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

pale, but scrupulously brushed and shaved, “Why, I seem to recollect you said yourself you didn’t believe in medicine.” So the days went by. Bazarov went on obstinately and grimly working⁠ ⁠… and meanwhile there was in Nikolai Petrovitch’s house one creature to whom, if he did not open his heart, he at least was glad to talk.⁠ ⁠… That creature was Fenitchka.

He used to meet her for the most part early in the morning, in the garden, or the farmyard; he never used to go to her room to see her, and she had only once been to his door to inquire⁠—ought she to let Mitya have his bath or not? It was not only that she confided in him, that she was not afraid of him⁠—she was positively freer and more at her ease in her behaviour with him than with Nikolai Petrovitch himself. It is hard to say how it came about; perhaps it was because she unconsciously felt the absence in Bazarov of all gentility, of all that superiority which at once attracts and overawes. In her eyes he was both an excellent doctor and a simple man. She looked after her baby without constraint in his presence; and once when she was suddenly attacked with giddiness and headache⁠—she took a spoonful of medicine from his hand. Before Nikolai Petrovitch she kept, as it were, at a distance from Bazarov; she acted in this way not from hypocrisy, but from a kind of feeling of propriety. Pavel Petrovitch she was more afraid of than ever; for some time he had begun to watch her, and would suddenly make his appearance, as though he sprang out of the earth behind her back, in his English suit, with his immovable vigilant face, and his hands in his pockets. “It’s like a bucket of cold water on one,” Fenitchka complained to Dunyasha, and the latter sighed in response, and thought of another “heartless” man. Bazarov, without the least suspicion of the fact, had become the cruel tyrant of her heart.

Fenitchka liked Bazarov; but he liked her too. His face was positively transformed when he talked to her; it took a bright, almost kind expression, and his habitual nonchalance was replaced by a sort of jesting attentiveness. Fenitchka was growing prettier every day. There is a time in the life of young women when they suddenly begin to expand and blossom like summer roses; this time had come for Fenitchka. Dressed in a delicate white dress, she seemed herself slighter and whiter; she was not tanned by the sun; but the heat, from which she could not shield herself, spread a slight flush over her cheeks and ears, and, shedding a soft indolence over her whole body, was reflected in a dreamy languor in her pretty eyes. She was almost unable to work; her hands seem to fall naturally into her lap. She scarcely walked at all, and was constantly sighing and complaining with comic helplessness.

“You should go oftener to bathe,” Nikolai Petrovitch told her. He had made a large bath covered in with an awning in one of his ponds which had not yet quite disappeared.

“Oh, Nikolai Petrovitch! But by the time one gets to the pond, one’s utterly dead, and, coming back, one’s dead again. You see, there’s no shade in the garden.”

“That’s true, there’s no shade,” replied Nikolai Petrovitch, rubbing his forehead.

One day at seven o’clock in the morning Bazarov, returning from a walk, came upon Fenitchka in the lilac arbour, which was long past flowering, but was still thick and green. She was sitting on the garden seat, and had as usual thrown a white kerchief over her head; near her lay a whole heap of red and white roses still wet with dew. He said good morning to her.

“Ah! Yevgeny Vassilyitch!” she said, and lifted the edge of her kerchief a little to look at him, in doing which her arm was left bare to the elbow.

“What are you doing here?” said Bazarov, sitting down beside her. “Are you making a nosegay?”

“Yes, for the table at lunch. Nikolai Petrovitch likes it.”

“But it’s a long while yet to lunch time. What a heap of flowers!”

“I gathered them now, for it will be hot then, and one can’t go out. One can only just breathe now. I feel quite weak with the heat. I’m really afraid whether I’m not going to be ill.”

“What an idea! Let me feel your pulse.” Bazarov took her hand, felt for the evenly-beating pulse, but did not even begin to count its throbs. “You’ll live a hundred years!” he said, dropping her hand.

“Ah, God forbid!” she cried.

“Why? Don’t you want a long life?”

“Well, but a hundred years! There was an old woman near us eighty-five years old⁠—and what a martyr she was! Dirty and deaf and bent and coughing all the time; nothing but a burden to herself. That’s a dreadful life!”

“So it’s better to be young?”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“But why is it better? Tell me!”

“How can you ask why? Why, here I now, while I’m young, I can do everything⁠—go and come and carry, and needn’t ask anyone for anything.⁠ ⁠… What can be better?”

“And to me it’s all the same whether I’m young or old.”

“How do you mean⁠—it’s all the same? It’s not possible what you say.”

“Well, judge for yourself, Fedosya Nikolaevna, what good is my youth to me. I live alone, a poor lonely creature⁠ ⁠…”

“That always depends on you.”

“It doesn’t at all depend on me! At least, someone ought to take pity on me.”

Fenitchka gave a sidelong look at Bazarov, but said nothing. “What’s this book you have?” she asked after a short pause.

“That? That’s a scientific book, very difficult.”

“And are you still studying? And don’t you find it dull? You know everything already I should say.”

“It seems not everything. You try to read a little.”

“But I don’t understand anything here. Is it Russian?” asked Fenitchka, taking the heavily bound book in both hands. “How thick it is!”

“Yes, it’s Russian.”

“All the same, I