Chapter VII: Part IV: I (1)

For many a day after his illness Oblomov’s mood was one of dull and painful despondency; but gradually this became replaced with a phase of mute indifference, in which he would spend hours in watching the snow fall and listening to the grinding of the landlady’s coffee-mill, to the barking of the housedogs as they rattled at their chains, to the creaking of Zakhar’s boots, and to the measured tick of the clock’s pendulum. As of old, Agafia Matvievna, his landlady, would come and propose one or another dish for his delectation; also her children would come running to and fro through his rooms. To the landlady he returned kindly, indifferent answers, and to the youngsters he gave lessons in reading and waiting, while smiling wearily, involuntarily at their playfulness. Little by little he regained his former mode of life.

One day Schtoltz walked into his room.

“Well, Ilya?” he said, with a questioning sternness which caused Oblomov to lower his eyes and remain silent.

“Then it is to be ‘never’?” went on his friend.

“‘Never’?” queried Oblomov.

“Yes. Do you not remember my saying to you, ‘Now or never’?”

“I do,” the other returned. “But I am not the man I then was. I have now set my affairs in order, and my plans for improving my estate are nearly finished, and I write regularly for two journals, and I have read all the books which you left behind you.”

“But why have you never come to join me abroad?” asked Schtoltz.

“Something prevented me.”

“Olga?”

Oblomov gathered animation at the question.

“Where is she?” he exclaimed. “I heard that she had gone abroad with her aunt--that she went there soon after, after----”

“Soon after she had recognized her mistake,” concluded Schtoltz.

“You know the story, then?” said Oblomov, scarcely able to conceal his confusion.

“Yes, the whole of it--even to the point of the sprig of lilac. Do you not feel ashamed of yourself, Ilya? Does it not hurt you? Are you not consumed with regret and remorse?”

“Yes; please do not remind me of it,” interrupted Oblomov hurriedly. “So great was my agony when I perceived the gulf set between us that I fell ill of a fever. Ah, Schtoltz, if you love me, do not torture me, do not mention her name. Long ago I pointed out to her her mistake, but she would not listen to me. Indeed I am not so much to blame.”

“I am not blaming you,” said Schtoltz gently; “for I have read your letter. It is I that am most to blame--then she--then you least of all.”

“How is she now?”

“How is she? She is in great distress. She weeps, and will not be comforted.”

Mingled anguish, sympathy, and alarm showed themselves on Oblomov’s features.

“What?” he cried, rising to his feet. “Come, Schtoltz! We must go to her at once, in order that I may beg her pardon on my knees.”

Schtoltz thought it well to change his tactics.

“Do you sit still,” he said with a laugh. “I have not been telling you the exact truth. As a matter of fact, she is well and happy, and bids me give you her greeting. Also, she wanted to write to you, but I dissuaded her on the ground that it would only cause you pain.”

“Thank God for that!” cried Oblomov, almost with tears of joy. “Oh, I am so glad, Schtoltz! Pray let me embrace you, and then let us drink to her happiness!”

“But why are you hidden away in this corner?” asked Schtoltz after a pause.

“Because it is quiet here--there is no one to disturb me.”

“I suppose so,” retorted Schtoltz. “In fact, you have here--well, Oblomovka over again, only worse.” He glanced about him. “And how are you now?”

“I am not very well. My breathing is bad, and spots persist in floating before my eyes. Sometimes, too, when I am asleep, some one seems to come and strike me a blow upon the back and head, so that I leap up with a start.”

“Listen, Ilya,” said Schtoltz gravely. “I tell you, in all seriousness, that if you do not change your mode of life you will soon be seized with dropsy or a stroke. As for your future, I have no hopes of it at all. If Olga, that angel, could not bear you from your swamp on her wings, neither shall I succeed in doing so. However, to the end I shall stand by you: and when I say that, I am voicing not only my own wish, but also that of Olga. For she desires you not to perish utterly, not to be buried alive; she desires that at least I shall make an attempt to dig you from the tomb.”

“Then she has not forgotten me?” cried Oblomov with emotion--adding: “As though I were worthy of her remembrance!”

“No, she has not forgotten you, and, I think, never will. Indeed, she is not the sort of person to forget you. Some day you must go and pay her a visit in the country.”

“Yes, yes--but not now,” urged Oblomov.

“Even at this moment I--I----” He pointed to his heart.

“What does it contain?” asked Schtoltz. “Love?”

“No, shame and sorrow. Ah, life, life!”

“What of it?”

“It disturbs me--it allows me no rest.”

“Were it to do so, the flame of your candle would soon go out, and you would find yourself in darkness. Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Life passes too swiftly for it to be spent in slumber. Would, rather, it were a perpetual fire!--that one could live for hundreds and hundreds of years! _Then_ what an immensity of work would one not do!”

“You and I are of different types,” said Oblomov. “_You_ have wings; you do not merely exist--you also fly. You have gifts and ambition; you do not grow fat; specks do not dance before your eyes; and the back of your neck does not need to be periodically scratched. In short, my organism and yours are wholly dissimilar.”

“Fie, fie! Man was created to order his own being, and even to change his own nature; yet, instead, he goes and develops a paunch, and then supposes that nature has laid upon him that burden. Once upon a time you too had wings. Now you have laid them aside.”

