Even his observations of men and women – the sole interest for a man like the Prince who takes no direct part in the ball as a card-player or a dancer – even these cannot afford him anything new or arresting. If he goes up to the groups of chatterers in the reception rooms, they are all composed of the same people and the frame of their conversation is always the same. Here is Madame D., a lady with a reputation for being a Moscow beauty, and indeed her dress, her face, her shoulders are all lovely beyond reproach; but there is something tediously impassive in her look and her continual smile, and her beauty produces in him a reaction of irritation. Deep down he finds D. the most intolerable woman in the world yet he still pursues her, simply because she is the first lady of Moscow society. Next to her, as always, is a group of hangers-on: young M., who is said to be a thoroughly bad character – but on the other hand he is exceptionally witty and agreeable; also with her is the Petersburg dandy F., dedicated to looking down disdainfully on Moscow society, with the result that no one can stand him … And here is the delightful Moscow aristocrat Annette Z., who, goodness knows why, has been failing to marry for such a long time; and consequently, somewhere here too is her last hope, a baron with a monocle and appallingly bad French who has been intending for a whole year past to marry her, but naturally will not get round to doing so. Here is the small, swarthy adjutant with a large nose who is convinced that the essence of civility in this modern age is to spout obscenities, and who is now splitting his sides as he relates something to the elderly but emancipated maiden lady G. Here is the stout old lady R., whose behaviour has been unseemly for so long that it has ceased to be original and has become simply disgusting; yet around her there still revolve an officer of hussars and a young student who imagine, poor things, that this will elevate them in the eyes of society. And if Prince Kornakov goes over to the card tables he will find the same tables in the same place they have occupied these five years or more, with the same people sitting at them. Even their particular ways of shuffling the cards, dealing, taking tricks and exchanging little jokes about gambling have all long since become familiar to him. Here is the old general who invariably loses heavily, however angry he gets and however much he shouts for the whole room to hear, but in particular the dried-up little man who sits opposite him in silence, hunched over the table and granting him an occasional sullen look from under his eyebrows. Here too is a young man who hopes to prove, by the fact of playing cards, that he has been doing this kind of thing for years. And here are the three high-born old ladies who have won two copecks each from their unlucky fellow-player, and the poor man is about to give up all the money he has in his pocket to pay them.
Kornakov approaches the tables with the intention of acquiring some winnings; some of the players fail to notice him, some shake his hand without looking round, a few invite him to join them for a while … Should he go into the rooms where the dancing is in progress? There he can see five or six students whirling round, a couple of newly arrived Guards officers, and the eternal striplings, young in years but already veterans of the Moscow parquet – Negichev, Gubkov, Tamarin; and two or three ageing Moscow lions who have already given up dancing in favour of paying compliments, but who are now either summoning up the courage to ask a lady to dance, or asking her with the sort of expression that seems to say ‘Look, what a gay dog I am.’
Also in the circle of gentlemen one can see as ever those unknown and unmoving figures in dress coats who simply stand and look; heaven alone knows what has made them come – only occasionally is there a movement among them as some bold spirit emerges, walks modestly or perhaps too boldly across the empty space in the centre and invites a lady – possibly the only one he knows – to dance, executes a few turns of the waltz with her, though she is clearly finding it an unpleasant experience, and returns to hide again behind the wall of standing gentlemen. Usually in Moscow society the men fall into two categories – the inexperienced youngsters who gaze at the social whirl with excessive seriousness; and the social lions well past their prime who look on, or appear to look on, with an exaggerated degree of disdain.
Some pathetic fellows, not knowing anyone, who have been invited only through the machinations of the hostess’s female relatives, sit around the walls of the ballroom, mortified with anger that despite their elegant turn-out which has cost them as much as a month’s earnings, no lady is willing to dance with them.—So the tale goes on, and the fact is that Prince Kornakov finds it all too drearily familiar. Although during his time in society many old people have departed and many young ones have entered the social arena, the attitudes, conversations and activities of these people have remained exactly the same. The physical arrangements of the ball, down to the buffet, the supper, the music, the furnishing of the rooms, are all so familiar to the Prince that he sometimes feels an unbearable repugnance at being faced with the same old thing for the twentieth time. Prince Kornakov was one of those wealthy middle-aged bachelors for whom social life has become the most inevitable and tedious of obligations: inevitable, because having in his early youth effortlessly achieved a leading place in this society, his self-esteem has never permitted him to try out his talents in any other, unknown path of life, or even to admit the possibility that some other mode of life might exist; tedious, because he was too intelligent not to have perceived long ago all the emptiness of the social relations of people who are not bound together by any common interest or noble feeling, but who assume that the purpose of life can be found in the artificial maintenance of these same endless social relations. His soul was constantly filled with unconscious sadness for a past squandered to no purpose and a future which promised nothing, but his ennui did not find expression in anguish or repentance, but in irritability and social gossip – sometimes trenchant, sometimes vacuous, but always intelligent and distinguished by its originality. He took so little part in the doings of society, regarding it with such indifference, as if à vol d’oiseau,11 that he was incapable of coming into conflict with anybody; so that no one liked him and no one disliked him, but everyone regarded him with the special respect accorded to those men who constitute society.
IV
Passion
‘Encore un tour, je t’en prie,’12 said Seriozha to his cousin as he clasped her slender waist and, flushed of face, lightly and gracefully sailed into the waltz for the tenth circuit of the ballroom.
‘No, that is enough, I am already tired,’ replied his charming cousin with a smile, disengaging his hand from her shoulder.
Seriozha was obliged to stop, and to stop right by the doorway where Prince Kornakov was leaning casually with his customary expression of self-satisfied composure, saying something to the charming little Countess Schöfing.