Oblomov

The light in Oblomov's face had become brighter and brighter with each successive question, and his gaze more and more suffused with radiance.

Part 2

Chapter 3

NEXT morning, however, he rose pale and sombre. There were traces of sleeplessness on his features, wrinkles on his brow, and a lack of fire and eagerness in his eyes. Once upon a time he would have sunk back upon the pillow after drinking his tea, but now he had grown out of the habit, and contented himself with resting his elbow where his head had just been lying. Something in him was working strongly; but that something was not love. True, Olga's image was still before him, but only at a distance, and in a mist, and shorn of its rays, like that of some stranger. With aching eyes he gazed at it for a moment or two, and then sighed.

"To live as God wills, and not as oneself wills, is a wise rule," he murmured. "Nevertheless--"

"Clearly that is so," presently he went on. "Otherwise, one would fall into a chaos of contradictions such as no human mind, however daring and profound, could hope to resolve. Yesterday one has wished, to-day one attains the madly longed-for object, and to-morrow one will blush to think that one ever desired it. Therefore one will fall to cursing life. And all because of a proud, independent striding through existence and a wilful 'I will'! No; rather does one need to feel one's way, to close one's eyes, to avoid becoming either intoxicated with happiness or inclined to repine because it has escaped one. Yes, that is life. Who was it first pictured life as happiness and gratification? The fool! 'Life is a duty,' says Olga. 'Life is a grave obligation which must be fulfilled as such.'" He heaved a profound sigh.

"No, I cannot visit Olga to-day," he went on. "My eyes are now open, and I see my duty before me. Better part with her now, while it is still possible, than later, when I shall have sworn to part with her no more."

How had this mood of his come about? What wind had suddenly affected him? How had it brought with it these clouds? Wherefore was he now for assuming such a grievous yoke? Only last night he had looked into Olga's soul, and seen there a radiant world and a smiling destiny; only last night he had read both her horoscope and his own. What had since happened?

Frequently, in summer, one goes to sleep while the weather is still and cloudless, and the stars are glimmering softly. "How beautiful the countryside will look to-morrow under the bright beams of morning!" one thinks to oneself. "And how glad one will be to dive into the depths of the forest and seek refuge from the heat!" Then suddenly one awakes to the beating of rain, to the sight of grey, mournful clouds, to a sense of cold and damp.

In Oblomov's breast the poison was working swiftly and vigorously. In thought he reviewed his life, and for the hundredth time felt his heart ache with repentance and regret for what he had lost. He kept picturing to himself what, by now, he would have been had he strode boldly ahead, and lived a fuller and a broader life, and exerted his faculties; whence be passed to the question of his present condition, and of the means whereby Olga had contrived to become fond of him, and of the reason why she still was so. "Is she not making a mistake?" was a thought which suddenly flashed through his mind like lightning; and as it did so the lightning seemed to strike his heart, and to shatter it. He groaned with the pain. "Yes, she is making a mistake," he kept saying again and again. "She merely loves me as she works embroidery on canvas. In a quiet, leisurely manner a pattern has evolved itself, and she has turned it over, and admired it. Soon she will lay it aside, and forget all about it. Yes, her present affection is a mere making ready to fall in love, a mere experiment of which I am the subject, for the reason that I chanced to be the first subject to come to hand." So he collated the circumstances, and compared them. Never would she have noticed him at all, had not Schtoltz pointed him out, and infected her young, impressionable heart with sympathy for his (Oblomov's) position, and therefore implanted in her a desire to see if possibly she could shake that dreamy soul from its lethargy before leaving it once more to its own devices.

"Yes, that is how the case stands," he said to himself with an access of revulsion. He rose and lit a candle with a trembling hand. "'Tis just that and nothing more. Her heart was ready to accept love--it was tensely awaiting it--and I happened to fall in her way, and at the same time to fall into a blunder. Only would some one else need to arrive for her to renounce that blunder. As soon as ever she saw that some one else she would turn from me with horror. In fact, I am stealing what belongs to another; I am no better than a thief. My God, to think that I should have been so blind!"

Glancing into the mirror, he saw himself pale, dull, and sallow. Involuntarily he pictured to his mind those handsome young fellows who would one day come her way. Suddenly she would take fire, glance at him, and--burst out laughing! A second time he glanced into the mirror. No, he was not the type with which women could fall in love! He flung himself down upon the bed, and buried his face in the pillow. "Forgive me, Olga!" he murmured. "And may you always be happy!"

He gave orders that he was to be reported as "not at home" to any one who might call from the Ilyinskis' house. Then he sat down to write Olga a letter. He wrote it swiftly. In fact, the pen flew over the pages. And when he had finished the missive he was surprised to find that his spirits felt cheered, and his mind easier.

"Why so?" he reflected. "Probably because I have put into what I have just written the whole sorrow of my heart."

Next, he dispatched the letter by the hand of Zakhar, and, leaving the house, turned into the park, and seated himself on the grass. Among the turf-shoots ants were scurrying hither and thither, and jostling one another, and parting again. From above, the scene looked like the commotion in a human market-place--it showed the same bustle, the same congestion, the same swarm of population. Here and there, too, a bumble bee buzzed over a flower, and then crept into its chalice, while a knot of flies had glued themselves to a drop of sap on the trunk of a lime-tree, in the foliage a bird was repeating an ever-insistent note (as though calling to its mate), and a couple of butterflies were tumbling through the air in a giddy, fluttering, intricate movement which resembled a waltz. Everywhere from the herbage strong scents could be detected arising; everywhere there could be heard a ceaseless chirping and twittering.

Suddenly he saw Olga approaching. Walking very quietly, she was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief as she did so. He had not expected those tears. Somehow they seemed to sear his heart. He rose and ran to meet her.

"Olga, Olga!" were his first tender words.

She started, looked at him with an air of astonishment, and turned away. He followed her.

"You are weeping?" he said.

"Yes, and 'tis you have made me do so," she replied, while her form shook with sobs. "But it is beyond your power to comfort me."

"That miserable letter!" he ejaculated, suddenly becoming full of remorse.

For answer she opened a basket which she was carrying, took from it the letter, and handed it to him.

"Take it away," she said. "The sight of it will only make me weep more bitterly."

He stuffed it silently into his pocket, and, with head bent, seated himself beside her.

"Give me credit for good intentions," he urged. "In any case the letter was evidence only of my care for your happiness--of the fact that I was thinking of it in advance, and was ready to sacrifice myself on its account. Do you think that I wrote the message callously--that inwardly I was not shedding tears the whole time? Why should I have acted as I did?"

"Why, indeed?" she interrupted. "For the reason that you wished to surprise me here, and to see whether I was weeping, and how bitterly. Had you really meant the letter as you say, you would be making preparations to go abroad instead of meeting me as you are now doing. Last night you wanted my 'I love you'; to-day you want to see my tears; and to-morrow, I daresay, you will be wishing that I were dead!"

"How can you wrong me like that? Believe me, I would give half my life to see smiles on your face instead of tears."

"Yes--now that you have seen a woman weeping on your account. But no; you have no heart. You say that you had no desire to make me weep. Had that been so, you would not have acted as you have done."

"Then what ought I to do?" he asked tenderly. "Will you let me beg your pardon?"

"No; only children beg pardon, or persons who have jostled some one in a crowd. Moreover, even when granted, such pardon is worth nothing."

"But what if the letter should be true, and your affection for me all a mistake?" he suggested.

"You are afraid, then?--you are afraid of falling into a well?--you are afraid lest some day I should hurt you by ceasing to be fond of you?"

"Would I could sink into the ground!" he reflected. The pain was increasing in proportion as he divined Olga's thoughts.

"On the other hand," she went on, "suppose you were to weary of love, even as you have wearied of books, of work, and of the world in general? Suppose that, fearing no rival, you were to go to sleep by my side (as you do on your sofa at home), and that my voice were to become powerless to wake you? Suppose that your present swelling of heart were to pass away, and your dressing-gown come to acquire more value in your eyes than myself? Often and often do such questions prevent my sleeping; yet I do not, on that account, trouble you with conjectures as to the future. Always I hope for better things, for, with me, happiness has cast out fear. Only for one thing have I long been sitting and waiting--namely, for happiness; until at length I had come to believe that I had found it. . . . Even if I have made a mistake, at least this "--and she laid her hand upon her heart--" does not convict me of guilt. God knows that I never desired such a fate! And I had been so happy!" She broke off abruptly.

"Then be happy again," urged Oblomov.

"No. Rather, go you whither you have always been wishing to go," she said softly.

"You are wiser than I am," he murmured, twisting a sprig of acacia between his fingers.

"No, I am simpler and more daring than you. What are you afraid of? Do you really think that I should cease to love you?"

"With you by my side I fear nothing," he replied. "With you by my side nothing terrible can fall to my lot."

Part 3

Chapter 1

OBLOMOV'S face beamed as he walked home. His blood was boiling, and a light was shining in his eyes. He entered his room--and at once the radiance disappeared as his eyes, full of disgusted astonishment, became glued to one particular spot. That particular spot was the arm-chair, wherein was snugly ensconced Tarantiev.

"Why is it I never find you here?" the visitor asked sternly. "Why are you always gadding about? That old fool Zakhar has quite got out of hand. I asked him for a morsel of food and a glass of vodka, and he refused me both!"

