“I have had a lot of bother with the peasants this year,” pursued Nikolai Petrovitch, turning to his son. “They won’t pay their rent. What is one to do?”
“But do you like your hired labourers?”
“Yes,” said Nikolai Petrovitch between his teeth. “They’re being set against me, that’s the mischief; and they don’t do their best. They spoil the tools. But they have tilled the land pretty fairly. When things have settled down a bit, it will be all right. Do you take an interest in farming now?”
“You’ve no shade; that’s a pity,” remarked Arkady, without answering the last question.
“I have had a great awning put up on the north side over the balcony,” observed Nikolai Petrovitch; “now we can have dinner even in the open air.”
“It’ll be rather too like a summer villa. … Still, that’s all nonsense. What air though here! How delicious it smells! Really I fancy there’s nowhere such fragrance in the world as in the meadows here! And the sky too.”
Arkady suddenly stopped short, cast a stealthy look behind him, and said no more.
“Of course,” observed Nikolai Petrovitch, “you were born here, and so everything is bound to strike you in a special—”
“Come, dad, that makes no difference where a man is born.”
“Still—”
“No; it makes absolutely no difference.”
Nikolai Petrovitch gave a sidelong glance at his son, and the carriage went on a half-a-mile further before the conversation was renewed between them.
“I don’t recollect whether I wrote to you,” began Nikolai Petrovitch, “your old nurse, Yegorovna, is dead.”
“Really? Poor thing! Is Prokofitch still living?”
“Yes, and not a bit changed. As grumbling as ever. In fact, you won’t find many changes at Maryino.”
“Have you still the same bailiff?”
“Well, to be sure there is a change there. I decided not to keep about me any freed serfs, who have been house servants, or, at least, not to entrust them with duties of any responsibility.” (Arkady glanced towards Piotr.) “Il est libre, en effet,” observed Nikolai Petrovitch in an undertone; “but, you see, he’s only a valet. Now I have a bailiff, a townsman; he seems a practical fellow. I pay him two hundred and fifty roubles a year. But,” added Nikolai Petrovitch, rubbing his forehead and eyebrows with his hand, which was always an indication with him of inward embarrassment, “I told you just now that you would not find changes at Maryino. … That’s not quite correct. I think it my duty to prepare you, though. …”
He hesitated for an instant, and then went on in French.
“A severe moralist would regard my openness, as improper; but, in the first place, it can’t be concealed, and secondly, you are aware I have always had peculiar ideas as regards the relation of father and son. Though, of course, you would be right in blaming me. At my age. … In short … that … that girl, about whom you have probably heard already …”
“Fenitchka?” asked Arkady easily.
Nikolai Petrovitch blushed. “Don’t mention her name aloud, please. … Well … she is living with me now. I have installed her in the house … there were two little rooms there. But that can all be changed.”
“Goodness, daddy, what for?”
“Your friend is going to stay with us … it would be awkward …”
“Please don’t be uneasy on Bazarov’s account. He’s above all that.”
“Well, but you too,” added Nikolai Petrovitch. “The little lodge is so horrid—that’s the worst of it.”
“Goodness, dad,” interposed Arkady, “it’s as if you were apologising; I wonder you’re not ashamed.”
“Of course, I ought to be ashamed,” answered Nikolai Petrovitch, flushing more and more.
“Nonsense, dad, nonsense; please don’t!” Arkady smiled affectionately. “What a thing to apologise for!” he thought to himself, and his heart was filled with a feeling of condescending tenderness for his kind, softhearted father, mixed with a sense of secret superiority. “Please, stop,” he repeated once more, instinctively revelling in a consciousness of his own advanced and emancipated condition.
Nikolai Petrovitch glanced at him from under the fingers of the hand with which he was still rubbing his forehead, and there was a pang in his heart. … But at once he blamed himself for it.
“Here are our meadows at last,” he said after a long silence.
“And that in front is our forest, isn’t it?” asked Arkady.
“Yes. Only I have sold the timber. This year they will cut it down.”
“Why did you sell it?”
“The money was needed; besides, that land is to go to the peasants.”
“Who don’t pay you their rent?”
“That’s their affair; besides, they will pay it some day.”
“I am sorry about the forest,” observed Arkady, and he began to look about him.
The country through which they were driving could not be called picturesque. Fields upon fields stretched all along to the very horizon, now sloping gently upwards, then dropping down again; in some places woods were to be seen, and winding ravines, planted with low, scanty bushes, recalling vividly the representation of them on the old-fashioned maps of the times of Catherine. They came upon little streams too with hollow banks; and tiny lakes with narrow dykes; and little villages, with low hovels under dark and often tumble-down roofs, and slanting barns with walls woven of brushwood and gaping doorways beside neglected threshing-floors; and churches, some brick-built, with stucco peeling off in patches, others wooden, with crosses fallen askew, and overgrown graveyards. Slowly Arkady’s heart sunk. To complete the picture, the peasants they met were all in tatters and on the sorriest little nags; the willows, with their trunks stripped of bark, and broken branches, stood like ragged beggars along the roadside; cows lean and shaggy and looking pinched up by hunger, were greedily tearing at the grass along the ditches. They looked as though they had just been snatched out of the murderous clutches of some threatening monster; and the piteous state of the weak, starved beasts in the midst of the lovely spring day, called up, like a white phantom, the endless, comfortless winter with its storms, and frosts, and snows. … “No,” thought Arkady,
