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By Root 2373 0

other hand, at Christmas or on Easter Sunday, or on the gay parties at Shrovetide, when everyone in the house was rejoicing, singing, eating, and drinking, she would suddenly burst into tears amid the general merry-making and hide herself in her room. Then she would withdraw into herself again and sometimes even look at her brother and his wife, as it were, with pride and pity. She realized that joy and laughter had gone out of her life, that God had breathed a soul into her and taken it away again, that the sun that had shone over her had set for ever…. For ever, it is true; but her life, too, had gained a meaning for ever: for now she knew why she had lived and that she had not lived in vain.

She had loved so much and so utterly: she had loved Oblomov as a lover, as a husband, and as a born gentleman; but, as before, she could never tell this to anyone. And no one around her would have understood her. Where would she have found the right words? No such words were to be found in her brother’s, Tarantyev’s, or her sister-in-law’s vocabulary, because they all lacked the ideas those words expressed; only Oblomov would have understood her, but she never told him, because at the time she did not understand it herself and did not know how to express it. As the years passed, she understood her past better and better and hid it more deeply within herself, becoming more taciturn and reserved. The seven years that had flown by like a moment shed their soft light over her whole life, and there was nothing more for her to desire, nowhere farther to go. Only when Stolz came to Petersburg for the winter, she ran to his house and looked eagerly at little Andrey, caressing him with timid tenderness; she would have liked to say something to Stolz, to thank him, to lay before him all that was pent up in her heart and was locked up there for ever – he would have understood her, but she did not know how to, and she merely rushed to Olga, pressed her lips to her hands, and burst into such a flood of scalding tears that Olga could not help weeping with her too, and Andrey, greatly agitated, hurried out of the room. They were all bound by the same feeling, the same memory of the crystal-clear soul of their dead friend. They tried to persuade her to go to the country with them and live with them, near little Andrey, but she always replied: ‘Where one was born and bred, there one must die.’ In vain did Stolz give her an account of his management of her estate and sent her the income due to her. She returned it all and asked him to keep it for little Andrey.

‘It is his, not mine,’ she repeated obstinately. ‘He will need it, he is a gentleman, and I can manage without it.’

11

Two gentlemen were walking along the wooden pavements of Vyborg about twelve o’clock one day; a carriage slowly followed them. One of them was Stolz, and the other a friend of his, a writer, a stout man with an apathetic face and with pensive and, as it were, sleepy eyes. They came to a church; morning mass was over and people were pouring into the street, preceded by a large crowd of beggars of all sorts.

‘I should like to know where the beggars come from,’ said the writer, looking at the beggars.

‘Where they come from? Why, from all sorts of nooks and crannies.’

‘I don’t mean that,’ the writer answered. ‘I should like to know how one becomes a beggar – how does one get to such a position? Does it happen suddenly or gradually? Is it true or false?’

‘What do you want to know that for? Not going to write Mystères de Petersbourg, are you?’

‘Maybe,’ the writer replied, yawning lazily.

‘Well, here’s your chance: ask any one of them, and for a rouble he’ll sell you the story of his life. You can write it down and sell it at a profit. Here’s an old man who seems to be a most ordinary type of beggar. I say, old man, come here a moment, will you?’

The old man turned at the call, took off his hat and walked up to them.

‘Kind sir,’ he wheezed, ’help a poor old soldier, badly wounded in thirty battles – –’

‘Zakhar!’ Stolz cried in surprise. ‘Is that