Now let us go and drink tea.”
Vassily Ivanovich jumped up briskly from the garden seat and hummed the air from Robert le Diable.
“The law, the law we set ourselves, To live, to live, for pleasure.”
“Astonishing vitality,” observed Bazarov, moving away from the window.
Midday arrived.
The sun was burning from under a thin veil of unbroken whitish clouds.
All was still; only the cocks in the village broke the silence by their vigorous crowing, which produced in everyone who heard it a strange sense of drowsiness and tedium; and from somewhere high up in a treetop sounded the plaintive and persistent chirp of a young hawk.
Arkady and Bazarov lay in the shade of a small haystack, and put under themselves two armfuls of rustling dry but still green and fragrant grass.
“That poplar tree,” began Bazarov, “reminds me of my childhood; it grows on the edge of the pit where the brick shed used to be, and in those days I firmly believed that the poplar and the pit possessed the peculiar power of a talisman; I never felt dull when I was near them.
I did not understand then that I was not dull just because I was a child.
Well, now I’m grown up, the talisman no longer works.”
“How long did you live here altogether?” asked Arkady.
“Two years on end; after that we traveled about.
We led a roving life, chiefly wandering from town to town.”
“And has this house been standing long?”
“Yes.
My grandfather built it, my mother’s father.”
“Who was he, your grandfather?”
“The devil knows — some kind of second-major.
He served under Suvorov and always told stories about marching across the Alps — inventions probably.”
“You have a portrait of Suvorov hanging in the drawing room.
I like such little houses as yours, old-fashioned and warm; and they always have a special kind of scent about them.”
“A smell of lamp oil and clover,” remarked Bazarov, yawning. “And the flies in these dear little houses . . . fugh!”
“Tell me,” began Arkady after a short pause, “were they strict with you as a child?”
“You see what my parents are like.
They’re not a severe sort.”
“Are you fond of them, Evgeny?”
“I am, Arkady.”
“How they adore you!”
Bazarov was silent for a while.
“Do you know what I’m thinking about?” he said at last, clasping his hands behind his head.
“No.
What is it?”
“I’m thinking how happy life is for my parents!
My father at the age of sixty can fuss around, chat about ‘palliative measures,’ heal people; he plays the magnanimous master with the peasants — has a gay time in fact; and my mother is happy too; her day is so crammed with all sorts of jobs, with sighs and groans, that she hasn’t a moment to think about herself; while I . . .”
“While you?”
“While I think; here I lie under a haystack . . . The tiny narrow space I occupy is so minutely small in comparison with the rest of space where I am not and which has nothing to do with me; and the portion of time in which it is my lot to live is so insignificant beside the eternity where I have not been and will not be . . . And in this atom, in this mathematical point, the blood circulates, the brain works and wants something . . . how disgusting! how petty!”
“Allow me to point out that what you say applies generally to everyone.”
“You’re right,” interrupted Bazarov. “I wanted to say that they, my parents I mean, are occupied and don’t worry about their own nothingness; it doesn’t sicken them . . . while I . . . I feel nothing but boredom and anger.”
“Anger? Why anger?”
“Why?
How can you ask why?
Have you forgotten?”
“I remember everything, but still I can’t agree that you have any right to be angry.
You’re unhappy, I realize, but . . .”
“Ugh! I can see, Arkady Nikolaich, that you regard love like all modern young men; cluck, cluck, cluck, you call to the hen, and the moment the hen comes near, off you run!
I’m not like that.
But enough of it all.
It’s a shame to talk about what can’t be helped.” He turned over on his side. “Ah, there goes a brave ant dragging along a half-dead fly.
Take her away, brother, take her!