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By Root 2284 0

two houses; in one he found a vacant four-roomed flat at 4,000 roubles and in the other he was asked 6,000 roubles for a five-roomed one. ‘Terrible! terrible!’ he repeated, stopping his ears and running away from the astonished caretakers. Adding to these sums the thousand odd roubles he had to pay Mrs Pshenitzyn, he was so terrified that he could not add up the total and, quickening his pace, rushed back to Olga’s. There was company there. Olga was very animated, talked, sang, and created a sensation. Only Oblomov listened absently, while she was talking and singing for him alone, because she did not want him to sit there looking crestfallen, but that everything in him, too, should be talking and singing.

‘Come to the theatre to-morrow – we have a box,’ she said.

‘In the evening, through the mud, and all that way!’ Oblomov thought, but, looking into her eyes, he answered her smile with a smile of consent.

‘Book a stall for the season,’ she added. ‘The Mayevskys are coming next week. Auntie invited them to our box.’

And she looked into his eyes to see how pleased he was.

‘Heavens,’ he thought in horror, ‘and I have only three hundred roubles left.’

‘Ask the baron; he knows everyone, and book a seat for you to-morrow.’

And again she smiled, and looking at her he smiled too and, still smiling, asked the baron to book a seat for him, and the baron, also with a smile, undertook to do so.

‘Now you will be in the stalls,’ Olga added, ‘and when you have finished your business, you will take your place in our box by right.’

And she smiled for the last time as she smiled when she was perfectly happy. Oh, how happy he suddenly felt when Olga slightly lifted the veil over the seductive vista, concealed in smiles as in flowers! He forgot all about the money, and it was only when on the following morning he saw Ivan Matveyevich with his parcel dash past his window that he remembered the deed of trust and asked his landlady’s brother to have it witnessed at the courts. Ivan Matveyevich read it, declared that there was one obscure point in it, and undertook to get it cleared up. The document was copied out again, then witnessed and posted. Oblomov told Olga triumphantly about it, and was pleased to leave it at that for a long time. He was glad that there was no need to look for a flat till he received an answer from the country and that in the meantime he would be getting something for his money. ‘One could live perfectly well here,’ he thought, ‘if it were not so far from everything, for strict order reigns in the house and it is run excellently.’ And, indeed, the place was run beautifully. Though he had his meals prepared separately, the landlady kept an eye on his food too. He went into the kitchen one day and found his landlady and Anisya almost in each other’s arms. If there is an affinity of souls, if kindred spirits recognize each other from afar, it had never been more clearly proved than in the sympathy Agafya Matveyevna and Anisya felt for each other. They understood and appreciated one another at the first glance, word and movement. By the way Anisya, rolling up her sleeves and armed with a rag and a poker, brought into order a kitchen that had not been in use for six months, and at a stroke brushed away the dust from the shelves, the walls, and the tables; by the wide sweep of her broom along the floor and the benches, by the speed with which she removed the ashes from the stove – Agafya Matveyevna appreciated the sort of treasure Anisya was and what a great help she could be to her in the house. Anisya, for her part, having only once observed how Agafya Matveyevna reigned in her kitchen, how her hawk eyes without eyebrows saw every clumsy movement of the slow Akulina; how she rapped out her orders to take something out, to put in, to add salt, to warm up something, how at the market she would tell unerringly, at a glance, or at most by a touch of a finger, the age of a chicken, how long a fish had been out of water, when parsley or lettuce had been cut – gazed at her with admiration and respectful