Fathers and Sons (25 page)

‘Is he dead?’ Bazarov heard Pyotr’s tremulous voice babbling behind him. He looked round.

‘Go and get some water, my friend, be quick, and he’ll outlive us both.’ But the latest model of servant didn’t appear to
understand his words and didn’t move. Pavel Petrovich slowly opened his eyes. ‘He’s going!’ Pyotr whispered, and began crossing
himself.

‘You’re right… What a stupid face!’ said the wounded gentleman with a forced smile.

‘Damn you, go and get some water!’ cried Bazarov.

‘I don’t need any… It was just a momentary
vertige
⁴
… Help me up… like that… We just need something to tie up this scratch, and I’ll walk home, or if not they can send the droshky
for me. If you agree, we won’t resume our duel. You have behaved nobly… today, today I mean.’

‘There’s no reason to go over the past,’ Bazarov retorted, ‘and we needn’t worry ourselves about the future either, because
I mean to go off at once. Come, I’ll now bandage your leg. Your wound isn’t dangerous, but it’s still better to stop the bleeding.
But first we have to bring this creature back to his senses.’

Bazarov shook Pyotr by the collar and sent him off to fetch the droshky.

‘Take care you don’t scare my brother,’ said Pavel Petrovich to him. ‘And don’t even think of reporting this to him.’

Pyotr hurried off, and while he was running to fetch the droshky the two opponents sat on the ground without speaking. Pavel
Petrovich tried not to look at Bazarov. In spite of everything he didn’t want to make his peace with him. He was ashamed of
his arrogance, of his failure, he was ashamed of the whole thing he had started, although he also felt the outcome couldn’t
have been more favourable. ‘At least he won’t be hanging about here,’ he consoled himself, ‘and many thanks for that.’ The
silence continued, heavy and awkward. Both men felt uncomfortable. Each knew the other understood him. That kind of knowledge
is agreeable for friends, and for enemies very disagreeable, especially when they can’t either have it out or separate.

‘Have I made the bandage on your leg too tight?’ Bazarov asked at last.

‘No, it’s all right, fine,’ Pavel Petrovich answered and added after a short pause, ‘We won’t be able to keep this from my
brother, we’ll have to tell him we fought over politics.’

‘Excellent,’ said Bazarov. ‘You can tell him I was rude about all Anglophiles.’

‘That’s very good. What do you suppose that man thinks of us now?’ Pavel Petrovich went on, pointing to that muzhik who had
driven his hobbled horses past Bazarov a few minutes before the duel and who was now coming back along the road. He stepped
deferentially aside and took off his cap at the sight of ‘gentlemen’.

‘Who knows!’ answered Bazarov. ‘It’s most likely he doesn’t think anything. The Russian muzhik is the mysterious stranger
whom Mrs Radcliffe
⁵
used to go on about. Who can understand him? He can’t himself.’

‘Oh, now you’re starting that!’ Pavel Petrovich began, then exclaimed suddenly, ‘Look what your idiot Pyotr has gone and done!
My brother is hurrying here!’

Bazarov turned and saw Nikolay Petrovich sitting in the droshky, white-faced. He jumped down before it had stopped and rushed
to his brother.

‘What’s going on?’ he said in an anxious voice. ‘Yevgeny Vasilyich, please, what is all this?’

‘Nothing at all,’ answered Pavel Petrovich. ‘There was no point in alarming you. Mr Bazarov and I had a small quarrel, and
I have paid a bit for it.’

‘What was it all about, for God’s sake?’

‘What can I tell you? Mr Bazarov said something disrespectful about Sir Robert Peel.
⁶
I hasten to add that in all of this only I am to blame and Mr Bazarov behaved very well. I called him out.’

‘But, my goodness, you’re bleeding!’

‘Do you think I have water in my veins? But this bloodletting will even do me good. Won’t it, doctor? Help me get into the
droshky and don’t give in to depression. Tomorrow I’ll be recovered. That’s it, excellent. Coachman, get going.’

Nikolay Petrovich followed the droshky; Bazarov would have stayed behind…

‘I must ask you to look after my brother,’ Nikolay Petrovich said to him, ‘until we get another doctor here from the town.’

Bazarov nodded without saying anything.

An hour later Pavel Petrovich was already lying in his bed, with a proper bandage round his leg. The whole house was in a
state of alarm. Fenechka felt unwell. Nikolay Petrovich quietly wrung his hands while Pavel Petrovich laughed and joked, especially
with Bazarov. He was wearing a fine batiste night-shirt and an elegant morning jacket and fez. He wouldn’t let them lower
the window-blind and made amusing complaints about not being allowed to take food.

