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By Root 2365 0

shame and revealed her past to Stolz earlier, for now she had to overcome fear as well. At times, unable to bear the agony of her heartache any longer, she seemed to be filled with resolution and was ready to rush to him and tell him of her past love not in words but in sobs, convulsions, and fainting fits, so that he should see how great her repentance was. She heard how other women acted in similar cases. Sonia, for instance, told her fiancé about the lieutenant, that she had made a fool of him, that he was just a boy, that she purposely kept him waiting out in the frost till it pleased her to go to her carriage, and so on. Sonia would not have hesitated to say about Oblomov that she had made fun of him for amusement, that he was so ridiculous, that she could not possibly be in love with ‘such a clumsy lout’, that no one could possibly believe that. But such conduct might be excused by Sonia’s husband and many others, but not by Stolz. Olga might have been able to put the whole thing in a better light by saying that she only wanted to draw Oblomov out of the abyss and, to do that, made use of a friendly flirtation – to revive a dying man and then leave him. But this would have been too sophisticated and forced and, in any case, false. No, no, there was no way out!

‘Oh dear, what an awful mess I am in!’ Olga thought in an agony of despair. ‘To tell him! No, no! I don’t want him ever to know about it, not for a long time! But not to tell him is no better than stealing. It’s like deceiving him, like trying to ingratiate myself with him. O Lord, help me!’ But there was no help.

However much she enjoyed Stolz’s presence, there were times when she wished not to meet him again, to pass through his life as a hardly perceptible shadow, and not to darken his serene and rational existence by an illicit passion. She would grieve for her unhappy love, weep over her past, bury in her heart the memory of him, and then – then she would perhaps make ‘a respectable match’, of which there are so many, and become a good, intelligent, solicitous wife and mother, and would not live, but make the most of her life. Was it not what all women did?

But, unfortunately, it was not a question of her alone; someone else, too, was concerned in it, and he rested the last and ultimate hopes of his life on her.

‘Why did I – love?’ she asked herself in agony, recalling the morning in the park when Oblomov wanted to run away and she had thought that the book of her life would be closed for ever if he did. She had solved the question of love and life so boldly and so easily, everything had seemed so clear to her – and everything had got tangled up in a hopeless knot. She had tried to be too clever, she had thought it was enough to look simply at things and go straight ahead and life would spread out before her obediently like a carpet under her feet – and there she was! She had no one even to put the blame on: it was all her own fault.

Without suspecting what Stolz had come for, Olga got up light-heartedly from the sofa, put down her book, and went to meet him.

‘I’m not disturbing you?’ he asked, sitting down at the window of her room that overlooked the lake. ‘You’ve been reading?’

‘No, I had stopped,’ she replied, speaking gently, trustfully, and friendlily. ‘It’s getting dark. I was expecting you!’

‘So much the better,’ he observed gravely, drawing up another chair to the window for her. ‘I want to speak to you.’

She gave a start and turned numb. Then she sank mechanically into the chair and remained sitting in an agony of suspense with her head bowed and without raising her eyes. She wished she were a hundred miles away. At that moment her past flashed through her mind like lightning. ‘The hour of reckoning has come. One can’t play with life as one plays with dolls,’ she seemed to hear a voice saying. ‘Don’t trifle with it, or you’ll have to pay dearly for it.’

For several minutes neither of them spoke. He was evidently collecting his thoughts. Olga looked fearfully at his face that had grown thinner, his knit brows and compressed