The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free Page A

the desires one has at the age of 15. My mother had a pretty chambermaid who looked a little silly but, you know, a silly look lends a certain grandeur to some faces. It was rather a damp day, no a rainy day: one of those erotic days that Daudet likes to describe. It began to drizzle. She took—mind you, I was her master and she was my slave—she took hold of me by the hair at the back of my head and said to me “Come.” What followed was the sensations we have all experienced. But the sweet clasp of my hair accompanied by that single word—that still gives me a sensation of happiness every time I think of it.
    The incident would strike his mother as normal, indeed proper; perhaps she arranged it. His inevitable love affairs would be under her control in the manner of her generation. She distinguished between sexual adventure and the far greater perils of love.
    The boy had suddenly grown as tall as his father, indeed into a plumpish young giant with a long body and shortish legs which gave a sway to his walk. He had chestnut hair and large grave blue eyes, a bold nose. When his face was still the expression was of a young man self-absorbed, posing a little, and waiting. He had the fashionable lisp and he had some difficulty in getting his words out at first; the voice was gentle and caressing, but he was easily excited and then in talk and laughter the voice became high and shrill, even boisterous and he started pacing up and down the room like an actor carried away by his part.
    In 1834 when he was sixteen, his mother pushed him on to Petersburg University, the proper place for a young nobleman and where she had good connections. He shared rooms with his older brother who was a cadet in the military college. His mother went off to Italy but presently there was the family tragedy. The father was dying at Spasskoye.
    So much has been made of the powerful influence of his mother upon Turgenev’s character that the father has come to seem a distant and negligent figure who let her run her family as she wished. This is not quite so. When he intervened his was the voice of authority and she had some awe of him. His distance had its spell. He was one of those fathers who have the disconcerting air of being a spectator in his own family. In this Ivan was very much his father’s son; he too had grown into a restless spectator, his mind on his inner personal freedom. They went out shooting together: the father, though poorly educated himself, took an awkward interest in his son’s education. Although he became a rationalist very early, Ivan was affected by the superstitions his father shared with the servants and one effect of seeing the agonies of his father’s death was to convince Ivan for life that he would die of the disease of the bladder that killed his father.
    It is tempting to trace Turgenev’s life-long hypochondria to this event but when one considers the peculiar emotional conditions of life at Spasskoye, other influences pervade. Cholera moved from district to district among the peasants and the news of it besieged the minds of the landowners who shut themselves up in their houses when it was about. Varvara Petrovna feared it so much that she is said to have been borne round her grounds in a glass-enclosed chair when the plague came near. Spasskoye was a hothouse of imaginarysymptoms and there was only a serf doctor living there to offer his crude remedies. Her temper brought on fainting fits and other disorders, and so strong was her will and imagination that she could act out any illness that suited her, with dramatic effect: it is not surprising that Ivan should have caught something of her morbidity.
    Much more important was the effect of the father’s death on Varvara Petrovna’s attitude to her favourite son. She now turned greedily, almost amorously to him for the love she had not received from her husband. Her possessiveness increased and in the storms she created