“And when with friends I drain the heady cup, I see before me all the while Julia, Julia,” came from the billiard-room the merry, tenor voice. Gradually the dramshop filled with a mist, through which the lights burned very low, and the noise of the revelers reached but indistinctly and seemed far off, resembling far-away sea-breakers. The dramshop filled with sea-waves, which rose and fell. And from the waves swam out a mermaid who was laughingly luring Kostovsky to her. For a moment he lifted his head, and again saw before him the bottle, poured out another glass, and drained it; the mist became denser, rolled before his eyes. But he still saw, rising amidst the wine-vapors high over the bottle, her poetic, sweet image. * * * * * When Kostovsky was at last found again after a search of several days in the different dramshops of the city, and brought to his senses, the opera, with its “sea-bottom” and mermaids, was again produced. Now Kostovsky once more looked his old self: the unkempt, carelessly dressed scene-painter was even more gloomy than before; his locks bristled and his mustaches stood on end worse than ever. He stood gloomily on his elevation behind the scenes, lighting up the mermaids with the rays from his reflector. His soul was filled with cold and gloom and obduracy. Now he himself kept aloof from everybody, hated the whole troupe, and lived alone. And the “mermaids” swam over the “sea-bottom.” But it was no longer the former radiant, poetic light which shone upon them; the light which the decorator threw upon them now was a sad, pale light, and under its rays they seemed inanimate, sickly, and half-dead. But when Julia appeared--swimming as formerly lower than the rest--sinister, dark-blue rays came pouring upon her, and she looked more like a fury than a mermaid. Her face was blue, horrible, with black lips and black cavities instead of eyes, and the slippery fish-body was as if covered with a loathsome slime. A mutter of disgust ran through the theatre. And the decorator also lit up with the same light the “sea-bottom” with all its monsters; and like a symbol of nightmare and sadness the green-eyed devil-fish came out of the darkness, and the noxious medusas began to move around. The blue body of Julia seemed to swim in this loathsome mass, and at last blended with it into one living, monstrous, deformed creature. The scene-painter slowly turned the glasses of the reflector, gazed upon the work of the light he had created, and it seemed to him that he had destroyed forever the former charm of the woman--that she whom he had loved had never been beautiful; and it seemed to him that now only he saw her in her real light, and that she only became divinely beautiful when lighted by the bright rays of his love. VALIA BY LEONID ANDREIEV [Illustration]