"I have been for a walk in the park," replied Oblomov coldly. For the moment he had forgotten the murky atmosphere wherein he had spent so much of his life. And now, in a twinkling, Tarantiev had brought him tumbling from the clouds! His immediate thought was that the visitor might insist on remaining to dinner, and so prevent him from paying his visit to Olga and her aunt.

"Why not come and take a look at that flat?" went on Tarantiev.

"Because there is no need," replied Oblomov, avoiding his interlocutor's eye. "I have decided not to move."

"Not to move?" exclaimed Tarantiev threateningly. "Not when I have hired the place for you, and you have signed the lease?"

This led Oblomov to remember that, on the very day of his removal from town to the country villa, he had signed, without previously perusing it, a document which his present visitor had submitted to him.

"Nevertheless," he remarked, " I shall not want the flat. I am going abroad."

"I am sure you are not," retorted Tarantiev coolly. "What is more, the sooner you hand over to me a half-year's rent, the better. Your new landlady does not care for such tricks to be played upon her. I have paid the money on your behalf, and I require to be repaid."

"Where did you contrive to get the money from?"

"That has nothing to do with you. As a matter of fact, I had an old debt repaid me. A better flat you could not find in all the city."

"Nevertheless I do not want it. It lies too far from--from--"

"From where? From the centre of the city?"

Oblomov forbore to specify what he meant, but merely remarked that he should not be dining at home that evening.

"Then hand me over the rent, and the devil take you!" exclaimed Tarantiev.

"I possess no money at all. As it is, I shall have to borrow some."

"Well, repay me at least my cab fare," insisted the visitor. "It was only three roubles."

"Where is the cabman? Why has he charged you so much?"

"I dismissed him long ago. I may add that the fare home is another three roubles."

"By the coach you could travel for half a rouble." However, Oblomov tendered Tarantiev four roubles, which the man at once pocketed.

"Also, I have expended some seven roubles on your account," went on Tarantiev. "Besides, you might as well advance me something towards the price of a dinner. Roadside inns are dear. As a rule they fleece one of five roubles."

Silently Oblomov handed him another rouble, in the hope that the man would now depart; but Tarantiev was not to be so easily shaken off.

"And also you might order Zakhar to bring me a snack now," he said.

"But I thought you intended to dine at an inn?"

"Yes, to dine, but at the moment the time is two o'clock, and no more."

Oblomov issued the necessary orders. On receiving them, Zakhar looked darkly at Tarantiev.

"We have no food ready," he said. "Also, where are my master's shirt and jacket?"

"Shirt and jacket? Why, I gave them back to you long ago. I stuffed them into your own hands, and you bundled them away into a corner. Yet you come asking me where they are!"

"Also, what about a floorbrush and two cups which you carried off?" persisted Zakhar.

"Floorbrush? What floorbrush?" retorted Tarantiev. "Go and get me something to eat, you old fool!"

"We have not a single morsel in the house," said Zakhar; "and also there is nobody to cook it." With which he withdrew.

Tarantiev looked about him, and, perceiving Oblomov to be possessed both of a hat and a cap, attempted unsuccessfully to borrow the former for the remainder of the summer, and then took his leave.

When he had gone Oblomov sat plunged in thought. He recognized that his bright, cloudless holiday of love was over, and that workaday love had now become the order of the day, and that already it was so completely entering into his life's ordinary tendencies that things were beginning to lose their rainbow colours.

"Indeed," he reflected, "this morning may have seen the extinction of the last roseate ray of love's festival--so that henceforth my life is to be warmed rather than lighted. Yes, life will swallow up love, although secretly it will remain moved by its powerful springs, and its manifestations be of an invariably simple, everyday nature. Yes, the poem is fading, and stern prose is to follow--to follow with a drab series of incidents which shall comprise a marriage ceremony, a journey to Oblomovka, the building of a house, an application to the local council, the laying out of roads, an endless transaction of business with peasants, a number of improvements, harvests, and so forth, the frequent spectacle of the bailiff's anxious face, elections to the council of nobles, and sundry sittings on the local bench." Somewhere he could see Olga beaming upon him, and singing Casta Diva, and then giving him a hasty kiss before he went forth to work, or to the town, or to interview the bailiff. Guests would call (a no very comforting prospect!), and they would talk about the wine which each happened to be brewing in his vats, and about the number of arshins of cloth which each happened to have rendered to the Treasury. What would this amount to? What was it he was promising for himself? Was it life? Whether life or not, it would have to be lived as though it, and it alone, constituted existence. At least it would be an existence that would find favour with Schtoltz

But the actual wedding ceremony--that, at all events, would represent the poetry of life, its nascent, its just opening flower? He pictured himself leading Olga to the altar. On her head there would be a wreath of orange-blossoms, and to her gown a long train, and the crowd would whisper in amazement. Shyly, and with gently heaving bosom and brow bent forward in gracious pride, she would give him her hand in complete unconsciousness that the eyes of all were fixed upon her. Then a bright smile would show itself on her face, the tears would begin to well, and for a moment or two the furrow on her forehead would twitch with thought. Then, when they had arrived home and the guests had all departed, she, yes, she--clad still in her gorgeous raiment--would throw herself upon his breast as she had done that morning!

Unable any longer to keep his fancies to himself, he went with them to Olga. She listened to him with a smile; but when he jumped up with the intention of informing also her aunt she frowned with such decision that he halted in awe.

"Not a word to any one!" she said. "The right moment is not yet come."

"What ought we to do first, then?

"To go to the registrar, and to sign the record."

"And then?"

"After marriage to go and live at Oblomovka, and to see what can be done there."

"We shall not be able to do that, for the house is in ruins, and a new one must first be built."

"Then where are we to live?"

"We must take a flat in town."

"Then you had better go at once and see about it."

"Alas!" was Oblomov's reflection. "Olga wishes for ever to be on the move. Apparently she cares nothing about dreaming over the poetical phases of life, or losing herself in reveries. She is like Schtoltz. It would seem as though the two had conspired to live life at top speed."

[arshins:] Ells.

Part 3

Chapter 2

LATE that August rain set in, and, one day, Oblomov saw a vanload of the Ilyinskis' furniture come past his windows. To remain in his country villa, now that the park was desolate and the shutters hung closed over the Ilyinskis' windows, seemed to him impossible. At length he removed to the rooms which had been recommended him by Tarantiev, until such time as he should be able to find for himself a new flat. He took hasty meals at restaurants, and spent most of his evenings with Olga.

But the long autumn evenings in town were not like the long, bright days amid fields and woods.

Here he could not visit Olga three times a day, nor send her notes by Zakhar, seeing that she was five versts away. Thus the posied poem of the late summer seemed somehow to have halted, or to be moving more slowly, as though it contained less substance than of yore.

Sometimes they would keep silence for quite half an hour at a time, while she busied herself with her needlework, and he busied himself in a chaos of thoughts which ranged beyond the immediate present. Only at intervals would he gaze at her and tremble with passion; only at intervals would she throw him a fleeting glance, and smile as she caught the rays of tender humility, of silent happiness, which his eyes conveyed.

Yet on the sixth day, when Olga invited him to meet her at a certain shop, and to escort her homeward on foot, he found his position begin to grow a trifle awkward.

"Oh, if you knew how difficult things are!" he said. She returned no answer, but sighed. On another occasion she said to him--"Until we have arranged everything we cannot possibly tell my aunt. Nor must we see so much of one another. You had better come to dinner only on Sundays and Wednesdays. Also, we might meet at the theatre occasionally, if I first give you notice that we are going to be there. Also, as soon as a fine day should occur I mean to go for a walk in the Summer Gardens, and you might come to meet me. The scene will remind us of our park in the country." She added this last with a quiver of emotion.

He kissed her hand in silence, and parted from her until Sunday. She followed him with her eyes--then sat down to immerse herself in a wave of sound at the piano. But something in her was weeping, and the notes seemed to be weeping in sympathy. She tried to sing, but no song would come.

A few days later, Oblomov was lolling on the sofa and playing with one of his slippers--now picking it up from the floor with his toe, now dropping it again. To him entered Zakhar.

"What now?" asked Oblomov indifferently. Zakhar said nothing, but eyed him with a sidelong glance.

"Well?" said Oblomov again.

"Have you yet found for yourself another flat?" Zakhar countered.

"No, not yet. Why should you want to know?"

"Because I suppose the wedding will be taking place soon after Christmas."

"The wedding? What wedding?" Oblomov suddenly leaped up.

"You know what wedding--your own," replied Zakhar with assurance, as though he were speaking of an event long since arranged for. "You are going to be married, are you not?"

"I to be married? To whom?" And Oblomov glared at the valet.

"To Mademoiselle Ilyinski--" Almost before the man could finish his words Oblomov had darted forward.

"Who put that idea into your head?" he cried in a carefully suppressed voice.

"The Lord bless us all and protect us!" Zakhar ejaculated, backing towards the door. "Who told me about it? Why, the Ilyinskis' servants, this very summer."

"Rubbish!" hissed Oblomov as he shook a warning finger at the old man. "Remember--henceforth let me hear not a word about it!" He pointed to the door, and Zakhar left the room--filling the flat with his sighs as he did so.

