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He's not there himself, so you'll have to go in and ask the princesses; and from there go on to the Rasgulyay the coachman Ipatka knows and look up the gypsy Ilyushka, the one who danced at Count Orlov's, you remember, in a white Cossack coat, and bring him along to me." "And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?" asked Nicholas, laughing. "Dear, dear!..."
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.
Kukushkin flattered Orlov's weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blasé ways; to please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary.
At three or four o'clock the party broke up or they went off together out of town, or to Officers' Street, to the house of a certain Varvara Ossipovna, while I retired to my quarters, and was kept awake a long while by coughing and headache. Three weeks after I entered Orlov's service it was Sunday morning, I remember somebody rang the bell. It was not yet eleven, and Orlov was still asleep.
"I've never been at a girls' boarding-school; I never learnt the art." "You are out of humour?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, taking Orlov's hand. "Tell me why. When you are like that, I'm afraid. I don't know whether your head aches or whether you are angry with me. . . ." Again there was a silence lasting several long minutes. "Why have you changed?" she said softly.
I recognised him: it was Orlov's father, the distinguished statesman. I answered that Georgy Ivanitch was not at home. The old man pursed up his lips tightly and looked into space, reflecting, showing me his dried-up, toothless profile. "I'll leave a note," he said; "show me in." He left his goloshes in the hall, and, without taking off his long, heavy fur coat, went into the study.
There were a sound of footsteps. "Father Fyodor, you are not resting?" a bass voice asked from the passage. "No, deacon; come in." Orlov's colleague, the deacon Liubimov, an elderly man with a big bald patch on the top of his head, though his hair was still black and he was still vigorous-looking, with thick black eyebrows like a Georgian's, walked in. He bowed to Father Anastasy and sat down.
Sometimes he would sit down at the piano, play a chord or two, and begin singing softly: "What does the coming day bring to me?" But at once, as though afraid, he would get up and walk from the piano. The visitors usually arrived about ten o'clock. They played cards in Orlov's study, and Polya and I handed them tea.
I entered this Orlov's service on account of his father, a prominent political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I reckoned that, living with the son, I should from the conversations I should hear, and from the letters and papers I should find on the table learn every detail of the father's plans and intentions.
In my time he was serving in Orlov's department; he was his head-clerk, but he said that he should soon exchange into the Department of Justice again.
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