However, by nightfall he had a fever. His head began to ache. The doctor from the town came. (Nikolay Petrovich hadn’t listened
to his brother, and this was what Bazarov himself wanted too; he had spent the whole day sitting in his room, looking all
jaundiced and angry, and he only came out for the briefest visits to the patient; a couple of times he happened to meet Fenechka,
but she recoiled from him in horror.) The new doctor prescribed cooling drinks but in other respects confirmed Bazarov’s assurances
that no danger need be envisaged. Nikolay Petrovich said to him that his brother had wounded himself through carelessness,
to which the doctor replied ‘Hm!’, but having then been given twenty-five silver roubles in his hand, he pronounced, ‘You
don’t say! That does indeed often happen.’

No one in the house went to bed or undressed. Nikolay Petrovich now and then tiptoed in and out of his brother’s room. Pavel
Petrovich dozed, groaned slightly, said to him in French, ‘
Couchez-vous
’
⁷
– and asked for a drink. Nikolay Petrovich once made Fenechka bring him a glass of lemonade; Pavel Petrovich stared at her
and drank the glass to the last drop. By morning the fever had risen a little, and he showed some signs of delirium. At first
Pavel Petrovich uttered incoherent words, then he suddenly opened his eyes and, seeing his brother by his bed solicitously
bending over him, said:

‘Nikolay, doesn’t Fenechka have something in common with Nelly?’

‘What Nelly, Pasha?’
⁸

‘How can you ask that? Princess R.… Especially in the upper part of the face.
C’est de la même famille.
’
⁹

Nikolay Petrovich said nothing in reply but in his heart he was astonished at the tenacity of a man’s old feelings.

‘So that’s come up now,’ he thought.

‘Oh, how I love that simple creature!’ Pavel Petrovich moaned, wearily putting his arms behind his head. ‘I will not allow
any insolent fellow to dare to touch…’ he babbled a few moments later.

Nikolay Petrovich only gave a sigh. He didn’t suspect to whom these words referred.

Bazarov came to see Pavel Petrovich the following day about eight o’clock. He had already packed and released all his frogs,
insects and birds.

‘Have you come to say goodbye to me?’ said Nikolay Petrovich, rising to greet him.

‘I have.’

‘I understand you and wholly approve. My poor brother of course is to blame. And he’s been punished for it. He told me himself
that he put you into a situation where it was impossible for you to act otherwise. I don’t believe you could have avoided
this duel which… which to some extent can be explained by the constant antagonism of your respective points of view.’ (Nikolay
Petrovich was getting lost in his words.) ‘My brother is a man of the old school, fiery-tempered and set in his ways… Thank
God, too, that it’s ended like this. I have taken all necessary measures against publicity…’

‘I’ll leave you my address in case you need it, should the story come out,’ Bazarov remarked coolly.

‘I hope no story comes out, Yevgeny Vasilyich… I’m very sorry that your stay in my house has had such a… such an end. I feel
the worse that Arkady…’

‘I’ll surely be seeing him,’ Bazarov retorted: all kinds of ‘explanation’ and ‘clarification’ always provoked in him a feeling
of impatience. ‘In case I don’t, please greet him for me and give him my regrets.’

‘And allow me…’ Nikolay Petrovich answered, with a bow.

But Bazarov didn’t wait for the end of his sentence and went out.

When he heard of Bazarov’s coming departure, Pavel Petrovich said that he wanted to see him and shook hands. But on this occasion
too Bazarov appeared cold as ice. He realized that Pavel Petrovich wanted to appear a little magnanimous. He didn’t manage
to say goodbye to Fenechka: he just caught her eye through a window. He thought her face looked sad. ‘That’ll surely pass!’
he said to himself. ‘She’ll somehow get over it!’ But Pyotr was so moved that he cried on his shoulder till Bazarov put him
off with the chilly question ‘Do your eyes run?’ And Dunyasha was obliged to dash off to the wood in order to hide her emotion.
The perpetrator of all this grief got into the carriage and lit up a cigar, and when after a couple of miles at a turn in
the road the extended line of the Kirsanovs’ manor buildings with the new mansion appeared to him for the last time, he just
spat and, muttering ‘Bloody gents!’, he wrapped himself deeper in his overcoat.