Somehow Oblomov could not recover his composure, but remained gazing at the spot which Zakhar had just vacated. Then he clasped his hands behind his head, and re-seated himself in the arm-chair.

"So the servants' hall and the kitchen are talking!" was his insistent reflection. " It has come to this, that Zakhar can actually dare to ask me when the wedding is to be! Yes, and that though even Olga's aunt has not an inkling of the truth! What would she think of it if she knew? The wedding, that most poetical moment in the life of a lover, that crown of all his happiness--why, lacqueys and grooms are talking of it even though nothing is yet decided upon! No answer has come from the estate, my registry certificate is a blank, and a new flat still remains to be found."

With that he fell to analysing that poetical phase from which the colour had faded with Zakhar's mention of the same. Oblomov was beginning to see the other face of the medal. He tossed and turned from side to side, lay flat on his back, leaped up and took a stride or two, and ended by sinking back into a reclining position.

"How come folk to know about it?" he reflected. "Olga has kept silence, and I too have breathed not a word. So much for stolen meetings at dawn and sunset, for passionate glances, for the wizardry of song! Ah, those poems of love! Never do they end save in disaster. One should go beneath the wedding canopy before one attempts to swim in an atmosphere of roses. To think that before any preparations have been made--before even an answer has come from the estate, or I have obtained either money or a flat--I should have to go to her aunt, and to say: 'This is my betrothed!' At all costs must I put a stop to these rumours. Marriage! What is marriage?"

He smiled as he remembered his recent poetical idealization of the ceremony--the long train to the gown, the orange-blossoms, the whispers of the crowd. Somehow the colours had now changed; the crowd now comprised also the uncouth, the slovenly Zakhar and the whole staff of the Ilyinskis' servants' hall. Also, he could see a long line of carriages and a sea of strange, coldly inquisitive faces. The scene was replete with glimmering, deadly weariness.

Summoning Zakhar to his presence, he again asked him how he had dared to spread such rumours.

"For do you know what marriage means?" he demanded of his valet. "It means that a lot of idle lacqueys and women and children start chattering in kitchens and shops and the market-place. A given individual ceases to be known as Ilya Ilyitch or Peter Petrovitch, and henceforth ranks only as the zhenich. Yesterday no one would have noticed him, but by to-morrow every one will be staring at him as though he were a notorious rascal. Neither at the theatre nor in the street will folk let him pass without whispering, 'Here comes the zhenich'. And every day other folk will call upon him with their faces reduced to an even greater state of imbecility than distinguishes yours at this moment--all in order that they may vie with one another in saying imbecile things. That is how such an affair begins. And early each morning the zhenich must go to see his betrothed in lemon-coloured gloves--never at any time may he look untidy or weary; and always he must eat and drink what is customary under the circumstances, in order that his sustenance may appear to comprise principally bouquets and air. That is the programme which is supposed to continue fully for three or four months! How could I go through such an ordeal? Meanwhile you, Zakhar, would have had to run backwards and forwards between my place and my betrothed's, as well as to keep making a round of the tailors', the bootmakers', and the cabinetmakers' establishments, owing to the fact that I myself could not have been in every spot at once. And soon the whole town would have come to hear of it. 'Have you yet heard the news? Oblomov is going to be married!' 'Really? To whom? And what is she like? And when is the ceremony to be?' Talk, talk, talk! Besides, how could I have afforded the necessary expenses? You know how much money I possess. Have I yet found another flat? And am I not owing a thousand roubles for this one? And would not the hire of fresh quarters have cost me three thousand roubles more, considering the extra rooms which would have been required? And would there not have been the cost of a carriage, and of a cook, and so forth? How could I possibly have paid for it all?"

Oblomov checked himself abruptly. He felt horrified to think of the threatening, the uncomfortable, vision which his imagination had conjured up. The roses, the orange-blossoms, the glitter and show, the whispers of the crowd--all these had faded into the background. His fond dreams, his peace of mind alike were gone. He could not eat or sleep, and everything had assumed an air of gloom and despondency. In seeking to overawe Zakhar, he had ended by frightening also himself, for he had stumbled upon the practical view of marriage, and come to perceive that, despite nuptial poetry, marriage constitutes an official, a very real step towards a serious assumption of new and insistent obligations. Unable, therefore, to make up his mind as to what he should say to Olga when he next met her, he decided to defer his visit until the following Wednesday. Having arrived at this decision, he felt easier.

Two days later, Zakhar entered the room with a letter from Olga.

"I cannot wait until Wednesday," she wrote. "I feel so lost through these long absences from your side that I shall look to see you in the Summer Gardens at three o'clock to-morrow."

"I cannot go," he thought to himself. The next moment he comforted himself with the reflection that very likely her aunt, or some other lady, would be with her; in which case he would have a chance of concealing his nervousness.

Scarcely had he reached the Gardens when he saw her approaching. She was veiled, and at first he did not recognize her.

"How glad I am that you have come!" she exclaimed. "I was afraid you would not do so."

She pressed his hand, and looked at him with an air so frank, so full of joy at having stolen this moment from Fate, that he felt envious of her, and regretful that he could not share in her lighthearted mood. Her whole face bespoke a childish confidence in the future, in her happiness, and in him. Truly she was very charming!

"But why do you look so gloomy?" suddenly she exclaimed. "Why do you say nothing? I had thought you would be overjoyed to see me, whereas I find you gone to sleep again! Wake up, sir!"

"I am both well and happy," he hastened to say--fearful lest things should attain the point of her guessing what was really in his mind. "But I am disturbed that you should have come alone."

"Rather, it is for me to be disturbed about that," she retorted. "Do you think I ought to have brought my aunt with me?"

"Yes, Olga."

"Then, if I had known that, I would have invited her to come," offendedly she said as she withdrew her hand from his. "Until now I had imagined that your greatest happiness in life was to be with me, and with me alone. Let us go for a row in a boat."

With that she set off towards the river, dragging his unwilling form behind her.

"Are you coming to our house to-morrow?" she inquired when they were safely settled in their seats.

"My God!" he reflected. "Already she has divined my thoughts, and knows that I do not want to come!"

"Yes, yes," he answered aloud.

"In the morning, and for the whole day?"

"Yes."

She splashed his face playfully with water.

"How bright and cheerful everything looks!" she remarked as she gazed about her. "Let us come again to-morrow. This time I shall come straight from home."

"Then you have not come straight from home to-day?"

"No, but from a shop, from a jeweller's."

Oblomov looked alarmed.

"Suppose your aunt were to find out?" he suggested.

"Oh, suppose the Neva were to become dried up, and that this boat were to overturn, and that our house were suddenly to fall down, and that--that you were suddenly to lose your love for me?" As she spoke she splashed him again.

"Listen, Olga," he said when they had landed on the bank. "At the risk of vexing and offending you, I ought to tell you something."

"What is it?" Her tone was impatient.

"That we ought not to be indulging in these secret meetings."

"But we are betrothed to one another?"

"Yes, dearest Olga," he replied, pressing her hands, "and therefore we are bound to be all the more careful. I would rather be walking with you along this avenue publicly than by stealth--I would rather see the eyes of passers-by drop respectfully before you than run the risk of incurring a suspicion that you have so far forgotten your modesty and your upbringing as to lose your head and fail in your duty."

"But I have not forgotten my modesty and my upbringing," she exclaimed, withdrawing her hands.

"No, I know that you have not," he agreed. "I was merely thinking of what people might say--of how the world in general might look upon it all. Pray do not misunderstand me. What I desire is that to the world you should seem to be as pure, as irreproachable, as in actual fact you are. To me your conduct seems solely honourable and modest; but would every one believe it to be so?"

"What you say is right," she said after a pause. "Consequently, let us tell my aunt to-morrow, and obtain her consent."

Oblomov turned pale. "Why hurry so?" he asked. "I know that, two weeks ago, I myself was urging haste; but at that time I had not thought of the necessary preparations."

"Then your heart is failing you? That I can see clearly."

"No; I am merely cautious. Even now I see a carriage approaching us. Are you sure that the people in it are not acquaintances of yours? How these things throw one into a fever of perspiration! Let us depart as quickly as possible." And with that he set off, almost at a run.

"Until to-morrow, then," she said.

"No, until the day after to-morrow. That would be better. Or even until Friday or Saturday."

"No, no; you must come to-morrow. Do you hear? What have we not come to! What a mountain of sorrow are you not threatening to bring upon my head!"

She turned to go home.

[Summer Gardens:] A public park in Petrograd.

[zhenich:] Bridegroom-to-be.

Part 3

Chapter 3

ON arriving at his rooms again, Oblomov never noticed that Zakhar gave him a cold dinner, or that, after it, he rolled into bed and slept heavily and insensibly, like a stone. Next day he received a letter in which Olga said that she had spent the whole night weeping.

"She has been unable to sleep!" he thought to himself. "Poor angel! Why does she care for me so much? And why am I so fond of her? Would we had never met! It is all Schtoltz's fault. He shed love over us as he might have shed a disease. What sort of a life is this? Nothing but anxiety and emotion! How can it ever lead to peaceful happiness and rest?"

Sighing deeply, he threw himself upon the sofa--then rose again, and went out into the street, as though seeking the normal existence which pursues a daily, gradual course of contemplation of nature, and constitutes a series of calm, scarcely perceptible phenomena of family life. Of existence as a spacious, a turbulent, a billowing river, as Schtoltz always conceived it to be, he could form no conception whatever.

