bred. My father did not come back. A disagreeable damp mist rose from the river; a fine rain began softly blowing up, and spotting with tiny dark flecks the stupid grey timber-stack, which I kept passing and repassing, and was deadly sick of by now. I was terribly bored, and still my father did not come. A sort of sentry-man, a Fin, grey all over like the timber, and with a huge old-fashioned shako, like a pot, on his head, and with a halberd (and how ever came a sentry, if you think of it, on the banks of the Moskva!) drew near, and turning his wrinkled face, like an old woman’s, towards me, he observed, ‘What are you doing here with the horses, young master? Let me hold them.’
I made him no reply. He asked me for tobacco. To get rid of him (I was in a fret of impatience, too), I took a few steps in the direction in which my father had disappeared, then walked along the little street to the end, turned the corner, and stood still. In the street, forty paces from me, at the open window of a little wooden house, stood my father, his back turned to me; he was leaning forward over the window-sill, and in the house, half hidden by a curtain, sat a woman in a dark dress talking to my father; this woman was Zinaida.
I was petrified. This, I confess, I had never expected. My first impulse was to run away. ‘My father will look round,’ I thought, ‘and I am lost … ’ but a strange feeling – a feeling stronger than curiosity, stronger than jealousy, stronger even than fear – held me there. I began to watch; I strained my ears to listen. It seemed as though my father were insisting on something. Zinaida would not consent. I seem to see her face now – mournful, serious, lovely, and with an inexpressible impress of devotion, grief, love, and a sort of despair – I can find no other word for it. She uttered monosyllables, not raising her eyes, simply smiling – submissively, but without yielding. By that smile alone, I should have known my Zinaida of old days. My father shrugged his shoulders, and straightened his hat on his head, which was always a sign of impatience with him… . Then I caught the words: ‘
My heart sinking with panic, with a sort of awe-struck horror, I rushed back, and running down the lane, almost letting go my hold of Electric, went back to the bank of the river. I could not think clearly of anything. I knew that my cold and reserved father was sometimes seized by fits of fury; and all the same, I could never comprehend what I had just seen… . But I felt at the time that, however long I lived, I could never forget the gesture, the glance, the smile, of Zinaida; that her image, this image so suddenly presented to me, was imprinted for ever on my memory. I stared vacantly at the river, and never noticed that my tears were streaming. ‘She is beaten,’ I was thinking,… ‘beaten … beaten… .’
‘Hullo! what are you doing? Give me the mare!’ I heard my father’s voice saying behind me.
Mechanically I gave him the bridle. He leaped on to Electric … the mare, chill with standing, reared on her haunches, and leaped ten feet away … but my father soon subdued her; he drove the spurs into her sides, and gave her a blow on the neck with his fist… . ‘Ah, I’ve no whip,’ he muttered.
I remembered the swish and fall of the whip, heard so short a time before, and shuddered.
‘Where did you put it?’ I asked my father, after a brief pause.
My father made no answer, and galloped on ahead. I overtook him. I felt that I must see his face.
‘Were you bored waiting for me?’ he muttered through his teeth.
‘A little. Where did you drop your whip?’ I asked again.
My father glanced quickly at me. ‘I didn’t drop it,’ he replied; ‘I threw it away.’ He sank into thought, and dropped his head … and then, for the first, and almost for the last time, I saw how much tenderness and pity his stern features were capable of expressing.
He galloped on again, and this time I could not overtake him; I got home a quarter-of-an-hour after him.
‘That’s love,’ I said to myself again, as I sat at night before my writing-table, on which books and papers had begun to make their appearance; ‘that’s passion!… To think of not revolting, of bearing a blow from any one whatever … even the dearest hand! But it seems one can, if one loves… . While I … I imagined … ’
I had grown much older during the last month; and my love, with all its transports and sufferings, struck me myself as something small and childish and pitiful beside this other unimagined something, which I could hardly fully grasp, and which frightened me like an unknown, beautiful, but menacing face, which one strives in vain to make out clearly in the half-darkness… .
A strange and fearful dream came to me that same night. I dreamed I went into a low dark room… . My father was standing with a whip in his hand, stamping with anger; in the corner crouched Zinaida, and not on her arm, but on her forehead, was a stripe of red … while behind them both towered Byelovzorov, covered with blood; he opened his white lips, and wrathfully threatened my father.
Two months later, I entered the university; and within six months my father died of a stroke in Petersburg, where he had just moved with my mother and me. A few days before his death he received a letter from Moscow which threw him into a violent agitation… . He went to my mother to beg some favour of her: and, I was told, he positively shed tears – he, my father! On the very morning of the day when he was stricken down, he had begun a letter to me in French. ‘
XXII
Four years passed. I had just left the university, and did not know exactly what to do with myself, at what door to knock; I was hanging about for a time with nothing to do. One fine evening I met Meidanov at the theatre. He had got married, and had entered the civil service; but I found no change in him. He fell into ecstasies in just the same superfluous way, and just as suddenly grew depressed again.
‘You know,’ he told me among other things, ‘Madame Dolsky’s here.’
‘What Madame Dolsky?’
‘Can you have forgotten her? – the young Princess Zasyekin whom we were all in love with, and you too. Do you remember at the country-house near Neskutchny gardens?’
‘She married a Dolsky?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is she here, in the theatre?’
‘No: but she’s in Petersburg. She came here a few days ago. She’s going abroad.’
‘What sort of fellow is her husband?’ I asked.
‘A splendid fellow, with property. He’s a colleague of mine in Moscow. You can well understand – after the scandal … you must know all about it … ’ (Meidanov smiled significantly) ‘it was no easy task for her to make a good marriage; there were consequences … but with her cleverness, everything is possible. Go and see her; she’ll be delighted to see you. She’s prettier than ever.’
Meidanov gave me Zinaida’s address. She was staying at the Hotel Demut. Old memories were astir within me… . I determined next day to go to see my former ‘flame.’ But some business happened to turn up; a week passed, and then another, and when at last I went to the Hotel Demut and asked for Madame Dolsky, I learnt that four days before, she had died, almost suddenly, in childbirth.
I felt a sort of stab at my heart. The thought that I might have seen her, and had not seen her, and should never see her – that bitter thought stung me with all the force of overwhelming reproach. ‘She is dead!’ I repeated, staring stupidly at the hall-porter. I slowly made my way back to the street, and walked on without knowing myself where I was going. All the past swam up and rose at once before me. So this was the solution, this was the goal to which that young, ardent, brilliant life had striven, all haste and agitation! I mused on this; I fancied those dear features, those eyes, those curls – in the narrow box, in the damp underground darkness – lying here, not far from me – while I was still alive, and, maybe, a few paces from my father… . I thought all this; I strained my imagination, and yet all the while the lines:
‘From lips indifferent of her death I heard, Indifferently I listened to it, too,’
were echoing in my heart. O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe – even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art
