She and Orlov came back after nine. Filled with the proud awareness of having accomplished something brave and extraordinary, passionately in love, and, as it seemed to her, loved passionately, languorous, anticipating a sound and happy sleep, Zinaida Fyodorovna reveled in her new life. Overflowing with happiness, she clasped her hands tightly, convinced that everything was beautiful, and vowed that she would love eternally, and these vows, and her naïve, almost childlike confidence that she was also truly loved and would be loved eternally, made her five years younger. She talked sweet nonsense and laughed at herself.
‘‘There’s no higher good than freedom!’’ she said, forcing herself to say something serious and significant. ‘‘How preposterous it is, if you stop to think! We give no value to our own opinion, even if it’s intelligent, but we tremble before the opinion of various fools. Up to the last minute, I was afraid of other people’s opinion, but as soon as I listened to myself and decided to live in my own way, my eyes were opened, I overcame my foolish fear, and now I’m happy and wish everyone such happiness.’’
But her train of thought immediately broke off, and she began talking about a new apartment, wallpaper, horses, traveling to Switzerland and Italy. Orlov, however, was weary from driving around to restaurants and shops, and continued to feel the same confusion before himself that I had noticed in him that morning. He smiled, but more out of politeness than pleasure, and when she said something serious, he ironically agreed: ‘‘Oh, yes!’’
‘‘Stepan, you must find a good cook at once,’’ she turned to me.
‘‘No point hurrying with kitchen matters,’’ said Orlov, giving me a cold look. ‘‘We’ll have to move to a new apartment first.’’
He had never kept a cook or horses because, as he put it, he didn’t want to ‘‘install any mess around him,’’ and he tolerated Polya and me in his apartment only out of necessity. The so-called family hearth with its ordinary joys and squabbles offended his taste, as a banality; to be pregnant or have children and talk about them was bad tone, philistinism. And I now found it extremely curious to picture how these two beings would get along in the same apartment—she, housewifely and practical, with her copper pans and dreams of a good cook and horses, and he, who had often said to his friends that, like a good ship of war, the apartment of a decent, clean man should have nothing superfluous in it— no women, no children, no rags, no kitchenware . . .
V
NOW I’LL TELL you what happened the next Thursday. On that day Orlov and Zinaida Fyodorovna dined at Contan’s or Donon’s. Orlov returned home alone, while Zinaida Fyodorovna, as I learned later, went to her old governess on the Petersburg side, to wait out the time while we were having guests. Orlov didn’t want to show her to his friends. I realized it in the morning over coffee, when he began assuring her that, for the sake of her peace, it would be necessary to cancel the Thursdays.
The guests, as usual, arrived at almost the same time.
‘‘And is the lady at home?’’ Kukushkin asked me in a whisper.
‘‘No, sir,’’ I replied.
He went in with sly, unctuous eyes, smiling mysteriously and rubbing his hands from the cold.
‘‘I have the honor of congratulating you,’’ he said to Orlov, his whole body trembling with obsequious, servile laughter. ‘‘I wish you to be fruitful and multiply like the cedars of Lebanon.’’ 12
The guests went to the bedroom and there exercised their wit at the expense of the woman’s slippers, the rug between the two beds, and the gray bed jacket that was hanging on the back of one bed. They found it funny that this stubborn man, who scorned everything ordinary in love, had suddenly been caught in a woman’s net in such a simple and ordinary way.
‘‘What thou hast mocked, that hast thou also served,’’ Kukushkin repeated several times, having, incidentally, the unpleasant affectation of flaunting Church Slavonic texts.13 ‘‘Quiet!’’ he whispered, putting his finger to his lips, as they went from the bedroom to the room next to the study. ‘‘Shhh! Here Margarete dreams of her Faust.’’14
And he rocked with laughter, as if he had said something terribly funny. I peered at Gruzin, expecting that his musical soul would be unable to bear that laughter, but I was mistaken. His kind, lean face beamed with pleasure. When they sat down to play cards, he said, swallowing his R’s and spluttering with laughter, that to attain full family happiness, it now only remained for Georginka to acquire a cherry-wood chibouk and a guitar. Pekarsky chuckled sedately, but it could be seen from his concentrated expression that he found Orlov’s new love story unpleasant. He did not understand what in fact had happened.
‘‘But what about the husband?’’ he asked in perplexity when they had played three rubbers.
‘‘I don’t know,’’ Orlov replied.
Pekarsky combed his big beard with his fingers and fell to thinking and was silent afterwards right up until supper. When they sat down to supper, he said slowly, drawing out each word:
‘‘Generally, excuse me, but I don’t understand the two of you. You could be in love with each other and break the seventh commandment as much as you like—that I understand. Yes, that I understand. But why initiate the husband into your secrets? Was it really necessary?’’
‘‘But does it make any difference?’’
‘‘Hm . . .’’ Pekarsky fell to thinking. ‘‘I’ll tell you this, my gentle friend,’’ he went on with evident mental strain, ‘‘if I ever get married a second time, and you decide to make me a cuckold, do it so that I don’t notice. It’s much more honest to deceive a man than to spoil the order of his life and his reputation. I understand. You both think that by living openly, you are acting with extraordinary honesty and liberalism, but with this...how is it called? . . . with this romanticism I cannot agree.’’
Orlov made no reply. He was out of sorts and did not want to talk. Pekarsky, continuing to be perplexed, drummed the table with his fingers, thought, and said:
‘‘I still don’t understand the two of you. You’re not a student, and she’s not a seamstress. You’re both people of means. I suppose you could arrange a separate apartment for her.’’
‘‘No, I couldn’t. Go and read Turgenev.’’15
‘‘Why should I read him? I already have.’’
‘‘Turgenev teaches in his works that every noble-hearted, honest-minded girl should go to the ends of the earth with the man she loves and serve his idea,’’ Orlov said, narrowing his eyes ironically. ‘‘The end of the world is licentia poëtica: the whole world, with all its ends, is located in the apartment of the man she loves. Therefore, not to live in the same apartment with the woman who loves you—means to reject her in her lofty purpose and not to share her ideals. Yes, my dear fellow, Turgenev wrote this porridge, and now I have to slop it up for him.’’
‘‘I don’t understand what Turgenev has to do with it,’’ Gruzin said softly and shrugged his shoulders. ‘‘But do you remember, Georginka, how, in ‘Three Meetings,’ he’s walking late in the evening somewhere in Italy and suddenly hears: ‘Vieni pensando a me segretamente!’ ’’5 Gruzin sang. ‘‘That’s good!’’