He wrote to Olga that he had taken a slight chill in the Summer Gardens--wherefore he must stay at home for a couple of days; but that he hoped soon to be better, and to see her on the following Sunday. In reply she wrote that he must take the greatest care of himself; that even on Sunday he must not come should he not be well enough; and that a whole week's separation would be bearable to her if thereby he were enabled to avoid risking his health. This excuse for omitting the Sunday visit Oblomov gladly seized upon; wherefore he sent back word that, as a matter of fact, a few days' additional convalescence would be no more than prudent.

Day succeeded day throughout the week. He read, he walked about the streets, and, occasionally, he looked in upon his landlady for the purpose of exchanging a couple of words and drinking some of her excellent coffee. So comfortable did she make him that he even thought of giving her a book to read; but when he did so she merely read the headings of a chapter or two, and then returned him the volume, saying that later she would get her little girl to read the work to her.

Meanwhile Olga received unexpected news. This was to the effect that a lawsuit with regard to her property had ended in her favour, and that within a month's time she would be able, should she wish, to enter into actual possession. But of this, and of her other plans for the future, she decided not to tell Oblomov, but to spend the present hour in dreams of the happiness that was to be hers and his when she had seen love complete its revolution in his apathetic soul, and the slothfulness fall from his shoulders.

That very day he was to come. Yet three o'clock arrived--four o'clock--and no Oblomov. By half-past five the beauty and the freshness of her features had begun to fade. Insensibly her form assumed a drooping posture, and as she sat at the table her face was pale. Yet no one noticed this. The rest of the guests consumed the dishes which she had prepared for him alone, and carried on a desultory, indifferent chatter of conversation. Until ten o'clock she vacillated between hope and despair. Then, on the arrival of that hour, she withdrew to her room. At first she showered upon his head all the resentment that was seething within her. Not a word of mordant sarcasm in her vocabulary would she not have devoted to his punishing, had he been present. But after a while her mind passed from fierceness to a thought which chilled it like ice.

"He is sick," was that thought. "He is lonely and ill, and unable even to write."

So much did the idea gain upon her that she passed a sleepless night, and rose pale, quiet, and determined. The same morning--it was Monday--the landlady informed Oblomov that a visitor desired to see him.

"To see me? Surely not?" he exclaimed. "Where is she?"

"Outside. Shall I send her away?"

Oblomov was about to assent when Olga's maid, Katia, entered the room. Oblomov changed countenance. "How come you to be here?" he asked.

"My mistress is outside," she replied, "and has sent me in to bid you go to her." There was no help for it, so he went out, and found Olga alone.

"Are you quite well?" she exclaimed. "What has been the matter with you?" With that they entered his study.

"I am better now--the sore throat is almost gone," he replied; and as he spoke he touched the part mentioned, and coughed slightly.

"Then why did you not come last night?" She raked him with a glance so keen that for the moment he found himself tongue-tied.

"And why have you taken such a step as this?" he countered. "Surely you know what you are doing?"

"Never mind," she retorted impatiently. "I do not believe you have been ill at all."

"No--I have not," he confessed.

"You have been deceiving me? Why so?"

"I will explain later. Important reasons have kept me away from you for a fortnight."

"What are they?"

I--I am afraid of scandal, of people's tongues."

"And not of the fact that possibly I might pass sleepless nights--that possibly I might be so anxious as to be unable to rest?"

"You cannot think what is passing within me," he said, pointing to his head, and then to his heart. "I am all on edge, all on fire."

With that he told her what Zakhar had said to him, and ended with a statement that, like herself, he could not sleep, and that in every glance he saw a question, or a sneer, or a veiled hint at the relations which might be existing between her and himself.

"Let us decide to tell my aunt this week," she replied, "and at once this chatter will cease. Had I not known you so well, I should scarcely have been able to understand the fact that you can be afraid of servants' gossip, yet not of making me anxious. Really I cannot understand you."

"Listen," presently she went on. "There is more in this than meets the eye. Tell me all that is in your mind. What does it mean?"

He looked at her--then kissed her hand and sighed.

"What have you been doing during the past week or so?" she persisted as she glanced round the room. "What a wretched place you have got! The windows are small, and the curtains dirty. Where are your other rooms?"

He hastened to show her them, in the hope that he might divert her mind from the question of his late doings; but she only repeated the question.

"I have been reading," he replied, "and writing, and thinking of you."

"Have you yet read my books?" she inquired. "Where are they? I will take them back with me."

One of them happened to be lying on the table. She looked at the page at which it was open, and saw that the page was covered with dust.

"You have not read them!" she exclaimed.

"No," he confessed.

Once more she looked at the mess and disorder in the room, and then inquired:

"Then what have you been doing? You have neither been writing nor reading."

"No; I have not had time to do so. In this place, as soon as one rises, the rooms need to be swept, and other interruptions occur afterwards. Next, when dinner is over--"

"When dinner is over you need to go to sleep."

So positive in its assurance was her tone that after a moment's hesitation he replied that her conjecture was correct.

"Why do you do that?"

"In order to pass the time. You are not here with me, Olga, and life is wearisome and unbearable without you."

Her gaze became so stern that he broke off abruptly.

"Listen, Ilya," she said very gravely. "Do you remember saying in the park that at length your life had been fired to flame, and that you believed me to be the aim, the ideal, of your life?"

"How should I not remember it, seeing that it has revolutionized my whole existence? Cannot you see how happy I am?"

"No, I do not see it," she replied coldly. "Not only have you deceived me, but also you are letting yourself relapse into your former ways."

"Deceived you? I swear to God that, were that so, I would leap into the pit of Hell!"

"Yes,--if the pit of Hell were just beneath your feet; but, were you to put off doing so, even for a day or two, you would straightway change your mind, and become nervous about the deed--more especially should Zakhar and the rest begin gossiping on the subject! That is not love."

"Ah, you have no idea how these cares and distractions have injured my health!" he exclaimed. "Ever since I have known you, nothing but anxiety has been my lot. Yet deprivation of you would cause me to die or to go out of my mind. Only through you can I breathe or feel or see. Is it, then, wonderful that, when you are not with me, I fall ill? Without you everything is wearisome and distasteful. I feel like a machine, I walk and act without knowing ever what I am doing. Yes, I am like a machine whereof only you are the fuel, the motive power. . . ."

When she had gone he trod the floor as on air. "How clearly she sees life!" he reflected. "How unerringly from that book of wisdom is she able to divine her road!" Yes, his life and hers had been bound to come together like two rivers, for she, and only she, was his true guide and instructor.

Next day there arrived a letter from the lawyer on his estate. He read it through� then let it slip from his fingers to the ground. The gist of the document was that his property was greatly involved, and that, if he wished matters to be set in order, he must hasten to take up his residence on the spot.

"Then marriage is not to be thought of for at least another year," he reflected with dismay. "First of all I shall need to complete my plans for the estate, and then to consult an architect, and then, and then--" He broke off with a sigh.

Part 3

Chapter 4

"ARE you certain that nothing remains to you of your property--that there is no hope of anything?" asked Olga a few days later.

"Yes, I am certain," he replied--then added with a touch of hesitation in his tone: "But perhaps within a year or so--"

"Within a year or so you may be able to order your life and your affairs? Reflect a moment."

He sighed, for he was fighting a battle with himself, and the battle was reflected in his face.

"Listen," she went on. "Remember that you and I are no longer children, and that we are not jesting, and that the matter may affect our whole lives. Inquire sternly of your conscience, therefore, and tell me (for I know you, as well as trust you) whether you can stand by me your life long, and be to me all that I need? You know me as I know you: consequently you understand what it is that I am trying to say. Should you return me a bold, a considered 'Yes,' I will cancel a certain decision of mine--I will give you my hand, and together we will go abroad, or to your estate, or to the Veaborg Quarter."

"Ah, if you knew how much I love you!" he began.

"I desire no protestations of love--only a brief answer."

"Do not torture me, Olga," he cried with weariness in his tone.

"Then am I right in what I suppose?" she asked.

"Yes--you are right," was the firm, but significant, reply.

There followed a long pause.

"Shall I tell you what you would have done had we married?" at length she said. "Day by day you would have relapsed farther and farther into your slough. And I? You see what I am--that I am not yet grown old, and that I shall never cease to live. But you would have taken to waiting for Christmas, and then for Shrovetide, and to attending evening parties, and to dancing, and to thinking of nothing at all. You would have retired to rest each night with a sigh of thankfulness that the day had passed so quickly; and each morning you would have awakened with a prayer that to-day might be exactly as yesterday. That would have been our future. Is it not so? Meanwhile I should have been fading away. Do you really think that in such a life you would have been happy?"

He tried to rise and leave the room, but his feet refused their office. He tried to say something, but his throat seemed dry, and no sound would come. All he could do was to stretch out his hand.

"Forgive me!" he murmured.

She too tried to speak, but could not. She too tried to extend her hand, but it fell back. Finally, her face contracted painfully, and, sinking forward upon his shoulder, she burst into a storm of sobbing. It was as though all her weapons had slipped from her grasp, and once more she was just a woman--a woman defenceless in her fight with sorrow.

