I shall be quite well tomorrow.
That’s it; excellent.
Drive off, coachman.”
Nikolai Petrovich followed the droshky on foot. Bazarov lagged behind . . .
“I must ask you to look after my brother,” Nikolai Petrovich said to him, “until we get another doctor from the town.”
Bazarov nodded his head without speaking.
An hour later Pavel Petrovich was already lying in bed with a skillfully bandaged leg.
The whole house was upset; Fenichka felt ill; Nikolai Petrovich was silently wringing his hands, while Pavel Petrovich laughed and joked, especially with Bazarov; he had put on a fine cambric nightshirt, an elegant morning jacket, and a fez; he did not allow the blinds to be drawn down, and humorously complained about the necessity of not being allowed to eat.
Towards night, however, he grew feverish; his head ached.
The doctor arrived from the town. (Nikolai Petrovich would not listen to his brother, nor did Bazarov want him to; he sat the whole day in his room, looking yellow and angry, and only went in to the invalid for as brief a visit as possible; twice he happened to meet Fenichka, but she shrank away from him in horror.) The new doctor advised a cooling diet; he confirmed, however, Bazarov’s assurance that there was no danger.
Nikolai Petrovich told him that his brother had hurt himself accidentally, to which the doctor replied
“Hm!” but on having twenty-five silver rubles slipped into his hand on the spot, he remarked,
“You don’t say so! Well, such things often happen, of course.”
No one in the house went to bed or undressed.
Nikolai Petrovich from time to time went in on tiptoe to his brother’s room and tiptoed out again; Pavel Petrovich dozed, sighed a little, told his brother in French
“Couchez-vous,” and asked for something to drink.
Nikolai Petrovich sent Fenichka in to him once with a glass of lemonade; Pavel Petrovich looked at her intently and drank off the glass to the last drop.
Towards morning the fever had increased a little; a slight delirium started.
At first Pavel Petrovich uttered incoherent words; then suddenly he opened his eyes, and seeing his brother beside his bed, anxiously leaning over him, he murmured,
“Don’t you think, Nikolai, Fenichka has something in common with Nellie?”
“What Nellie, Pavel dear?”
“How can you ask that?
With Princess R . Especially in the upper part of the face.
C’est de la meme famille.”
Nikolai Petrovich made no answer, but inwardly he marveled at the persistent vitality of old passions in a man.
“This is what happens when it comes to the surface,” he thought.
“Ah, how I love that empty creature!” groaned Pavel Petrovich, mournfully clasping his hands behind his head. “I can’t bear that any insolent upstart should dare to touch . . .” he muttered a few minutes later.
Nikolai Petrovich only sighed; he never even suspected to whom these words referred.
Bazarov came to see him on the following day at eight o’clock.
He had already managed to pack and had set free all his frogs, insects and birds.
“You have come to say good-by to me?” said Nikolai Petrovich, getting up to meet him.
“Exactly.”
“I understand and fully approve of you.
My poor brother is of course to blame; but he has been punished for it.
He told me that he made it impossible for you to act otherwise.
I believe that you could not avoid this duel, which . . . which to some extent is explained by the almost constant antagonism of your different points of view.” (Nikolai Petrovich began to get rather mixed up in his words.) “My brother is a man of the old school, hot-tempered and obstinate . . . thank God that it has only ended in this way.
I have taken all possible precautions to avoid publicity.”
“I’ll leave you my address, in case there’s any fuss,” said Bazarov casually.
“I hope there will be no fuss, Evgeny Vassilich . . . I am very sorry that your stay in my house should have come to . . . such an end.
It distresses me all the more on account of Arkady’s . . .”
“I expect I shall see him,” replied Bazarov, in whom every kind of “explanation” and “pronouncement” always aroused a feeling of impatience. “In case I don’t, may I ask you to say good-by to him for me and to accept the expression of my regret.”
“And I, too, ask . . .” began Nikolai Petrovich with a bow.
But Bazarov did not wait for him to finish his sentence and went out of the room.
On hearing that Bazarov was going, Pavel Petrovich expressed a desire to see him and shook him by the hand.
But even then Bazarov remained as cold as ice; he realized that Pavel Petrovich wanted to display magnanimity.
He found no opportunity of saying good-by to Fenichka; he only exchanged glances with her from the window.
Her face struck him by its sad look.
“She’ll come to grief, probably,” he said to himself, “though she may pull through somehow!”
Pyotr, however, was so overcome that he wept on his shoulder, until Bazarov cooled him down by asking if he had a constant water supply in his eyes; and Dunyasha felt obliged to run away into the plantation to hide her emotion.
The originator of all this distress climbed into a country cart, lit a cigar, and when, three miles further on at a bend in the road, he saw for the last time the Kirsanovs’ farmstead and its new manor house standing together on the sky line, he merely spat and muttering,