Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [112]
Stolz was about to say good-bye. Oblomov, too, wanted to go, but Stolz and Olga insisted that he should stay.
‘I have some business to attend to,’ Stolz observed, ‘but you’d merely go to lie down – and it’s still too early.’
‘Andrey! Andrey!’ Oblomov said imploringly. ‘No,’ he added, ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay – I must go!’ And he went.
He did not sleep all night; sad and thoughtful, he walked up and down the room; he went out at daybreak, walked along the Neva and then along the streets, and goodness only knows what he was feeling and thinking. Three days later he was there again, and in the evening, when the other visitors had sat down to play cards, he found himself at the piano alone with Olga. Her aunt had a headache and she was sitting in her study sniffing smelling-salts.
‘Would you like me to show you the collection of drawings Mr Stolz brought me from Odessa?’ Olga asked. ‘He didn’t show it to you, did he?’
‘You’re not trying to entertain me like a hostess, are you?’ asked Oblomov. ‘You needn’t trouble.’
‘Why not? I don’t want you to be bored. I want you to feel at home here. I want you to be comfortable, free, and at your ease, so that you shouldn’t go away – to lie down.’
‘She’s a spiteful, sarcastic creature,’ Oblomov thought, admiring, in spite of himself, her every movement.
‘You want me to be free and at ease and not be bored, do you?’ he repeated.
‘Yes,’ she answered, looking at him as she had done before, but with an expression of still greater curiosity and kindness.
‘If you do,’ Oblomov said, ‘you must, to begin with, not look at me as you are looking now and as you did the other day – –’
She looked at him with redoubled curiosity.
‘For it is this look that makes me feel uncomfortable.… Where’s my hat?’
‘Why does it make you feel uncomfortable?’ she asked gently, and her look lost its expression of curiosity, becoming just kind and affectionate.
‘I don’t know. Only I can’t help feeling that with that look you are trying to extract from me everything that I don’t want other people to know – you, in particular.’
‘But why not? You are a friend of Mr Stolz and he is my friend, therefore – –’
‘– therefore,’ he finished the sentence for her, ‘there is no reason why you should know all that Mr Stolz knows about me.’
‘There is no reason, but there is a chance.’
‘Thanks to my friend’s frankness – a bad service on his part.’
‘You haven’t any secrets, have you?’ she asked. ‘Crimes, perhaps?’ she added, laughing and moving away from him.
‘Perhaps,’ he answered, with a sigh.
‘Oh, it is a great crime,’ she said softly and timidly, ‘to put on odd socks.’
Oblomov grabbed his hat.
‘I can’t stand it!’ he said. ‘And you want me to be comfortable? I’ll fall out with Andrey. Did he tell you that too?’
‘He did make me laugh terribly at it to-day,’ Olga added. ‘He always makes me laugh. I’m sorry, I won’t, I won’t, and I’ll try to look at you differently.…’ She looked at him with a mock-serious expression.
‘All this is to begin with,’ she went on. ‘Very well, I’m not looking at you as I did the other day, so that you ought to feel comfortable and at ease now. Now, what must I do secondly so that you shouldn’t be bored?’
He looked straight into her grey-blue, tender eyes.
‘Now you, too, are looking strangely at me,’ she said.
He really was looking at her not so much with his eyes as with his mind, with all his will, like a magnetizer, but involuntarily, being quite incapable of not looking.
‘Heavens, how pretty she is!’ he thought, looking at her almost with terrified eyes. ‘And to think that such wonderful girls actually exist! This white skin, these eyes which are as dark as deep pools and yet there is something gleaming in them – her soul, no doubt! Her smile can be read like a book, disclosing her beautiful teeth and – and her whole head – how tenderly it rests on her shoulders, swaying, like a flower, breathing with