"Good-bye, good-bye!" she said amid her spasms of weeping. He sat listening painfully to her sobs, but felt as though he could say nothing to check them. Sinking into a chair, and burying her face in her handkerchief, she wept bitter, burning tears, with her head bowed upon the table.

"Olga," at length he said, "why torture yourself in this way? You love me, and could never survive a parting. Take me, therefore, as I am, and love in me just so much as may be worthy of it."

Without raising her head, she made a gesture of refusal.

"No, no," she forced herself to gasp. "Nor need you fear for me and my grief. I know myself. I am merely weeping my heart out, and shall then weep no more. Do not hinder me, but go. God has punished me. Yet how it hurts, how it hurts!"

Her sobs redoubled.

"But suppose the pain should not pass?" he said. "Suppose it should wreck your health? Tears like these are tears of poison. Olga, darling, do not weep. Forget the past."

"No, no; let me weep. I am weeping not so much for the future as for the past." She could scarcely utter the words. "It was all so bright--but now it is gone! It is not I that am weeping; it is my memory--my memory of the summer, of the park--that is pouring out its grief. Do you remember those things? Yes, I am yearning for the avenue, and for the lilac that you gave me . . . They had struck their roots into my heart, and--and the plucking of them up is painful indeed!"

In her despair she bowed her head, and sobbed again--repeating: "Oh, how it hurts! Oh, how it hurts!"

"But suppose you were to die of this?" he said in sudden alarm. "Olga, Olga! Think a moment!"

"No, no," she interrupted, raising her head, and striving to look at him through her tears. "Not long ago I realized that I was loving in you only what I wished you to contain--that it was only the future Oblomov of my dreams--it was so dear to me. Ilya, you are good and honourable and tender; but you are all this only as is a dove which, with its head hidden under its wing, wishes to see nothing better. All your life you would have sat perched beneath the eaves. But I am different--I wish for more than that; though what it is I wish for even I myself could scarcely say. On the other hand, do you think that you could have taught me what that something is, that you could have supplied me with what I lack, that you could have given me all that I--?"

Oblomov's legs were tottering under him. Sinking into a chair, he wiped his hands and forehead with his handkerchief. The words had been harsh--they had stung him to the quick. Somehow, too, they had seared him inwardly, while outwardly they had chilled him as with a breath of frost. No more could he do than smile the sort of pitiful, deprecating smile which may be seen on the face of a beggar who is being rated for his sorry clothing--the sort of smile which says: "I am poor and naked and hungry. Beat me, therefore--beat me."

Suddenly Olga realized the sting which her words had contained, and threw herself impetuously upon him.

"Forgive me, my friend," she said tenderly and with tears in her voice. "I did not think what I was saying, for I am almost beside myself. Yes, forget all that has happened, and let us be as formerly--let all remain unchanged."

"No," he replied, as abruptly he rose to his feet and checked her outburst with a decisive gesture. "All cannot remain unchanged. Nor need you regret that you have told me the truth. I have well deserved it."

She burst into a renewed fit of weeping.

"Go!" she said, twisting her tear-soaked handkerchief in her hands. "I cannot bear this any longer. To me at least the past is dear."

She covered her face, and the sobs poured forth afresh.

"Why has everything thus come to rack and ruin?" she cried. "Who has put a curse upon you, Ilya? Why have you done this? You are clever and kind and good and noble; yet you can wreck our lives in this way! What nameless evil has undone you?"

"It has a name," he said almost inaudibly. She looked at him questioningly with tear-filled eyes. "That name," he added, "is 'The Disease of Oblomovka.'"

Turning with bowed head, he departed.

Whither he wandered, or what he did, he never afterwards knew. Late at night he returned home. His landlady, hearing his knock, awoke Zakhar, who undressed his master, and wrapped him in the old dressing-gown.

"How comes that to be here?" asked Oblomov, glancing at the garment.

"I was given it by the landlady to-day," replied Zakhar. "She has just cleaned and mended it."

Sinking into an arm-chair, Oblomov remained there. All around was growing dim and dreamlike. As he sat there with his head resting on his hand he neither remarked the dimness nor heard the striking of the hours. All his mind was plunged in a chaos of formless, indefinite thoughts which, like the clouds in the sky, passed aimlessly, disconnectedly athwart the surface of his brain. Of none of them could he catch the actual substance. His heart felt crushed, and for the moment the life in it was in abeyance. Mechanically he gazed in front of him without even noticing that day was breaking, or that his landlady's dry cough was once more audible, or that the dvornik was beginning to cut firewood in the courtyard, or that the usual clatter in the house had begun again. At length he went to bed, and fell into a leaden, an uncomfortable sleep . . . .

"To-day is Sunday," whispered the kindly voice of the landlady, "and I have baked you a pie. Will you not have some?"

He returned no answer, for he was in a high fever.

Part 4

Chapter 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 writing, 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.

Part 4

Chapter 2

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 breakdown 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 have hitherto been maturing." He was speaking rather to himself than to her.

"Pray utter your thoughts aloud, Andrei," 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 gropings 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--?"

He did not complete his question, for, 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," he 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 I--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.

Part 4

Chapter 3

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 of 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 lumberroom, 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 second 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 of 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 thunder-peals 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 fighting 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.

But suddenly a change occurred. One day, after his usual quota of slumber and day dreams, he tried to rise from the sofa, but failed, and his tongue refused to obey him. Terrified, he could compass only a gesture when he tried to call for help. Had he been living with Zakhar alone, he might have continued to signal for assistance until next morning, or have died, and not been found there till the following day; but, as it was, the eyes of his landlady had been watching over him like the eyes of Providence itself, and it cost her no skill of wit, but only an instinct of the heart, to divine that all was not well with Oblomov. No sooner had the instinct dawned upon her than Anisia was dispatched in a cab for a doctor, while Agafia Matvievna herself applied ice to the patient's head, and extracted from her medicine chest the whole armoury of smelling-bottles and fomentations which custom and report had designated for use at such a juncture. Even Zakhar managed to get one of his boots on, and, thus shod, to fuss around his master in company with the doctor, the mistress of the house, and Anisia.

At length, blood having been let, Oblomov returned to consciousness, and was informed that he had just sustained an apoplectic stroke, and that he must adopt a different course of life. Henceforth, vodka, beer, wine, coffee, and rich food were, with certain exceptions, to be prohibited, while in their place there were prescribed for him daily exercise and a regular amount of sleep of an exclusively nocturnal nature. Even then these remedies would have come to nothing but for Agafia Matvievna's watchfulness; but she had the wit so to introduce the system that the entire household involuntarily assisted in its working. Thus, partly by cunning and partly by kindness, she contrived to wean Oblomov from his attractive indulgences in wine, postprandial slumber, and fish pasties. For instance, as soon as ever he began to doze, either a chair would be upset in an adjoining room, or, of its own volition, some old and worthless crockery would begin flying into splinters, or the children would start making a noise, and be told, fortissimo, to be gone. Lastly, should even this not prove effective, her own kindly voice would be heard calling to him, in order to ask him some question or another.

Also, the garden path was lengthened, and on it Oblomov accomplished, morning and evening, a constitutional of some two hours' duration. With him there would walk the landlady--or, if she could not attend, one of the children, or his old friend, the irresponsible and to every man both humble and agreeable Alexiev. One morning Oblomov, leaning on the boy Vania's arm, slowly paced the path. By this time Vania had grown into almost a youth, and found it hard to restrict his brisk, rapid step to Oblomov's more tardy gait. As the elder man walked he made little use of one of his legs, which was a trace of the stroke which he had recently sustained.

"Let us go indoors now, Vaniushka," he said; wherefore they directed their steps towards the door. But to meet them there issued Agafia Matvievna.

"Why are you coming in so early?" she inquired.

"Early, indeed? Why, we have paced the path twenty times each way, and from here to the fence is a distance of fifty sazhens; wherefore we have covered two versts in all."

"And how many times do you say you have paced it?" she inquired of Vania.

He hesitated.

"Do not lie, but look me straight in the face," she continued, fixing him with her gaze. "I have been watching you the whole time. Remember next Sunday. Possibly I might not let you go to the party that night."

"Well, mother," the boy said at length, "we have paced the path only twelve times."

"Ah, you rogue!" exclaimed Oblomov. "You were nipping off acacia-leaves all the time, whereas I was keeping the most careful account."

"Then you must go and do some more walking," decided the landlady. "Besides, the fish soup is not yet ready." And she closed the door upon the pair.

Oblomov, much against his will, completed another eight pacings of the path, and then entered the dining-room. On the large round table the fish soup was now steaming, and all hastened to take their usual seats--Oblomov in solitary state on the sofa, the landlady on his right, and the rest in due sequence.

"I will help you to this herring, as it is the fattest," said Agafia Matvievna.

"Very well," he remarked. "Only, I think that a pie would go well with it."

"Oh dear! I have forgotten the pies! I meant to make some last night, but my memory is all gone to pieces!" The artful Agafia Matvievna! "Besides, I am afraid that I have forgotten the cutlets and the cabbage. In fact, you must not expect very much of a dinner to-day." This was addressed ostensibly to Alexiev.

"Never mind," he replied. "I can eat anything."

"But why not cook him some pork and peas, or a beef-steak?" asked Oblomov.

