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. He even used to repeat these often blunt or pointless witticisms, and for instance, with no reason at all, went on saying for several days, “Well, that’s a far away business,” simply because his son, on hearing that he was going to the early church service, had used that expression. “Thank God, he has got over his melancholy,” he whispered to his wife. “How he went for me today, it was marvelous!” Besides, the idea of having such an assistant filled him with enthusiasm and pride. “Yes, yes,” he said to a peasant woman wearing a man’s cloak and a horn-shaped hood, as he handed her a bottle of Goulard’s extract or a pot of white ointment, “you, my dear, ought to be thanking God every minute that my son is staying with me; you will be treated now by the most up-to-date scientific methods; do you know what that means? The Emperor of the French, Napoleon, even he has no better doctor.” But the peasant woman, who had come to complain that she felt queer all over (though she was unable to explain what she meant by these words), only bowed low and fumbled in her bosom where she had four eggs tied up in the corner of a towel.

Once Bazarov pulled out a tooth for a traveling pedlar of cloth, and although this tooth was quite an ordinary specimen, Vassily Ivanovich preserved it like some rare object and incessantly repeated, as he showed it to Father Alexei, “Only look, what roots! The strength Evgeny has! That pedlar was just lifted up in the air . . . even if it had been an oak, he would have rooted it up!”

“Admirable!” Father Alexei would comment at last, not knowing what to answer or how to get rid of the ecstatic old man.

One day a peasant from a neighboring village brought over to Vassily Ivanovich his brother, who was stricken with typhus. The unhappy man, lying flat on a truss of straw, was dying; his body was covered with dark patches, he had long ago lost consciousness. Vassily Ivanovich expressed his regret that no one had taken any steps to secure medical aid earlier and said it was impossible to save the man. In fact the peasant never got his brother home again; he died as he was, lying in the cart.

Three days later Bazarov came into his father’s room and asked him if he had any silver nitrate.

“Yes; what do you want it for?”

“I want it . . . to burn out a cut.”

“For whom?”

“For myself.”

“How for yourself? What is that? What sort of a cut? Where is it?”

“Here, on my finger. I went today to the village where they brought that peasant with typhus, you know. They wanted to open the body for some reason, and I’ve had no practice at that sort of thing for a long time.”

“Well?”

“Well, so I asked the district doctor to help; and so I cut myself.”

Vassily Ivanovich suddenly turned completely white, and without saying a word rushed into his study and returned at once with a piece of silver nitrate in his hand. Bazarov was about to take it and go away.

“For God’s sake,” muttered Vassily Ivanovich, “let me do it myself.”

Bazarov smiled.

“What a devoted practitioner you are!”

“Don’t laugh, please. Show me your finger. It’s a small cut. Am I hurting you?”

“Press harder; don’t be afraid.”

Vassily Ivanovich stopped.

“What do you think, Evgeny; wouldn’t it be better to burn it with a hot iron?”

“That ought to have been done sooner, now really even the silver nitrate is useless. If I’ve caught the infection, it’s too late now.”

“How . . . too late . . .?” murmured Vassily Ivanovich almost inaudibly.

“I should think so! It’s over four hours ago.”

Vassily Ivanovich burned the cut a little more.

“But hadn’t the district doctor got any caustic?”

“No.”

“How can that be, good heavens! A doctor who is without such an indispensable thing!”

“You should have seen his lancets,” remarked Bazarov, and went out.

Till late that evening and all the following day Vassily Ivanovich kept seizing on every possible pretext to go into his son’s room, and though, far from mentioning the cut, he even tried to talk about the most irrelevant subjects, he looked so persistently into his son’s face and watched him with so much anxiety that Bazarov lost patience and threatened to leave the house. Vassily Ivanovich then promised not to bother him, and he did this the more readily since Arina Vlasyevna, from whom, of course, he had kept it all secret, was beginning to worry him about why he did not sleep and what trouble had come over him. For two whole days he held firm, though he did not at all like the look of his son, whom he kept watching on the sly . . . but on the third day at dinner he could bear it no longer. Bazarov was sitting with downcast eyes and had not touched a single dish.