“Where are they?” asked Oblomov. “I am powerless, completely powerless.”

“Rather, you are _determined_ to be powerless. Even during your boyhood at Oblomovka, and amid the circle of your aunts and nurses and valets, you had begun to waste your intellect, and to be unable to put on your own socks, and so forth. Hence your present inability to live.”

“All that may be so,” said Oblomov with a sigh; “but now it is too late to turn back.”

“And what am I to say to Olga on my return?”

Oblomov hung his head in sad and silent meditation.

“Say nothing,” at length he said. “Or say that you have not seen me....”

A year and a half later Oblomov was sitting in his dull, murky rooms. He had now grown corpulent, and from his eyes _ennui_ peered forth like a disease. At intervals, too, he would rise and pace the room, then lie down again, then take a book from the table, read a few lines of it, yawn, and begin drumming with his fingers upon the table’s surface. As for Zakhar, he was more seedy and untidy than ever. The elbows of his coat were patched, and he had about him a pinched and hungry air, as though his appetite were bad, his sleep poor, and his work three times as much as it ought to have been. Oblomov’s dressing-gown also was patched: yet, carefully though the holes had been mended, the seams were coming apart in various places. Likewise the coverlet of the bed was ragged, while the curtains, though clean, were faded and hanging in strips.

Suddenly the landlady entered to announce a visitor, and also to say that it was neither Tarantiev nor Alexiev.

“Then it must be Schtoltz again!” thought Oblomov, with a sense of horror. “What can he want with me? However, it does not matter.”

“How are you?” inquired Schtoltz when he entered the room. “You have grown stout, yet your face is pale.”

“Yes, I am not well,” agreed Oblomov. “Somehow my left leg has lost all feeling.” Schtoltz threw at him a keen glance, and then eyed the dressing-gown, the curtains, and the coverlet.

“Never mind,” said Oblomov confusedly. “You know that never at any time do I keep my place tidy. But how is Olga?”

“She has not forgotten you. Possibly you will end by forgetting _her?_”

“No, never! Never could I forget the time when I was really alive and living in Paradise. Where is she, then?”

“In the country.”

“With her aunt?”

“Yes--and also with her husband.”

“So she is married? Has she been married long? And is she happy?” Oblomov had quite sloughed his lethargy. “I feel as though you had removed a great burden from my mind. True, when you were last here, you assured me that she had forgiven me; but all this time I have been unable to rest for the gnawing at my heart.... Tell me who the fortunate man is?”

“Who he is?” repeated Schtoltz. “Why, cannot you guess, Ilya!”

Oblomov’s gaze grew more intent, and for a moment or two his features stiffened, and every vestige of colour left his cheeks.

“Surely it is not yourself?” he asked abruptly.

“It is. I married her last year.”

The agitation faded from Oblomov’s expression, and gave place to his usual apathetic moodiness. For a moment or two he did not raise his eyes; but when he did so they were full of kindly tears.

“Dear Schtoltz!” he cried, embracing his friend. “And dear Olga! May God bless you both! How pleased I am! Pray tell her so.”

“I will tell her that in all the world there exists not my friend Oblomov’s equal.” Schtoltz was profoundly moved.

“No, tell her, rather, that I was fated to meet her, in order that I might set her on the right road. Tell her also that I bless both that meeting and the road which she has now taken. To think that that road might have been different! As it is, I have nothing to blush for, and nothing of which to repent. You have relieved my soul of a great burden, and all within it is bright. I thank you, I thank you!”

“I _will_ tell her what you have said,” replied Schtoltz. “She has indeed reason for never forgetting you, for you would have been worthy of her--yes, worthy of her, you who have a heart as deep as the sea. You must come and visit us in the country.”

“No,” replied the other. “It is not that I am afraid of witnessing your married happiness, or of becoming jealous of her love for you. Yet I will not come.”

“Then of what are you afraid?”

“Of growing envious of you. In your happiness I should see, as in a mirror, my own bitter, broken life. Yet no life but this do I wish, or have it in my power, to live. Do not, therefore, disturb it. Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain. Let us speak of something else. Let me thank you for all the care and attention which you have devoted to my affairs. Yet never can I properly requite you. Seek, rather, requital in your own heart, and in your happiness with Olga Sergievna. Likewise, forgive me for having failed to relieve you of your duties with regard to Oblomovka. It is my fixed intention to go there before long.”

“You will find great changes occurred in the place. Doubtless you have read the statements of accounts which I have sent you?”

Oblomov remained silent.

“What? You have _not_ read them?” exclaimed Schtoltz, aghast. “Then where are they?”

“I do not know. Wait a little, and I will look for them after dinner.”

“Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Scarcely do I know whether to laugh or to weep.”

“Never mind. We will attend to the affair after dinner. First let us eat.”

During the meal Oblomov bestowed high encomiums upon his landlady’s cooking.

“She looks after everything,” he said. “Never will you see me either with unmended socks or with a shirt turned inside out. She supervises every detail.”

He ate and drank with great gusto--so much so that Schtoltz contemplated him with amazement.

