And he turned his face wearily to the wall, while Vasili Ivanitch left the room, ascended to the bedroom above, and fell upon his knees before the sacred ikons.
"Pray, Arina, pray!" he moaned. "Our son is dying!"
On the doctor arriving, the latter proved to be the district physician who had failed to produce hell-stone when required. After an examination of the patient he prescribed a watching course, and also added a few words as to a possible recovery.
"Have you ever known people in my condition not set out for the Elysian Fields?" asked Bazarov sharply as he caught hold of the leg of a table which stood beside his sofa, and shook it until the table actually altered its position. "See my strength!" he continued. "All of it is still there, yet I must go hence! To think that, whereas an old man has lost touch with life, I should——! Ah, however much you may deny death, it never will deny you.... I hear some one weeping. Who is it?" There was a pause. "Is it my mother? Poor soul! No one will be left for her to stuff with her marvellous borstchi.[1] And you, Vasili Ivanitch—are you too whimpering? Come, come! If Christianity cannot help you, try to become a Stoic philosopher. You have often enough boasted of being one."
"Aye, a fine philosopher I, to be sure!" sobbed poor old Vasili with the tears hopping down his cheeks.
Thereafter Bazarov grew hourly worse, for the disease was taking the rapid course inevitable under the circumstances. Yet his powers of memory were unimpaired, and he understood everything that was said to him, for as yet he was making a brave fight to retain his faculties.
"No, I must not let my senses fail," he kept whispering to himself as he clenched his fists. "But oh, the folly of it all!" And then he would repeat to himself, over and over again, some such formula as "Eight and ten—what do they make?"
Meanwhile Vasili Ivanitch wandered about in a state bordering upon distraction—proposing first one remedy, and then another, and constantly covering up his son's feet.
"Suppose we wrap him in an ice-sheet?" he suggested once in a tone of agony. "How, too, about an emetic, or a mustard plaster on his stomach, or a little bloodletting?"
But to each and all of these remedies the doctor (whom Vasili Ivanitch had begged to remain in the house) demurred. Likewise the doctor drank the patient's lemonade, and then requested to be given a pipe and "something warm and strengthening"—to wit, a glassful of vodka. Meanwhile Arina Vlasievna sat on a chair by the door, and only at intervals retired to pray. It seemed that a few days earlier she had let fall, and broken, a toilet mirror, and that all her life long she had looked upon such an occurrence as an evil omen. With her, in silence, sat Anfisushka; while, as for Timotheitch, he had departed with the message to Madame Odintsov.