Part 13

"Do you dislike the conversation? Then let us philosophise no more, but 'permit nature to waft upon us the silence of sleep,' to quote Pushkin."

"Pushkin never said any such thing," objected Arkady.

"Then, if he did not, he ought, being a poet, to have done so. Perhaps he had served in the army?"

"Never did he serve in the army."

"Indeed? Why, in his every line we come across 'To battle, to battle, for the honour of Russia!'"

"That is a mere invention on your part. The statement is an absolute calumny."

"A calumny? What matters a calumny? What is there in the term to be afraid of? Slander a man as much as you like, yet for himself he will hear things twenty times worse."

"Suppose we sleep," said Arkady irritably.

"With pleasure," Bazarov replied.

Nevertheless neither succeeded in the effort, for almost every sleep-destroying sentiment happened to be in the ascendant. So, after five minutes of such ineffectual striving, both opened their eyes, and lay mutely gazing about then.

"Look!" cried Arkady after a pause. "Do you see that withered maple leaf fluttering to the ground? Are not its movements exactly like those of a butterfly? Strange that an object so joyous and full of life should be able so to counterfeit an object mournful and dead!"

"My friend," protested Bazarov, "let me make at least _this_ request of you: that you do not talk in 'beautiful language.'"

"I talk as I am able. I decline to be domineered over. Should a thought chance to enter my head, why should I not express it?"

"Similarly am I at liberty to express the thought that to talk in 'beautiful language' is sheerly indecent."

"Indecent? Then swearing is _not_ indecent?"

"Aha! I perceive you still to be minded to follow in your uncle's footsteps. How the idiot would have rejoiced if he could have heard you!"

"_What_ did you call Paul Petrovitch?"

"I called him merely what he is--merely an idiot."

"Have done!" shouted Arkady.

"Therein I detect the tie of blood," said Bazarov calmly. "It is a very stubborn factor, I have noticed, in some people. A man may abjure everything else, and cut himself adrift from every other prejudice, yet still remain powerless to confess that the brother who habitually steals his shirts is a thief. You see, the difficulty lies in the word 'my.' Is not that so?"

"No. It was from a sense of justice, rather than from a sense of kinship, that I spoke. But since you have no understanding of the former, as an instinct which you simply do not possess, you are not in a position to pass judgment upon such a feeling."

"In other words, 'I, Arkady Kirsanov, am altogether above your comprehension,' Well, I make mute obeisance to that."

"Come, come, Evgenii! We shall end by quarrelling."

"Oh that you _would_ do me the favour to quarrel! We could have a real set-to _à outrance_, and with our coats off."

"To the end that----?"

"To the end that we might rend one another in pieces. Why not? Here, amid the hay, in this idyllic setting, far from the madding crowd and every human eye, it would be not at all a bad thing. No, you shall _not_ make it up with me! Rather will I seize you by the throat!"

As he extended his long, sharp fingers, Arkady rolled over and prepared jestingly to grapple with his assailant. But the next moment the sight of Bazarov's face, with its expression of malice and the non-jesting menace which lurked in the twisted smile and the flashing eyes, gave him a shock, and filled him with involuntary awe.

"_This_, then, is where you have got to!" cried Vasili Ivanitch from behind them as, vested in a home-made cotton pea-jacket and a home-made straw hat, the old military doctor suddenly confronted the pair. "I have been searching for you everywhere, and certainly you have chosen a capital spot, and are engaged also in a capital occupation--in the occupation of lying on the earth and gazing at the heavens. For my part, I believe that such an occupation can have its uses."

"I gaze at the heavens only when I am going to sneeze," said Bazarov. Then, turning to Arkady, he added in an undertone: "Forgive me if I hurt you."

"Do not mention it," was Arkady's rejoinder in a similar undertone, as covertly he pressed his friend's hand.

Shocks of such a kind, however, were bound, in time, to react upon their friendship.

"As I look at you, young gentlemen," Vasili Ivanitch continued as, nodding his head, he rested his hands upon a crooked stick, his own manufacture, which had a Turk's head for a handle, "I cannot sufficiently admire you. What strength you embody! How you speak of the flower of youth, of capacity, and of talent! You resemble Castor and Pollux themselves."