“Drink, dear friend, drink,” said Oblomov. “This is splendid _vodka_. Even Olga could not make _vodka_ or patties or mushroom stews equal to these. They are like what we used to have at Oblomovka. No man could be better looked after by a woman than I am by my landlady, Agafia Matvievna. Nevertheless I, I------” He hesitated.

“Well, what?” prompted Schtoltz.

“I owe her ten thousand roubles on note of hand.”

“Ten thousand roubles? To your landlady? For board and lodging?” gasped Schtoltz, horrified.

“Yes. You see, the sum has gone on accumulating, for I live generously, and the debt includes accounts for peaches, pineapples, and so forth.”

“Ilya,” said Schtoltz, “_what_ is this woman to you?”

The other made no reply.

“She is robbing him,” thought his friend. “She is wheedling his all out of him. Such things are everyday, occurrences, yet I had not guessed it.”

Desirous of taking Oblomov away with him, he nevertheless found all his efforts in that direction ineffectual.

“I ask you once again,” he said. “In what relation do you stand to your landlady?”

Again Oblomov reddened.

“Why are you desirous of knowing?” he countered.

“Because, on the score of our old friendship, I think it my duty to give you a very serious warning indeed.”

“A warning against what?”

“A warning against a pit into which you may fall, Now I must be going. I will tell Olga that we may expect to see you this summer whether at our place or at Oblomovka.”

Then Schtoltz departed.

Not for some years did he visit the capital again, for Olga’s health necessitated a lengthy sojourn in the Crimea. For some reason or other her recovery after the birth of a child had been slow.

“How happy I am!” was her frequent reflection. Yet, no sooner had she passed her life in admiring review than she would find herself relapsing into a meditative mood. What a curious person she was!--a person who, in proportion as her felicity became more, complete, plunged ever deeper and deeper into a brooding over the past! Delving into the recesses of her own mind, she began to realize that this peaceful existence, this halting at various stages of felicity, annoyed her. However, with an effort of will she shook her soul clear of this despondency, and quickened her steps through life in a feverish desire to seek noise and movement and occupation. Yet the bustle of society brought her small relief, and she would retire again into her corner--there to rid her spirit of the unwonted sense of depression. Then she would go out once more, and busy herself with petty household cares which confined her to the nursery and the duties of a nurse and a mother, or join her husband in reading and discussing serious books or poetry. Her main fear was lest she should fall ill of the disease, the apathetic malady, of Oblomovka. Yet, for all her efforts to slough these phases of torpor and of spiritual coma, a dream of happiness other than the present used to steal upon her, and wrap her in a haze of inertia, and cause her whole being to halt, as for a rest from the exertions of life. Again, to this mood there would succeed a phase of torture and weariness and apprehension--a phase of dull sorrowfulness which kept asking itself dim, indefinite questions and ceaselessly pondering upon them. And as she listened to those questions she would examine herself, yet never discover what it was she yearned for, nor why, at times, she seemed to tire of her comfortable existence, to demand of it new and unfamiliar impressions, and to be gazing ahead in search of something.

“What does it all mean?” she would say to herself with a shudder. “Is there really anything more that I require, or that I need wish for? Whither am I travelling? I have no farther to go--my journey is ended. Yet have I _really_ completed my cycle of existence? Is this _really_ all--all?” Then she would glance timidly around her, and wonder, in doubt and trembling, what such whispers of the soul might portend. With anxious eyes she would scan the earth, the heavens, and the wilds, yet find therein no answer, but merely gloom, profundity, and remoteness. All nature seemed to be saying the same thing; in nature she could perceive only a ceaseless, uniform current of life to which there was neither a beginning nor an ending. Of course, she knew whom she could consult concerning these tremors--she knew who could return the needed answers to her questionings. But what would those answers import? What if Schtoltz should say that her self-questionings represented the murmurings of an unsympathetic, an unwomanly, heart--that his quondam idol possessed but a _blasé_, dissatisfied soul from which nothing good was to be looked for? Yes, how greatly she might fall in his estimation, were he to discover these new and unwonted pangs of hers! Consequently, whenever, in spite of her best efforts to conceal the fact, her eyes lost their velvety softness, and acquired a dry and feverish glitter; whenever, too, a heavy cloud overspread her face, and she could not force herself to smile, and to talk, and to listen indifferently to the latest news in the political world, or to descriptions of interesting phenomena in some new walk of learning, or to remarks upon some new creation of art--well, then she hid herself away, on the plea of illness.

Yet she felt no desire to give way to tears; she experienced none of those sudden alarms which had been hers during the period when her girlish nerves had been excited even to the point of self-expression. So if, while resting on some calm, beautiful evening, there came stealing upon her, even amid her husband’s talk and caresses, a feeling of weariness and indifference to everything, she would merely ask herself despairingly what it all meant. At one moment she would become, as it were, turned to stone, and sit silent; at another she would make feverish attempts to conceal her strange malady. Finally a headache would supervene, and she would retire to rest. Yet all the while it was a difficult matter for her to evade the keen eyes of her husband. This she knew well, and therefore prepared herself for conversation with him as nervously as she would have done for confession to a priest.

II

One evening she and Schtoltz were pacing the poplar avenue in their garden. She was suffering from her usual inexplicable lack of energy, and finding herself able to return but the briefest of answers to what he said.

“By the way,” he remarked, “the nurse tells me that Olinka is troubled with a night cough. Ought we not to send for the doctor to-morrow?”

“No. I have given her some hot medicine, and am going to keep her indoors for the present,” answered Olga dully.

In silence they walked to the end of the avenue.

“Why have you sent no reply to that letter from your friend Sonichka?” he inquired. “This is the third letter that you have left unanswered.”

“I would rather forget her altogether,” was Olga’s brief rejoinder.

“Then you are not well?” he continued after a pause.

“Oh yes; nothing is the matter with me. Why should you think otherwise’?”

“Then you are _ennuyée?_”

She clasped her hands upon his shoulder.

“No,” she said, in a tone of assumed cheerfulness--yet a tone in which the note of _ennui_ was only too plainly apparent.

He led her clear of the shade of the trees, and turned her face to the moonlight.

“Look at me,” he commanded. He gazed intently into her eyes.

“One would say that you were unhappy,” he commented. “Your eyes have a strange expression in them which I have noticed more than once before. What is the matter with you, Olga?”

She took him by the sleeve and drew him back into the shade.

“Are you aware,” she said with forced gaiety, “that I am hungry for supper?”

“No, no,” he protested. “Do not make a jest of this.”

“Unhappy, indeed?” she said reproachfully, halting in front of him. “Yes, I _am_ unhappy--but only from excess of happiness.” So tender was her tone, and so caressing the note in her voice, that he bent down and kissed her.

With that she grew bolder. The jesting supposition that she could be unhappy inspired her to greater frankness.

“No, I am not _ennuyée_,” she went on; “nor should I ever be so. You know that well, yet you refuse to believe my words. Nor am I ill. It is merely that, that well, that sometimes a feeling of depression comes over me. You are a difficult man to conceal things from. Sometimes I feel depressed, though I could not say why.”

She laid her head upon his shoulder.

“Nevertheless, what _is_ the reason of it?” he asked her gently as he bent over her.

“I do not know,” she repeated.

“Yet there _must_ be a reason of some sort. If that reason lies neither in me nor in your surroundings, it must lie in yourself. Sometimes such depression is a symptom of ill-health. Are you _sure_ that you are quite well?”

“At all events I feel so,” she replied gravely. “See for yourself how I eat and walk and sleep and work! Yet every now and then there comes over me a mood in which life seems to me incomplete.... Do not mind this, however. It is nothing--nothing at all.”

“Tell me more,” he urged. “Certainly life is incomplete, but what would you add to it?”

“And sometimes,” she continued, “I grow afraid lest everything should be about to be changed, or to come to an end; while at other times I find myself torturing my brain with a stupid wondering as to what more is to be expected from the future, this happiness of ours, this life, with its joys and sorrows”--she had dropped her voice to a whisper, in a sort of shame at her own questionings--“I know to be quite natural; yet something seems still to be drawing me onwards, and to be making me dissatisfied with my lot. How ashamed I feel of my folly and fancifulness! But do not notice me: this despondency of mine will soon pass away, and I shall once more become bright and cheerful.”

She pressed herself closer with a timid caress, as though she were asking pardon for what she termed her “folly.” He questioned her as to her symptoms as a physician might have done, and, in return, she described to him her dull self-interrogations, her confusion of soul. Meanwhile Schtoltz paced the avenue with his head on his breast and his mind filled with doubt and anxiety--anxiety at the fact that he so little understood his wife. At length she, in her turn, drew him into the light of the moon, and gazed inquiringly into his eyes.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked bashfully. “Are you smiling at my foolishness? Yes, ’tis very foolish, this despondency of mine. Do you not think so?”

He made no reply.

“Why do you not speak?” she urged impatiently.

“You have long been keeping silence,” he replied, “although always you have known how solicitous I am on your account. Permit _me_, therefore, to keep silence and reflect.”

“Yet, if you do that, I shall feel uneasy. Never ought I to have spoken out. Pray say _something_.”

“What am I to say?” he asked meditatively. “It may be that a nervous break down is hanging over you. Should that be so, the doctor, not I, will have to decide how best you can be treated. I will send for him to-morrow. In any case, if the mischief is not that, then----”

“Then what?” she queried, shaking his arm.

“It is over-imagination on your part. You are too full of life and hitherto been maturing.” He was speaking rather to himself than to her.

“Pray utter your thoughts aloud, Andrei,”

“It is over--I am still maturing,” she said beseechingly. “I cannot bear it when you go muttering to yourself like that. I have told you of my follies, and you merely bow your head and mumble something into your beard. In this dark spot such conduct makes me feel uncomfortable.”

“I am at a loss what to say. You tell me, ‘Depression comes over me,’ and ‘I find myself troubled with disturbing questions.’ What am I to make of that? Let us speak on the subject again later, and in the meanwhile consider matters. Possibly you require a course of sea-bathing, or something of the kind.”

“But you said to yourself: ‘Hitherto you have been maturing.’ What did you mean by that?”

“I was thinking that, that----” He spoke slowly and hesitatingly, as though he were distrustful of his own thoughts and ashamed of his own words. “You see, there are moments when symptoms of this kind betoken that, if a woman has nothing radically wrong with her health, she has reached maturity--has arrived at the stage when life’s growth becomes arrested, and there remains for her no further problem to solve.”

