“Recite some poetry to me,”—said Zinaída in a low voice, leaning on her elbow.—“I like to hear you recite verses. You make them go in a sing-song, but that does not matter, it is youthful. Recite to me: ‘On the Hills of Georgia.’—Only, sit down first.”
I sat down and recited, “On the Hills of Georgia.”
“‘That it is impossible not to love,’”—repeated Zinaída.—“That is why poetry is so nice; it says to us that which does not exist, and which is not only better than what does exist, but even more like the truth.... ‘That it is impossible not to love’?—I would like to, but cannot!”—Again she fell silent for a space, then suddenly started and rose to her feet.—“Come along. Maidánoff is sitting with mamma; he brought his poem to me, but I left him. He also is embittered now ... how can it be helped? Some day you will find out ... but you must not be angry with me!”
Zinaída hastily squeezed my hand, and ran on ahead. We returned to the wing. Maidánoff set to reading us his poem of “The Murderer,” which had only just been printed, but I did not listen. He shrieked out his four-footed iambics in a sing-song voice; the rhymes alternated and jingled like sleigh-bells, hollow and loud; but I kept staring all the while at Zinaída, and striving to understand the meaning of her strange words.
“Or, perchance, a secret rival
Has unexpectedly subjugated thee?”
suddenly exclaimed Maidánoff through his nose—and my eyes and Zinaída’s met. She dropped hers and blushed faintly. I saw that she was blushing, and turned cold with fright. I had been jealous before, but only at that moment did the thought that she had fallen in love flash through my mind. “My God! She is in love!”
X
My real tortures began from that moment. I cudgelled my brains, I pondered and pondered again, and watched Zinaída importunately, but secretly, as far as possible. A change had taken place in her, that was evident. She took to going off alone to walk, and walked a long while. Sometimes she did not show herself to her visitors; she sat for hours together in her chamber. This had not been her habit hitherto. Suddenly I became—or it seemed to me that I became—extremely penetrating. “Is it he? Or is it not he?”—I asked myself, as in trepidation I mentally ran from one of her admirers to another. Count Malévsky (although I felt ashamed to admit it for Zinaída’s sake) privately seemed to me more dangerous than the others.
My powers of observation extended no further than the end of my own nose, and my dissimulation probably failed to deceive any one; at all events, Doctor Lúshin speedily saw through me. Moreover, he also had undergone a change of late; he had grown thin, he laughed as frequently as ever, but somehow it was in a duller, more spiteful, a briefer way;—an involuntary, nervous irritability had replaced his former light irony and feigned cynicism.
“Why are you forever tagging on here, young man?”—he said to me one day, when he was left alone with me in the Zasyékins’ drawing-room. (The young Princess had not yet returned from her stroll and the shrill voice of the old Princess was resounding in the upper story; she was wrangling with her maid.)—“You ought to be studying your lessons, working while you are young;—but instead of that, what are you doing?”