Fathers and Sons (5 page)

‘And are you happy with the hired labourers?’

‘Yes,’ Nikolay Petrovich said in a low voice. ‘The trouble is that people are getting at them. And there is still no real
will to work. They are ruining the harnesses. But their ploughing hasn’t been too bad. It’ll all come right in the end. So
are you becoming interested in farming?’

‘It’s such a pity you’ve no shade at home,’ Arkady remarked, not answering the last question.

‘I’ve put up a big awning above the balcony on the north side,’ said Nikolay Petrovich. ‘Now we can have dinner outside.’

‘It’ll look pretty suburban… but none of that matters. The air is so good here! It smells so wonderful! I really think there’s
nowhere in the world where the air smells as good as in this bit of country! And the sky…’

Arkady suddenly stopped speaking, looked surreptitiously behind him out of the corner of his eye and fell silent.

‘Of course,’ remarked Nikolay Petrovich, ‘you were born here, so everything here must seem special to you…’

‘But, Papa, it makes no difference where a man is born.’

‘Still…’

‘No, it makes absolutely no difference.’

Nikolay Petrovich looked sideways at his son and the carriage went another quarter of a mile before their conversation resumed.

‘I can’t remember if I wrote to tell you,’ Nikolay Petrovich began, ‘your old nanny Yegorovna died.’

‘Did she? Poor old woman! And is Prokofyich still alive?’

‘He is and he hasn’t changed a bit. He’s just as grumpy. Generally speaking you won’t find big changes at Marino.’

‘Do you still have the same bailiff?’
²

‘I’ve changed my bailiff. I decided I wouldn’t any longer employ old house serfs
³
who’d been freed, or at any rate I wouldn’t give them jobs involving responsibility.’ (Arkady looked meaningfully at Pyotr.)
‘
Il est libre, en effet
,’
⁴
Nikolay Petrovich said in a low voice, ‘but he’s just a valet. My new bailiff’s a townsman.
⁵
He seems a sensible fellow. I’m giving him 250 roubles a year.
⁶
By the way,’ added Nikolay Petrovich, rubbing his forehead and eyebrows with his hand, which with him was always a sign of
embarrassment, ‘I told you just now you wouldn’t find any changes at Marino… That’s not quite true. I feel I ought to warn
you, although…’

He faltered for a moment and went on, now speaking in French.

‘A strict moralist would find my frankness inappropriate, but firstly this is something which can’t be concealed, and secondly
you know I’ve always had definite principles about the relationship of father and son. Of course you are quite entitled to
condemn me. At my age… In a word, the… the girl, of whom you’ve probably already heard…’

‘You mean Fenechka?’ Arkady asked, casually.

Nikolay Petrovich went red.

‘Please don’t say her name so loudly… Well, yes… she’s now living with me. I’ve put her in the main house… there were two
small rooms free. But all that can be changed.’

‘For goodness’ sake, Papa, why?’

‘Your friend will be staying with us… it’s awkward…’

‘Please don’t worry about Bazarov. He’s above that kind of thing.’

‘And then there’s you,’ said Nikolay Petrovich. ‘The trouble is the rooms in the wing are so bad.’

‘For goodness’ sake, Papa,’ Arkady went on, ‘you seem to be apologizing. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Of course, I ought to be ashamed of myself,’ answered Nikolay Petrovich, getting redder and redder.

‘Stop it, Papa, do me a favour and just stop it!’ Arkady gave him a tender smile. ‘Why’s he apologizing?’ he thought to himself,
overcome by indulgent tenderness towards his kind, soft-hearted father, which was mixed with the sense of a sort of secret
superiority. ‘Stop it, please,’ he said again, involuntarily enjoying the consciousness of his own maturity and freedom.

Nikolay Petrovich looked at him through the fingers of the hand with which he was continuing to rub his forehead. Something
stabbed his heart. But here he blamed himself.

‘These are our fields now,’ he said after a long silence.

‘And aren’t those our woods ahead?’ Arkady asked.

‘Yes, they are. Only I’ve sold them. They’re going to be felling them this year.’

‘Why did you sell them?’

‘I needed the money. And also this land is going to the peasants.’

‘Who aren’t paying you rent?’

‘That’s their business. But they will one day.’

‘I’m sorry about the woods,’ said Arkady and began to look around.

