Oblomov (38 page)

‘Then I may hope for – –’ he said suddenly, flushing with joy.

‘Everything! But – –’

She fell silent. He suddenly came to life. She, too, hardly recognized Oblomov: his sleepy, misty face was transformed in a moment, his eyes opened, colour came into his cheeks; thoughts stirred in his mind, desires and resolution sparkled in his glance. She, too, read clearly in the mute play of his features that Oblomov had instantly acquired an aim in life.

‘Life, life is opening to me once more,’ he said, speaking as though in a delirium. ‘It is there – in your eyes, your smile, in this sprig of lilac, in
Casta diva
– it’s all there.’

She shook her head.

‘No, not all – half.’

‘The best.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

‘But where is the other half? What else is there after this?’

‘Look for it.’

‘Why?’

‘So as not to lose the first,’ she replied, taking his arm, and they went home.

He kept glancing, sometimes with delight and sometimes stealthily, at her pretty head, her figure, her curls, clasping the lilac twig in his hand.

‘It is all mine! Mine!’ he kept repeating musingly, unable to believe his own words.

‘You won’t be moving to Vyborg, will you?’ she asked when he was going home.

He laughed, and did not even call Zakhar a fool.

9

A
FTER THAT
there were no sudden changes in Olga. She was even-tempered and calm with her aunt and in company, but lived and felt that she was alive only with Oblomov. She no
longer asked anyone what she ought to do or how she ought to behave, and did not appeal in her mind to Sonia’s authority. As the different phases in life – that is to say, feelings – opened before her, she keenly observed all that happened around her, listened intently to the voice of her instinct, checking her feelings by the few observations she had made, and moved forward cautiously, trying with her foot the ground on which she was going to tread. She had no one she could ask for advice. Her aunt? But she skimmed over such problems so lightly and dexterously that Olga never succeeded in reducing any opinion of hers to a maxim and in fixing it in her memory. Stolz was away. Oblomov? But he was a kind of Galatea whose Pygmalion she herself had to be. Her life was filled so quietly and imperceptibly that no one noticed it, and she lived in her new sphere without arousing attention and without any visible outbursts of passion and anxieties. She did the same things for the others as before, but she did them differently. She went to the French theatre, but the play seemed to have some sort of connexion with her life; she read a book, and there were invariably lines in it which struck sparks in her own mind, passages which blazed with her own feelings, words which she had uttered the day before, as though the author had overheard her heart beating. There were the same trees in the woods, but their rustle had a special meaning for her; there was a living concord between her and them. The birds were not just chirping and twittering, but saying something to one another; and everything around her was speaking, everything responded to her mood; if a flower opened, she seemed to hear it breathe. Her dreams, too, had a life of their own: they were filled with visions and images to which she sometimes spoke aloud – they seemed to be telling her something, but so indistinctly that she could not understand; she made an effort to speak to them and ask them some question, but she, too, said something incomprehensible. It was her maid Katya who told her in the morning that she had been talking in her sleep. She remembered Stolz’s words: he often told her that she had not begun to live, and she was sometimes offended that he should regard her as a child when she was twenty. But now she realized that he had been right, that she had only now begun to live.

‘When all the powers of your organism awaken,’ Stolz used to say to her, ‘then life around you will also awaken, and you will see what you do not notice now, you will hear what you do not hear now: your nerves will become attuned to the music of the
spheres and you will listen to the grass growing. Wait, don’t be in a hurry. It will come of itself!’ he used to threaten her.

It had come.

‘This is, I suppose, my powers asserting themselves, my organism awakening,’ she repeated his words, listening intently to the unfamiliar tremor within her and watching keenly and timidly each new manifestation of the awakening force.

She did not give way to day-dreaming, she did not succumb to the sudden rustle of the leaves, the nightly visions, to the mysterious whispers, when someone seemed to bend over her and say something indistinct and incomprehensible in her ear.

