The World's Greatest Books - Volume 8 Part 36

"Here, on my finger. I have been dissecting that peasant who died of typhus fever."

Va.s.sily Ivanovitch suddenly turned quite white. All that day he watched his son's face stealthily. On the third day Bazaroff could not touch his food.

"Have you no appet.i.te? And your head?" he at last asked, timidly; "does it ache?"

"Yes, of course it aches."

"Don't be angry, please," continued Va.s.sily Ivanovitch. "Won't you let me feel your pulse?"

Bazaroff got up. "I can tell you without feeling my pulse," he said. "I am feverish."

"Has there been any s.h.i.+vering?"

"Yes, there's been s.h.i.+vering, too; I'll go and lie down."

Bazaroff did not get up again all day, and pa.s.sed the whole night in heavy, half-unconscious slumber. At one o'clock in the morning, opening his eyes with an effort, he saw, by the light of a lamp, his father's pale face bending over him, and told him to go away. The old man begged his pardon, but he quickly came back on tiptoe, and, half hidden by the cupboard door, he gazed persistently at his son. His wife did not go to bed either, and, leaving the study door open a very little, she kept coming up to it to listen "how Enyusha was breathing" and to look at Va.s.sily Ivanovitch. She could see nothing but his motionless bent back, but even that afforded her some faint consolation.

In the morning Bazaroff spoke to his father in a slow, drowsy voice.

"Governor, I am in a bad way; I've got the infection, and in a few days you will have to bury me."

Va.s.sily Ivanovitch staggered back as if someone had aimed a blow at his leg.

"G.o.d have mercy on you! What do you mean? You have only caught a cold.

I've sent for the doctor and you'll soon be cured."

"Come, that's humbug. I've got the typhus; you can see it in my arm. You told me you'd sent for the doctor. You did that to comfort yourself...

comfort me, too; send a messenger to Madame Odintsov; she's a lady with an estate... Do you know?" (Va.s.sily Ivanovitch nodded.) "Yevgeny Bazaroff, say, sends his greetings, and sends word he is dying. Will you do that?"

"Yes, I will do it... But it is an impossible thing for you to die...

Think only! Where would divine justice be after that?"

"I know nothing about that; only you send the messenger."

He turned his face painfully to the wall, while Va.s.sily Ivanovitch went out of the study, and, struggling as far as his wife's bedroom, simply dropped down on to his knees before the holy pictures.

"Pray, Arina, pray for us," he murmured. "Our son is dying."

Bazaroff got worse every hour. He was in the agonies of high fever. His mother and father watched over him, combing his hair and giving him gulps of tea. The old man was tormented by a special anguish. He wished his son to take the sacrament, though, knowing his att.i.tude towards religion, he dared not ask him. At last he could keep back the words no longer. As in a broken voice he begged his son to see a priest, a strange look came over Bazaroff's face.

"I won't refuse if that can be any comfort to you, but I'll wait a little."

There was the sound of carriage wheels outside. Va.s.sily Ivanovitch rushed to the door. A lady in a black veil and a black mantle, accompanied by a little German doctor in spectacles, got out of the carriage.

"I am Madame Odintsov," said the lady. "Your son is still living? I have a doctor with me."

"Benefactress!" cried Va.s.sily Ivanovitch, s.n.a.t.c.hing her hand and placing it convulsively to his lips. "Still living; my Yevgeny is living, and now he will be saved! Wife! wife!... An angel from heaven has come to us."

But when the doctor came out from examining his patient he breathed the news that there was no hope, and Va.s.sily Ivanovitch conducted Madame Odintsov to his son's room. As she looked at Bazaroff she felt simply dismayed, with a sort of cold and suffocating dismay; the thought that she would not have felt like that if she had really loved him flashed instantaneously through her brain.