"I did go to the butcher's for a beefsteak, but there was not a single morsel of good beef left. However, I have made Monsieur Alexiev a cherry compôte instead. I know he likes that." The truth was that cherry compôte was not bad for Oblomov wherefore the complacent Alexiev had no choice but both to eat it and to like it.

After dinner no power on earth could prevent Oblomov from assuming a recumbent position; so, to obviate his going to sleep, the landlady was accustomed to place beside him his coffee, and then to inspire her children to play games on the floor, so that, willy-nilly, Oblomov should be forced to join in their sport. Presently she withdrew to the kitchen to see if the coffee was yet ready, and, meanwhile, the children's clatter died away. Almost at once a gentle snore arose in the room--then a louder one--then one louder still; and when Agafia Matvievna returned with the steaming coffee-pot she encountered such a volume of snoring as would have done credit to a post-house.

Angrily she shook her head at Alexiev.

"It is not my fault," he said deprecatingly. "I tried to stir up the children, but they would not listen to me."

Swiftly depositing the coffee-pot upon the table, she caught up little Andriusha from the floor, and gently seated him upon the sofa by Oblomov's side; whereupon the child wriggled towards him, climbed his form until he had reached his face, and grasped him firmly by the nose.

"Hi! Hullo! Who is that?" cried Oblomov uneasily as he opened his eyes.

"You had gone to sleep, so Andriusha climbed on to the sofa and awoke you," replied the landlady kindly.

"I had gone to sleep, indeed?" retorted Oblomov, laying his arm around the little one. "Do you think I did not hear him creeping along on all fours? Why, I hear everything. To think of the little rascal catching me by the nose! I'll give it him! But there, there." Tenderly embracing the child, he deposited him on the floor again, and heaved a profound sigh. "Tell us the news, Ivan Alexiev," he said.

"You have heard it all. I have nothing more to tell."

"How so? You go into society, and I do not. Is there nothing new in the political world?"

"It is being said that the earth is growing colder every day, and that one day it will become frozen altogether."

"Away with you! Is that politics?"

A silence ensued. Oblomov quietly relapsed into a state of coma that was neither sleeping nor waking. He merely let his thoughts wander at will, without concentrating them upon anything in particular as calmly he listened to the beating of his heart and occasionally blinked his eyes. Thus he sank into a vague, enigmatical condition which partook largely of the nature of hallucination. In rare instances there come to a man fleeting moments of abstraction when he seems to be reliving past stages of his life. Whether he has previously beheld in sleep the phenomena which are passing before his vision, or whether he has gone through a previous existence and has since forgotten it, we cannot say; but at all events he can see the same persons around him as were present in the first instance, and hear the same words as were uttered then.

So was it with Oblomov now. Gradually there spread itself about him the hush which he had known long ago. He could hear the beating of the well-known pendulum, the snapping of the thread as it was bitten off, and the repetition of familiar whispered sentences like "I cannot make the thread go through the eye of the needle. Pray do it for me, Masha--your eyesight is keener than mine."

Lazily, mechanically he looked into his landlady's face; and straightway from the recesses of his memory there arose a picture which, somewhere, had been well known to him.

To his vision there dawned the great, dark drawing-room in the house of his youth, lit by a single candle. At the table his mother and her guests were sitting over their needlework, while his father was silently pacing up and down. Somehow the present and the past had become fused and interchanged, so that, as the little Oblomov, he was dreaming that at length he had reached the enchanted country where the rivers run milk and honey, and bread can be obtained without toil, and every one walks clad in gold and silver.

Once again he could hear the old legends and the old folk-tales, mingled with the clatter of knives and crockery in the kitchen. Once again he was pressing close to his nurse to listen to her tremulous, old woman's voice. "That is Militrissa Kirbitievna," she was saying as she pointed to the figure of his landlady. Also, the same clouds seemed to be floating in the blue zenith that used to float there of yore, and the same wind to be blowing in at the window, and ruffling his hair, and the same cock of the Oblomovkan poultry-yard to be strutting and crowing below. Suddenly a dog barked. Some other guest must be arriving! Would it be old Schtoltz and his little boy from Verklevo? Yes, probably, for to-day is a holiday. And in very truth it is they--he can hear their footsteps approaching nearer and nearer! The door opens, and "Andrei!" he exclaims excitedly, for there, sure enough, stands his friend--but now grown to manhood, and no longer a little boy! . . .

Part 4

Chapter 4

OBLOMOV recovered consciousness. Before him Schtoltz was standing--but the Schtoltz of the present, not the Schtoltz of a daydream.

Swiftly the landlady caught up the baby Andriusha, swept the table clear of her work, and carried off the children. Alexiev also disappeared, and Schtoltz and Oblomov found themselves alone. For a moment or two they gazed at one another amid a tense silence.

"Is that really you, Schtoltz?" asked Oblomov in tones scarcely audible for emotion--such tones as a man employs only towards his dearest friend and after a long separation.

"Yes, it is I," replied Schtoltz quietly. "And you--are you quite well?"

Oblomov embraced him heartily. In that embrace were expressed all the long-concealed grief and joy which, fermenting ever in his soul, had never, since Schtoltz's last departure, been expressed to any human being. Then they seated themselves, and once more gazed at one another.

"Are you really well?" Schtoltz asked again.

"Yes, thank God!" replied Oblomov.

"But you have been ill?"

"Yes--I was seized with a stroke."

"Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Evidently you have let yourself go again. What have you been doing? Actually, it is five years since last we saw one another!"

Oblomov sighed, but said nothing. "And why did you not come to Oblomovka?" pursued Schtoltz. "And why have you never written to me?"

"What was there to say?" was Oblomov's sad reply. "You know me. Consequently you need ask no more."

"So you are still living in these rooms?" And Schtoltz surveyed the room as he spoke. "Why have you not moved?"

"Because I am still here. I do not think the move will ever take place."

"Why are you so sure?"

"Because I am sure."

Again Schtoltz eyed him closely, then became thoughtful, and started to pace the room.

"And what of Olga Sergievna?" was Oblomov's next question. "Where is she now, and does she still remember me?" At this point he broke off abruptly.

"Yes, she is well, and has of you a remembrance as clear as though she had parted from you yesterday. Presently I will tell you where she is."

"And your children?"

"The children too are well. But are you jesting when you say that you are going to remain where you are? My express purpose in coming here is to carry you off to our place in the country."

"No, no!" cried Oblomov, though lowering his voice as he glanced at the door. Evidently the proposal had disturbed him greatly. "Do not say a word about it," he pleaded. "Do not begin your arguments again."

"But why will you not come? What is the matter with you? You know me well, and know that long ago I undertook this task, and shall never relinquish it. Hitherto business affairs have occupied my time, but now I am free once more. Come and live with us, or, at all events, near us. Olga and I have decided that you must do so. Thank God that I have found you the same as before, and not worse! My hopes of doing that had been small. Let us be off at once. I am prepared even to abduct you by force. You must change your mode of life, as you well know."

To this speech Oblomov listened with impatience.

"Do not speak so loudly," he urged. "In there--"

"Well--in there?"

"Is the landlady, and, should she hear us, she will think that I am going to leave her."

"And why should you not leave her? Let her think what she likes!"

"Listen, Andrei." Oblomov's tone was one of unwonted firmness. "Do not continue your useless attempts to persuade me. Come what may, I must remain where I am."

Schtoltz gazed at his friend in astonishment, but Oblomov returned the gaze with quiet resolution on his features.

"Remain here, and you are lost," said Schtoltz. "This house, that woman, this way of living?--I tell you the thing cannot be. Let us go."

He caught Oblomov by the sleeve, and started to drag him towards the door.

"Why do you want to take me away?" asked Oblomov, hanging back.

"Because I want you to leave this den, this swamp, for the world of light and air and health and normal existence." Schtoltz was speaking sternly, and almost in a tone of command. "To what point have you sunk?" he went on. "What is going to become of you? Think for a moment. Are you so attached to this mode of life that you wish to go to sleep like a mole in its burrow? Remember that--"

"I desire to remember nothing. Do not disturb the past. It can never be brought back again." Into Oblomov's face there had come a full consciousness of his power to think, to reason, and to will. "What is it you wish me to do? From the world to which you would abduct me I have parted for ever; and to solder together two pieces which have started asunder is impossible. I have grown to look upon this nook as my world. Should you uproot me from it, I shall die."

"But look at the place, at the people with whom you are living!"

"I know what you mean--I am perfectly conscious of the facts. Ah, Andrei, believe me when I say that so well do I feel and understand things that for many a day past I have been ashamed to show myself abroad. Yet I cannot accompany you on your road. Even did I wish it, such a course is out of my power. Possibly, when you were last here, I might have made the attempt; but now"--here he dropped his eyes for a moment and paused--"now it is too late. Go, and waste no further time upon me. Your friendship, as God in heaven knows, I value; but your disturbance of my peace I do not value."

"Nothing that you can say will turn me from my purpose. I intend to carry you off, and the more so because I suspect certain things. Look here. Put on a garment of some sort, and come and spend the evening at my rooms. I have much to tell you, for I suppose you know what is afoot at our place?"

Oblomov looked at him inquiringly.

"Ah, I had forgotten," Schtoltz went on. "You no longer go into society. Well, come with me, and I will tell you the whole story. Also, do you know who is waiting for me in a carriage at the gates? I will go and call her in."

