea of applause, white gloves clapping, heads shaking. The noise was strange and rattling. What a curious multiple object a theatre-audience was! It seemed to have a million heads, a million hands, and one monstrous, unnatural consciousness. The singers appeared before the curtain—the applause rose up like clouds of dust.
“Oh, isn't it too wonderful!” cried Julia. “I am wild with excitement. Are you all of you?”
“Absolutely wild,” said Lilly laconically.
“Where is Scott to-night?” asked Struthers.
Julia turned to him and gave him a long, queer look from her dark blue eyes.
“He's in the country,” she said, rather enigmatic.
“Don't you know, he's got a house down in Dorset,” said Robert, verbally rushing in. “He wants Julia to go down and stay.”
“Is she going?” said Lilly.
“She hasn't decided,” replied Robert.
“Oh! What's the objection?” asked Struthers.
“Well, none whatsoever, as far as can be seen, except that she can't make up her mind,” replied Robert.
“Julia's got no mind,” said Jim rudely.
“Oh! Hear the brotherly verdict!” laughed Julia hurriedly.
“You mean to go down to Dorset alone!” said Struthers.
“Why not?” replied Robert, answering for her.
“And stay how long?”
“Oh—as long as it lasts,” said Robert again.
“Starting with eternity,” said Lilly, “and working back to a fortnight.”
“And what's the matter?—looks bad in the eyes of the world?”
“Yes—about that. Afraid of compromising herself—”
Lilly looked at them.
“Depends what you take the world to mean. Do you mean us in this box, or the crew outside there?” he jerked his head towards the auditorium.
“Do you think, Lilly, that we're the world?” said Robert ironically.
“Oh, yes, I guess we're shipwrecked in this box, like Robinson Crusoes. And what we do on our own little island matters to us alone. As for the infinite crowds of howling savages outside there in the unspeakable, all you've got to do is mind they don't scrap you.”
“But WON'T they?” said Struthers.
“Not