“Then you mean that I am growing old?” she interrupted sharply. “How can you say that? I am still young and strong.” And she drew herself up as she spoke.

He smiled.

“Do not fear,” he said. “You are not of the kind that will ever grow old. True, in old age one’s energies fail, and one ceases to battle with life; but that is a very different thing. Provided it be what I take it to be, your sense of depression and weariness is a sign of vigour. Frequently the growings of a vivid, excitable intellect transcend the limits of everyday existence, and, finding no answer to what that intellect demands of life, become converted into despondency and a temporary dissatisfaction with life. The meaning of it is that the soul is sorrowful at having to ask life its secret. Perhaps such is the case with _you_. If so, you need not term it folly.”

She sighed, but, apparently, with relief at the thought that the danger was over, and that she had not fallen in her husband’s estimation.

“I am quite happy,” she repeated, “nor do I spend my time in dreaming, nor is my life monotonous. What more, then, is there for me to have? What do these questionings portend? They harass me like a sickness.”

“They are a spur to encourage a weak, groping intellect which has lacked full preparation. True, such depression and self-questionings have caused many to lose their senses; but to others they seem mere formless visions, a mere fever of the brain.”

“To think that just when one’s happiness is full to overflowing, and one is thoroughly in love with life, there should come upon one a taint of sorrow!” she murmured.

“Yes; such is the payment exacted for the Promethean fire. You must not only endure, you must even love and respect, the sorrow and the doubts and the self-questionings of which you have spoken: for they constitute the excess, the luxury, of life, and show themselves most when happiness is at its zenith, and has alloyed with it no gross desires. Such troubles are powerless to spring to birth amid life which is ordinary and everyday; they cannot touch the individual who is forced to endure hardship and want. That is why the bulk of the crowd goes on its way without ever experiencing the cloud of doubt, the pain of self-questioning. To him or to her, however, who _voluntarily_ goes to meet those difficulties they become welcome guests, not a scourge.”

“But one can never get even with them. To almost every one they bring sorrow and indifference.”

“Yes; but that does not last. Later they serve to shed light upon life, for they lead one to the edge of the abyss whence there is no return--then gently force one to turn once more and look upon life. Thus they seem to challenge one’s tried faculties in order that the latter may be prevented from sinking wholly into inertia.”

“And to think, also, that one should be disturbed by phantoms at all!” she lamented. “When all is bright, one’s life suddenly becomes overshadowed with some sinister influence. Is there _no_ resource against it?”

“Yes, there is one. That resource lies in life itself. Without such phantoms and such questionings life would soon become a wearisome business.”

“Then what ought I to do? To submit to them, and to wear out my heart?”

“No,” he replied. “Rather, arm yourself with resolution, and patiently, but firmly, pursue your way.” With that he embraced her tenderly. “You and I are not Titans; it is not for us to join the Manfreds and the Fausts of this world in going out to do battle with rebellious problems. Rather, let us decline the challenge of such difficulties, bow our heads, and quietly live through the juncture until such time as life shall have come to smile again, and happiness be once more ours.”

“But suppose they decline to pass us by? Will not our doubts and fears continue to increase?”

“No; for we shall accept them as a new verse in life’s poem. In this case, however, there is no fear of that. Your trouble is not peculiar to you alone; it is an infectious malady common to all humanity, of which a touch has visited you with the rest. Invariably does a human being feel lost when he or she first breaks away from life and finds no support in place of it. May God send that in the present instance this mood of yours be what I believe it to be, and not a forerunner of some bodily illness. That would be worse, for it would be the one thing before which I should be nerveless and destitute of weapons. Surely that cloud, that depression, those doubts, those self-questionings of yours, are not going to deprive us of our happiness, of our------?” before he could do so, she had flung herself upon him in a frantic embrace.

“Nothing shall _ever_ do that!” she murmured in an access of renewed joy and confidence. “No, neither doubts nor sorrow nor sickness! No, nor yet--nor yet death itself!” Never had she seemed to love him as she did at that moment.

“Take care that Fate does not overhear what you have whispered,” he interposed with a superstitious caution born of tender forethought for her. “Yes, take care that it does not rate you ungrateful, for it likes to have its gifts appreciated at their true worth. Hitherto you have been _learning_ only about life: now you are going also to experience it. Soon, as life pursues its course, there will come to you fresh sorrows and travail; and, together, they will force you to look beyond the questions of which you have spoken, and therefore you must husband your strength.”

Schtoltz uttered these words softly, and almost as though he were speaking to himself. And in the words was a note of despondency which seemed to say that already he could see approaching her “sorrows” and “travail.”

She said nothing--she was too deeply struck with the mournful foreboding in his tone. Yet she trusted him implicitly--his voice alone inspired in her belief; and for that very reason his gravity affected her deeply, and concentrated her thoughts upon herself. Leaning upon him, she paced the avenue slowly and mechanically, with her soul awed to a silence which she could not break. Following her husband’s eyes, she was gazing forward at the vista of life, and trying to discern the point where, according to his words, “sorrows and travail” were awaiting her. And as she did so she saw arise before her a vision in which there became revealed to her a sphere of life that was no longer to be bright and leisured and protected, that was no longer to be passed amid plenty, that was no longer to be spent alone with him. In that sphere she could descry only a long sequence of losses and privations, with copious tears, strict asceticism, involuntary renunciation of whims born of hours of ease, and new and unwonted sensations which should call forth from her cries of pain and disappointment. Yes, in that vision she saw before her only sickness, material ruin, the loss of her husband, and...

Shuddering and faltering, she, with a man’s courageous curiosity, continued to gaze at this unfamiliar presentment of life, and timidly to review and to estimate her ability to cope with it. Only love, she saw, would never fail her--only love would over this new existence keep ever-faithful watch and ward. Yet it would be love of a different kind. From it there would be absent all ardent sighs and shining days and rapturous nights; as the years went on such things would come to seem children’s sport compared with the non-intimate affection which life, now grown profound and menacing, would cause her to adopt for her guide. From that life came to her ears no sound of laughter and kisses and tremulous, soulful intercourse amid groves and flowers, while life and nature kept high holiday. No, such things were “withered and gone.” The love beheld in that vision was a love which, unfading and indestructible, expressed itself on the features of husband and wife only during seasons of mutual sorrow, and shone forth only in slow, silent glances of mutual sympathy, and voiced itself only in a constant, joint endurance of the trials of life as he and she restrained the tears, and choked back the sobs, which those trials called forth. With that there came stealing into the midst of the doubts and fears which beset her other visions--visions remote but clear, inspiring but definite....

*****

Her husband’s calm, assured reasoning, added to her own implicit confidence in him, helped Olga to succeed in shaking off both her enigmatical, singular misgivings and her visionary, menacing dreams concerning the future. Once more, therefore, she strode boldly forward. To the night of doubt there succeeded a brilliant morning of maternal and housewifely duties. On the one hand, there beckoned to her the flower garden and the meadows; on the other hand there beckoned to her her husband’s study. No longer did she play with life as with a means of carefree indulgence. Rather, life had become a season of mysterious, systematic waiting, and of getting ready.

Yet once, when Schtoltz happened to mention Oblomov’s name, she let fall her sewing, and sank into a reverie.

“What of him?” later she asked. “Could we not find out how he is through some of his friends?”

“Even so, we should find out no more than we know already. Independently of his friends, I happen to be aware that he is alive and well, and living in the same rooms as formerly. But how he is spending his days, and whether he is morally dead or still there is flickering in him a last spark of vitality, it is impossible for an outsider to ascertain.”

“Do not speak like that, Andrei,” said Olga. “It hurts me to hear you do so. Were I not afraid, I would go in person to glean news of him.” The tears had risen very near to her eyes.

“Next spring we ourselves shall be in Petrograd,” the husband remarked. “_Then_ we will find out.”

“But it is not sufficient merely to find out: we ought also to do all we can for him!”

“Already I have done what is possible. When one is with him he is ready to take any steps desired; but directly one’s back is turned he relapses into slumber. ’Tis like trying to deal with a drunken man.”

“Then why turn your back upon him _ever?_ He ought to be treated firmly--he ought to, be removed from his rooms and taken away. Were I to ask him, he would come with us into the country. I feel sure I should never get over it if I were to see him sink to rack and ruin. Perhaps my tears----”

“Might revive him, you think?”

“No, but at least compel him to look around him, and to exchange his life for something better. With us he would be out of the mire, and living among his equals.”

“Surely you do not love him as you used to do?” Schtoltz asked half-jestingly.

“No, I do not,” she replied (and as she did so her grave eyes seemed to be gazing back into the past). “Yet in him there is something for which I have an abiding affection, and to which I shall ever remain true.”

“Shall I tell you what that something is?” She nodded an assent.”’Tis an honourable, trustworthy heart. That heart is the nugget given him of Nature, and he has carried it unsullied through all his life. Under life’s stress he fell, lost his enthusiasm, and ended by going to sleep--a broken, disenchanted man who had lost his power to live, but not his purity and his intrinsic worth. Never a false note has that heart sounded; never a particle of mire has there clung to his soul; never a specious lie has he heeded; never to the false road has he been seduced by any possible attraction. Even were a whole ocean of evil and rascality to come seething about him, and even were the whole world to become infected with poison and be turned upside down, Oblomov would yet refuse to bow to the false image, and his soul would remain as clean, as radiant, and as without spot as ever. That soul is a soul of crystal transparency. Of men like him but few exist, so that they shine amid the mob like pearls. No price could be high enough to purchase his heart. Everywhere and always that heart would remain true to its trust. It is to this element in him that you have always remained true; and it is owing to the same element in him that my task of keeping watch will never become a burden. In my day I have known many men with splendid qualities. Never have I known a man cleaner, brighter, and more simple than Oblomov. For many a man have I cherished an affection. Never for a man have I cherished an affection more ardent and lasting than that which I cherish for Oblomov. Once known, his personality is an entity for which one’s love could never die.... Is that so? Have I divined aright?”

She said nothing: her eyes were fixed intently upon her work. At length she arose, ran to her husband, gazed into his eyes for a moment as she embraced him, and let her head sink forward upon his shoulder. During those few moments there had arisen to her memory Oblomov’s kindly, pensive face, his tender, deprecating gaze, and the shy, wistful smile with which, at their last parting, he had met her reproaches. As she saw those things her heart ached with pity.

