My father used every day to ride out on horse-back. He had a splendid
English mare, a chestnut piebald, with a long slender neck and long
legs, an inexhaustible and vicious beast. Her name was Electric. No one
could ride her except my father. One day he came up to me in a good
humour, a frame of mind in which I had not seen him for a long while;
he was getting ready for his ride, and had already put on his spurs. I
began entreating him to take me with him.
“We’d much better have a game of leap-frog,” my father replied. “You’ll
never keep up with me on your cob.”
“Yes, I will; I’ll put on spurs too.”
“All right, come along then.”
We set off. I had a shaggy black horse, strong, and fairly spirited. It
is true it had to gallop its utmost, when Electric went at full trot,
still I was not left behind. I have never seen any one ride like my
father; he had such a fine carelessly easy seat, that it seemed that
the horse under him was conscious of it, and proud of its rider. We
rode through all the boulevards, reached the “Maidens’ Field,” jumped
several fences (at first I had been afraid to take a leap, but my
father had a contempt for cowards, and I soon ceased to feel fear),
twice crossed the river Moskva, and I was under the impression that we
were on our way home, especially as my father of his own accord
observed that my horse was tired, when suddenly he turned off away from
me at the Crimean ford, and galloped along the river-bank. I rode after
him. When he had reached a high stack of old timber, he slid quickly
off Electric, told me to dismount, and giving me his horse’s bridle,
told me to wait for him there at the timber-stack, and, turning off
into a small street, disappeared. I began walking up and down the
river-bank, leading the horses, and scolding Electric, who kept
pulling, shaking her head, snorting and neighing as she went; and when
I stood still, never failed to paw the ground, and whining, bite my cob
on the neck; in fact she conducted herself altogether like a spoilt
thorough-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 Zinaïda.
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. Zinaïda 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 Zinaïda 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: “_Vous devez
vous séparer de cette…_” Zinaïda sat up, and stretched out her arm….
Suddenly, before my very eyes, the impossible happened. My father
suddenly lifted the whip, with which he had been switching the dust off
his coat, and I heard a sharp blow on that arm, bare to the elbow. I
could scarcely restrain myself from crying out; while Zinaïda
shuddered, looked without a word at my father, and slowly raising her
arm to her lips, kissed the streak of red upon it. My father flung away
the whip, and running quickly up the steps, dashed into the house….
Zinaïda turned round, and with outstretched arms and downcast head, she
too moved away from the window.
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 Zinaïda; 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 Zinaïda, 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. “My son,” he
wrote to me, “fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison….”
After his death, my mother sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow.