My father was in the habit of riding on horseback every day; he had a
splendid red-roan English horse, with a long, slender neck and long
legs, indefatigable and vicious. Its name was Electric. No one could
ride it except my father. One day he came to me in a kindly frame of
mind, which had not happened with him for a long time: he was preparing
to ride, and had donned his spurs. I began to entreat him to take me
with him.
“Let us, rather, play at leap-frog,”--replied my father,--“for thou wilt
not be able to keep up with me on thy cob.”
“Yes, I shall; I will put on spurs also.”
“Well, come along.”
We set out. I had a shaggy, black little horse, strong on its feet and
fairly spirited; it had to gallop with all its might, it is true, when
Electric was going at a full trot; but nevertheless I did not fall
behind. I have never seen such a horseman as my father. His seat was so
fine and so carelessly-adroit that the horse under him seemed to be
conscious of it and to take pride in it. We rode the whole length of all
the boulevards, reached the Maidens’ Field,[9] leaped over several
enclosures (at first I was afraid to leap, but my father despised timid
people, and I ceased to be afraid), crossed the Moscow river twice;--and
I was beginning to think that we were on our way homeward, the more so
as my father remarked that my horse was tired, when suddenly he turned
away from me in the direction of the Crimean Ford, and galloped along
the shore.--I dashed after him. When he came on a level with a lofty
pile of old beams which lay heaped together, he sprang nimbly from
Electric, ordered me to alight and, handing me the bridle of his horse,
told me to wait for him on that spot, near the beams; then he turned
into a narrow alley and disappeared. I began to pace back and forth
along the shore, leading the horses after me and scolding Electric, who
as he walked kept incessantly twitching his head, shaking himself,
snorting and neighing; when I stood still, he alternately pawed the
earth with his hoof, and squealed and bit my cob on the neck; in a word,
behaved like a spoiled darling, _pur sang_. My father did not return. A
disagreeable humidity was wafted from the river; a fine rain set in and
mottled the stupid, grey beams, around which I was hovering and of which
I was so heartily tired, with tiny, dark spots. Anxiety took possession
of me, but still my father did not come. A Finnish sentry, also all
grey, with a huge, old-fashioned shako, in the form of a pot, on his
head, and armed with a halberd (why should there be a sentry, I thought,
on the shores of the Moscow river?), approached me, and turning his
elderly, wrinkled face to me, he said:
“What are you doing here with those horses, my little gentleman? Hand
them over to me; I’ll hold them.”
I did not answer him; he asked me for some tobacco. In order to rid
myself of him (moreover, I was tortured by impatience), I advanced a few
paces in the direction in which my father had retreated; then I walked
through the alley to the very end, turned a corner, and came to a
standstill. On the street, forty paces distant from me, in front of the
open window of a small wooden house, with his back to me, stood my
father; he was leaning his breast on the window-sill, while in the
house, half concealed by the curtain, sat a woman in a dark gown talking
with my father: the woman was Zinaída.
I stood rooted to the spot in amazement. I must confess that I had in
nowise expected this. My first impulse was to flee. “My father will
glance round,” I thought,--“and then I am lost.”... But a strange
feeling--a feeling more powerful than curiosity, more powerful even than
jealousy, more powerful than fear,--stopped me. I began to stare, I
tried to hear. My father appeared to be insisting upon something.
Zinaída would not consent. I seem to see her face now--sad, serious,
beautiful, and with an indescribable imprint of adoration, grief, love,
and a sort of despair. She uttered monosyllabic words, did not raise her
eyes, and only smiled--submissively and obstinately. From that smile
alone I recognised my former Zinaída. My father shrugged his shoulders,
and set his hat straight on his head--which was always a sign of
impatience with him.... Then the words became audible: “_Vous devez vous
séparer de cette._”... Zinaída drew herself up and stretched out her
hand.... Suddenly, before my very eyes, an incredible thing came to
pass:--all at once, my father raised the riding-whip, with which he had
been lashing the dust from his coat-tails,--and the sound of a sharp
blow on that arm, which was bare to the elbow, rang out. I could hardly
keep from shrieking, but Zinaída started, gazed in silence at my father,
and slowly raising her arm to her lips, kissed the mark which glowed
scarlet upon it.
My father hurled his riding-whip from him, and running hastily up the
steps of the porch, burst into the house.... Zinaída turned round, and
stretching out her arms, and throwing back her head, she also quitted
the window.
My heart swooning with terror, and with a sort of alarmed perplexity, I
darted backward; and dashing through the alley, and almost letting go of
Electric, I returned to the bank of the river.... I could understand
nothing. I knew that my cold and self-contained father was sometimes
seized by fits of wild fury; and yet I could not in the least comprehend
what I had seen.... But I immediately felt that no matter how long I
might live, it would be impossible for me ever to forget that movement,
Zinaída’s glance and smile; that her image, that new image which had
suddenly been presented to me, had forever imprinted itself on my
memory. I stared stupidly at the river and did not notice that my tears
were flowing. “She is being beaten,”--I thought.... “She is being beaten
... beaten....”
“Come, what ails thee?--Give me my horse!”--rang out my father’s voice
behind me.
I mechanically gave him the bridle. He sprang upon Electric ... the
half-frozen horse reared on his hind legs and leaped forward half a
fathom ... but my father speedily got him under control; he dug his
spurs into his flanks and beat him on the neck with his fist.... “Ekh, I
have no whip,”--he muttered.
I remembered the recent swish through the air and the blow of that same
whip, and shuddered.
“What hast thou done with it?”--I asked my father, after waiting a
little.
My father did not answer me and galloped on. I dashed after him. I was
determined to get a look at his face.
“Didst thou get bored in my absence?”--he said through his teeth.
“A little. But where didst thou drop thy whip?”--I asked him again.
My father shot a swift glance at me.--“I did not drop it,”--he said,--“I
threw it away.”--He reflected for a space and dropped his head ... and
then, for the first and probably for the last time, I saw how much
tenderness and compunction his stern features were capable of
expressing.
He set off again at a gallop, and this time I could not keep up with
him; I reached home a quarter of an hour after him.
“That’s what love is,”--I said to myself again, as I sat at night before
my writing-table, on which copy-books and text-books had already begun
to make their appearance,--“that is what passion is!... How is it
possible not to revolt, how is it possible to endure a blow from any one
whomsoever ... even from the hand that is most dear? But evidently it
can be done if one is in love.... And I ... I imagined....”
The last month had aged me greatly, and my love, with all its agitations
and sufferings, seemed to me like something very petty and childish and
wretched in comparison with that other unknown something at which I
could hardly even guess, and which frightened me like a strange,
beautiful but menacing face that one strives, in vain, to get a good
look at in the semi-darkness....
That night I had a strange and dreadful dream. I thought I was entering
a low, dark room.... My father was standing there, riding-whip in hand,
and stamping his feet; Zinaída was crouching in one corner and had a red
mark, not on her arm, but on her forehead ... and behind the two rose up
Byelovzóroff, all bathed in blood, with his pale lips open, and
wrathfully menacing my father.
Two months later I entered the university, and six months afterward my
father died (of an apoplectic stroke) in Petersburg, whither he had just
removed with my mother and myself. A few days before his death my father
had received a letter from Moscow which had agitated him extremely....
He went to beg something of my mother and, I was told, even wept,--he,
my father! On the very morning of the day on which he had the stroke, he
had begun a letter to me in the French language: “My son,”--he wrote to
me,--“fear the love of women, fear that happiness, that poison....”
After his death my mother sent a very considerable sum of money to
Moscow.