"To think of your flaunting your mythology like that!" said Bazarov. "At the same time, you must have been a fine Latin scholar in your day. In fact, did not you once receive a silver medal for an essay?"

"The Dioscuri, the Dioscuri themselves!" continued the old man ecstatically.

"Come, come, father! Do not play the fool,"

"Ah, well! No, I have not sought you out to pay you compliments: I have come to inform the pair of you that dinner is nearly ready, and also to give you, Evgenii, a warning. I know that, as a man of sense, as well as a man well versed in the world, you will be charitable. The case is this. This morning your mother took it into her head to organise a thanksgiving ceremony on the occasion of your return.--No, do not think that I am inviting you to the ceremony: on the contrary, it is over. All that I am going to say is that Father Alexis----"

"The priest?"

"Yes, and our private confessor. Well, this Father Alexis is going to dine with us, even though I had not expected it, and it was not my suggestion, but merely an arrangement which has come about somehow--probably through his having failed to understand me aright. Not that we look upon him as anything but a man of rectitude and good sense."

"Surely you do not mean to imply that he is likely to devour my portion of the food, do you?"

Vasili Ivanitch burst out laughing.

"Ha, ha, ha!" he cried.

"I feel easy, then," continued Bazarov. "In fact, never do I mind with whom I sit at table."

Vasili Ivanitch's face brightened at once.

"I felt sure of that in advance," he said. "Yes, I knew that you, a young man, are as superior to prejudice as I am at sixty-two" (Vasili had none the less shrunk from confessing that he had wished for the thanksgiving ceremony as much as his wife had, since his piety was fully equal to hers). "In any case Father Alexis would like to make your acquaintance; while you, for your part, will very likely take to him, seeing that he not only plays cards, but also (though this is quite between ourselves) smokes a pipe!"

"Indeed? After dinner, then, we will have a game, and I will despoil him utterly."

"Ha, ha, ha! We shall see, we shall see."

"Then at times you hark back to old days?" Bazarov asked with a tinge of surprise.

Vasili Ivanitch's bronzed cheeks took on a faint flush.

"For shame, Evgenii!" he muttered. "Remember that the past is the past. Nevertheless, even in this gentleman's presence I am ready to confess that in my youth I had my addictions, and that, since, I have paid for them. But how hot the weather is! Let me seat myself beside you; though I hope that, in doing so, I shall not interrupt your conversation?"

"By no means," replied Arkady with alacrity.

Vasili Ivanitch subsided with a grunt and the remark:

"Your _logement_ reminds me of my military bivouacking days--this rick being a dressing-station." There followed a sigh. "Aye, many and many an experience have I had in my time. For instance, let me tell you a curious story about the black death in Bessarabia."

"When you received the order of St. Vladimir?" said Bazarov. "Yes, I know the story. But why do you never wear the badge of the order?"

"As I have told you, I care not a jot for appearances," protested Vasili Ivanitch (though only on the previous day had he had the red riband of the order removed from his coat). He then embarked upon the story.

"Evgenii has gone to sleep," presently he whispered to Arkady with a good-humoured wink and a pointing finger. "Come, come, Evgenii!" he added in a louder tone. "It is time to get up! Time for dinner!"

Father Alexis--a stout, good-looking man with thick, well-combed hair and an embroidered girdle over a lilac cassock--proved a clever, resourceful guest who, taking the initiative as regards shaking hands with Arkady and Bazarov (somehow he seemed to divine that they did not require his blessing), bore himself, in general, with complete absence of restraint, and, while neither demeaning himself nor imposing general constraint, made merry over scholastic Latin, defended his archbishop, quaffed a couple of glasses of wine (refusing a third), and accepted one of Arkady's cigars, though, instead of smoking it, he put it into his pocket to take home with him. The only thing that was at all unpleasant was the fact that every now and then, on raising a stealthy hand to brush from his face a fly, he, in lieu of doing so, crushed the insect flat!

