Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [235]
‘Dear me, women will shed tears about anything! You said yourself that you were sorry for the bunch of lilac and your favourite seat in the park. Add to that injured vanity, your failure as Oblomov’s saviour, a certain degree of habit – and there you have lots of reasons for tears!’
‘And our meetings and walks – are they mistakes, too? You remember I – I went to his flat,’ she concluded in embarrassment, wishing, it seemed, to stifle those words herself.
She was trying to accuse herself only so as to make him defend her the more warmly, to appear more and more justified in his eyes.
‘I can see from your account that during your last meetings you had nothing even to talk about. Your so-called “love” lacked all inner content – it could not have gone any farther. You had parted before your final separation, and you were faithful not to love but to its phantoms which you had yourself invented – that is the whole mystery.’
‘And the kiss?’ she whispered so softly that he guessed rather than heard it.
‘Oh, that’s awfully important,’ he said with ironic severity, ‘for that you ought to go – without your sweet at dinner.’
He was looking at her with ever-growing tenderness and affection.
‘A joke is no condonation of such a mistake,’ she retorted sternly, offended by his indifference and casual tone. ‘I should have felt happier if you had punished me by some harsh word and called my misdemeanour by its proper name.’
‘I should not have joked if it were a question of someone else and not of Ilya,’ he said by way of apology. ‘If it had been somebody else your mistake might have ended in – disaster, but I know Oblomov.’
‘Someone else, never!’ she interrupted him, flaring up. ‘I got to know him better than you do.’
‘There you are!’ he assented.
‘But if – if he had changed, if he had come to life and listened to me and – don’t you think I’d have loved him then? Could it have been a lie and a mistake even then?’ she said, anxious to examine the position from every point of view so that there should be nothing whatever left unexplained.
‘That is, if another man had been in his place,’ Stolz interrupted. ‘In that case, no doubt, your relationship would have grown into love, would have become consolidated, and then – – But that is another love-story and another hero, and it has nothing to do with us.’
She sighed as though throwing the last load off her mind. Both were silent.
‘Oh, how lovely it is to – recover!’ she said slowly, as though opening up like a flower, and turned on him a look of such deep gratitude, such warm and unparalleled friendship that in her glance he seemed to catch a glimpse of the spark he had been vainly seeking for almost a year.
A thrill of happiness went through him.
‘No, it is I who am recovering,’ he said, looking thoughtful. ‘Oh, had I only known that the hero of your romance was Ilya! How much time was wasted, how much bad feeling bred! Why? Whatever for?’ he kept on repeating almost with vexation.
But suddenly he seemed to recover from his vexation and came to himself after his heavy brooding. His forehead was smooth and his eyes were bright again.
‘It seems it was inevitable, but,’ he added with rapture, ‘I am no longer worried now, I am – happy!’
‘It’s like a dream, as though nothing had happened,’ she said pensively, barely audibly, amazed at her sudden regeneration. ‘You have taken away not only the shame and remorse, but also the bitterness and the pain – everything. How did you do it?’ she asked softly. ‘But will it all pass – this mistake?’
‘Why, I should think it has passed already!’ he said, looking at her for the first time with eyes full of passion, and not concealing it. ‘I mean, all that has been.’
‘And what’s going to be – will not be – a mistake, but the real thing?’ she asked, hesitantly.
‘It is written here,’ he declared, picking up the letter again, ‘“The man before you is not the one you’ve been waiting for and dreaming of: he will come and you will come to your senses,”