Fathers and Children, Ivan Turgenev [best book reader .TXT] 📗

air, and blushed. Afterwards, the first timid visits, the half-words, the half-smiles, and embarrassment; and melancholy, and yearnings, and at last that breathing rapture.⁠ ⁠… Where had it all vanished? She had been his wife, he had been happy as few on earth are happy.⁠ ⁠… “But,” he mused, “these sweet first moments, why could one not live an eternal, undying life in them?”

He did not try to make his thought clear to himself; but he felt that he longed to keep that blissful time by something stronger than memory; he longed to feel his Marya near him again to have the sense of her warmth and breathing, and already he could fancy that over him.⁠ ⁠…

“Nikolai Petrovitch,” came the sound of Fenitchka’s voice close by him; “where are you?”

He started. He felt no pang, no shame. He never even admitted the possibility of comparison between his wife and Fenitchka, but he was sorry she had thought of coming to look for him. Her voice had brought back to him at once his grey hairs, his age, his reality.⁠ ⁠…

The enchanted world into which he was just stepping, which was just rising out of the dim mists of the past, was shaken⁠—and vanished.

“I’m here,” he answered; “I’m coming, run along.” “There it is, the traces of the slave owner,” flashed through his mind. Fenitchka peeped into the arbour at him without speaking, and disappeared; while he noticed with astonishment that the night had come on while he had been dreaming. Everything around was dark and hushed. Fenitchka’s face had glimmered so pale and slight before him. He got up, and was about to go home; but the emotion stirred in his heart could not be soothed at once, and he began slowly walking about the garden, sometimes looking at the ground at his feet, and then raising his eyes towards the sky where swarms of stars were twinkling. He walked a great deal, till he was almost tired out, while the restlessness within him, a kind of yearning, vague, melancholy restlessness, still was not appeased. Oh, how Bazarov would have laughed at him, if he had known what was passing within him then! Arkady himself would have condemned him. He, a man forty-four years old, an agriculturist and a farmer, was shedding tears, causeless tears; this was a hundred times worse than the violoncello.

Nikolai Petrovitch continued walking, and could not make up his mind to go into the house, into the snug peaceful nest, which looked out at him so hospitably from all its lighted windows; he had not the force to tear himself away from the darkness, the garden, the sense of the fresh air in his face, from that melancholy, that restless craving.

At a turn in the path, he was met by Pavel Petrovitch. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked Nikolai Petrovitch; “you are as white as a ghost; you are not well; why don’t you go to bed?”

Nikolai Petrovitch explained to him briefly his state of feeling and moved away. Pavel Petrovitch went to the end of the garden, and he too grew thoughtful, and he too raised his eyes toward the heavens. But in his beautiful dark eyes, nothing was reflected but the light of the stars. He was not born an idealist, and his fastidiously dry and sensuous soul, with its French tinge of cynicism was not capable of dreaming.⁠ ⁠…

“Do you know what?” Bazarov was saying to Arkady the same night. “I’ve got a splendid idea. Your father was saying today that he’d had an invitation from your illustrious relative. Your father’s not going; let us be off to X⁠⸺; you know the worthy man invites you too. You see what fine weather it is; we’ll stroll about and look at the town. We’ll have five or six days’ outing, and enjoy ourselves.”

“And you’ll come back here again?”

“No; I must go to my father’s. You know, he lives about twenty-five miles from X⁠⸺. I’ve not seen him for a long while, and my mother too; I must cheer the old people up. They’ve been good to me, especially my father; he’s awfully funny. I’m their only one too.”

“And will you be long with them?”

“I don’t suppose so. It will be dull, of course.”

“And you’ll come to us on your way back?”

“I don’t know⁠ ⁠… I’ll see. Well, what do you say? Shall we go?”

“If you like,” observed Arkady languidly.

In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend’s suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!

The next day he set off with Bazarov to X⁠⸺. The younger part of the household at Maryino were sorry at their going; Dunyasha even cried⁠ ⁠… but the old folks breathed more easily.

XII

The town of X⁠⸺ to which our friends set off was in the jurisdiction of a governor who was a young man, and at once a progressive and a despot, as often happens with Russians. Before the end of the first year of his government, he had managed to quarrel not only with the marshal of nobility, a retired officer of the guards, who kept open house and a stud of horses, but even with his own subordinates. The feuds arising from this cause assumed at last such proportions that the ministry in Petersburg had found it necessary to send down a trusted personage with a commission to investigate it all on the spot. The choice of the authorities fell upon Matvy Ilyitch Kolyazin, the son of the Kolyazin, under whose protection the brothers Kirsanov had once found themselves. He, too, was a “young man”; that is to say, he had not long passed forty, but he was already on the high road to becoming a statesman, and wore a star on each side of his breast⁠—one, to be sure, a foreign star, not of the first magnitude. Like the governor, whom he had come down to pass judgment upon, he was reckoned a progressive; and