Dinner over, he seated himself with modest zest at the card-table, and ended by despoiling Bazarov of two-and-a-half roubles in paper money (this rural establishment took no account of the system of computing cash in silver). During the game the hostess sat beside her son with her cheek resting on her hand as usual, and only rose from the table when it became necessary to order further relays of refreshment. Yet to caress Bazarov was more than she dared do; nor did he give her the least encouragement in that direction; in addition to which Vasili Ivanitch further restrained her ardour by whispering at intervals: "Do not worry our Evgenii. Young men do not like that sort of thing." Also, hardly need it be said that the dinner of which the company had just partaken had been of the usual sumptuousness, seeing that at break of day Timotheitch had set out for Circassian beef, and that the _starosta_ also had galloped in quest of trout, eels, and crabs, while a sum of forty-two kopecks had been paid to peasant women for mushrooms. Arina Vlasievna's eyes, fixed immovably upon Bazarov, had in them something more than tenderness and affection. In them there were also sadness, curiosity, a touch of apprehension, and a kind of painful deference. Yet never did he mark their expression, since never did he turn in her direction, save to put to her the curtest of questions, and, once, to ask her to lay her hand in his, "for luck." On the latter occasion she slipped her plump fingers into his hard, capacious palm, waited a little, and then asked him:

"Has that helped you at all in your play?"

"It has not," he replied with a contemptuous grimace. "On the contrary, things are even worse than they were before."

"Yes, the cards seem to be against you," remarked Father Alexis with an assumed air of sympathy as he stroked his handsome beard.

"But beware of the Code Napoleon, my father," observed Vasili Ivanitch as he played an ace. "Beware of the Code Napoleon."

"Which, in the end, brought Napoleon to St. Helena," retorted the father as he trumped the ace.

"A glass of currant wine, Eniushka dear?" asked Arina Vlasievna.

Bazarov replied with a shrug of his shoulders.

Next day he said to Arkady:

"To-morrow I must depart. The place wearies me, for I wish to work, and it is impossible to do so here. I will come to your place, I think, for all my chemical preparations are there. Moreover, one can at least lock one's door at your place; whereas here, though my father keeps saying, 'My study is entirely at your disposal, and no one shall disturb you,' he himself is never absent for a moment. And, for that matter, I should be ashamed to lock him outside, or my mother either. Sometimes I can hear her groaning in the next room. Yet no sooner do I go out to her than I find that I have not a word to say."

"She will be much distressed at your departure," said Arkady. "And so will he."

"But I intend to return."

"Exactly when?"

"When I am on my way back to St. Petersburg."

"I am particularly sorry for your mother."

"Why so? Has she been stuffing you with fruit?" Arkady lowered his eyes.

"You do not know her," he said. "She is not only a good woman, but also a very wise one. This morning I had half an hour's very practical and interesting talk with her."

"A talk in which she told you all about me?"

"We spoke of other topics besides yourself."

"Possibly. Possibly, too, you, as an outsider, may see things clearer than I do. Yet when a woman can talk for half an hour it is a good sign, and I will depart as I have said."

"But you will not find it easy to break the news to her, for her plans for us extend over a couple of weeks."

"No, it may not prove easy, as you say; and the less so since the devil led me to vex my father this morning. It was like this. A few days ago he had one of his serfs flogged, and therein did rightly. No, you need not look at me with such indignation. I say my father did rightly for the reason that the peasant in question had proved himself to be an arrant thief and drunkard. Unfortunately, my father had not expected me to get to hear of the occurrence; wherefore he was the more put out when he found that I had done so. Well, now his vexation will be twofold! However, no matter. He will get over it before long."

Yet, though Bazarov had said "No matter," he let the whole of the rest of the day elapse before he could make up his mind to acquaint Vasili Ivanitch with his intention. Finally, just as he was saying good-night to his father in the study, he observed with a prolonged yawn:

"By the way, I had almost forgotten to request you to have our horses sent forward to Thedot's."

Vasili Ivanitch looked thunderstruck.

"Then is Monsieur Kirsanov leaving us?" he inquired.

