The so-called domestic hearth with its everyday joys and its petty cares offended his taste as vulgarity; to be with child, or to have children and talk about them, was bad form, like a petty bourgeois.
And I began to feel very curious to see how these two creatures would get on together in one flat -- she, domestic and home-loving with her copper saucepans and her dreams of a good cook and horses; and he, fond of saying to his friends that a decent and orderly man's flat ought, like a warship, to have nothing in it superfluous -- no women, no children, no rags, no kitchen utensils.
Chapter V.
Then I will tell you what happened the following Thursday.
That day Zinaida Fyodorovna dined at Content's or Donon's.
Orlov returned home alone, and Zinaida Fyodorovna, as I learnt afterwards, went to the Petersburg Side to spend with her old governess the time visitors were with us.
Orlov did not care to show her to his friends.
I realised that at breakfast, when he began assuring her that for the sake of her peace of mind it was essential to give up his Thursday evenings.
As usual the visitors arrived at almost the same time.
"Is your mistress at home, too?" Kukushkin asked me in a whisper.
"No, sir," I answered.
He went in with a sly, oily look in his eyes, smiling mysteriously, rubbing his hands, which were cold from the frost.
"I have the honour to congratulate you," he said to Orlov, shaking all over with ingratiating, obsequious laughter. "May you increase and multiply like the cedars of Lebanon."
The visitors went into the bedroom, and were extremely jocose on the subject of a pair of feminine slippers, the rug that had been put down between the two beds, and a grey dressing-jacket that hung at the foot of the bedstead.
They were amused that the obstinate man who despised all the common place details of love had been caught in feminine snares in such a simple and ordinary way.
"He who pointed the finger of scorn is bowing the knee in homage," Kukushkin repeated several times. He had, I may say in parenthesis, an unpleasant habit of adorning his conversation with texts in Church Slavonic. "Sh-sh!" he said as they went from the bedroom into the room next to the study. "Sh-sh!
Here Gretchen is dreaming of her Faust."
He went off into a peal of laughter as though he had said something very amusing.
I watched Gruzin, expecting that his musical soul would not endure this laughter, but I was mistaken.
His thin, good-natured face beamed with pleasure.
When they sat down to play cards, he, lisping and choking with laughter, said that all that "dear George" wanted to complete his domestic felicity was a cherry-wood pipe and a guitar.
Pekarsky laughed sedately, but from his serious expression one could see that Orlov's new love affair was distasteful to him.
He did not understand what had happened exactly.
"But how about the husband?" he asked in perplexity, after they had played three rubbers.
"I don't know," answered Orlov.
Pekarsky combed his big beard with his fingers and sank into thought, and he did not speak again till supper-time.
When they were seated at supper, he began deliberately, drawling every word:
"Altogether, excuse my saying so, I don't understand either of you.
You might love each other and break the seventh commandment to your heart's content--that I understand.
Yes, that's comprehensible.
But why make the husband a party to your secrets?
Was there any need for that?"
"But does it make any difference?"
"Hm! . . . ." Pekarsky mused. "Well, then, let me tell you this, my friend," he went on, evidently thinking hard: "if I ever marry again and you take it into your head to seduce my wife, please do it so that I don't notice it.
It's much more honest to deceive a man than to break up his family life and injure his reputation.
I understand.
You both imagine that in living together openly you are doing something exceptionally honourable and advanced, but I can't agree with that . . . what shall I call it? . . . romantic attitude?"
Orlov made no reply.
He was out of humour and disinclined to talk.
Pekarsky, still perplexed, drummed on the table with his fingers, thought a little, and said:
"I don't understand you, all the same.
You are not a student and she is not a dressmaker.
You are both of you people with means.
I should have thought you might have arranged a separate flat for her."
"No, I couldn't.
Read Turgenev."
"Why should I read him?
I have read him already."
"Turgenev teaches us in his novels that every exalted, noble-minded girl should follow the man she loves to the ends of the earth, and should serve his idea," said Orlov, screwing up his eyes ironically. "The ends of the earth are poetic license; the earth and all its ends can be reduced to the flat of the man she loves. . . .
And so not to live in the same flat with the woman who loves you is to deny her her exalted vocation and to refuse to share her ideals.