; what does he understand?'

'What should he understand!' answered the other peasant, and jerking
back their caps and pushing down their belts, they proceeded to
deliberate upon their work and their wants. Alas! Bazarov, shrugging
his shoulders contemptuously, Bazarov, who knew how to talk to peasants
(as he had boasted in his dispute with Pavel Petrovitch), did not in
his self-confidence even suspect that in their eyes he was all the
while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.

He found employment for himself at last, however. One day Vassily
Ivanovitch bound up a peasant's wounded leg before him, but the old
man's hands trembled, and he could not manage the bandages; his son
helped him, and from time to time began to take a share in his
practice, though at the same time he was constantly sneering both at
the remedies he himself advised and at his father, who hastened to make
use of them. But Bazarov's jeers did not in the least perturb Vassily
Ivanovitch; they were positively a comfort to him. Holding his greasy
dressing-gown across his stomach with two fingers, and smoking his
pipe, he used to listen with enjoyment to Bazarov; and the more
malicious his sallies, the more good-humouredly did his delighted
father chuckle, showing every one of his black teeth. He used even to
repeat these sometimes flat or pointless retorts, and would, for
instance, for several days constantly without rhyme or reason,
reiterate, 'Not a matter of the first importance!' simply because his
son, on hearing he was going to matins, had made use of that
expression. 'Thank God! he has got over his melancholy!' he whispered
to his wife; 'how he gave it to me to-day, it was splendid!' Moreover,
the idea of having such an assistant excited him to ecstasy, filled him
with pride. 'Yes, yes,' he would say to some peasant woman in a man's
cloak, and a cap shaped like a horn, as he handed her a bottle of
Goulard's extract or a box of white ointment, 'you ought to be thanking
God, my good woman, every minute that my son is staying with me; you
will be treated now by the most scientific, most modern method. Do you
know what that means? The Emperor of the French, Napoleon, even, has no
better doctor.' And the peasant woman, who had come to complain that
she felt so sort of queer all over (the exact meaning of these words
she was not able, however, herself to explain), merely bowed low and
rummaged in her bosom, where four eggs lay tied up in the