"Yes, and I am going with him."

Vasili Ivanitch fidgeted for a moment or two.

"You say that you are going with him?" he murmured.

"Yes. I _must_ go. So pray have the horses sent forward as requested."

"I--I will, I will," the old man stuttered. "So they are to go to Thedot's? Yes, yes, very well. Only, only--is there any particular reason for this change of plan?"

"There is. I am engaged to pay Arkady a short visit. That done, I will return to you."

"Only to be a _short_ visit? Good!" And Vasili Ivanitch pulled out his pocket-handkerchief, and blew his nose. In doing so, he bent his head very low--almost to the ground. "Well, well! Things shall be as you desire. Yet we had hoped that you would have stayed with us a little longer. Three days only! Three days after three years of absence! Ah, that is not much, Evgenii--it is not much!"

"But I tell you I intend to return soon. You see, I _must_ go."

"You have no choice, eh? Very well, very well. Of course, engagements must be kept. Yes, yes; of course they must be kept. And I am to send the horses forward? Very good. Naturally, Arina and I had not altogether looked for this. Only to-day she has been to a neighbour to beg flowers for your room."

Nor of the fact that, each morning, he had gone downstairs in his slippers to confer with Timotheitch; nor of the fact that, producing, with tremulous fingers, one ragged banknote after another, he had commissioned his henchman to make various purchases with special reference to the question of eatables (in particular, of a certain red wine which he had noticed the young men to like); no, of none of these facts did Vasili Ivanitch make any mention.

"The greatest thing in the world is one's freedom," he went on. "I, too, make it my rule. Never should one let oneself be hampered or----"

A sudden break occurred in his voice, and he made for the door.

"I promise you that we will return soon, my father. I give you my word of honour upon that."

But Vasili Ivanitch did not look round--he just waved his hand and departed. Mounting to the bedroom, he found Arina asleep, so started to say his prayers in an undertone, for fear of awaking her. But at once she opened her eyes.

"In that you, Vasili Ivanitch?" she asked.

"Yes, mother."

"Have you just left Eniusha? Do you know, I am anxious about him. Does he sleep comfortably on the sofa? To-day I told Anfisushka to lay him out your travelling mattress and the new pillows. Also, I would have given him our feather bed had he not disliked soft lying."

"Do not fret, mother dear. He is quite comfortable. 'Lord, pardon us sinners!'" And Vasili Ivanitch went on with his prayers. Yet his heart was full of an aching compassion for his old companion; nor did he want to tell her overnight of the sorrow which was awaiting her on the morrow.

Next day, therefore, Arkady and Bazarov departed. From earliest morn an air of woe pervaded the household. Anfisushka let fall some crockery, and Thedika's perturbation ended in his taking off his shoes. As for Vasili Ivanitch, he fussed about, and made a brave show--he talked in loud tones, and stamped his feet upon the floor as he walked; but his face had suddenly fallen in, and his glance could not meet that of his son. Meanwhile Arina Vlasievna indulged in quiet weeping. Indeed, but for the fact that her husband had spent two hours that morning in comforting her, she would have broken down completely, and lost all self-control.

But at last, when, after reiterated promises to return within, at most, a month, Bazarov had freed himself from the arms which sought to detain him, and entered the _tarantass_; when the horses had started, and their collar-bow had begun to tinkle, and the wheels to revolve; when to gaze after the vehicle any longer had become useless, and the dust had subsided, and Timotheitch, bent and tottering, had crawled back into his pantry; when the old couple found themselves alone in a house which seemed suddenly to have grown as dishevelled and as decrepit as they--then, ah, then did Vasili Ivanitch desist from his brief show of waving his handkerchief in the verandah, and sink into a chair, and drop his head upon his breast.

"He has gone for ever, he has gone for ever," he muttered. "He has gone because he found the life here tedious, and once more I am as lonely as the sand of the desert!"

These words he kept repeating again and again; and, each time that he did so, he raised his hand, and pointed into the distance.

