He neither betrayed his own opinions nor provoked the other members of the company; he made an appropriate joke about seminary Latin and stood up in defense of his bishop; he drank two glasses of wine and refused a third; he accepted a cigar from Arkady, but did not smoke it on the spot, saying he would take it home with him.
Only he had a somewhat unpleasant habit of raising his hand from time to time, slowly and carefully, to catch the flies on his face, and sometimes managing to squash them.
He took his seat at the green card table with a measured expression of satisfaction, and ended by winning from Bazarov two and a half rubles in notes (they had no idea of how to reckon in silver in Arina Vlasyevna’s house). She sat, as before, close to her son — she did not play cards — and as before she leaned her cheek on her little clenched hand; she got up only to order some fresh sweetmeat to be served.
She was afraid to caress Bazarov, and he gave her no encouragement, for he did nothing to invite her caresses; and besides, Vassily Ivanovich had advised her not to “disturb” him too much.
“Young men are not fond of that sort of thing,” he explained to her. (There is no need to say what dinner was like that day; Timofeich in person had galloped off at dawn to procure some special Circassian beef; the bailiff had gone off in another direction for turbot, perch and crayfish; for mushrooms alone the peasant woman had been paid forty-two kopeks in copper); but Arina Vlasyevna’s eyes, looking steadfastly at Bazarov, expressed not devotion and tenderness alone, for sorrow was visible in them also, mingled with curiosity and fear, and with a trace of humble reproachfulness.
Bazarov, however, was in no state of mind to analyze the exact expression of his mother’s eyes; he seldom turned to her and then only with some short question.
Once he asked her for her hand “for luck”; she quietly placed her soft little hand on his rough broad palm.
“Well,” she asked after waiting for a time, “did it help?”
“Worse luck than before,” he answered with a careless smile.
“He plays too rashly,” pronounced Father Alexei, as it were compassionately, and stroked his handsome beard.
“That was Napoleon’s principle, good Father, Napoleon’s,” interposed Vassily Ivanovich, leading with an ace.
“But it brought him to the isle of St. Helena,” observed Father Alexei, and trumped his ace.
“Wouldn’t you like some black-currant tea, Enyushka?” asked Arina Vlasyevna.
Bazarov merely shrugged his shoulders.
“No!” he said to Arkady the following day, “I go away from here tomorrow.
I’m bored; I want to work but I can’t here.
I will come again to your place; I left all my apparatus there.
In your house at least one can shut oneself up, but here my father keeps on repeating to me,
‘My study is at your disposal — nobody shall interfere with you,’ and all the time he himself is hardly two steps away.
And I’m ashamed somehow to shut myself away from him.
It’s the same thing with my mother.
I hear how she sighs on the other side of the wall, and then if one goes in to see her — one has nothing to say.”
“She will be most upset,” said Arkady, “and so will he.”
“I shall come back to them.”
“When?”
“Well, when I’m on my way to Petersburg.”
“I feel particularly sorry for your mother.”
“How’s that?
Has she won your heart with her raspberries?”
Arkady lowered his eyes.
“You don’t understand your mother, Evgeny.
She’s not only a very good woman, she’s really very wise.
This morning she talked to me for half an hour, and so interestingly, so much to the point.”
“I suppose she was expatiating about me the whole time.”
“We didn’t talk about you only.”
“Maybe as an outsider you see more.
If a woman can keep up a conversation for half an hour, it’s already a good sign.
But I’m going away, all the same.”
“It won’t be easy for you to break the news to them.
They are making plans for us a fortnight ahead.”
“No; it won’t be easy.
Some devil drove me to tease my father today; he had one of his rent-paying peasants flogged the other day and quite rightly too — yes, yes, don’t look at me in such horror — he did right because that peasant is a frightful thief and drunkard; only my father had no idea that I, as they say, became aware of the facts.
He was very much embarrassed, and now I shall have to upset him as well . . . Never mind!
He’ll get over it.”
Bazarov said,
“Never mind,” but the whole day passed before he could bring himself to tell Vassily Ivanovich about his decision.
At last when he was just saying good night to him in the study, he remarked with a strained yawn:
“Oh yes . . . I almost forgot to tell you — will you send to Fedot’s for our horses tomorrow?”
Vassily Ivanovich was dumbfounded.
“Is Mr. Kirsanov leaving us then?”