“I warned you, my dear guest,” began Vassily Ivanovich, “that we live, so to speak, bivouacking . . .”
“Now stop that, what are you apologizing for?” Bazarov interrupted. “Kirsanov knows very well that we’re not Croesuses and that you don’t live in a palace.
Where are we going to put him, that’s the question?”
“To be sure, Evgeny, there’s an excellent room in the little wing; he will be very comfortable there.”
“So you’ve had a wing built on?”
“Of course, where the bathhouse is,” put in Timofeich.
“That is next to the bathroom,” Vassily Ivanovich added hurriedly. “It’s summer now . . . I will run over there at once and arrange things; and you, Timofeich, bring in their luggage meanwhile.
Of course I hand over my study to you, Evgeny.
Suum cuique.”
“There you have him!
A most comical old chap and very good-natured,” remarked Bazarov, as soon as Vassily Ivanovich had gone. “Just as queer a fish as yours, only in a different way.
He chatters too much.”
“And your mother seems a wonderful woman,” remarked Arkady.
“Yes, there’s no humbug about her.
You just see what a dinner she’ll give us.”
“They weren’t expecting you today, sir, they’ve not brought any beef,” observed Timofeich, who was just dragging in Bazarov’s trunk.
“We shall manage all right even without beef; you can’t squeeze water from a stone.
Poverty, they say, is no crime.”
“How many serfs has your father?” asked Arkady suddenly.
“The property is not his, but mother’s; there are fifteen serfs, if I remember.”
“Twenty-two in all,” added Timofeich in a dissatisfied tone.
The shuffling of slippers was heard and Vassily Ivanovich reappeared.
“In a few minutes your room will be ready to receive you,” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Arkady — Nikolaich? I think that’s how I should call you.
And here is your servant,” he added, indicating a boy with close-cropped hair, who had come in with him, wearing a long blue caftan with holes in the elbows and a pair of boots which did not belong to him.
“His name is Fedka, I repeat again, though my son has forbidden it, you must not expect anything grand.
But this fellow knows how to fill a pipe.
You smoke, of course?”
“I prefer to smoke cigars,” answered Arkady.
“And you’re quite right there.
I like cigars myself, but in these remote parts it is extremely difficult to get them.”
“Enough crying poverty,” interrupted Bazarov. “You had better sit down on the sofa here and let us have a look at you.”
Vassily Ivanovich laughed and sat down.
His face was very much like his son’s, only his brow was lower and narrower, his mouth rather wider, and he never stopped making restless movements, shrugged his shoulders as though his coat cut him under the armpits, blinked, cleared his throat and gesticulated with his fingers, whereas his son’s most striking characteristic was the nonchalant immobility of his manner.
“Crying poverty,” repeated Vassily Ivanovich. “You must suppose, Evgeny, that I want our guest, so to speak, to take pity on us, by making out that we live in such a wilderness.
On the contrary I maintain that for a thinking man there is no such thing as a wilderness.
At least I try, as far as possible, not to grow rusty, so to speak, not to fall behind the times.”
Vassily Ivanovich drew out of his pocket a new yellow silk handkerchief, which he had found time to snatch up when he ran over to Arkady’s room, and flourishing it in the air, he went on:
“I am not speaking now of the fact that I, for instance, at the cost of quite considerable sacrifices to myself, have put my peasants on the rent system and given up my land to them in return for half the proceeds.
I considered it my duty; common sense alone demands that it should be done, though other landowners don’t even think about doing it.
But I speak now of the sciences, of education.”
“Yes, I see you have here the Friend of Health for 1855,” remarked Bazarov.
“That was sent me by an old comrade as a friendly gesture,” Vassily Ivanovich hastily announced; “but we have, for instance, some idea even of phrenology,” he added, addressing himself principally to Arkady, and pointing out a small plaster head on the cupboard, divided into numbered squares; “even Sch?nlein is not unknown to us — and Rademacher.”
“Do people still believe in Rademacher in this province?” inquired Bazarov.
Vassily Ivanovich cleared his throat.
“In this province . . . of course gentlemen, you know better; how could we keep pace with you?
You are here to take our places.
Even in my time, there was a so-called humoralist Hoffman, and a certain Brown with his vitalism — they seemed very ridiculous to us, but they, too, had great reputations at one time.
Someone new has taken Rademacher’s place with you; you bow down to him, but in another twenty years it will probably be his turn to be laughed at.”
“For your consolation I can tell you,” said Bazarov, “that we nowadays laugh at medicine altogether and bow down to nobody.”
“How do you mean?