Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [208]
At last, soon after nine o’clock, Zakhar opened the door into the study with the tray, kicked the door, as usual, in order to shut it and, as usual, missed it, keeping the tray intact, however – he had grown expert at it from long practice, and, besides, he knew that Anisya was keeping an eye on him from behind the door and that if he dropped something she would at once rush to pick it up and put him to shame. His beard pressed into the tray which he hugged tightly, he reached the bed safely and was about to put the cups on the bedside table and waken his master, when he noticed that the bed had not been slept in and that the master was not in it! He gave a start and a cup flew on to the floor, followed by the sugar-basin. He tried to catch them in the air, the tray swayed, and the other things fell too. He succeeded in keeping only one spoon on the tray.
‘What’s all this?’ he said, watching Anisya pick up lumps of sugar, broken pieces of the cup and the bread. ‘Where is the master?’
The master was sitting in the arm-chair, looking terribly ill. Zakhar looked at him open-mouthed.
‘Why did you sit in the chair all night, sir, instead of going to bed?’ he asked.
Oblomov slowly turned his head, looked vacantly at Zakhar, at the spilt coffee, at the scattered sugar on the carpet.
‘And why did you break the cup?’ he said, and walked up to the window.
It was snowing heavily, the big flakes thickly covering the ground.
‘Snow, snow, snow!’ he kept repeating senselessly, looking at the snow which lay in a thick layer on the railings, the trellis fence, and the kitchen-garden. ‘It has covered everything!’ he whispered desperately, lay down on the bed and sank into a leaden, comfortless sleep.
It was past twelve o’clock when he was wakened by the creak of the landlady’s door: a bare arm holding a plate was thrust through the door – on the plate lay a piece of steaming hot pie.
‘It’s Sunday to-day,’ said a tender voice, ‘and we’ve been baking a pie. Won’t you have some?’
But he made no answer: he was in a high fever.
PART FOUR
1
A YEAR had passed since Oblomov’s illness. The year had brought many changes in different parts of the world: here an insurrection had broken out, there it had been put down; here a world-famous luminary had set, there another one had risen; here the world had solved a new mystery of life, there houses and whole generations had been reduced to ashes. Where the old life lay shattered, the new one, like young verdure, began to show….
Though at the house of the widow Pshenitzyn, in Vyborg, days and nights passed peacefully without any sudden violent changes in its monotonous existence, and though the four seasons followed each other as regularly as ever, life did not stand still, but was constantly undergoing a change; but the change was slow and gradual as are the geological changes of our planet: in one place a mountain slowly crumbled away, in another the sea was washing up silt or receding from the shores and forming new land.
Oblomov had recovered. His agent, Zatyorty, had gone to the country and sent the full amount of the money received for the sale of corn, his fares, his living expenses, and his fee being paid out of it. As for the taxes, Zatyorty wrote that it was impossible to collect the money because the peasants were either ruined or had gone away to different places and their whereabouts were unknown – he was making energetic inquiries on the spot. There was no particular hurry so far as the road and the bridges were concerned, since the peasants preferred trudging over the hill and through the ravine to the large village where the market was held, to working on constructing a new road or building bridges. In short, the information and the money received were satisfactory, and, seeing