Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/546

464 where in the Indian Ocean they would eclipse Shakespeare and Kant

But at last he becomes tired. The monologue is broken by long pauses. His walk becomes listless. It is half past five. He drinks another two glasses, takes a candle, and goes off to his room:

"To-morrow morning we will go aboard Savva."

Your bed is in the next room in the tower. You lie down, but you cannot get to sleep. You think: how tired he must be! Tonight in his room he has walked a distance of not less than twelve miles, and his conversation, if it were written down, would make a good sized book. What a senseless waste of energy!

In the morning in the long-boat Khamoidol we make for the sea. And where has Andreyev got that leather Norwegian fisherman's cap from? I have only seen them before in pictures, in the paper Round the World. And high, waterproof boots, exactly like a cinema pirate. Give him a harpoon in his hand and he would be one of Jack London's magnificent whalers.

Here is the yacht. And here is the gardener Stepanitch, transmogrified into a boatswain. We range about the Gulf of Finland until late in the evening and I never cease being delighted with this inspired actor, who has now played such a new and difficult part—without a public; only for himself—for twenty-four hours. How he stuffs his pipe, how he spits, how he glances at his toy compass! He feels himself to be the captain of some ocean-going vessel. His powerful legs planted widely apart, he gazes with silence and concentration into the distance; his commands ring out sharply He pays no attention to the passengers; as if the captain of an ocean-going vessel would indulge in conversation with his passengers!

In this playing there was much delightful childish simplicity. Only very talented people—only poets—are able to be children to the same extent. It is easy to imagine Pushkin's Mozart, playing at horses with delight: Salière reveals his absence of talent just by his incapacity for such play. When a child makes a railway out of chairs one has to be depressingly unimaginative to be able to tell it that the chairs are not really coaches. And the chief charm of Andreyev lay in the fact that whatever game he happened to be playing—and he was always playing some game or other—he believed in it firmly and gave himself to it without reserve.