Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

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 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: 'Vous devez vous séparer de cette... ' Zinaida 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 Zinaida 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...

Table of Contents