Fathers and Children Part 40

'Children,' she said aloud, 'what do you say, is love a purely imaginary feeling?'

But neither Katya nor Arkady even understood her. They were shy with her; the fragment of conversation they had involuntarily overheard haunted their minds. But Anna Sergyevna soon set their minds at rest; and it was not difficult for her--she had set her own mind at rest.

CHAPTER XXVII

Bazarov's old parents were all the more overjoyed by their son's arrival, as it was quite unexpected. Arina Vlasyevna was greatly excited, and kept running backwards and forwards in the house, so that Va.s.sily Ivanovitch compared her to a 'hen partridge'; the short tail of her abbreviated jacket did, in fact, give her something of a birdlike appearance. He himself merely growled and gnawed the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, or, clutching his neck with his fingers, turned his head round, as though he were trying whether it were properly screwed on, then all at once he opened his wide mouth and went off into a perfectly noiseless chuckle.

'I've come to you for six whole weeks, governor,' Bazarov said to him.

'I want to work, so please don't hinder me now.'

'You shall forget my face completely, if you call that hindering you!'

answered Va.s.sily Ivanovitch.

He kept his promise. After installing his son as before in his study, he almost hid himself away from him, and he kept his wife from all superfluous demonstrations of tenderness. 'On Enyusha's first visit, my dear soul,' he said to her, 'we bothered him a little; we must be wiser this time.' Arina Vlasyevna agreed with her husband, but that was small compensation since she saw her son only at meals, and was now absolutely afraid to address him. 'Enyushenka,' she would say sometimes--and before he had time to look round, she was nervously fingering the ta.s.sels of her reticule and faltering, 'Never mind, never mind, I only----' and afterwards she would go to Va.s.sily Ivanovitch and, her cheek in her hand, would consult him: 'If you could only find out, darling, which Enyusha would like for dinner to-day--cabbage-broth or beetroot-soup?'--'But why didn't you ask him yourself?'--'Oh, he will get sick of me!' Bazarov, however, soon ceased to shut himself up; the fever of work fell away, and was replaced by dreary boredom or vague restlessness. A strange weariness began to show itself in all his movements; even his walk, firm, bold and strenuous, was changed. He gave up walking in solitude, and began to seek society; he drank tea in the drawing-room, strolled about the kitchen-garden with Va.s.sily Ivanovitch, and smoked with him in silence; once even asked after Father Alexey. Va.s.sily Ivanovitch at first rejoiced at this change, but his joy was not long-lived. 'Enyusha's breaking my heart,' he complained in secret to his wife; 'it's not that he's discontented or angry--that would be nothing; he's sad, he's sorrowful--that's what's so terrible. He's always silent. If he'd only abuse us; he's growing thin, he's lost his colour.'--'Mercy on us, mercy on us!' whispered the old woman; 'I would put an amulet on his neck, but, of course, he won't allow it.' Va.s.sily Ivanovitch several times attempted in the most circ.u.mspect manner to question Bazarov about his work, about his health, and about Arkady.... But Bazarov's replies were reluctant and casual; and, once noticing that his father was trying gradually to lead up to something in conversation, he said to him in a tone of vexation: 'Why do you always seem to be walking round me on tiptoe? That way's worse than the old one.'--'There, there, I meant nothing!' poor Va.s.sily Ivanovitch answered hurriedly. So his diplomatic hints remained fruitless. He hoped to awaken his son's sympathy one day by beginning _a propos_ of the approaching emanc.i.p.ation of the peasantry, to talk about progress; but the latter responded indifferently: 'Yesterday I was walking under the fence, and I heard the peasant boys here, instead of some old ballad, bawling a street song. That's what progress is.'

Sometimes Bazarov went into the village, and in his usual bantering tone entered into conversation with some peasant: 'Come,' he would say to him, 'expound your views on life to me, brother; you see, they say all the strength and future of Russia lies in your hands, a new epoch in history will be started by you--you give us our real language and our laws.'

The peasant either made no reply, or articulated a few words of this sort, 'Well, we'll try ... because, you see, to be sure....'

'You explain to me what your _mir_ is,' Bazarov interrupted; 'and is it the same _mir_ that is said to rest on three fishes?'

'That, little father, is the earth that rests on three fishes,' the peasant would declare soothingly, in a kind of patriarchal, simple-hearted sing-song; 'and over against ours, that's to say, the _mir_, we know there's the master's will; wherefore you are our fathers. And the stricter the master's rule, the better for the peasant.'

After listening to such a reply one day, Bazarov shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and turned away, while the peasant sauntered slowly homewards.

'What was he talking about?' inquired another peasant of middle age and surly aspect, who at a distance from the door of his hut had been following his conversation with Bazarov.--'Arrears? eh?'

'Arrears, no indeed, mate!' answered the first peasant, and now there was no trace of patriarchal singsong in his voice; on the contrary, there was a certain scornful gruffness to be heard in it: 'Oh, he clacked away about something or other; wanted to stretch his tongue a bit. Of course, he's a gentleman; what does he understand?'

'What should he understand!' answered the other peasant, and jerking back their caps and pushing down their belts, they proceeded to deliberate upon their work and their wants. Alas! Bazarov, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, Bazarov, who knew how to talk to peasants (as he had boasted in his dispute with Pavel Petrovitch), did not in his self-confidence even suspect that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.

