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

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 tassels of her reticule and faltering, “Never mind, never mind, I only⁠—” and afterwards she would go to Vassily Ivanovitch and, her cheek in her hand, would consult him: “If you could only find out, darling, which Enyusha would like for dinner today⁠—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 Vassily Ivanovitch, and smoked with him in silence; once even asked after Father Alexey. Vassily 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.” Vassily Ivanovitch several times attempted in the most circumspect 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 Vassily Ivanovitch answered hurriedly. So his diplomatic hints remained fruitless. He hoped to awaken his son’s sympathy one day by beginning apropos of the approaching emancipation 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 singsong; “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 Vassily 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 Vassily 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 God! he has got over his melancholy!” he whispered to his wife; “how he gave it to me today, it was splendid!” Moreover, the idea of having such an assistant excited him to ecstasy, filled him with pride. “Yes, yes,” he would say