At first Anna Sergeyevna was afraid that the sight of their happiness would prove rather upsetting to herself, but it turned out to the contrary; it not only did not upset her to see their happiness, it occupied her mind, and in the end it even soothed her heart.
This outcome both gladdened and grieved Anna Sergeyevna.
“Evidently Bazarov was right,” she thought, “I have curiosity, nothing but curiosity, and love of a quiet life, and egoism . . .”
“Children,” she said aloud, “do you think love is an imaginary feeling?”
But neither Katya nor Arkady even understood her.
They were shy with her; the fragment of conversation which they had accidentally overheard haunted their minds.
But Anna Sergeyevna soon relieved their anxieties, and that was not difficult for her; she had set her own mind at rest.
Chapter 27
Bazarov’s old parents were all the more overjoyed by their son’s sudden arrival on account of its complete unexpectedness.
Arina Vlasyevna was so agitated, continually bustling about all over the house, that Vassily Ivanovich said she was like a partridge; the short flat tail of her little jacket certainly gave her a birdlike look.
He himself made noises and bit the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, or, clutching his neck with his fingers, turned his head round, as though he were trying to find out if it was properly screwed on, then suddenly opened his wide mouth and laughed noiselessly.
“I’ve come to stay with you for six whole weeks, old man,” Bazarov said to him. “I want to work, so please don’t interrupt me.”
“You will forget what my face looks like, that’s how I will interrupt you!” answered Vassily Ivanovich.
He kept his promise.
After installing his son in his study as before, he almost hid himself away from him and he restrained his wife from any kind of superfluous demonstration of affection.
“Last time Enyushka visited us, little mother, we bored him a little; we must be wiser this time.”
Arina Vlasyevna agreed with her husband, but she gained nothing thereby, since she saw her son only at meals and was in the end afraid to say a word to him.
“Enyushenka,” she would sometimes start to say — but before he had time to look round she would nervously finger the tassels of her handbag and murmur,
“Never mind, I only . . . .” and afterwards she would go to Vassily Ivanovich and ask him, her cheek leaning on her hand,
“If only you could find out, darling, what Enyusha would like best for dinner today, beet-root soup or cabbage broth?” “But why didn’t you ask him yourself?” “Oh, he’ll get tired of me!” Bazarov, however, soon ceased to shut himself up; his fever for work abated and was replaced by painful boredom and a vague restlessness.
A strange weariness began to show itself in all his movements; even his walk, once so firm, bold and impetuous, was changed.
He gave up his solitary rambles and began to seek company; he drank tea in the drawing room, strolled about the kitchen garden with Vassily Ivanovich, smoked a pipe with him in silence and once even inquired after Father Alexei.
At first Vassily Ivanovich rejoiced at this change, but his joy was short-lived.
“Enyusha is breaking my heart,” he plaintively confided to his wife. “It’s not that he’s dissatisfied or angry — that would be almost nothing; but he’s distressed, he’s downcast — and that is terrible.
He’s always silent; if only he would start to scold us; he’s growing thin, and he’s lost all the color in his face.”
“Lord have mercy on us!” whispered the old woman. “I would hang a charm round his neck, but of course he won’t allow it.”
Vassily Ivanovich tried several times in a very tactful manner to question Bazarov about his work, his health, and about Arkady . . . But Bazarov’s replies were reluctant and casual, and once, noticing that his father was trying gradually to lead up to something in the conversation, he remarked in a vexed tone,
“Why do you always seem to be following me about on tiptoe?
That way is even worse than the old one.”
“Well, well, I didn’t mean anything!” hurriedly answered poor Vassily Ivanovich.
So his diplomatic hints remained fruitless.
One day, talking about the approaching liberation of the serfs, he hoped to arouse his son’s sympathy by making some remarks about progress; but Bazarov only answered indifferently,
“Yesterday I was walking along the fence and heard our peasant boys, instead of singing an old folk song, bawling some street ditty about ‘the time has come for love’ . . . that’s what your progress amounts to.”
Sometimes Bazarov went into the village and in his usual bantering tone got into conversation with some peasant.
“Well,” he would say to him, “expound your views on life to me, brother; after all, they say the whole strength and future of Russia lies in your hands, that a new era in history will be started by you — that you will give us our real language and our laws.”
The peasant either answered nothing, or pronounced a few words like these,
“Oh, we’ll try . . . also, because, you see, in our position . . .”
“You explain to me what your world is,” Bazarov interrupted, “and is it the same world which is said to rest on three fishes?”
“No, batyushka,it’s the land that rests on three fishes,” the peasant explained soothingly in a good-natured patriarchal sing-song voice; “and over against our ‘world’ we know there’s the master’s will, because you are our fathers.
And the stricter the master’s rule, the better it is for the peasant.”
After hearing such a reply one day, Bazarov shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and turned away, while the peasant walked homewards.
“What was he talking about?” inquired another peasant, a surly middle-aged man who from the door of his hut had witnessed at a distance the conversation with Bazarov. “Was it about arrears of taxes?”
“Arrears? No fear of that, brother,” answered the first peasant, and his voice had lost every trace of the patriarchal sing-song; on the contrary, a note of scornful severity could be detected in it. “He was just chattering about something, felt like exercising his tongue.
Of course, he’s a gentleman. What can he understand?”
“How could he understand!” answered the other peasant, and pushing back their caps and loosening their belts they both started discussing their affairs and their needs.
Alas! Bazarov, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, he who knew how to talk to the peasants (as he had boasted in his dispute with Pavel Petrovich), the self-confident Bazarov did not for a moment suspect that in their eyes he was all the same a kind of buffoon . . . .
However, he found an occupation for himself at last.
One day Vassily Ivanovich was bandaging a peasant’s injured leg in his presence, but the old man’s hands trembled and he could not manage the bandages; his son helped him and from that time regularly took part in his father’s practice, though without ceasing to joke both about the remedies he himself advised and about his father, who immediately applied them.
But Bazarov’s gibes did not upset Vassily Ivanovich in the least; they even comforted him.
Holding his greasy dressing gown with two fingers over his stomach and smoking his pipe, he listened to Bazarov with enjoyment, and the more malicious his sallies, the more good-humoredly did his delighted father chuckle, showing all his discolored black teeth.