Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [109]
After supper Oblomov hastily took leave of Olga’s aunt: she invited him to dinner the next day and asked him to convey the invitation to Stolz as well. Oblomov bowed and walked across the whole length of the room without raising his eyes. Behind the piano was the screen and the door – he looked up: Olga sat at the piano and looked at him with great interest. He thought she smiled. ‘I expect,’ he decided, ‘Andrey must have told her that I had odd socks on yesterday or that my shirt was inside out!’ He drove home, out of spirits, both because of this suspicion and still more because of the invitation to dine which he had answered with a bow – that is to say, he had accepted it.
From that moment Olga’s persistent gaze haunted Oblomov. In vain did he stretch out full length on his back, in vain did he assume the laziest and most comfortable positions – he simply could not go to sleep. His dressing-gown seemed hateful to him, Zakhar stupid and unbearable, and the dust and cobwebs intolerable. He told Zakhar to take out of the room several worthless pictures some patron of poor artists had forced upon him; he himself put right the blind which had not functioned for months, called Anisya and told her to clean the windows, brushed away the cobwebs, and then lay down on his side and spent an hour thinking of – Olga. At first he tried hard to recall what she looked like, drawing her portrait from memory. Strictly speaking, Olga was no beauty – that is, her cheeks were not of a vivid colour, and her eyes did not burn with an inward fire; her lips were not corals nor her teeth pearls, nor were her hands as tiny as those of a child of five nor her fingernails shaped like grapes. But if she were made into a statue, she would have been a model of grace and harmony. She was rather tall, and the size of her head was in strict proportion to her height, and the oval of her face to the size of her head; all this, in turn, was in perfect harmony with her shoulders and waist. Anyone who met her, even if he were absent-minded, could not help stopping for a moment before a creature so carefully and artistically made. Her exquisite nose was slightly aquiline; her lips were thin and for the most part tightly closed; a sign of concentrated thought. Her keen, bright, and wide-awake blue-grey eyes, which never missed anything, shone, too, with the same light and thought. The brows lent a peculiar beauty to her eyes: they were not arched, they had not been plucked into two thin lines above the eyes – no, they were two brown, fluffy, almost straight streaks, which seldom lay symmetrically: one was a little higher than the other, forming a tiny wrinkle above it which seemed to say something, as if some idea was hidden there. When she walked, her head, which was so gracefully and nobly poised on her slender, proud neck, was slightly inclined; her whole body moved evenly, striding along with so light a step that it was almost imperceptible.
‘Why did she look so intently at me yesterday?’ Oblomov thought. ‘Andrey swears that he never mentioned my socks and shirt to her, but spoke of his friendship for me, of how we had grown up and gone to school together – about all the good things we had experienced together, and he also told her how unhappy I was, how everything that is fine in me perishes for lack of sympathy and activity, how feebly life flickers in me and how – – But what was there to smile at?’ Oblomov continued to muse. ‘If she had a heart it ought to have throbbed or bled with pity, but instead – oh well, what does it matter what she did! I’d better stop thinking about her! I’ll go and dine there to-day – and then I shall never cross the threshold of her house!’
Day followed day, and he never left Olga’s house. One fine morning Tarantyev moved all his belongings to his friend’s in Vyborg, and Oblomov spent three days as he had not done for years: without a bed, or a sofa, dining at Olga’s aunt’s. Then suddenly it appeared