“Why don’t you eat, Evgeny?” he inquired, putting on a perfectly carefree expression. “The food, I think, is very well prepared.”

“I don’t want anything, so I don’t eat.”

“You have no appetite? And your head,” he added timidly, “does it ache?”

“Yes, of course it aches.”

Arina Vlasyevna sat bolt upright and became very alert.

“Please don’t be angry, Evgeny,” went on Vassily Ivanovich, “but won’t you let me feel your pulse?”

Bazarov got up.

“I can tell you without feeling my pulse, I’m feverish.”

“And have you been shivering?”

“Yes, I’ve been shivering. I’ll go and lie down; and you can send me in some lime-flower tea. I must have caught cold.”

“Of course, I heard you coughing last night,” murmured Arina Vlasyevna.

“I’ve caught cold,” repeated Bazarov, and left the room.

Arina Vlasyevna busied herself with the preparation of the lime-flower tea, while Vassily Ivanovich went into the next room and desperately clutched at his hair in silence.

Bazarov did not get up again that day and passed the whole night in heavy half-conscious 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 obeyed, but immediately returned on tiptoe, and half-hidden behind the cupboard door he gazed persistently at his son. Arina Vlasyevna did not go to bed either, and leaving the study door a little open, she kept coming up to it to listen “how Enyusha was breathing,” and to look at Vassily Ivanovich. She could see only his motionless bent back, but even that have her some kind of consolation. In the morning Bazarov tried to get up; he was seized with giddiness, and his nose began to bleed; he lay down again. Vassily Ivanovich waited on him in silence; Arina Vlasyevna went up to him and asked him how he felt. He answered, “Better,” and turned his face to the wall. Vassily Ivanovich made a gesture to his wife with both hands; she bit her lip to stop herself from crying and left the room. The whole house seemed to have suddenly darkened; every person had a drawn face and a strange stillness reigned; the servants carried off from the courtyard into the village a loudly crowing cock, who for a long time was unable to grasp what they were doing with him. Bazarov continued to lie with his face to the wall. Vassily Ivanovich tried to ask him various questions, but they wearied Bazarov, and the old man sank back in his chair, only occasionally cracking the joints of his fingers. He went into the garden for a few minutes, stood there like a stone idol, as though overwhelmed with unutterable amazement (a bewildered expression never left his face), then went back again to his son, trying to avoid his wife’s questions. At last she caught him by the arm, and convulsively, almost threateningly, asked, “What is wrong with him?” Then he collected his thoughts and forced himself to smile at her in reply, but to his own horror, instead of smiling, he suddenly started to laugh. He had sent for a doctor at daybreak. He thought it necessary to warn his son about this, in case he might be angry.

Bazarov abruptly turned round on the sofa, looked fixedly with dim eyes at his father and asked for something to drink.

Vassily Ivanovich gave him some water and in so doing felt his forehead; it was burning.

“Listen, old man,” began Bazarov in a slow husky voice, “I’m in a bad way. I’ve caught the infection and in a few days you’ll have to bury me.”

Vassily Ivanovich staggered as though someone had knocked his legs from under him.

“Evgeny,” he muttered, “what are you saying? God have mercy on you! You’ve caught cold . . .”

“Stop that,” interrupted Bazarov in the same slow, deliberate voice; “a doctor has no right to talk like that. I’ve all the symptoms of infection, you can see for yourself.”

“What symptoms . . . of infection, Evgeny? . . . Good heavens!”

“Well, what’s this?” said Bazarov, and pulling up his shirt sleeve he showed his father the ominous red patches coming out on his arm.

Vassily Ivanovich trembled and turned cold from fear.

“Supposing,” he said at last, “supposing . . . even supposing . . . there is something like an infection . . .”

“Blood poisoning,” repeated Bazarov severely and distinctly; “have you forgotten your textbooks?”

“Well, yes, yes, as you like . . . all the same we............