"Thanks," said Bazaroff from the bed. "I did not expect this. It's a deed of mercy. So we have seen each other again as you promised.... I loved you! there was no sense in that even before, and less than ever now. Love is a form, and my own form is already breaking up."

Madame Odintsov gave an involuntary shudder.

"n.o.ble-hearted!" he whispered. "Oh, how young and fresh and pure... in this loathsome room! Well, good-bye.... I thought I wouldn't die; I'd break down so many things. I wouldn't die; why should I? There were problems to solve, and I was a giant! And now all the problem for the giant is how to die decently.... My father will tell you what a man Russia is losing.... That's nonsense, but don't contradict the old man.

Whatever toy will comfort a child... you know. And be kind to mother.

People like them are not to be found in your great world.... I was needed by Russia.... No, it's clear I wasn't needed. And who is needed?"

Bazaroff put his hand to his brow. Madame Odintsov bent down to him.

"Yevgeny Va.s.silyvitch, I am here...." He at once took his hand away and raised himself.

"Good-bye," he said, with a sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with their last light. "Good-bye.... Listen.... You know I didn't kiss you then.... Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out...."

She put her lips on his forehead.

"Enough!" he murmured, and dropped back on to the pillow. "Now...

darkness...."

Madame Odintsov went softly out. "Well?" Va.s.sily Ivanovitch asked her in a whisper. "He has fallen asleep," she answered, hardly audible. But Bazaroff was not fated to awaken. That night he breathed his last. A universal lamentation arose in the house. Va.s.sily Ivanovitch was seized by a sudden frenzy.

"I said I should rebel," he shrieked hoa.r.s.ely, his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone; "and I rebel, I rebel!"

But his wife, all in tears, hung upon his neck, and both fell on their faces together. "Side by side," said one of the servants afterwards, "they drooped their poor heads like lambs at noonday...."

There is a little grave in the graveyard, surrounded by an iron railing; two young fir-trees have been planted, one at each end. Yevgeny Bazaroff is buried in this tomb. Often from the little village not far off two quite feeble old people come to visit it--a husband and wife. At the iron railing they fall down and remain on their knees, and long and bitterly they weep and yearn and intently they gaze at the dumb stone under which their son is lying.... Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred, devoted love, is not all-powerful?

Oh, no! however pa.s.sionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, that great peace of "indifferent" nature; they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.

A Nest of n.o.bles

"A Nest of n.o.bles" ("Dvorianskoe Gniezdo"), published in 1858, brought Turgenev a European reputation. Of all his novels, "A Nest of n.o.bles" is probably the best. It has all the love of detail that is peculiar to the Slavonic mind, a trait which is largely responsible for that feeling of pessimism that pervades the writings of all those who have listened to the "still, sad music of humanity." Yet Turgenev is not typical of that Russian school of novelists of which Tolstoy and Gorki are distinguished examples; rather he belongs to the school of Thackeray, George Eliot, and d.i.c.kens.

_I.--A Student's Marriage_

Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky came of an ancient n.o.ble family. His father, a strangely whimsical man, determined that his son should grow up a Spartan. A gymnastic instructor was his princ.i.p.al teacher, although he also studied natural science, mathematics, and international law. Music, as a pursuit unworthy of a man, was discarded. The female s.e.x he was taught to hold in contempt, and all the gentler arts and emotions were rigorously repressed. The boy was conscious of defects in his education, and from his eighteenth year set himself to remedy them as far as he could. His father died when he was twenty-two, and young Lavretsky determined to go to Moscow, in the hope that diligent study might enable him to regain the ground lost in youth.

The whole tendency of his education had been to make him into a shy man: he could not get on with people; with an unquenchable thirst for love in his heart, he had never yet dared to look a woman in the face. Robust, rosy-cheeked, bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on his companions, who did not suspect that this outwardly austere man was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, made no overtures to him, and he avoided them. During the first two years he spent at the University he only became fairly intimate with one student, Mihalevitch by name, for he took lessons in Latin.