Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [31]
Although the audience was still sparse, a stifling atmosphere already hung over the auditorium. On Sunday there had been two performances, a matinee and an evening show, and the steamy vapours of their passing storm lingered thick and oppressive in the air. The dark recesses of the boxes were still strewn with discarded tickets, scattered sweet wrappers and scraps of hardening orange peel. The theatre had been neither swept nor aired. Furthermore, to the eternal shame of Sárszeg's only theatre–and in spite of countless impassioned pleas in the local press–electric lighting had still not been introduced in the auditorium, and the old oil lamps continued to emit their layers of heavy smoke and a certain melancholy odour, referred to by the locals as “stage stench.”
It was above all for this reason that Skylark never went to the theatre. As soon as she inhaled this air, felt its heat strike her face, and saw the unfamiliar sight of seething crowds before and beneath her, her head would spin and she'd be overcome by a sort of nausea that resembled seasickness. On the one occasion when they had booked three seats in the stalls, they were forced to go home in the middle of the first act. Since then they hadn't been to the theatre at all. Their daughter said she'd rather stay at home with her needlework.
Gradually the auditorium came to life.
Opposite, in a circle box, sat the Priboczays–the mother a good-natured, fair-haired creature, the father an exemplary paterfamilias, and their four daughters who all wore their hair in exactly the same fashion, parted neatly in the middle, and all wore the same pink dresses. Like four pink roses in varying stages of bloom.
Beside them sat Judge Doba with his wife, a lean, dark-haired, flirtatious woman who simply lived for the theatre, or rather for the actors. She always dragged her husband along with her, who would sit with his prematurely bald head buried miserably and wearily in his hands.
The judge was a very melancholy man, and not without good reason. His wife betrayed him left and right, quite openly, with actors, articled clerks and even older grammar-school boys. It was said she'd had separate door keys made for her lovers, who would visit her whenever her husband was not at home. Doba for his part knew nothing, absolutely nothing–or at least didn't show it. In court he would excel himself in the execution of his lofty office, impartially administering justice to others. But at the end of the day he'd sit in the Széchenyi Café with his wife and her circle, light up a Virginia and keep silence. Now he was silent too.
Leaning out of the club box sat Feri Füzes and Galló with a host of aldermen and other town dignitaries, who made up the membership of the Theatre Committee. They all suddenly rose to their feet. Gyalokay had arrived, the new Lord Lieutenant of Prime Minister Kálmán Széll.
Gyalokay really did appear to be the “agile” figure who was often described in the Sárszeg Gazette. He had nimble quicksilver movements and a bushy, chaotically upward-shooting moustache which was so dense one could have been forgiven for imagining the Lord Lieutenant had inadvertently left his whisker brush in its midst–two thick whisker brushes poking up from the two separate stems of his moustache. He simply couldn't stop fidgeting, waving and bowing, springing up from his seat every other minute as if it had turned to hot coals beneath him. He reminded one of some feverish, restless rodent–of an otter, above all.
He had hardly finished