"What? Olga?" As the words burst tremulously from Oblomov's lips his face underwent a sudden change. "For God's sake do not bring her here! Go, go, for God's sake!"

But the elder man refused to move, although his friend half started to push him towards the door.

"I cannot return to her without you," he said. "I have pledged my word on that. If you will not come with me to-day, then you must come to-morrow. You are merely putting me off for a time: you will never put me off for ever. Even should it be the day after to-morrow, we still shall meet again."

Oblomov said nothing, but hung his head as though afraid to meet Schtoltz's eye.

"When are you coming, therefore?" went on Schtoltz. "Olga will be sure to ask me when."

"Ah, Andrei," cried the other in a tone of affectionate appeal as he embraced his friend and laid his head upon his shoulder, "Pray leave me and--forget me."

"What? For ever?" cried Schtoltz in astonishment as he withdrew a little from Oblomov's embrace in order the better to look him in the face.

"Yes," whispered Oblomov.

Schtoltz stepped back a pace or two.

"Can this really be you, Ilya?" he exclaimed reproachfully. "Do you really reject me in favour of that woman, of that landlady of yours?" He started with a sudden pang. "So that child which I saw just now is your child? Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Come hence at once. How you have fallen! What is that woman to you?"

"She is my wife," said Oblomov simply.

Schtoltz stood petrified.

"Yes, and the child is my son," Oblomov continued. "He has been called Andrei after yourself." Somehow he seemed to breathe more freely now that he had got rid of the burden of these disclosures. As for Schtoltz, his face fell, and he gazed around the room with vacant eyes. A gulf had opened before him, a high wall had suddenly shot up, and Oblomov seemed to have ceased to exist--he seemed to have vanished from his friend's sight, and to have fallen headlong. The only feeling in Schtoltz's mind was an aching sorrow of the kind which a man experiences when, hastening to visit a friend after a long parting, he finds that for many a day past that friend has been dead.

"You are lost!" he kept whispering mechanically. "What am I to say to Olga?"

At length Oblomov caught the last words, and tried to say something, but failed. All he could do was to extend his hands in Schtoltz's direction. Silently, convulsively the pair embraced, even as before death or a battle. In that embrace was left no room for words or tears or expressions of feeling.

"Never forget my little Andrei," was Oblomov's last choking utterance. Slowly and silently Schtoltz left the house. Slowly and silently he crossed the courtyard and entered the carriage. When he had gone Oblomov reseated himself upon the sofa in his room, rested his elbows upon the table, and buried his face in his hands . . . .

"No, never will I forget your little Andrei," thought Schtoltz sadly as he drove homewards. "Ah, Ilya, you are lost beyond recall! It would be useless now to tell you that your Oblomovka is no longer in ruins, that its turn is come again, and that it is basking in the rays of the sun. It would be useless now to tell you that, some four years hence, it will have a railway-station, and that your peasantry are clearing away the rubbish there, and that before long an iron road will be carrying your grain to the wharves, and that already local schools have been built. Such a dawn of good fortune would merely affright you; it would merely cause your unaccustomed eyes to smart. Yet along the road which you could not tread I will lead your little Andrei; and with him I will put into practice those theories whereof you and I used to dream in the days of our youth. Farewell, Oblomovka of the past! You have outlived your day!" For the last time Schtoltz looked back at Oblomov's diminutive establishment.

"What do you say?" asked Olga with a beating heart.

"Nothing," Schtoltz answered dryly and abruptly.

"Is he alive and well?"

"Yes," came the reluctant reply.

"Then why have you returned so soon? Why did you not call me to the house, or else bring him out to see me? Let me go back, please."

"No, you cannot."

"Why so? What has happened there? Will you not tell me?"

Schtoltz continued to say nothing.

"Again I ask you: what is the matter with him?"

"The disease of Oblomovka," was the grim response. And throughout the rest of the journey homeward Schtoltz refused to answer a single one of Olga's questions.

Part 4

Chapter 5

FIVE years have passed, and more than one change has taken place in the Veaborg Quarter. The street which used to lead, unenclosed, to Oblomov's humble abode is now lined with villas. In the midst of them a tall stone Government office rears its head between the sunlight and the windows of that quiet, peaceful little house which the sun's rays once warmed so cheerfully.

The house itself has grown old and crazy: it wears a dull, neglected look like that of a man who is unshaven and unwashed. In places the paint has peeled away, and in others the gutters are broken. To the latter is due the fact that pools of dirty water stand in the courtyard, and that thrown across them is a piece of old planking. Should a visitor approach the wicket, the old watchdog no longer leaps nimbly to the extent of his chain, but gives tongue hoarsely and lazily from the interior of his kennel.

And, within the house, what changes have taken place! Over it there reigns a different housewife to the former one, and different children sport in play. Again is seen about the premises the lean countenance of Tarantiev, rather than the kindly, careless features of Alexiev; while of Zakhar and Anisia also there is not a sign discernible. A new cook performs, rudely and unwillingly, the quiet behests of Agafia Matvievna, and our old friend Akulina--her apron girded around her middle--washes up, as formerly, the domestic crockery and the pots and pans. Lastly, the same old sleepy dvornik whiles away the same old idle life in the same old den by the gates, and at a given hour each morning, as well as always at the hour of the evening meal, there flashes past the railings of the fence the figure of Agafia's brother, clad, summer and winter alike, in galoshes, and always carrying under his arm a large bundle of documents.

But what of Oblomov? Where is he--where? Under a modest urn in the adjoining cemetery his body rests among the shrubs. All is quiet where he is lying; only a lilac-tree, planted there by a loving hand, waves its boughs to and fro over the grave as it mingles its scent with the sweet, calm odour of wormwood. One would think that the Angel of Peace himself were watching over the dead man's slumbers. . . .

Despite his wife's ceaseless and devoted care for every moment of his existence, the prolonged inertia, the unbroken stillness, the sluggish gliding from day to day had ended by quietly arresting the machine of life. Thus Oblomov met his end, to all appearances without pain, without distress, even as stops a watch which its owner has forgotten to wind up. No one witnessed his last moments or heard his expiring gasp. A second stroke of apoplexy occurred within a year of the first, and, like its precursor, passed away favourably. Later, however, Oblomov became pale and weak, took to eating little and seldom walking in the garden, and increased in moodiness and taciturnity as the days went on. At times he would even burst into tears, for he felt death drawing nearer, and was afraid of it. One or two relapses occurred, from which he rallied, and then Agafia Matvievna entered his room, one morning, to find him resting on his deathbed as quietly as he had done in sleep--the only difference being that his head had slipped a little from the pillow, and that one of his hands was convulsively clutching the region of the heart in a manner which suggested that the pain had there centred itself until the circulation of the blood had stopped for ever.

After his death Agafia Matvievna's sister-in-law, Irina Paptelievna, assumed control of the establishment. That is to say, she arrogated to herself the right to rise late in the morning, to drink three cups of coffee for breakfast, to change her dress three times a day, and to confine her housewifely energies to seeing that her gowns were starched to the utmost degree of stiffness. More she would not trouble to undertake, and, as before, Agafia Matvievna remained the active pendulum of the domestic clock. Not only did she superintend the kitchen and the dining-room, and prepare tea and coffee for the entire household, but also she did the general mending and supervised the linen, the children, Akulina, and the dvornik.

Why was this? Was she not Madame Oblomov and the proprietress of a landed estate? Might she not have maintained a separate, an independent establishment, and have wanted for nothing, and have been at no one's beck and call? What had led her to take upon her shoulders the burden of another's housekeeping, the care of another's children, and all those petty details which women usually assume only at the call of love, or in obedience to sacred family ties, or for the purpose of earning a morsel of daily bread? Where, too, were Zakhar and Anisia--now become, by every right of law, her servants? Where, too, was the little treasure, Andrei, which Oblomov had bequeathed her? Where, finally, were her children by her first husband?

Those children were now all provided for. That is to say, Vania had finished his schooling and entered Government service, his sister had married the manager of a Government office, and little Andrei had been committed to the care of Schtoltz and his wife, who looked upon him as a member of their own family. Never for a moment did Agafia Matvievna mentally compare his lot, or place it on a level with, that of her first children--although, unconsciously it may be, she allotted them all an equal place in her heart. In her opinion the little Andrei's upbringing, mode of life, and future career stood divided by an immeasurable gulf from the fortunes of Vania and his sister.

"What are they?" she would say to herself when she called to see Andrei. "They are children born of the people, whereas this one was born a young barin."

Then she would caress the boy, if not with actual timidity, at all events with a certain touch of caution, and add to herself with something like respect: "What a white skin he has! 'Tis almost transparent. And what tiny hands and feet, too, and what silky hair! He is just like his dead father." Consequently she was the more ready to accede to Schtoltz's request when he asked her that he (Schtoltz) should educate the youngster; since she felt sure that Schtoltz's household was far more the lad's proper place than was her own establishment, where he would have been thrown among her grimy young nephews.

Clad in black, she would glide like a shadow from room to room of the house--opening and shutting cupboards, sewing, making lace, but doing everything quietly, and without the least sign of energy. When spoken to, she would reply as though to do so were an effort. Moreover, her eyes no longer glanced swiftly from object to object, as they had done in the old days: rather, they remained fixed in a sort of ever concentrated gaze. Probably they had assumed that gaze during the hour when she had stood looking at her dead husband's face.

