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‘No, extremes aren’t good in anything,’ Natalie said calmly, putting his paper-knife in its proper place on the desk.

‘Well, come here now, you perfect children,’ he said to the handsome boys who came in and, after bowing to Levin, went over to their father, evidently wishing to ask him about something.

Levin would have liked to talk with them, to hear what they said to their father, but Natalie turned to him, and just then Lvov’s colleague, Makhotin, in a court uniform, came into the room to fetch him, so that they could go together to meet someone, and now an endless conversation started about Herzegovina, Princess Korzinsky, the duma, and the unexpected death of Mme Apraksin.

Levin quite forgot about the errand he had been given. He remembered it only on his way to the front hall.

‘Ah, Kitty told me to discuss something about Oblonsky with you,’ he said, when Lvov stopped on the stairs, seeing his wife and Levin out.

‘Yes, yes, maman wants us, les beaux-frères, to fall upon him,’ he said, blushing and smiling. ‘But, after all, why me?’

‘Then I’ll fall upon him,’ Natalie said, waiting in her white dog-fur rotonde for the conversation to end. ‘Well, come along!’

V

Two very interesting things were offered at the matinee concert.

One was a fantasia, King Lear on the Heath,7 the other a quartet dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both pieces were new and in the new spirit, and Levin wanted to form his own opinion of them. Having taken his sister-in-law to her seat, he installed himself by a column and resolved to listen as closely and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to get distracted and spoil his impression by looking at the arm-waving of the white-tied conductor, which is always such an unpleasant distraction of musical attention, or at the ladies in hats, who had carefully tied ribbons over their ears especially for the concert, or at all the faces, either unoccupied by anything or occupied by interests quite other than music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs and talkers, and stood with lowered eyes, listening.

But the longer he listened to the King Lear fantasia, the further he felt from any possibility of forming some definite opinion for himself. The musical expression of feeling was ceaselessly beginning, as if gathering itself up, but it fell apart at once into fragments of new beginnings of musical expressions and sometimes into extremely complex sounds, connected by nothing other than the mere whim of the composer. But these fragments of musical expressions, good ones on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected and in no way prepared for. Gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appeared without justification, like a madman’s feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly.

All through the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance. He was in utter perplexity when the piece ended and felt great fatigue from such strained but in no way rewarded attention. Loud applause came from all sides. Everybody stood up, began walking, talking. Wishing to explain his perplexity by means of other people’s impressions, Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see one well-known connoisseur talking with Pestsov, whom he knew.

‘Amazing!’ Pestsov’s dense bass said. ‘Good afternoon, Konstantin Dmitrich. Particularly graphic and, so to speak, sculptural and rich in colour is the place where you feel Cordelia approaching, where a woman, das ewig Weibliche,cx8 enters the struggle with fate. Don’t you think?’

‘But what does Cordelia have to do with it?’ Levin asked timidly, forgetting completely that the fantasia portrayed King Lear on the heath.

‘Cordelia comes in ... here!’ said Pestsov, tapping his fingers on the satiny playbill he was holding and handing it to Levin.

Only then did Levin remember the title of the fantasia, and he hastened to read Shakespeare’s verses in Russian translation, printed on the back of the bill.