Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [161]
He glanced at her: she was absorbed in pushing a pebble along the sand with her parasol.
‘You would enter a drawing-room and several bonnets would stir with indignation. One of the women would go and sit farther away from you – and your pride would be the same as ever and you would know perfectly well that you were higher and better than they – –’
‘Why are you telling me all these horrors?’ she said calmly. ‘I shall never go that way.’
‘Never?’ Oblomov asked dejectedly.
‘Never!’ she repeated.
‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you would not have the strength to face shame. You might not be afraid of death: it is not the execution that is so terrible, but the preparations for it, the hourly tortures. You would not have been able to stand it. You would have pined away, wouldn’t you?’
He kept peering into her face to see what she felt.
She looked cheerful: the picture of horror did not upset her; a light smile was playing on her lips.
‘I don’t want to pine away or die,’ she said. ‘It’s all wrong; one can love all the more and yet not follow that road.…’
‘But why wouldn’t you follow it,’ he asked insistently, almost with vexation, ‘if you are not afraid?’
‘Because – people who follow it always end up eventually by – parting,’ she said, ‘and I – to part from you!.…’
She paused, put her hand on his shoulder, looked intently at him and, suddenly, flinging away her parasol, quickly and ardently threw her arms round his neck, kissed him, and, flushing crimson, pressed her face to his breast, adding softly:
‘Never!’
He uttered a joyful cry and sank on the grass at her feet.
PART THREE
1
OBLOMOV walked home feeling deliriously happy. His blood coursed exultantly in his veins and his eyes were shining. It seemed to him that even his hair was ablaze. It was thus that he entered his room – and suddenly the radiance disappeared, and his eyes became fixed with unpleasant surprise on one place: Tarantyev was sitting in his chair.
‘Why do you keep people waiting for hours?’ Tarantyev asked sternly, giving him his hirsute hand. ‘Where have you been gadding about? And that old devil of yours has got out of hand completely. I asked him for a bite to eat – there wasn’t anything; I asked for vodka, and he refused to give me any, either.’
‘I’ve been for a walk in the woods,’ Oblomov said casually, still unable to recover from the shock of Tarantyev’s visit, and at such a moment, too!
He had forgotten the gloomy surroundings in which he had lived for so many years and was no longer used to their stifling atmosphere. Tarantyev had in a twinkling brought him down, as it were, from heaven into a swamp. Oblomov kept asking himself painfully what Tarantyev had come for and how long he was going to stay. He suffered agonies at the thought that Tarantyev might stay to dinner and that he would be unable to go to the Ilyinskys’. He had to get rid of Tarantyev at any price – that was the only thing that mattered to him now. He waited gloomily and in silence for Tarantyev to speak.
‘Why don’t you go and have a look at your flat, old man?’ asked Tarantyev.
‘I don’t need it any more,’ said Oblomov. ‘I – I am not going to move there.’
‘Wha-at? Not move there?’ Tarantyev cried menacingly. ‘You’ve rented it and you’re not going to move? And what about the agreement?’
‘What agreement?’
‘You’ve forgotten, have you? You signed an agreement for a year. Come on, let us have eight hundred roubles, and then you can go where you like. Four people were after that flat and they were all turned away. One of them would have taken it for three years.’
Oblomov only just remembered that on the very day of his moving to the country cottage Tarantyev brought him a paper which in his hurry he signed without reading. ‘Good Lord, what have I done?’ he thought.
‘But I don’t want the flat,’ said Oblomov. ‘I’m going abroad.’
‘Abroad!’ Tarantyev interrupted. ‘With that German? You’ll never do it, old man…. You’ll never