Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.
`Marvelous!' Pestsov was saying in his deep bass. `How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievich? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche , enters into conflict with fate.
Isn't it?'
`You mean... What has Cordelia to do with it?' Levin asked timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear.
`Cordelia comes in... See here!' said Pestsov, tapping his finger on the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it to Levin.
Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made haste to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare that were printed on the back of the program.
`You can't follow it without that,' said Pestsov, addressing Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had no one to talk to.
In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of the music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal.
`These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging to the stairs,' said Levin. The comparison pleased him, but he could not remember whether he had not used the same phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he said it he felt confused.
Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by the conjunction of all kinds of art.
The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov, who was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time, condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to call upon.
`Well, go at once then,' Madame Lvova said, when he told her;`perhaps they'll not be at home, and then you can come to the meeting to fetch me. You'll find me still there.'
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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 7, Chapter 06[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 6 `Perhaps they're not at home?' said Levin, as he went into the hall of Countess Bol's house.
`At home; please walk in,' said the porter, resolutely removing his overcoat.
`How annoying!' thought Levin with a sigh, taking off one glove and stroking his hat. `What did I come for? What have I to say to them?'
As he passed through the first drawing room Levin met in the doorway Countess Bol, with a careworn and severe face, giving some order to a servant.
On seeing Levin she smiled, and asked him to come into the next little drawing room where he heard voices. In this room there were sitting in armchairs the two daughters of the Countess, and a Moscow colonel, whom Levin knew. Levin walked up, greeted them, and sat down beside the sofa, with his hat on his knees.
`How is your wife? Have you been at the concert? We couldn't go.
Mamma had to be at the requiem.'
`Yes, I heard.... What a sudden death!' said Levin.
The Countess came in, sat down on the sofa, and she too asked after his wife and inquired about the concert.
Levin answered, and repeated an inquiry about Madame Apraksina's sudden death.
`But she was always in poor health.'
`Were you at the opera yesterday?'
`Yes, I was.'
`Lucca was very good.'
`Yes, very good,' he said, and, as it was utterly of no consequence to him what they thought of him, he began repeating what they had heard a hundred times about the characteristics of the singer's talent. Countess Bol pretended to be listening. Then, when he had said enough and had paused, the colonel, who had been silent till then, began to talk. The colonel too talked of the opera and illumination. At last, after speaking of the proposed folle journée at Turin's, the colonel laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too rose, but he saw by the face of the Countess that it was not yet time for him to go. He must stay two minutes longer. He sat down.
But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.
`You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very interesting,' began the Countess.
`No, I promised my belle-soeur to fetch her from it,' said Levin.
A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with one of the daughters.
`Well, now I think the time has come,' thought Levin, and he got up. The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say mille choses to his wife for them.
The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat: `Where is Your Honor staying?' and immediately wrote down his address in a big handsomely bound book.
`Of course I don't care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully stupid,' thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that everyone does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.
