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Updated: May 13, 2025
As I was well aware that my mother's anxiety about my studies was confined to these few words, I did not feel it necessary to make any rejoinder; but after morning tea was over, my father took me by the arm, and turning into the garden with me, forced me to tell him all I had seen at the Zasyekins'. A curious influence my father had over me, and curious were the relations existing between us.
'Nor her father either, rejoined my father. 'He was cultivated indeed, but a fool. My mother sighed and sank into thought. My father said no more. I felt very uncomfortable during this conversation. After dinner I went into the garden, but without my gun. I swore to myself that I would not go near the Zasyekins' garden, but an irresistible force drew me thither, and not in vain.
But he, too, had changed of late; he had grown thin, he laughed as often, but his laugh seemed more hollow, more spiteful, shorter, an involuntary nervous irritability took the place of his former light irony and assumed cynicism. 'Why are you incessantly hanging about here, young man? he said to me one day, when we were left alone together in the Zasyekins' drawing-room.
'My father, before all, and above all, desired to live, and lived.... Perhaps he had a presentiment that he would not have long to enjoy the 'savour' of life: he died at forty-two. I described my evening at the Zasyekins' minutely to my father. Half attentively, half carelessly, he listened to me, sitting on a garden seat, drawing in the sand with his cane.
On the evening of the same day the usual guests were assembled at the Zasyekins'. I was among them. The conversation turned on Meidanov's poem. Zinaida expressed genuine admiration of it. 'But do you know what? she said to him. 'If I were a poet, I would choose quite different subjects.
I had grown used to many things of late; I had learned much from what I had seen at the Zasyekins; their disorderly ways, tallow candle-ends, broken knives and forks, grumpy Vonifaty, and shabby maid-servants, the manners of the old princess all their strange mode of life no longer struck me.... But what I was dimly discerning now in Zinaida, I could never get used to.... 'An adventuress! my mother had said of her one day.
'The time has come! I muttered between my teeth; and buttoning myself up to the throat, and even pulling my sleeves up, I went into the garden. I had already fixed on the spot from which to keep watch. At the end of the garden, at the point where the fence, separating our domain from the Zasyekins, joined the common wall, grew a pine-tree, standing alone.
He turned his back on me and walked rapidly away. I looked after him; he disappeared through the gates. I saw his hat moving along beside the fence; he went into the Zasyekins'. He stayed there not more than an hour, but then departed at once for the town, and did not return home till evening. After dinner I went myself to the Zasyekins'. In the drawing-room I found only the old princess.
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