The country through which they were driving could hardly be called picturesque. Fields, nothing but fields, rolled gently
up and down, stretching to the horizon. Here and there they could see small woods and winding gullies, covered with sparse,
low-growing bushes, which looked just the way they are shown on old maps from the time of Catherine the Great.
⁷
They passed streams with crumbling banks and tiny ponds with broken dams. There were little villages of low huts beneath
dark roofs, with thatch often half gone, and crooked threshing barns with walls of woven wattle and gaping doors, next to
empty threshing floors. There were churches, brick ones with plaster peeling here and there, wooden ones with crosses askew
and ruined cemeteries.

Arkady’s heart slowly sank. As if it had been planned, all the peasants they passed were dressed in rags and riding wretched
little horses. The willows by the road stood like tattered beggars, with torn bark and broken branches. Emaciated, rough-skinned
cows, all bone, hungrily munched the grass in the
ditches; they looked as if they’d just been torn from the murderous claws of some awesome beast. And on that beautiful spring
day the pitiful sight of these exhausted animals called up the spectre of unending, cheerless winter with its blizzards and
frosts and snow…

‘No,’ thought Arkady, ‘this country is poor, it doesn’t have either prosperity or industry. It mustn’t, mustn’t remain like
this, changes are essential… but how are we to achieve them, where do we begin?…’

Those were Arkady’s reflections… and while he was thinking, spring was coming into its own. Everything around was green and
gold, everything gently and lavishly rippled and glistened in the quiet breath of a warm breeze, every single plant – trees,
bushes and grass. Everywhere larks burst into an endless flow of song. Lapwings cried circling above the low-lying fields
or silently ran through the tussocky grass. The cranes made beautiful specks of black as they walked through the tender green
of the young spring corn. They disappeared in the rye, now just brushed with white, and from time to time only their heads
showed above its rippling haze. Arkady looked and looked, and his thoughts gradually became feeble and vanished… He threw
off his overcoat and looked at his father so cheerfully, so much like a little boy that Nikolay Petrovich again gave him a
hug.

‘It’s not far now,’ said Nikolay Petrovich. ‘We just have to climb this little hill and we’ll be able to see the house. We’re
going to have a wonderful life together, Arkasha. You’ll help me with the farming, if you don’t get bored with it. You and
I must now become really close and get to know each other properly, mustn’t we?’

‘Of course we must,’ said Arkady, ‘but what a beautiful day it is!’

‘To welcome you, Arkady dear. Yes, spring is here in all its glory. But I must say I agree with Pushkin – do you remember
in
Eugene Onegin
:
⁸

‘Spring, spring – season of love and passion,

Your coming fills my heart with gloom,

Your…’

‘Arkady!’ Bazarov’s voice rang out from the
tarantas
. ‘Pass me over a match, I haven’t got anything to light my pipe.’

Nikolay Petrovich fell silent, and Arkady, who had been beginning to listen to him with some amazement, though not without
sympathy, quickly took a silver match box from his pocket and sent it over to Bazarov with Pyotr.

‘Would you like a cigar?’ Bazarov shouted again.

‘Yes, please,’ answered Arkady.

Pyotr came back to the carriage and handed him the box and a fat black cigar, which Arkady at once lit. It gave off such a
strong and acrid smell of rank tobacco that Nikolay Petrovich, who had never smoked in his life, had to turn away his nose,
but unobtrusively so as not to hurt his son’s feelings. A quarter of an hour later both carriages stopped in front of the
steps of a new wooden house, painted grey and with a red iron roof. This was Marino, also known as New Town, or, as the peasants
called it, Poor Man’s Farm.

No crowd of house serfs spilled out on to the steps to greet the gentlemen: a single twelve-year-old girl appeared. She was
followed out of the house by a young fellow who looked very like Pyotr, in a grey livery jacket with white crested buttons.
This was Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov’s manservant. He silently opened the carriage door and unfastened the leather apron of the
tarantas
. Nikolay Petrovich, his son and Bazarov went through a dark, almost empty hall – through a doorway there was a glimpse of
a young woman’s face – into a drawing room furnished in the latest fashion.

‘We’re home,’ said Nikolay Petrovich, taking off his cap and running his fingers through his hair. ‘The main thing now is
to have some supper and rest.’

‘It’d be no bad thing to have a bite to eat,’ said Bazarov, stretching, and he sank down on to a sofa.

