“But why, Daddy; what for?’
“Your friend will be staying with us . . . it will be awkward.”
“Please don’t worry about Bazarov.
He’s above all that.”
“Well, but you too,” added Nikolai Petrovich. “Unfortunately the little side-wing is in such a bad state.”
“For goodness’ sake, Daddy,” interposed Arkady. “You needn’t apologize. Are you ashamed?”
“Of course, I ought to be ashamed,” answered Nikolai Petrovich, turning redder and redder.
“Enough of that, Daddy, please don’t . . .” Arkady smiled affectionately.
“What a thing to apologize for,” he thought to himself, and his heart was filled with a feeling of indulgent tenderness for his kind, soft-hearted father, mixed with a sense of secret superiority. “Please stop that,” he repeated once more, instinctively enjoying the awareness of his own more emancipated outlook.
Nikolai Petrovich looked at his son through the fingers of the hand with which he was again rubbing his forehead, and a pang seized his heart . . . but he immediately reproached himself for it.
“Here are our own meadows at last,” he remarked after a long silence.
“And that is our forest over there, isn’t it?” asked Arkady.
“Yes.
But I have sold it.
This year they will cut it down for timber.”
“Why did you sell it?”
“We need the money; besides, that land will be taken over by the peasants.”
“Who don’t pay their rent?”
“That’s their affair; anyhow they will pay it some day.”
“It’s a pity about the forest,” said Arkady, and began to look around him.
The country through which they were driving could not possibly be called picturesque.
Field after field stretched right up to the horizon, now gently sloping upwards, then slanting down again; in some places woods were visible and winding ravines, planted with low scrubby bushes, vividly reminiscent of the way in which they were represented on the old maps of Catherine’s times.
They passed by little streams with hollow banks and ponds with narrow dams, small villages with low huts under dark and often crumbling roofs, and crooked barns with walls woven out of dry twigs and with gaping doorways opening on to neglected threshing floors; and churches, some brick-built with the stucco covering peeling off in patches, others built of wood, near crosses fallen crooked in the overgrown graveyards.
Gradually Arkady’s heart began to sink.
As if to complete the picture, the peasants whom they met were all in rags and mounted on the most wretched-looking little horses; the willows, with their broken branches and trunks stripped of bark, stood like tattered beggars along the roadside; lean and shaggy cows, pinched with hunger, were greedily tearing up grass along the ditches.
They looked as if they had just been snatched out of the clutches of some terrifying murderous monster; and the pitiful sight of these emaciated animals in the setting of that gorgeous spring day conjured up, like a white ghost, the vision of interminable joyless winter with its storms, frosts and snows . . .
“No,” thought Arkady, “this country is far from rich, and the people seem neither contented nor industrious; we just can’t let things go on like this; reforms are indispensable . . . but how are we to execute them, how should we begin?”
Such were Arkady’s thoughts . . . but even while he was thinking, the spring regained its sway.
All around lay a sea of golden green — everything, trees, bushes and grass, vibrated and stirred in gentle waves under the breath of the warm breeze; from every side the larks were pouring out their loud continuous trills; the plovers were calling as they glided over the low-lying meadows or noiselessly ran over the tufts of grass; the crows strutted about in the low spring corn, looking picturesquely black against its tender green; they disappeared in the already whitening rye, only from time to time their heads peeped out from among its misty waves.
Arkady gazed and gazed and his thoughts grew slowly fainter and died away . . . He flung off his overcoat and turned round with such a bright boyish look that his father hugged him once again.
“We’re not far away now,” remarked Nikolai Petrovich. “As soon as we get to the top of this hill the house will be in sight.
We shall have a fine life together, Arkasha; you will help me to farm the land, if only it doesn’t bore you.
We must draw close to each other now and get to know each other better, mustn’t we?”
“Of course,” murmured Arkady. “But what a wonderful day it is!”
“To welcome you home, my dear one.
Yes, this is spring in all its glory.
Though I agree with Pushkin — do you remember, in Evgeny Onegin,
“‘To me how sad your coming is, Spring, spring, sweet time of love!
What — ’”
“Arkady,” shouted Bazarov’s voice from the tarantass, “give me a match. I’ve got nothing to light my pipe with.”
Nikolai Petrovich fell silent, while Arkady, who had been listening to him with some surprise but not without sympathy, hurriedly pulled a silver matchbox out of his pocket and told Pyotr to take it over to Bazarov.
“Do you want a cigar?” shouted Bazarov again.
“Thanks,” answered Arkady.
Pyotr came back to the carriage and handed him, together with the matchbox, a thick black cigar, which Arkady started to smoke at once, spreading around him such a strong and acrid smell of cheap tobacco that Nikolai Petrovich, who had never been a smoker, was forced to turn away his head, which he did unobtrusively, to avoid hurting his son’s feelings.
A quarter of an hour later both carriages drew up in front of the porch of a new wooden house, painted grey, with a red iron roof.
This was Maryino, also known as New Hamlet, or as the peasants had nicknamed it, Landless Farm.
Chapter 4
No crowd of house servants ran out to meet their master; there appeared only a little twelve-year-old girl, and behind her a young lad, very like Pyotr, came out of the house; he was dressed in a grey livery with white armorial buttons and was the servant of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov.
He silently opened the carriage door and unbuttoned the apron of the tarantass.
Nikolai Petrovich with his son and Bazarov walked through a dark and almost empty hall, through the door of which they caught a glimpse of a young woman’s face, and into a drawing room furnished in the most modern style.