Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [140]
‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ it came back to him, and his heart began to grow warmer, but was suddenly chilled again. Olga’s thrice-repeated ‘I love you’ – what did it mean? Did her eyes deceive her? Did her heart beguile her? It was not love, but merely a presentiment of love! That voice would sound one day, and so powerfully, with such a tremendous crash of chords, that the whole world would be startled! The aunt and the baron would know of it, and the echo of that voice would resound far and wide! That feeling would not meander as gently as a brook concealed in the grass with hardly an audible murmur. She loved now just as she embroidered: the pattern came to light slowly, and she unfolded it even more lazily and, after admiring it for a moment, put it down and forgot all about it. Yes, that was only a preparation for love, it was only an experiment, and he chanced to have turned up as the first fairly tolerable subject for the experiment.… For was it not chance that had brought them together? She would not have noticed him otherwise. Stolz had pointed him out to her and infected her young, impressionable heart with his own sympathy; she was sorry for him, was fired with the ambition to rouse him from his sleep, and then she would leave him. ‘That’s what it is!’ he muttered in horror, getting out of bed and lighting a candle with a trembling hand. ‘There has never been anything more than that! She was ready for love, her heart was waiting for it eagerly, and she met me accidentally, by chance.… Let another man appear – and she will recognize her mistake with horror! How she will look at me then! How she will turn away! Awful! I’m taking what doesn’t belong to me! I’m a thief! What am I doing? How blind I have been – my God!’
He looked at himself in the mirror: he was pale, yellow, his eyes were lustreless. He thought of those lucky young men whose eyes were moist and dreaming but, like Olga’s, had a deep and forceful look in them and sparkled tremulously, whose smile was confident of victory, whose step was bold, and whose voice was strong and ringing. And one day one of them might come: she would flush suddenly, look at him and Oblomov and – burst out laughing!
He looked at himself in the glass again.
‘Women don’t love men like me!’ he said.
Then he lay down and buried his face in the pillow.
‘Good-bye, Olga,’ he concluded. ‘Be happy.’
‘Zakhar!’ he called in the morning. ‘If a servant comes from the Ilyinskys for me, say I am not at home, that I’ve gone to town.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘Yes – no, I’d better write to her,’ he said to himself, ‘or she’ll think it strange that I’ve suddenly disappeared. I have to offer some explanation.’
He sat down to the table and began writing quickly, eagerly, with feverish haste, quite differently from the way he had written to his landlord at the beginning of May. Not once was there an unpleasant collision between two whichs and two thats.
‘You may find it strange, Olga Sergeyevna,’ (he wrote) ‘to get this letter instead of seeing me, when we meet each other so often. Read it to the end and you will see that I could not have done otherwise. I ought to have begun by writing it, then we should have both been saved a great deal of self-reproach in the future; but it is not too late even now. We fell in love