‘Nerves!’ she would sometimes say with a smile, through tears, scarcely able to overcome her fear and bear the strain of the struggle between the awakening forces within her and her weak nerves. She got out of bed, drank a glass of water, opened the window, fanned her face with her handkerchief, and recovered from the visions that haunted her asleep and awake.

As soon as Oblomov awakened in the morning, the first image that arose before him was the image of Olga with a sprig of lilac in her hand. He thought of her when he went to sleep, and she was beside him when he went for a walk or when he read. He carried on an endless conversation with her in his mind by day and by night. He kept adding to the
History of Discoveries and Inventions
some fresh discoveries in Olga’s appearance or character, invented occasions for meeting her accidentally or sending her a book or arranging some pleasant surprise for her. After talking to her at one of their meetings, he would continue the conversation at home, so that when Zakhar happened to come in he said to him in the very soft and tender voice in which he had been mentally addressing Olga: ‘You’ve again forgotten to polish my boots, you bald-headed devil! Take care, or you’ll catch it good and proper one day!’

But from the moment she had first sung to him, he was no longer care-free. He no longer lived his old life when it did not make any difference to him whether he was lying on his back or staring at a wall, whether Alexeyev was sitting in his drawing-room or he himself was at Ivan Gerasimovich’s, in those days when he expected nothing and no one either by day or by night. Now day and night, every hour of the morning and the evening had its own shape and form, and was either filled with rainbow radiance or colourless and gloomy, according to whether he spent it in the presence of Olga or passed it dully and listlessly without her. All this had a great effect on him: his head was a
regular network of daily and hourly considerations, conjectures, anticipations, agonies of uncertainty – all revolving round the questions whether he would see her or not, what she would say and do, how she would look, what commission she would give him, what she would ask him, would she be pleased or not. All these considerations had become questions of life and death to him. ‘Oh, if one could experience only this warmth of love without its anxieties!’ he mused. ‘No, life does not leave you alone. You get burnt wherever you go! How many fresh emotions and occupations have suddenly been crowded into it! Love is a most difficult school of life!’ He had read several books. Olga asked him to tell her what they were about, and listened to him with incredible patience. He wrote several letters to his estate, replaced his bailiff and got in touch with one of his neighbours through the good offices of Stolz. He would even have gone to Oblomovka if he had thought it possible to be away from Olga. He had no supper, and for the last fortnight he had not known what it meant to lie down in the daytime. In two or three weeks they had visited all the places round Petersburg. Olga and her aunt, the baron and Oblomov appeared at suburban concerts and fêtes. They talked of going to Imatra in Finland.

So far as Oblomov was concerned, he would not have stirred anywhere farther than the park, but Olga kept planning it all, and if he showed the slightest hesitation in accepting an invitation to go somewhere, the excursion was sure to take place. Then there was no end to Olga’s smiles. There was not a hill within a radius of five miles from his summer cottage that he had not climbed several times.

Meanwhile their attachment grew and developed and expressed itself in accordance with the immutable laws. Olga blossomed out as her feeling grew stronger. Her eyes were brighter, her movements more graceful, her bosom filled out so gorgeously and rose and fell so evenly.

‘You’ve grown prettier in the country, Olga,’ her aunt said.

The baron’s smile expressed the same compliment. Blushing, Olga put her head on her aunt’s shoulders, and her aunt patted her affectionately on the cheek.

‘Olga! Olga!’ Oblomov called cautiously, almost in a whisper, standing at the foot of a hill, where she had asked him to meet her to go for a walk.

There was no answer. He looked at his watch.

‘Olga Sergeyevna,’ he added in a loud voice.

Silence.

Olga was sitting on the top of the hill. She had heard him call, but she suppressed her laughter and said nothing.

‘Olga Sergeyevna!’ he called, looking up to the top after having clambered half-way up between the bushes. ‘She told me to come at half-past five,’ he said to himself.

She could no longer refrain from laughing.

‘Olga! Olga! Why, you’re there!’ he said, and continued to climb up. ‘Ugh! What do you want to hide on a hill for?’ he said, sitting down beside her.