“You will never abandon him--you will never let him leave your sight?” she asked with her arms around her husband’s neck.

“No, never!--not though an abyss should open between us, and a dividing wall arise!”

She kissed him.

“Nor shall I ever forget the words which you have just spoken,” she murmured.

III

In the Veaborg Quarter peace and quietness reigned supreme. They reigned in its unwashed streets, with their wooden sidewalks, and in its lean gardens amid the nettle-encumbered ditches, where a goat with a ragged cord around its neck was diligently engaged in cropping the herbage and snatching dull intervals of slumber. At midday, however, the high, smart boots of a clerk clattered along a sidewalk, the muslin curtain at a window was pulled aside to admit the features of a Civil Service official’s lady, and for a brief moment there showed itself over a garden fence the fresh young face of a girl--then the face of a companion--then the face which had first appeared, as two maidens laughed and tittered during the process cf swinging each other on a garden swing.

Also in the abode of Oblomov’s landlady all was quiet. Had you entered the little courtyard, you would have happened upon an idyllic scene. The poultry would have started running hither and thither in fussy alarm, and the dogs given tongue in furious accents, while Akulina would have paused in her pursuit of milking the cow, and the _dvornik_ in his task of chopping firewood, in order that they might gaze unhampered at the visitor. “Whom do you wish to see?” the _dvornik_ would have inquired; and on your mentioning Oblomov’s name, or that of the mistress of the house, he would have pointed to the steps of the front door, and then resumed his task of wood-chopping; whereupon the visitor would have followed the neat, sanded path to the steps (which he would have found covered with a plain, clean carpet of some sort), and, reaching for the brightly polished knob of the doorbell, would have had the door opened to him by Anisia, one of the children, the landlady herself, or Zakhar. Everything in Agafia Matvievna’s establishment smacked of an opulence and a domestic sufficiency which had been lacking in the days when she had shared house with her brother, Tarantiev’s bosom friend. The kitchen, the lumber-room, and the pantry were alike fitted with cupboards full of china, crockery, and household wares of every sort; while in cases were set out Oblomov’s plate and articles of silver (long ago redeemed, and never since pledged). In short, the place abounded in such commodities as are to be found in the abode of every frugal housewife. Also, so carefully was everything packed in camphor and other preservatives that when Agafia Matvievna went to open the doors of the cupboards she could scarcely stand against the overwhelming perfume of mingled narcotics which came forth, and had to turn her head aside for a few moments. Hams hung from the ceiling of the storeroom (to avoid damage by mice), and, with them, cheeses, loaves-of--sugar, dried fish, and bags of nuts and preserved mushrooms. On a table stood tubs of butter, pots of sour cream, baskets of apples, and God knows what else besides, for it would require the pen of a scribe Homer to describe in full, and in detail, all that had become accumulated in the various corners and on the various floors of this little nest of domestic life. As for the kitchen, it was a veritable palladium of activity on the part of the mistress and her efficient assistant, Anisia. Everything was kept indoors and in its proper place; throughout there prevailed a system of orderliness and cleanliness; and only into one particular nook of the house did a ray of light, a breath of air, the good housewife’s eye, and the nimble, all-furbishing hand of the domestic never penetrate. That nook was Zakhar’s den. Lacking a window, it was so constantly plunged in darkness that its resemblance to a lair rather than to a human habitation was rendered the more complete. Whenever Zakhar surprised in his den the mistress of the house (come thither to plan a cleaning or various improvements) he explained to her, in forcible terms, that it was not a woman’s business to sweep out a place where faggots, blacking, and boots ought to lie, and that it mattered not a jot that clothes should be tossed in a heap on the floor, or that the bed in the stove corner had become overspread with dust, seeing that it was he, and not she, whose function it was to repose upon that bed. As for a besom, a few planks, a couple of bricks, the remains of a barrel, and two blocks of wood which he always kept in his room, he could not, he averred, get on in his domestic duties without them (though why that was so he left to the imagination). Finally, according to his own statement, neither the dust nor the cobwebs in the least inconvenienced him--to which he begged to add a reminder that, since he never obtruded his nose into the kitchen, he should be the more pleased if he could be left alone by those to whom the kitchen was at all times open. Once, when he surprised Anisia in his sanctum, he threatened her so furiously with uplifted fist that the case was referred to the court of superior instance--that is to say, to Oblomov himself, who walked supinely to the door of the den, inserted his head therein, scanned the apartment and its contents, sneezed, and returned mutely to his own quarters.

“What have you gained by it all?” said Zakhar to the mistress and her myrmidon, who had accompanied Oblomov, in the hope that his participation in the affair would lead to a change of some sort. Then the old valet laughed to himself in a way which twisted his eyebrows and whiskers askew.

In the other rooms of the house, however, everything looked bright and clean and fresh. The old stuff curtains had disappeared, and the doors and windows of the drawing-room and the study were hung with blue and green drapery and muslin curtains--the work of Agafia Matvievna’s own hands. Indeed, for days at a time Oblomov, prone upon his sofa, had watched her bare elbows flicker to and fro as she plied needle and thread; nor had he once gone to sleep to the sound of thread being alternately inserted and bitten off, as had been his custom in the old days at Oblomovka.