That the light of her life was fast flickering before going out, that God had breathed His breath into her existence and taken it away again, and that her sun had shone brilliantly and was setting for ever, she clearly understood. Yes, that sun was setting for ever, but not before she had learnt the reason why she had been given life, and the fact that she had not lived in vain. Greatly she had loved, and to the full: she had loved Oblomov as a lover, as a husband, and as a barin. But around her there was no one to comprehend this; wherefore she kept her grief the more closely locked in her own bosom.

Only, next winter, when Schtoltz came to town, she ran to see him, and to gaze hungrily at little Andrei, whom she covered with caresses. Presently she tried to say something--to thank Schtoltz, and to pour out before him all that had been accumulating in her heart in the absence of an outlet. Such words he would have understood perfectly, had they been uttered. But the task was beyond her--she could only throw herself upon Olga, glue her lips to her hand, and burst into such a torrent of scalding tears that perforce Olga wept with her, and Schtoltz, greatly moved, hastened from the room. All three had now a common bond of sympathy--that bond being the memory of Oblomov's unsullied soul. More than once Schtoltz and Olga besought the widow to come and live with them in the country, but always she replied: "Where I was born and have lived my live, there must I also die." Likewise, when Schtoltz proposed to render her an account of his management of the Oblomovkan property, she returned him the income therefrom, with a request that he should lay it by for the benefit of little Andrei.

"'Tis his, not mine," she said. "He is the barin, and I will continue to live as I have always done.

Part 4

Chapter 6

ONE day, about noon, two gentlemen were walking along a pavement in the Veaborg Quarter, while behind them a carriage quietly paced. One of the gentlemen was Schtoltz, the other a literary friend of his--a stout individual with an apathetic face and sleepy, meditative eyes. As they drew level with a church, Mass had just ended, and the congregation was pouring into the street. In front of them a knot of beggars was collecting a rich and varied harvest.

"I wonder where these mendicants come from," said the literary gentleman, glancing at the reapers.

"Out of sundry nooks and corners, I suppose," replied the other carelessly.

"That is not what I meant. What I meant is, how have they descended to their present position of beggars? Have they come to it suddenly or gradually, for a good reason or for a bad one?"

"Why are you so anxious to know? Are you contemplating writing a 'Mysteries of Petrograd'?"

"Perhaps I am," the literary gentleman explained with an indolent yawn.

"Then here is a chance for you. Ask any one of them, and, for the sum of a rouble, he will sell you his story, which, jotted down, you could resell to the nobility. For instance, take this old man here. He looks a good example of the normal type. Hi, old man! We want you!"

The old man turned his head at the summons, doffed his cap, and approached the two gentlemen.

"Good sirs," he whined, "pray help a poor man who has been wounded in thirty battles and grown old in war."

"It is Zakhar!" exclaimed Schtoltz in astonishment. "It is you, Zakhar, is it not?" But Zakhar said nothing. Then suddenly he shaded his eyes from the sun, and, staring intently at Schtoltz, muttered--"Pardon me, your Honour--I do not recognize you. I am nearly blind."

"What? You have forgotten your old friend, the barin Schtoltz?" the other asked reproachfully.

"Dear, dear! Is it really your Honour? My bad sight has got the better of me."

Catching Schtoltz impetuously by the hand, the old man imprinted kiss after kiss upon the skirt of his coat.

"The Lord Himself has permitted a poor lost wretch to see a joyful day!" he said, half-laughing, half-crying. Over his face, and particularly over his nose, there had spread a purplish tinge, while his head was almost completely bald, and his whiskers, though still long, looked so matted and entangled as to resemble pieces of felt wherein snowballs have been wrapped. As for his clothing, it consisted of an old, faded cloak, with one of the lapels missing, and a pair of down-at-heel goloshes. In his hands was a cap from which the fur had become worn away.

"Ah, good sir!" he repeated. "Heaven has indeed granted me joy for to-day's festival!"

"But why are you in this state?" Schtoltz inquired. "Are you not ashamed of yourself?"

"Yes, your Honour; but what else could I do?" And Zakhar heaved a profound sigh. "How else was I to live? So long as Anisia was alive I had not to go wandering about like this, for I was given bite and sup whenever I wanted it; but she died of cholera (Heaven rest her soul!), and her brother straightway refused to support me, saying that I was nothing but an old hanger-on. From Michei Andreitch Tarantiev too I received shameful abuse, and neither of them--would you believe it, your Honour?--ever gave me a morsel of bread! Indeed, had it not been for the barinia, God bless her"--and Zakhar crossed himself--"I should long ago have perished of the cold; but for a while she gave me a bit of clothing, and as much bread as I could eat, and a place by the stove of a night. Then they took to rating her on my account; so at last I left the house to wander whither my eyes might lead me. This is the second year that I have been dragging out this miserable existence."

"But why did you not go and seek a situation?" Schtoltz inquired.

"Where was I to get one at this time of day, your Honour? True, I tried for two, but was unsuccessful. Things are not what they used to be: everything has changed for the worse. Nowadays masters require their lacqueys to look respectable, and the gentry no longer keep their halls chock-full of footmen. Indeed, 'tis seldom that you will find so many as two footmen in a house. Yes," he went on, "the gentry actually take off their own boots! They have even gone so far as to invent a machine to do it with!" Evidently the idea cut Zakhar to the heart. "Yes," he repeated, "our gentry are a shame and a disgrace to the country. They are fast coming to rack and ruin." A sigh of profound regret followed.

"At one place," presently he resumed, "I did obtain a situation. 'Twas with a German merchant, who engaged me to be his hall lacquey. After a while, however, he sent me to serve in the pantry. Now, was that my proper business? One day I was carrying some crockery across the room on a tray, and the floor happened to be smooth and slippery, and down I fell, and the tray and the crockery with me. So I was turned out of doors. Next, an old countess took a fancy to my looks. 'He is of respectable appearance,' she said to herself, and added me to her staff of Swiss lacqueys. The post was a light one, and bid fair to be permanent, too. All that I had to do was to sit as solemnly as possible on a chair, to cross one leg over the other, and, when any rascal called, not to answer him, but just to grunt and send the fellow away--or else give him a box on the ear. Of course, to the gentry one had to behave differently--just to wave one's staff like this." Zakhar gave an illustration of what he meant. "As I say, 'twas an easy job, and the lady, God bless her! was not over-difficult to please. But one day she happened to peep into my room and to see there a bug. With that she bristled up and shrieked as though it had been I who had invented bugs! When was a household ever without a bug? So the next time she passed me she pretended that I smelt of liquor, and dismissed me."

"Yes, and you smell of it now--and very strongly," remarked Schtoltz.

"To my sorrow, I suppose so," whined Zakhar, wrinkling his brow bitterly. "Well, then I tried to get a coachman's job, and took service with a gentleman; but one day I had my feet frost-bitten (for I was over-old and weak for the job), and another day the brute of a horse fell down and nearly broke my ribs, and another day I ran over an old woman and got taken to the police-station."

"Well, well! Instead of drinking and getting yourself into trouble, come to my house, and I will give you a corner there until it is time for us to return to the country. Do you hear?"

"Yes, your Honour�yes; but, but--" Zakhar sighed again. "I would rather not leave these parts. You see, the grave is here--the grave where my old patron is lying." Zakhar sobbed. "Only to-day I have been there to commend his soul to God. What a barin the Lord God has taken from us! 'Twould have been good for us if he could have lived another hundred years. Yes, only to-day I have been visiting his grave. Whenever I am near the spot I go and sit beside it, and shed tears--ah, such tears! And sometimes, too, when all is quiet there, I seem to hear him calling to me once more, 'Zakhar! Zakhar!'--and shivers go running down my back. Never lived there such a barin as he! And how fond of yourself he was, your Honour! May the Lord remember him when the heavenly kingdom shall come!"

"You ought to see our little Andrei," said Schtoltz. "If you like, you can have charge of him." And he handed the old man some money.

"Yes, I will come! How could I not come when it is to see little Andrei Ilyitch? By this time he must be grown into a tall young gentleman. What joy the Lord has reserved for me this day! Yes, I will come, your Honour, and may God send you good health and many a long year of life!" But it was after a departing carriage that Zakhar was dispatching his benedictions.

"Did you hear the old beggar's story?" Schtoltz asked of his companion.

"Yes. Who was the Oblomov whom he mentioned?"

"He was--Oblomov. More than once I have spoken to you of him."

"Ah, I think I remember the name. Yes, he was a friend and comrade of yours, was he not? What became of him?"

"He came to rack and ruin--though for no apparent reason." As he spoke Schtoltz sighed heavily. Then he added: "His intellect was equal to that of his fellows, his soul was as clear and as bright as glass, his disposition was kindly, and he was a gentleman to the core. Yet he--he fell."

"Wherefore? What was the cause?"

"The cause?" re-echoed Schtoltz. "The cause was--the disease of Oblomovka."

"The disease of Oblomovka?" queried the literary gentleman in some perplexity. " What is that?"

"Some day I will tell you. For the moment leave me to my thoughts and memories. Hereafter you shall write them down, for they might prove of value to some one."

In time Schtoltz related to his friend what herein is to be found recorded.

THE END