‘I suppose it’s because you want to make me suffer, but you make yourself suffer too, don’t you?’

‘Where do you come from? Straight from home?’ she asked.

‘No, I went to your place first. They told me you had gone out.’

‘What have you been doing to-day?’ she asked.

‘To-day – –’

‘Had a row with Zakhar?’ she finished for him.

He laughed as though it had been something utterly impossible.

‘No, I read the
Revue
. Listen, Olga,’ but he said nothing more and, sitting down beside her, sank into contemplation of her profile, her head, the up-and-down movement of her hand as she pulled the needle through the canvas. He fixed her with his eyes and was unable to take them off her. He did not move, only his glance moved to right and to left, following the movement of her hand. Everything within him was in a state of tremendous activity: his blood was racing through his veins, his pulse was beating twice as fast, his heart was seething – all this had such an effect on him that he breathed slowly and painfully, as people do before their execution or at the moment of the highest spiritual joy. He could not bring himself to speak or even to move; only his eyes, moist with deep-felt emotion, were fixed on her irresistibly.

From time to time she threw a deep glance at him, read the all-too-obvious meaning written on his face, and thought: ‘Dear God, how he loves me! How tender he is to me, how tender!’ and she felt proud and looked with admiration at the man brought to her feet by her own power. The time of symbolic hints, meaningful smiles, and sprigs of lilac had irrevocably passed. Love had become severer, more exacting, and was beginning to be transformed into a sort of duty; they felt that they possessed rights over each other. Both revealed more and more of themselves: misunderstandings and doubts disappeared
or gave way to more positive and clearer questions. At first she taunted him with slightly sarcastic remarks for the years he had wasted in idleness; she passed a severe sentence on him and condemned his apathy more deeply and effectively than Stolz; then, as she grew more intimate with him, she gave up taunting him for his flabby and listless existence and began to manifest her despotic will over him, reminding him courageously of the purpose and the duties of life and sternly demanded a change in his state of mind, constantly arousing it from its torpor either by involving him in a subtle discussion of some vital problem that was familiar to her or by approaching him with a problem that was not clear to her and that she could not grasp. He struggled, racked his brains, did his best not to lower himself in her estimation and to help explain some knotty problem to her, or else boldly set it aside. All her feminine tactics were pervaded by tender sympathy; all his attempts to keep in step with the workings of her mind were inspired by passion. But more often he lay down at her feet exhausted, put his hand to his heart and listened to its beating without taking his wide-open, amazed, rapturous eyes from her. ‘How he loves me!’ she kept saying at those moments, looking admiringly at him. If she sometimes noticed some of Oblomov’s old traits still lurking in his soul – and she could look deep into it – such as the least weariness or barely perceptible inertness of spirit, she overwhelmed him with reproaches, in which there was occasionally a touch of bitter regret and fear of having made a mistake. Sometimes, just when he was about to open his mouth in a yawn, he was struck by her look of astonishment and he immediately shut his mouth with a snap. She would not permit the faintest shadow of somnolence on his face. She asked him not only what he had been doing, but also what he was going to do. What made him sit up even more than her reproaches was the realization that his weariness made her weary too, and she became cold and indifferent. Then he became full of life, strength, and activity, and the shadow disappeared once more, and their feeling for one another was again full of strength and vigour. But all these troubles did not so far go beyond the magic circle of love. His activity was of a purely negative character: he did not sleep, he read, he sometimes thought about writing his plan for managing his estate, he walked and drove a lot. But what he was to make of his life, what he was to do with himself – that was still a matter of mere intentions.

‘What other sort of life and activity does Andrey want?’
Oblomov said, opening his eyes wide after dinner so as not to fall asleep. ‘Isn’t this life? Isn’t love service? Let him try it! Every day means a good seven-mile walk! I spent last night in a wretched inn in town without undressing, only took off my boots, and Zakhar was not there to help me, either – and all because I had to carry out some commissions for her!’