But presently Arina Vlasievna approached him, and, pressing her grey head to his, said:

"Never mind, my Vasia. True, our son has broken away from us; he is like a falcon--he has flown hither, he has flown thither, as he willed: but you and I, like lichen in a hollow tree, are still side by side, we are not parted.... And ever I shall be the same to you, as you will be the same to me."

Taking his hands from his face, Vasili Ivanitch embraced his old comrade, his wife, as never--no, not even during the days of his courtship--he had done before. And thus she comforted him.

[1] Alexander Vasilievitch Suvorov (1729-1800), the great Russian general who, after defeating Napoleon in Italy, crossed the Alps to join hands with Korsakov, but found the latter to have been routed by Massena.

XXII

In silence, or merely exchanging a few unimportant words, the travellers made their way to Thedot's posting-house. Arkady felt anything but pleased with Bazarov, and Bazarov felt anything but pleased with himself. Moreover, the younger man's heart was heavy with the sort of unreasoning depression which is known only to youth.

The driver hitched his horses, and then, mounting to the box, inquired whether he was to drive to the right or to the left.

Arkady started. The road to the right led to the town, and thence to his father's house; while the road to the left led to Madame Odintsov's establishment.

He glanced at Bazarov.

"To the left, Evgenii?" he queried.

Bazarov turned away his head.

"Why that folly again?" he muttered.

"Folly, I know," said Arkady, "but what does that matter? We need but call in passing."

Bazarov pulled his cap over his eyes.

"Do as you like," he said.

"To the left, then," cried Arkady to the coachman; and the _tarantass_ started in the direction of Nikolsköe. Nevertheless, for all that the friends had decided upon this foolish course, they remained as silent and downcast as ever.

Indeed, Madame Odintsov's butler had not even made his appearance upon the verandah before the pair divined that they had done unwisely to yield to such an impulse. The fact that no one in the house had expected them was emphasised by the circumstance that when Madame entered the drawing-room they had already spent a considerable time there in awkward silence. However, she accorded them her usual suave welcome, though she seemed a little surprised at their speedy return, and, at heart, not over-pleased at it. For this reason they hastened to explain that theirs was a mere passing call, and that in about four hours they would be continuing their journey to the town. In reply she said nothing beyond that she requested Arkady to convey her greetings to his father, and then sent for her aunt; and inasmuch as the Princess entered in a state of having just overslept herself, her wrinkled old face betokened even greater malignity than usual. Katia was not well, and did not leave her room at all: and this caused Arkady suddenly to realise that he would have been as glad to see her as Anna Sergievna. The four hours were filled with a desultory conversation which Anna Sergievna carried on without a single smile: nor until the very moment of parting did her usual friendliness seem to stir within her soul.

"I am out of humour to-day," she said, "but that you must not mind. Come again soon. I address the invitation to you both."

Bazarov and Arkady responded with silent bows, re-entered the _tarantass_, and drove forward to Marino, whither they arrived, without incident, on the following evening. _En route_, neither of the pair mentioned Madame Odintsov, and Barazov in particular scarcely opened his mouth, but gazed towards the horizon with a hard look in his eyes.

But at Marino every one was delighted to see them, for Nikolai Petrovitch had begun to feel uneasy at the prolonged absence of his son, and now leapt from the sofa with a cry of joy when Thenichka ran to announce that "the young gentlemen" were arriving. Yes, even Paul Petrovitch felt conscious of a touch of pleasant excitement, and smiled indulgently as he shook hands with the wanderers. Ensued then much talking and questioning, in which Arkady took the leading part, and more especially during supper, which lasted far into the night, since Nikolai Petrovitch ordered up several bottles of porter which had just arrived from Moscow, and made so merry that his cheeks assumed a raspberry tint, and he fell to venting half-boyish, half-hysterical laughs. Moreover, the general enlivenment extended even to the kitchen, where Duniasha kept breathlessly banging doors, and at three o'clock in the morning Peter essayed to execute on the guitar a Cossack waltz which would have sounded sweet and plaintive amid the stillness of the night had not the performance broken down after the opening cadenza, owing to the fact that nature had denied the cultured underling a talent either for music or for anything else.