“You call a friendly conversation gossip! Or perhaps you consider me as a woman unworthy of your confidence?
I know you despise us all!”
“I don’t despise you, Anna Sergeyevna, and you know that.”
“No, I don’t know anything . . . but let us suppose so. I understand your disinclination to talk about your future career, but as to what is taking place within you now . . .”
“Taking place!” repeated Bazarov. “As if I were some kind of government or society!
In any case, it is completely uninteresting, and besides, can a person always speak out loud of everything which ‘takes place’ within him!”
“But I don’t see why you shouldn’t speak freely, about everything you have in your heart.”
“Can you?” asked Bazarov.
“I can,” answered Anna Sergeyevna, after a moment’s hesitation.
Bazarov bowed his head.
“You are luckier than I.”
“As you like,” she continued, “but still something tells me that we did not get to know each other for nothing, that we shall become good friends.
I am sure that your — how shall I say — your constraint, your reserve, will disappear eventually.”
“So you have noticed in me reserve . . . and, how did you put it — constraint?”
“Yes.”
Bazarov got up and went to the window.
“And would you like to know the reason for this reserve, would you like to know what is happening within me?”
“Yes,” repeated Madame Odintsov, with a sort of dread which she did not quite understand.
“And you will not be angry?”
“No.”
“No?” Bazarov was standing with his back to her. “Let me tell you then that I love you like a fool, like a madman . . . There, you’ve got that out of me.”
Madame Odintsov raised both her hands in front of her, while Bazarov pressed his forehead against the windowpane.
He was breathing hard; his whole body trembled visibly.
But it was not the trembling of youthful timidity, not the sweet awe of the first declaration that possessed him: it was passion beating within him, a powerful heavy passion not unlike fury and perhaps akin to it . . . Madame Odintsov began to feel both frightened and sorry for him.
“Evgeny Vassilich . . .,” she murmured, and her voice rang with unconscious tenderness.
He quickly turned round, threw a devouring look at her — and seizing both her hands, he suddenly pressed her to him.
She did not free herself at once from his embrace, but a moment later she was standing far away in a corner and looking from there at Bazarov.
He rushed towards her . . .
“You misunderstood me,” she whispered in hurried alarm.
It seemed that if he had made one more step she would have screamed . . . Bazarov bit his lips and went out.
Half an hour later a maid gave Anna Sergeyevna a note from Bazarov; it consisted merely of one line:
“Am I to leave today, or can I stop till tomorrow?”
“Why should you leave?
I did not understand you — you did not understand me,” Anna Sergeyevna answered, but to herself she thought
“I did not understand myself either.”
She did not show herself till dinnertime, and kept walking up and down her room, with her arms behind her back, sometimes stopping in front of the window or the mirror, and sometimes slowly rubbing her handkerchief over her neck, on which she still seemed to feel a burning spot.
She asked herself what had impelled her to get that out of him, as Bazarov had expressed it, to secure his confidence, and whether she had really suspected nothing . . .
“I am to blame,” she concluded aloud, “but I could not have foreseen this.”
She became pensive and blushed when she recalled Bazarov’s almost animal face when he had rushed at her . . .
“Or?” she suddenly uttered aloud, stopped short and shook her curls . . . she caught sight of herself in the mirror; her tossed-back head, with a mysterious smile on the half-closed, half-open eyes and lips, told her, it seemed, in a flash something at which she herself felt confused . . .
“No,” she decided at last. “God alone knows what it would lead to; he couldn’t be trifled with; after all, peace is better than anything else in the world.”
Her own peace of mind was not deeply disturbed; but she felt sad and once even burst into tears, without knowing why — but not on account of the insult she had just experienced.
She did not feel insulted; she was more inclined to feel guilty.
Under the influence of various confused impulses, the consciousness that life was passing her by, the craving for novelty, she had forced herself to move on to a certain point, forced herself also to look beyond it — and there she had seen not even an abyss, but only sheer emptiness . . . or something hideous.
Chapter 19
In spite of her masterly self-control and superiority to every kind of prejudice, Madame Odintsov felt awkward when she entered the dining room for dinner.
However, the meal went off quite satisfactorily.
Porfiri Platonich turned up and told various anecdotes; he had just returned from the town.
Among other things, he announced that the governor had ordered his secretaries on special commissions to wear spurs, in case he might want to send them off somewhere on horseback, at greater speed.
Arkady talked in an undertone to Katya, and attended diplomatically to the princess.