Peter Lake climbed down into paradise. Walking through that place, he felt like Mohammed in Bismillah. Everything was shiny, sparkling, alert, and familiar. The machines seemed to greet him with the same ingenuous affection as a class of kindergarten children receiving the mayor. And as they puffed and revolved and did their mad angular dances, Peter Lake realized that he was a mechanic. In each section of the half-acre of machinery, years of knowledge charged out from the interior darkness and stood at attention like brigades and brigades of soldiers on parade. The realization was locked in place as if with strikes and bolts.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

If we shadows have offended
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to scrape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.
So, Good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

(Act 5, Scene 1, 418-433)

Official applause also greeted Prokofiev's score for Sergei Eisenstein's film, "Alexander Nevsky," a celebration of the thirteenth-century prince who routed the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peripus. Few experiences in Prokofiev's checkered career gave him more satisfaction than his collaboration with Eisenstein, who treated his composers not as hired hands but as creative equals. The tour-de-force scene in "Nevsky," the battle on the ice, was filmed only after the music had been sketched out, and the resulting integration of sound and image rivals anything in the animated creations of Walt Disney, whom both director and composer admired. In other scenes Eisenstein implied rhythm in the sequence of images. Watching in the screening room, Prokofiev would tap his fingers in time to the footage. He would deliver a finished piece by noon the following day, and Eisenstein would use the music to finalize his edit. The almost unprecedented vision of film as spoken-word opera was one that Stalin did not fail to appreciate. When, in 1941, the first Stalin prizes were handed out, "Alexander Nevsky" was among the winners.

Each small gleam was a voice,
A lantern voice --
In little songs of carmine, violet, green, gold.
A chorus of colours came over the water;
The wondrous leaf-shadow no longer wavered,
No pines crooned on the hills,
The blue night was elsewhere a silence,
When the chorus of colours came over the water,
Little songs of carmine, violet, green, gold.

Small glowing pebbles
Thrown on the dark plane of evening
Sing good ballads of God
And eternity, with soul's rest.
Little priests, little holy fathers,
None can doubt the truth of your hymning,
When the marvellous chorus comes over the water,
Songs of carmine, violet, green, gold.