‘Ah, this I must tell you!’ Betsy, laughing, addressed a lady who was entering her box. ‘He’s made me laugh so!’
‘Well, bonne chance,’i she added, giving Vronsky a free finger of the hand holding her fan, and lowering the slightly ridden-up bodice of her dress with a movement of her shoulders, so as to be well and properly naked when she stepped out to the foot of the stage under the gaslights and under everyone’s eyes.
Vronsky went to the French Theatre, where he indeed had to see the regimental commander, who never missed a single performance at the French Theatre, in order to talk over his peacemaking, which had already occupied and amused him for three days. Petritsky, whom he liked, was involved in this affair, as was another nice fellow, recently joined up, an excellent comrade, the young prince Kedrov. And, above all, the interests of the regiment were involved.
Both were in Vronsky’s squadron. An official, the titular councillor Wenden, had come to the regimental commander with a complaint about his officers, who had insulted his wife. His young wife, so Wenden recounted (he had been married half a year), had gone to church with her mother and, suddenly feeling unwell owing to a certain condition, had been unable to continue standing7 and had gone home in the first cab that came along. Here the officers had chased after her, she had become frightened and, feeling still more sick, had run up the stairs to her home. Wenden himself, having returned from work, had heard the bell and some voices, had gone to the door and, seeing drunken officers with a letter, had shoved them out. He had demanded severe punishment.
‘No, say what you like,’ the regimental commander had said to Vronsky, whom he had invited to his place, ‘Petritsky is becoming impossible. Not a week passes without some story. This official won’t let the affair drop, he’ll go further.’
Vronsky had seen all the unseemliness of the affair, and that a duel was not possible here, that everything must be done to mollify this titular councillor and hush the affair up. The regimental commander had summoned Vronsky precisely because he knew him to be a noble and intelligent man and, above all, a man who cherished the honour of the regiment. They had talked it over and decided that Petritsky and Kedrov would have to go to this titular councillor with Vronsky and apologize. The regimental commander and Vronsky had both realized that Vronsky’s name and his imperial aide-de-camp’s monogram ought to contribute greatly to the mollifying of the titular councillor. And, indeed, these two means had proved partly effective; but the result of the reconciliation remained doubtful, as Vronsky had told Betsy.
Arriving at the French Theatre, Vronsky withdrew to the foyer with the regimental commander and told him of his success, or unsuccess. Having thought everything over, the regimental commander decided to let the affair go without consequences, but then, just for the pleasure of it, began asking Vronsky about the details of his meeting, and for a long time could not stop laughing as he listened to Vronsky telling how the subsiding titular councillor would suddenly flare up again, as he remembered the details of the affair, and how Vronsky, manoeuvring at the last half word of the reconciliation, had retreated, pushing Petritsky in front of him.
‘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, fair-haired young man standing by the table.
‘Oh, yes! He’s in the same style as this drawing room, which is why he frequents it so much.’
This conversation sustained itself because they spoke in allusions precisely about something that could not be talked about in that drawing room - that is, the relations between Tushkevich and the hostess.
Meanwhile, by the samovar and the hostess, the conversation, after vacillating for some time among three inevitable topics: the latest social news, the theatre, and the judging of one’s neighbour, also settled as it struck on this last topic — that is, malicious gossip.