212 213
meetings, greetings, offers of tea, and as it were, feeling about for some-
thing to rest upon.
“She’s exceptionally good as an actress; one can see she’s studied
Kaulbach,” said a diplomatic attache in the group round the
ambassador’s wife. “Did you notice how she fell down?...”
“Oh, please ,don’t let us talk about Nilsson! No one can possibly
say anything new about her,” said a fat, red-faced, flaxen-headed lady,
without eyebrows and chignon, wearing an old silk dress. This was
Princess Myakaya, noted for her simplicity and the roughness of her
manners, and nicknamed enfant terrible. Princess Myakaya, sitting in
the middle between the two groups, and listening to both, took part in
the conversation first of one and then of the other. “Three people have
used that very phrase about Kaulbach to me today already, just as
though they had made a compact about it. And I can’t see why they
liked that remark so.”
The conversation was cut short by this observation, and a new
subject had to be thought of again.
“Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful,” said the
ambassador’s wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversa-
tion called by the English, small talk. She addressed the attache, who
was at a loss now what to begin upon.
“They say that that’s a difficult task, that nothing’s amusing that
isn’t spiteful,” he began with a smile. “But I’ll try. Get me a subject. It
all lies in the subject. If a subject’s given me, it’s easy to spin something
round it. I often think that the celebrated talkers of the last century
would have found it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever is
so stale...”
“That has been said long ago,” the ambassador’s wife interrupted
him, laughing.
The conversation began amiably, but just because it was too ami-
able, it came to a stop again. They had to have recourse to the sure,
never-failing topic—gossip.
“Don’t you think there’s something Louis Quinze about
Tushkevitch?” he said, glancing towards a handsome, fair-haired young
man, standing at the table.
“Oh, yes! He’s in the same style as the drawing room and that’s
why it is he’s so often here.”
This conversation was maintained, since it rested on allusions to
what could not be talked on in that room—that is to say, of the relations
of Tushkevitch with their hostess.
Round the samovar and the hostess the conversation had been
meanwhile vacillating in just the same way between three inevitable
topics: the latest piece of public news, the theater, and scandal. It, too,
came finally to rest on the last topic, that is, ill-natured gossip.
“Have you heard the Maltishtcheva woman—the mother, not the
daughter—has ordered a costume in diable rose color?”
“Nonsense! No, that’s too lovely!”
“I wonder that with her sense—for she’s not a fool, you know—
that she doesn’t see how funny she is.”
Everyone had something to say in censure or ridicule of the luck-
less Madame Maltishtcheva, and the conversation crackled merrily,
like a burning faggot-stack.
The husband of Princess Betsy, a good-natured fat man, an ardent
collector of engravings, hearing that his wife had visitors, came into the
drawing room before going to his club. Stepping noiselessly over the
thick rugs, he went up to Princess Myakaya.
“How did you like Nilsson?” he asked.
“Oh, how can you steal upon anyone like that! How you startled