Pavel Petrovich soon felt better, but he had to stay in bed for about a week. He bore his ‘captivity’, as he called it, patiently,
only he took a great deal of pains over his toilet and kept telling them to fumigate the room with eau de Cologne. Nikolay
Petrovich read the newspapers to him, Fenechka waited on him as before, brought him broth, lemonade, soft-boiled eggs, tea.
But she was overcome by secret terror every time she entered his room. Pavel Petrovich’s surprising action had scared everyone
in the house and her most of all; only Prokofyich was unperturbed and explained that in his day gentlemen were always fighting,
‘only it was noble gentlemen fighting each other, but rubbish like that they’d have had flogged in the stables for impertinence’.

Fenechka had almost no reproaches of conscience but she was troubled at times by the thought of the real reason for the quarrel.
And Pavel Petrovich looked at her so strangely… so that even when she had her back to him she felt his eyes on her. She had
become thinner from the constant inner anxiety and, as usually happens, had become even prettier.

One day – it was in the morning – Pavel Petrovich felt better
and moved from his bed to a sofa while Nikolay Petrovich, having inquired after his health, went off to the threshing barn.
Fenechka brought a cup of tea, put it down on a table and was about to go. Pavel Petrovich detained her.

‘Why are you in such a hurry, Fedosya Nikolayevna?’ he began. ‘Have you things to do?’

‘No… yes… I have to pour out the tea in there.’

‘Dunyasha will do that without you. Sit a bit with the patient. Incidentally, I must talk to you.’

Fenechka sat down on the edge of a chair without speaking.

‘Listen,’ said Pavel Petrovich and tugged at his moustache. ‘I have long been meaning to ask you – you’re frightened of me,
aren’t you?’

‘I, frightened of you?’

‘Yes, you. You never look at me, as if you had something on your conscience.’

Fenechka went red but she did glance at Pavel Petrovich. He had a strange look, she felt, and her heart began to beat gently.

‘You don’t have anything on your conscience, do you?’

‘Why should I?’ she whispered.

‘There are plenty of reasons. But whom could you have wronged? Myself? Unlikely. Others here in the house? Also improbable.
Then my brother? But you do love him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘With all your heart and all your soul?’

‘I love Nikolay Petrovich with all my heart.’

‘Truthfully? Look at me, Fenechka.’ (He called her that for the first time…) ‘You know that lying is a grave sin.’

‘I am not lying, Pavel Petrovich. Stop loving Nikolay Petrovich – after that I might as well die!’

‘And you wouldn’t give him up for anyone else?’

‘For whom could I?’

‘It could be anyone! Say the gentleman who’s just left here.’

Fenechka got up.

‘My God, Pavel Petrovich, why are you tormenting me? What have I done to you? How can you say such a thing?…’

‘Fenechka,’ said Pavel Petrovich sadly, ‘but I saw…’

‘What did you see?’

‘I saw you there in the arbour.’

Fenechka blushed to her ears and the roots of her hair.

‘But did I do wrong there?’ she said with some difficulty.

Pavel Petrovich rose.

‘Did you really do nothing wrong? Nothing? Nothing at all?’

‘Nikolay Petrovich is the only one in the world that I love, and I will love him always!’ Fenechka pronounced with a sudden
surge of strength while sobs were still choking her throat. ‘But as for what you saw, I’ll say at the Last Judgement that
I bear no blame for that, and it would be better for me to die here and now if people had any suspicions about me there, that
I could cause my benefactor, Nikolay Petrovich…’

But here her voice failed her and at the same time she felt that Pavel Petrovich had taken hold of her hand and squeezed it…
She looked at him and froze. He had become even paler than before, his eyes shone, and, most surprising of all, a single tear
rolled down his cheek.

‘Fenechka!’ he said in a kind of odd whisper. ‘You must love my brother, love him! He is such a kind, good man. Don’t betray
him for anyone in the world, don’t listen to the fine words of others! Think, what can be more terrible than to love and not
to be loved! Don’t abandon my poor Nikolay!’

So great was Fenechka’s astonishment that her eyes dried and her terror passed. But what did she feel when Pavel Petrovich,
Pavel Petrovich himself, took her hand to his lips and pressed it there, without kissing it and only occasionally giving a
convulsive sigh…

‘Lord above!’ she thought. ‘Is he having a fit?…’ But at that moment his whole ruined life was quivering within him. The stairs
creaked, and there was the sound of hurried footsteps… He pushed her away from him, and his head fell back on the pillow.
The door opened – and Nikolay Petrovich appeared, all cheerful, fresh and rosy. Mitya, in just a shirt, as fresh and rosy
as his father, was jumping up and down on his chest, grabbing the big buttons of his country coat between his bare toes.