Somewhere doves were cooing and bees were buzzing, flying low from blade to blade over the sparse grass. Overhead, the sky was blue and tender, but I felt terribly sad.

‘Read me some poetry,’ said Zinaida in a low voice, and raised herself on one elbow. ‘I like your reading poetry. You speak it in a sing-song, but I do not mind it, that’s youth. Read me On Georgia’s Hills, only first sit down.’

I sat down, and recited On Georgia’s Hills.

‘“Which it cannot help but love”,’ Zinaida repeated after me. ‘That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth. “Which it cannot help but love” – it would like not to, but cannot help itself!’ She was silent again and suddenly started and stood up. ‘Let’s go. Maidanov is with Mama. He has brought me his poem, but I left him. He is hurt too, now, but what can one do? One day you will discover…only don’t be angry with me.’

She pressed my hand hastily and moved quickly forward. We went back to the lodge.

Maidanov began to recite to us his recently published Murderer, but I did not listen. He shouted his four-foot iambics in a kind of sing-song. The rhymes succeeded each other, ringing like sleigh bells, hollow and shrill, while I could only look at Zinaida, trying to grasp the meaning of her last words.

Or perchance it was some secret rival

That sudden cast his spell on thee

exclaimed Maidanov suddenly in a nasal tone, and my eyes and Zinaida’s met. She lowered hers and blushed slightly. I saw her blush and froze with terror. I was jealous of her before, but only at that instant did the thought that she was in love flash through my mind: ‘My God, she has fallen in love!’

10

From that moment, my real torment began. I racked my brain, I thought of every possibility, and kept a ceaseless though, as far as possible, secret watch on Zinaida. A change had come over her, that was evident. She began to go for long, solitary walks. Sometimes she refused to see her visitors. For hours she sat alone in her room. She had never done this before. I suddenly developed – or it seemed to me that I had developed – tremendous perspicacity.

‘Is it he? Or maybe it is not,’ I used to ask myself, anxiously running over in my mind one admirer after another. I secretly looked upon Count Malevsky (although it made me ashamed of Zinaida to admit this) as more dangerous than the others.

I could not see further than the end of my nose, and probably my secretiveness deceived no one. At any rate, Dr Looshin soon saw through me. Incidentally, he too had altered during this time. He had grown thinner, and though he laughed just as much, his laughter had somehow become shorter, more hollow, more malicious. Where previously there had been light irony and an affectation of cynicism, there was now a nervous irritability which he could not control.

‘Why are you always trailing in and out of here, young man?’ he once said to me when we were alone in the Zasyekins’ drawing-room.