First Love

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.