“Enough of work,” he had nevertheless said to her at intervals, “Pray cease your labours for a while.”

“Nay,” she had always replied, “God loves those who toil.”

Nor was his coffee prepared for him with less care, attention, and skill than had been the case before he had changed his old quarters for his present ones. Giblet soup, macaroni with Parmesan cheese, soup concocted of _kvass_ and herbs, home-fed pullets--all these dishes succeeded one another in regular rotation, and by so doing helped to make agreeable breaks in the otherwise monotonous routine of the little establishment. Nor did the sun, whenever shining, fail to brighten his room from morning till night--thanks to the fact that the market-gardens on either side of the building prevented that luminary’s rays from being shaded off by any obstacle. Outside, ducks quacked cheerfully, while, within, a geranium, added to a few hyacinths which the children had brought home, filled the little apartment with a perfume which mingled pleasantly with the smoke of Havana cigars and the scent of the cinnamon or the vanilla which the mistress of the house would be preparing with bare, energetic arms.

Thus Oblomov lived in a sort of gilded cage--a cage within which, as in a diorama, the only changes included alternations of day and night and of the seasons. Of changes of the disturbing kind which stir up the sediment from the bottom of life’s bowl--a sediment only too frequently both bitter and obnoxious--there were none. Ever since the day when Schtoltz had cleared him of debt, and Tarantiev and Tarantiev’s friend had taken themselves off for good, every adverse element had disappeared from Oblomov’s existence, and there surrounded him only good, kind, sensible folk who had agreed to underpin his existence with theirs, and to help him not to notice it, nor to feel it, as it pursued its even course. Everything was, as it were, at peace, and of that peace, that inertia, Oblomov represented the complete, the natural, embodiment and expression. After passing in review and considering his mode of life, he had sunk deeper and deeper therein, until finally he had come to the conclusion that he had no farther to go, and nothing farther to seek, and that the ideal of his life would best be preserved where he was--albeit without poetry, without those finer shades wherewith his imagination had once painted for him a spacious, careless course of manorial life on his own estate and among his own peasantry and servants.

Upon his present mode of life he looked as a continuation of the Oblomovkan existence (only with a different colouring of locality, and, to a certain extent, of period). Here, as at Oblomovka, he had succeeded in escaping life, in driving a bargain with it, and ensuring to himself an inviolable seclusion. Inwardly he congratulated himself on having left behind him the irksome, irritating demands and menaces cf mundane existence--on having placed a great distance between himself and the horizon where there may be seen flashing the lightning-bolts of keen pleasure, and whence come the thunderpeals of sudden affliction, and where flicker the false hopes and the splendid visions of average happiness, and where independence of thought gradually engulfs and devours a man, and where passion slays him outright, and where the intellect fails or triumphs, and where humanity engages in constant warfare, and leaves the field of battle in a state of exhaustion and of ever-unsatisfied, ever-insatiable desire. Never having experienced the consolations to be won in combat, he had none the less renounced them, and felt at ease only in a remote corner to which action and lighting and the actual living of life were alike strangers.

Yet moments there were when his imagination stirred within him again, and when there recurred to his mind forgotten memories and unrealized dreams, and when he felt in his conscience whispered reproaches for having made of his life so little as he had done. And whenever that occurred he slept restlessly, awoke at intervals, leaped out of bed, and shed chill tears of hopelessness over the bright ideal that was now extinguished for ever. He shed them as folk shed them over a dead friend whom with bitter regret they recognize to have been neglected during his lifetime. Then he would glance at his surroundings, hug to himself his present blessings, and grow comforted on noting how quietly, how restfully, the sun was rising amid a blaze of glory. Thus he had come to a decision that not only was his life compounded in the best manner for expressing the possibilities to which the idealistic-peaceful side of human existence may attain, but also that it had been expressly created for and preordained to, that purpose. To others, he reflected, let it fall to express life’s restless aspects; to others let it be given to exercise forces of construction and destruction; to each man be allotted his true _métier_.

Such the philosophy which our Plato of Oblomovka elaborated for the purpose of lulling himself to sleep amid the problems and the stern demands of duty and of destiny. He had been bred and nourished to play the part, not of a gladiator in the arena but of a peaceful onlooker at the struggle. Never could his diffident, lethargic spirit have faced either the raptures or the blows of life. Hence he expressed only one of its aspects, and had no mind either to succeed in it, or to change anything in it, or to repent of his decision. As the years flowed on both emotion and repining came to manifest themselves at rarer and rarer intervals, until, by quiet, imperceptible degrees, he became finally interned in the plain, otiose tomb of retirement which he had fashioned with his own hands, even as desert anchorites who have turned from the world dig for themselves a material sepulchre. Of reorganizing his estate, and removing thither with his household; he had given up all thought. The steward whom Schtoltz had placed in charge of Oblomovka regularly sent him the income therefrom, and the peasantry proffered him flour and poultry at Christmastide, and everything on the estate was prospering.

Meanwhile he ate heartily and much, even as he had done at Oblomovka. Also, he walked and worked sluggishly and little--again, as he had done at Oblomovka. Lastly, in spite of his advancing years, he drank beer and _vodka à raisin_ with complete _insouciance_, and took to sleeping ever more and more protractedly after dinner.