“Evgeny!” suddenly exclaimed Arkady.
“Well?”
“I shall also leave tomorrow.”
Bazarov made no answer.
“Only I shall go home,” continued Arkady. “We will go together as far as Khokhlovsky, and there you can get horses at Fedot’s.
I should have been delighted to meet your people, but I’m afraid I should only get in their way and yours.
Of course you’re coming back to stay with us?”
“I’ve left all my things with you,” said Bazarov, without turning round.
“Why doesn’t he ask me why I’m going away? — and just as suddenly as he is?” thought Arkady. “As a matter of fact, why am I going, and why is he?” he went on reflecting.
He could find no satisfactory answer to his own question, though his heart was filled with some bitter feeling.
He felt he would find it hard to part from this life to which he had grown so accustomed; but for him to stay on alone would also be queer.
“Something has happened between them,” he reasoned to himself; “what’s the good of my hanging around here after he has gone? Obviously I should bore her stiff, and lose even the little that remains for me.”
He began to conjure up a picture of Anna Sergeyevna; then other features gradually eclipsed the lovely image of the young widow.
“I’m sorry about Katya too,” Arkady whispered to his pillow, on which a tear had already fallen . . . Suddenly he shook back his hair and said aloud:
“What the devil brought that idiotic Sitnikov here?”
Bazarov started to move about in his bed, and then made the following answer:
“I see you’re still stupid, my boy.
Sitnikovs are indispensable to us.
For me, don’t you understand — I need such blockheads.
In fact, it’s not for the gods to bake bricks . . .”
“Oho!” thought Arkady, and only then he saw in a flash the whole fathomless depth of Bazarov’s conceit. “So you and I are gods, in that case? At least, you’re a god, but I suppose I’m one of the blockheads.”
“Yes,” repeated Bazarov gloomily. “You’re still stupid.”
Madame Odintsov expressed no particular surprise when Arkady told her the next day that he was going with Bazarov; she seemed tired and preoccupied.
Katya looked at him with silent gravity. The princess went so far as to cross herself under her shawl, so that he could not help noticing it; but Sitnikov, on the other hand, was most disconcerted.
He had just appeared for. breakfast in a smart new costume, not this time in the Slavophil fashion; the previous evening he had astonished the man appointed to look after him by the quantity of linen he had brought, and now all of a sudden his comrades were deserting him!
He took a few quick steps, darted round like a hunted hare on the edge of a wood, and abruptly, almost with terror, almost with a wail, he announced that he also proposed to leave.
Madame Odintsov made no attempt to detain him.
“My carriage is very comfortable,” added the unlucky young man, turning to Arkady; “I can take you, while Evgeny Vassilich takes your tarantass, so that will be even more convenient.”
“But really, it’s quite off your road, and it’s a long way to where I live.”
“Never mind, that’s nothing; I’ve plenty of time, besides I have business in that direction.”
“Selling vodka?” asked Arkady, rather too contemptuously.
But Sitnikov was already reduced to such despair that he did not even laugh as he usually did.
“I assure you, my carriage is extremely comfortable,” he muttered, “and there will be room for everyone.”
“Don’t upset Monsieur Sitnikov by refusing . . .,” murmured Anna Sergeyevna.
Arkady glanced at her and bowed his head significantly.
The visitors left after breakfast.
As she said good-by to Bazarov, Madame Odintsov held out her hand to him, and said,
“We shall meet again, shan’t we?”
“As you command,” answered Bazarov.
“In that case, we shall.”
Arkady was the first to go out into the porch; he climbed into Sitnikov’s carriage.
The butler tucked him in respectfully, but Arkady would gladly have struck him or burst into tears.
Bazarov seated himself in the tarantass.
When they reached Khokhlovsky, Arkady waited till Fedot, the keeper of the posting station, had harnessed the horses, then going up to the tarantass, he said with his old smile to Bazarov,
“Evgeny, take me with you, I want to come to your place.”
“Get in,” muttered Bazarov between his teeth.
Sitnikov, who had been walking up and down by the wheels of his carriage, whistling boldly, could only open his mouth and gape when he heard these words; while Arkady coolly pulled his luggage out of the carriage, took his seat beside Bazarov, and, bowing politely to his former traveling companion, shouted,
“Drive off!”
The tarantass rolled away and was soon out of sight . . . Sitnikov, utterly confused, looked at his coachman, but he was flicking his whip round the tail of the off-side horse.
Finally Sitnikov jumped into his carriage — and yelling at two passing peasants,