Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [82]
‘A nasty story, but killingly funny. Kedrov really cannot fight with this gentleman! So he got terribly worked up?’ he asked again, laughing. ‘And isn’t Claire something tonight? A wonder!’ he said about the new French actress. ‘Watch all you like, she’s new each day. Only the French can do that.’
VI
Princess Betsy left the theatre without waiting for the end of the last act. She had just time to go to her dressing room, sprinkle powder on her long, pale face and wipe it off, put her hair to rights and order tea served in the big drawing room, when carriages began driving up one after the other to her huge house on Bolshaya Morskaya. The guests stepped out on to the wide porch, and the corpulent doorkeeper, who used to read newspapers in the morning behind the glass door for the edification of passers-by, noiselessly opened this huge door, allowing people to pass.
Almost at one and the same time the hostess, with freshened hair and freshened face, came through one door and the guests came through another into the big drawing room with its dark walls, plush carpets and brightly lit table shining under the candlelight with the whiteness of the tablecloth, the silver of the samovar, and the translucent porcelain of the tea service.
The hostess sat by the samovar and took off her gloves. Moving chairs with the help of unobtrusive servants, the company settled down, dividing itself into two parts - one by the samovar with the hostess, the other at the opposite end of the drawing room, round the ambassador’s wife, a beautiful woman in black velvet and with sharp black eyebrows. The conversation in both centres, as always in the first minutes, vacillated, interrupted by meetings, greetings, offers of tea, as if seeking what to settle on.
‘She’s remarkably good as an actress; one can see that she’s studied Kaulbach,’8 said a diplomat in the ambassador’s wife’s circle, ‘did you notice how she fell ...’
‘Ah, please, let’s not talk about Nilsson! It’s impossible to say anything new about her,’ said a fat, red-faced, fair-haired woman with no eyebrows and no chignon, in an old silk dress. This was Princess Miagky, well known for her simplicity and rudeness of manner, and nicknamed the enfant terrible. Princess Miagky was sitting between the two circles, listening, and participating now in one, now in the other. ‘Today three people have said this same phrase to me about Kaulbach, as if they’d agreed on it. And the phrase - I don’t know why they like it so much.’
The conversation was interrupted by this remark, and they had to invent a new topic.
‘Tell us something amusing but not wicked,’ said the ambassador’s wife, a great expert at graceful conversation, called ‘small talk’ in English, turning to the diplomat, who also had no idea how to begin now.
‘They say that’s very difficult, that only wicked things are funny,’ he began with a smile. ‘But I’ll try. Give me a topic. The whole point lies in the topic. Once the topic is given, it’s easy to embroider on it. I often think that the famous talkers of the last century would now find it difficult to talk intelligently. Everything intelligent is so boring ...’
‘That was said long ago,’ the ambassador’s wife interrupted him, laughing.
The conversation had begun nicely, but precisely because it was much too nice, it stopped again. They had to resort to that sure, never failing remedy - malicious gossip.
‘Don’t you find something Louis Quinze in Tushkevich?’ he said, indicating with his eyes a handsome,