Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [114]
‘Why, did you notice something in my face?’ he asked.
‘Tears, though you did conceal them; it’s a bad habit with men to be ashamed of their feelings. That, too, is vanity, only false vanity. They had better sometimes be ashamed of their intellect: it leads them more often astray. Even Mr Stolz is ashamed of his feelings. I told him that, and he agreed with me. And you?’
‘Looking at you, one would agree with anything!’ he said.
‘Another compliment – and such a – –’ she could not find the right word.
‘– vulgar one,’ Oblomov finished, without taking his eyes off her.
She assented with a smile.
‘That was exactly what I was afraid of when I refused to ask you to sing. What can one say after a first hearing? And yet one has to say something. It is difficult to be clever and sincere at the same time, especially about one’s feelings, when one is as greatly impressed as I was then.’
‘I really did sing then as I had not done for ages, perhaps as I had never done.… Don’t ask me to sing, I shall not be able to sing so again.… Wait, I’ll sing one more thing,’ she said, and her face seemed to flush, her eyes blazed. She sat down, struck two or three loud chords and began to sing.
Dear Lord, what did he not hear in her singing! Hopes, vague fear of storms, the storms themselves, transports of happiness – all this could be heard, not in the song, but in her voice. She sang a long time, turning to him now and again to ask like a child: ‘Have you had enough? No? Well, just this, then,’ and she went on singing. Her cheeks and ears were burning with agitation; sometimes her young face lit up with the sudden flash of emotion or with a ray of such mature passion as though she were re-living in her heart some great experience of the distant past, and then this momentary ray was suddenly extinguished and her voice once more sounded fresh and silvery. Oblomov, too, experienced the same sort of feeling: it seemed to him as though he had been living through it all not for one hour or two, but for years.… Both of them, though outwardly motionless, were rent by an inward fire, shaken by the same agitation; the tears in their eyes were called forth by the same mood. These were all the symptoms of the passions which were evidently destined to arise in her young heart, now subject only to brief and fleeting outbursts of the still slumbering forces of life. She finished on a long-drawn-out note, and her voice died away in it. She stopped, put her hands in her lap, and, deeply moved and excited herself, glanced at Oblomov to see what he was feeling. His face was radiant with happiness that welled up from the depths of his being; he looked at her with eyes brimming with tears.
Now it was she who grasped his hand involuntarily.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Why do you look like that? Why?’
But she knew why he looked like that, and inwardly she modestly triumphed, enjoying this manifestation of her powers.
‘Look in the glass,’ she went on, pointing with a smile to the reflection of his face in the mirror. ‘Your eyes are shining! Goodness, there are tears in them! How deeply you feel music!’
‘No,’ said Oblomov quietly, ‘it isn’t music I feel, it’s – love!’
She at once dropped his hand and changed colour. Their eyes met: his gaze was fixed, almost deranged; it was not Oblomov, but passion that looked at her.
Olga realized that his words had escaped him against his will and that he was powerless to suppress them, for he merely spoke the truth.
He came to himself, took his hat, and ran out of the room without turning round. She did not follow him with curious eyes, but stood motionless like a statue at the piano for a long time, her eyes fixed on the ground; only her bosom rose and fell agitatedly.
6
WHENEVER Oblomov lay about indolently at home or was sunk into a dull slumber or indulged in