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

her ears gave a girlish expression to her pure and fresh face.

“Thank you for keeping your promise,” she began. “You must stay a little while with me; it’s really not bad here. I will introduce you to my sister; she plays the piano well. That is a matter of indifference to you, Monsieur Bazarov; but you, I think, Monsieur Kirsanov, are fond of music. Besides my sister I have an old aunt living with me, and one of our neighbours comes in sometimes to play cards; that makes up all our circle. And now let us sit down.”

Madame Odintsov delivered all this little speech with peculiar precision, as though she had learned it by heart; then she turned to Arkady. It appeared that her mother had known Arkady’s mother, and had even been her confidante in her love for Nikolai Petrovitch. Arkady began talking with great warmth of his dead mother; while Bazarov fell to turning over albums. “What a tame cat I’m getting!” he was thinking to himself.

A beautiful greyhound with a blue collar on, ran into the drawing-room, tapping on the floor with his paws, and after him entered a girl of eighteen, black-haired and dark-skinned, with a rather round but pleasing face, and small dark eyes. In her hands she held a basket filled with flowers.

“This is my Katya,” said Madame Odintsov, indicating her with a motion of her head. Katya made a slight curtsey, placed herself beside her sister, and began picking out flowers. The greyhound, whose name was Fifi, went up to both of the visitors, in turn wagging his tail, and thrusting his cold nose into their hands.

“Did you pick all that yourself?” asked Madame Odintsov.

“Yes,” answered Katya.

“Is auntie coming to tea?”

“Yes.”

When Katya spoke, she had a very charming smile, sweet, timid, and candid, and looked up from under her eyebrows with a sort of humorous severity. Everything about her was still young and undeveloped; the voice, and the bloom on her whole face, and the rosy hands, with white palms, and the rather narrow shoulders.⁠ ⁠… She was constantly blushing and getting out of breath.

Madame Odintsov turned to Bazarov. “You are looking at pictures from politeness, Yevgeny Vassilyitch,” she began. “That does not interest you. You had better come nearer to us, and let us have a discussion about something.”

Bazarov went closer. “What subject have you decided upon for discussion?” he said.

“What you like. I warn you, I am dreadfully argumentative.”

“You?”

“Yes. That seems to surprise you. Why?”

“Because, as far as I can judge, you have a calm, cool character, and one must be impulsive to be argumentative.”

“How can you have had time to understand me so soon? In the first place, I am impatient and obstinate⁠—you should ask Katya; and secondly, I am very easily carried away.”

Bazarov looked at Anna Sergyevna. “Perhaps; you must know best. And so you are inclined for a discussion⁠—by all means. I was looking through the views of the Saxon mountains in your album, and you remarked that that couldn’t interest me. You said so, because you suppose me to have no feeling for art, and as a fact I haven’t any; but these views might be interesting to me from a geological standpoint, for the formation of the mountains, for instance.”

“Excuse me; but as a geologist, you would sooner have recourse to a book, to a special work on the subject, and not to a drawing.”

“The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.”

Anna Sergyevna was silent for a little.

“And so you haven’t the least artistic feeling?” she observed, putting her elbow on the table, and by that very action bringing her face nearer to Bazarov. “How can you get on without it?”

“Why, what is it wanted for, may I ask?”

“Well, at least to enable one to study and understand men.”

Bazarov smiled. “In the first place, experience of life does that; and in the second, I assure you, studying separate individuals is not worth the trouble. All people are like one another, in soul as in body; each of us has brain, spleen, heart, and lungs made alike; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all; the slight variations are of no importance. A single human specimen is sufficient to judge of all by. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch-tree.”

Katya, who was arranging the flowers, one at a time in a leisurely fashion, lifted her eyes to Bazarov with a puzzled look, and meeting his rapid and careless glance, she crimsoned up to her ears. Anna Sergyevna shook her head.

“The trees in a forest,” she repeated. “Then according to you there is no difference between the stupid and the clever person, between the good-natured and ill-natured?”

“No, there is a difference, just as between the sick and the healthy. The lungs of a consumptive patient are not in the same condition as yours and mine, though they are made on the same plan. We know approximately what physical diseases come from; moral diseases come from bad education, from all the nonsense people’s heads are stuffed with from childhood up, from the defective state of society; in short, reform society, and there will be no diseases.”

Bazarov said all this with an air, as though he were all the while thinking to himself, “Believe me or not, as you like, it’s all one to me!” He slowly passed his fingers over his whiskers, while his eyes strayed about the room.

“And you conclude,” observed Anna Sergyevna, “that when society is reformed, there will be no stupid nor wicked people?”

“At any rate, in a proper organisation of society, it will be absolutely the same whether a man is stupid or clever, wicked or good.”

“Yes, I understand; they will all have the same spleen.”

“Precisely so, madam.”

Madame Odintsov turned to Arkady. “And what is your opinion, Arkady Nikolaevitch?”

“I agree with Yevgeny,” he answered.

Katya looked up at him from under her eyelids.

“You amaze me, gentlemen,” commented