‘Yes, yes, let’s have supper, let’s have it right away.’ Nikolay
Petrovich for no obvious reason stamped his feet. ‘And here’s Prokofyich.’

A white-haired man entered: about sixty, thin and swarthy, wearing a brown tail coat with copper buttons and a pink kerchief
round his neck. He gave a grin, kissed Arkady’s hand and, bowing to the guest, went over to the door and put his hands behind
his back.

‘So, Prokofyich,’ began Nikolay Petrovich, ‘he’s come home to us at last… So? How do you think he looks?’

‘Very well, sir,’ the old man said and grinned again, but then quickly brought his thick eyebrows together in a frown. ‘Would
you like me to serve?’ he said solemnly.

‘Yes, yes, please. But won’t you first go to your room, Yevgeny Vasilyich?’

‘No thanks, no need. Just tell them to stick my case in there and this old thing too,’ he added, taking off his cloak.

‘Certainly. Prokofyich, take the gentleman’s coat.’ (Prokofyich, looking puzzled, took Bazarov’s ‘old thing’ in both hands
and went off on tiptoe, holding it high above his head.) ‘And, Arkady, don’t you want to go to your room for a minute?’

‘Yes, I must clean myself up,’ Arkady answered and moved towards the door. But at that moment a man came into the drawing
room. He was of medium height and wore a dark English suit, a fashionable low-cut cravat and patent leather boots. It was
Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov. He looked about forty-five. His short-cut grey hair shone with the dark sheen of new silver.
¹
His features, while revealing irritability, were unlined; they were exceptionally regular and clean-cut, as if chiselled
with delicate, light strokes, and showed the remains of remarkable good looks. His brilliant, dark, elongated eyes were particularly
fine. Arkady’s uncle’s whole way of holding himself displayed elegance and breeding; he had kept a young man’s grace and that
upright carriage, standing very straight, which usually disappears after thirty.

Pavel Petrovich took his shapely hand, with its long pink polished nails, out of his trouser pocket – a hand whose looks were
set off by the snowy whiteness of a cuff fastened by a link set with a single big opal – and offered it to his nephew. Having
first given him a European ‘
shake hands
’
²
he then kissed him three times in the Russian way, that is, he three times brushed Arkady’s cheek with his scented moustache
and said, ‘Welcome.’

Nikolay Petrovich introduced his brother to Bazarov. Pavel Petrovich gave a slight inclination of his graceful torso and a
half smile, but he didn’t offer his hand and even put it back in his pocket.

‘I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come today,’ he began in a pleasant voice, amiably rocking back and forth, shifting
his shoulders and displaying fine white teeth. ‘Did something happen on the way?’

‘Nothing happened,’ answered Arkady, ‘we just got held up a bit. But we’re now hungry as wolves. Papa, make Prokofyich hurry
up, and I’ll be right back.’

‘Wait, I’ll come with you,’ exclaimed Bazarov, suddenly getting up from the sofa. Both young men went out.

‘Who is that person?’ asked Pavel Petrovich.

‘A friend of Arkasha’s; he says he’s a very clever man.’

‘Is he going to be staying with us?’

‘Yes.’

‘That hairy creature?’

‘Well yes.’

Pavel Petrovich drummed his nails on the table.

‘I find Arkady
s’est dégourdi
,’
³
he commented. ‘I’m glad he’s back.’

There wasn’t much conversation during supper. Bazarov in particular said almost nothing but ate a great deal. Nikolay Petrovich
told various stories out of what he called his ‘farmer’s life’ and talked of forthcoming government initiatives, of committees
and delegates, of the need to introduce machinery and so forth. Pavel Petrovich slowly paced up and down the dining room –
he never ate supper – occasionally sipping from a glass filled with red wine and even more occasionally making remarks or
rather exclamations like ‘ah!’, ‘eh!’, ‘hm!’ Arkady gave them some Petersburg news but he felt a slight awkwardness, the awkwardness
which tends to come over a young man who has just left boyhood and come back to a place where people have
been used to seeing and thinking of him as a boy. He talked at too great length, he avoided the word ‘Papa’ and even once
said ‘Father’ instead, even if in a very low voice. With too liberal a hand he poured much more wine in his glass than he
wanted and drank it all. Prokofyich didn’t take his eyes from him and just chewed his lips. After supper they all went to
their rooms.