Reginald Fairfax, the English sea captain played by a tall and slender young actor, kissed Mimosa full on the mouth.
The woman offered no resistance. Divesting herself of all the nobility of her sex, she herself offered the European stranger her lips and proceeded to instruct him in the art of love.
Mimosa would not let go of the youth, holding him in a brazen embrace. This woman knew no shame at all. The two mouths remained glued together for some time, devouring each other, tearing at each other, drinking in delight, refusing to break asunder. The smouldering embrace grew still more passionate, while the good citizens of Sárszeg waited breathlessly for what should follow, their eyes riveted to the couple, watching, learning, like children at school, thinking of how they too, in similar circumstances, would do exactly the same.
The glasses brought this image so close to Ákos that for a moment he shrank back.
He put the glasses down disapprovingly, frowned, then glanced at his wife as if to ask what she thought of this unsightly scene.
The woman said nothing. She had long held a rather damning opinion of actors. She often spoke of Etel Pifkó, an ancient local actress who had poisoned herself while pregnant and whose grave lay beyond the walls of Sárszeg cemetery because she had not been buried in consecrated ground and hadn't enjoyed the Church's final blessing.
Wun-Hi lightened the couple's spirits. This pigtailed Chinaman, owner of the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joys, went dashing busily to and fro. His powers of invention knew no bounds.
“You know who that is, don't you?” whispered Ákos.
“Who?'
“Szolyvay.”
“Never!'
“Look at the programme.”
“Goodness, I'd never have recognised him. What an excellent disguise!'
“And the voice too, the voice. Just listen to it. Totally unrecognisable.”
Szolyvay lisped and hawked and bleated. After his every prank the Vajkays looked at each other, their smiles spreading wider each time.
When Marquis Imari appeared beneath a red parasol, threatening to put Wun-Hi's tearoom up for auction, the panic-stricken Chinaman immediately threw himself at the marquis's feet. The whole theatre erupted in a roar of laughter. Ákos and his wife laughed too.
They laughed so much that they didn't hear a knock at the door behind them. Környey came into their box; the first act was nearly over.
“Well,” he inquired, “enjoying yourselves?'
“Tremendously,” the woman replied.
“Amusing stuff and nonsense,” said Ákos, tempering his response. “Entertaining, at any rate.”
“Just you wait; the best is still to come.”
Környey, true theatre buff that he was, only used his opera glasses to observe the audience.
“Look up there,” he said.
He pointed to a box in the upper circle where Imre Zányi sat in the company of a shady-looking woman with straw-blonde hair.
“He sits there every evening,” said the commander in chief pointing up at Zányi. “But only when she's playing. The great she, Olga Orosz. He's madly in love with her, you know. Has been for two years.”
Ákos focused his opera glasses alternately on Zányi and Olga Orosz. His eyes couldn't seem to get enough of them.
During the interval Környey entertained Mrs Vajkay with local gossip, while Ákos, in his serious frock coat, neatly combed hair and waxed moustache, made an appearance in the club box before the gentlemen of Sárszeg. He paid his respects to the Lord Lieutenant, who received him very warmly, his light, fidgety body leaping out from, and back into, his seat in a flash. He immediately invited Ákos to join him for lunch the following day, when the Budapest commissioner would also be present. Then they began to discourse on the proper conduct of elections, so freely and in such depth that they failed to notice that the second act had already begun. This Ákos watched in their company from beginning to end.
Miklós Ijas arrived halfway through the act, having only just completed his editorial duties. He sat down in the seat permanently reserved for the Sárszeg Gazette. As always, he didn't cast a single glance at the stage. He rested his head on the back of the seat before him in a gesture that seemed to say: rubbish. He was never satisfied with the performance, yet never missed a single one. He was especially critical of Szolyvay, of whom he'd recently written: “He plays to the gallery and his Wun-Hi is an altogether scandalous example of provincial histrionics, totally lacking in either character or conscience, which would be summarily dismissed by any self-respecting audience in Pest.”
This judgement, which caused no small stir, was considered too harsh by many and entirely unjust by others, including Szolyvay himself, who, after a few days’ contemplation, reverted to his tried and tested theatrical antics which never failed to bring irresistible hoots of laughter from his audience. The editor pursed his lips in vexation.
Ijas only raised his head when Margit Lator came on stage, playing the part of Miss Molly Seamore. She was, in his eyes, a genuine actress, and in his reviews he praised her refreshing ingenuity, rated her vocal range superior to that of Olga Orosz, compared her to the legendary Klára Küry, and repeatedly insisted that she belonged on the Budapest stage. Some said that all the poems he published in the Sárszeg Gazette were dedicated to her.
At the end of the second act, Környey went over to the club box and took Ákos down to the courtyard to smoke a cigarette.
They groped and zigzagged their way through dimly lit archways until they reached the first floor of the inn, with its red marble stairway whose wide steps Ákos had once climbed with his wife and daughter to the ballroom above. The large mirror, before which women would make final adjustments to their coiffures before entering the ball, still stood between two cypress trees. But now the ballroom door was firmly locked. A cold, unfriendly twilight hung in the corridor. The chambermaid, a plump woman in white stockings and high-heeled patent-leather shoes, leaned on the banisters, rocking back and forth with a copper candlestick holder in her hand, making unmistakable gestures to the young men on the floor below. Something indecent was evidently afoot.
They hurried past her down the steps and out through a little door into the theatre courtyard. Here they lit up.
Acetylene lamps illuminated the canvas backs of the stage sets with a garish glow. Seedy youths took down the lanterns which had been used on stage and carried them to the props cupboard. In the middle of the courtyard, beneath a large sycamore, sat Szolyvay at a one-time restaurant table drinking a spritzer.
“You were splendid,” said Környey, complimenting him.
“Splendid,” Ákos echoed, “absolutely splendid.” And he chuckled.
He wrung his hands continually as he stood gazing at the actor, chuckling. A devil of a fellow, this Szolyvay. Szolyvay, yet not Szolyvay. The pigtail was still swinging from his bare head and beads of perspiration rolled across his thick make-up. Ákos could not contain his laughter.
Szolyvay was preoccupied with graver matters, deep in conversation with the group that surrounded him concerning the latest developments in the old affair between Olga Orosz and Imre Zányi.
Dr Gál was also present, as the theatre's in-house physician, together with several members of the Theatre Committee and other insiders and friends of the performers. Among them stood Papa Fehér, manager of the Agricultural Bank. For want of anyone better, he had his arms around an anonymous-looking geisha girl with large dark-blue shadows on her eyelids.