He found employment for himself at last, however. One day Va.s.sily Ivanovitch bound up a peasant's wounded leg before him, but the old man's hands trembled, and he could not manage the bandages; his son helped him, and from time to time began to take a share in his practice, though at the same time he was constantly sneering both at the remedies he himself advised and at his father, who hastened to make use of them. But Bazarov's jeers did not in the least perturb Va.s.sily Ivanovitch; they were positively a comfort to him. Holding his greasy dressing-gown across his stomach with two fingers, and smoking his pipe, he used to listen with enjoyment to Bazarov; and the more malicious his sallies, the more good-humouredly did his delighted father chuckle, showing every one of his black teeth. He used even to repeat these sometimes flat or pointless retorts, and would, for instance, for several days constantly without rhyme or reason, reiterate, 'Not a matter of the first importance!' simply because his son, on hearing he was going to matins, had made use of that expression. 'Thank G.o.d! he has got over his melancholy!' he whispered to his wife; 'how he gave it to me to-day, it was splendid!' Moreover, the idea of having such an a.s.sistant excited him to ecstasy, filled him with pride. 'Yes, yes,' he would say to some peasant woman in a man's cloak, and a cap shaped like a horn, as he handed her a bottle of Goulard's extract or a box of white ointment, 'you ought to be thanking G.o.d, my good woman, every minute that my son is staying with me; you will be treated now by the most scientific, most modern method. Do you know what that means? The Emperor of the French, Napoleon, even, has no better doctor.' And the peasant woman, who had come to complain that she felt so sort of queer all over (the exact meaning of these words she was not able, however, herself to explain), merely bowed low and rummaged in her bosom, where four eggs lay tied up in the corner of a towel.

Bazarov once even pulled out a tooth for a pa.s.sing pedlar of cloth; and though this tooth was an average specimen, Va.s.sily Ivanovitch preserved it as a curiosity, and incessantly repeated, as he showed it to Father Alexey, 'Just look, what a fang! The force Yevgeny has! The pedlar seemed to leap into the air. If it had been an oak, he'd have rooted it up!'

'Most promising!' Father Alexey would comment at last, not knowing what answer to make, and how to get rid of the ecstatic old man.

One day a peasant from a neighbouring village brought his brother to Va.s.sily Ivanovitch, ill with typhus. The unhappy man, lying flat on a truss of straw, was dying; his body was covered with dark patches, he had long ago lost consciousness. Va.s.sily Ivanovitch expressed his regret that no one had taken steps to procure medical aid sooner, and declared there was no hope. And, in fact, the peasant did not get his brother home again; he died in the cart.

Three days later Bazarov came into his father's room and asked him if he had any caustic.

'Yes; what do you want it for?'

'I must have some ... to burn a cut.'

'For whom?'

'For myself.'

'What, yourself? Why is that? What sort of a cut? Where is it?'

'Look here, on my finger. I went to-day to the village, you know, where they brought that peasant with typhus fever. They were just going to open the body for some reason or other, and I've had no practice of that sort for a long while.'

'Well?'

'Well, so I asked the district doctor about it; and so I dissected it.'

Va.s.sily Ivanovitch all at once turned quite white, and, without uttering a word, rushed to his study, from which he returned at once with a bit of caustic in his hand. Bazarov was about to take it and go away.

'For mercy's sake,' said Va.s.sily Ivanovitch, 'let me do it myself.'

Bazarov smiled. 'What a devoted pract.i.tioner!'

'Don't laugh, please. Show me your finger. The cut is not a large one.

Do I hurt?'

'Press harder; don't be afraid.'

Va.s.sily Ivanovitch stopped. 'What do you think, Yevgeny; wouldn't it be better to burn it with hot iron?'

'That ought to have been done sooner; the caustic even is useless, really, now. If I've taken the infection, it's too late now.'

'How ... too late ...' Va.s.sily Ivanovitch could scarcely articulate the words.

'I should think so! It's more than four hours ago.'

Va.s.sily Ivanovitch burnt the cut a little more. 'But had the district doctor no caustic?'

'No.'

'How was that, good Heavens? A doctor not have such an indispensable thing as that!'

'You should have seen his lancets,' observed Bazarov as he walked away.

Up till late that evening, and all the following day, Va.s.sily Ivanovitch kept catching at every possible excuse to go into his son's room; and though far from referring to the cut--he even tried to talk about the most irrelevant subjects--he looked so persistently into his face, and watched him in such trepidation, that Bazarov lost patience and threatened to go away. Va.s.sily Ivanovitch gave him a promise not to bother him, the more readily as Arina Vlasyevna, from whom, of course, he kept it all secret, was beginning to worry him as to why he did not sleep, and what had come over him. For two whole days he held himself in, though he did not at all like the look of his son, whom he kept watching stealthily, ... but on the third day, at dinner, he could bear it no longer. Bazarov sat with downcast looks, and had not touched a single dish.

'Why don't you eat, Yevgeny?' he inquired, putting on an expression of the most perfect carelessness. 'The food, I think, is very nicely cooked.'

'I don't want anything, so I don't eat.'

'Have you no appet.i.te? And your head?' he added timidly; 'does it ache?'

'Yes. Of course, it aches.'

Arina Vlasyevna sat up and was all alert.