Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [54]
‘Well, you can go now,’ he said to Zakhar in a conciliatory tone of voice. ‘Wait, give me some more kvas! My throat is parched. You might have thought of it yourself – can’t you hear your master is hoarse? That’s what you have brought me to! I hope,’ he went on when Zakhar had brought him the kvas, ‘you’ve understood your misdemeanour and that you won’t ever again compare your master to “other people”! To atone for your guilt, you must make some arrangement with the landlord so that we have not got to move. This is how much you care for your master’s peace of mind: you have thoroughly upset me and made it impossible for me to think of any new and useful idea. And who will suffer from it? You will. It is to my peasants that I have devoted all my life, it is for all of you that I have resigned from the service and sit shut up in my room. Well, never mind! There, it’s striking three. Only two hours left before dinner, and what can one do in two hours? Nothing. And there’s lots to be done. Oh well, I shall have to put off my letter till the next post and jot down the plan to-morrow. And now I’ll lie down for an hour: I’m worn out. Draw the blinds, shut the door, and be sure I’m not disturbed. Wake me at half-past four.’
Zakhar began to seal up his master in the study; first he covered him up and tucked the blanket under him, then he drew the blinds, closed the doors tightly, and retired to his own room.
‘May you never get up again, you devil,’ he growled, wiping away the traces of tears and climbing on the stove. ‘A devil he is, and no mistake! A house of your own, a kitchen garden, wages!’ Zakhar, who had understood only the last words, muttered. ‘He knows how to talk, he does, just like cutting your heart with a knife! This is my house and my kitchen garden, and this is where I’ll peg out!’ he said, hitting the stove furiously. ‘Wages! If I didn’t pick up a few coppers now and then, I shouldn’t have anything to buy tobacco with or to treat my friend. Curse you!… I wish I was dead and buried!’
Oblomov lay on his back, but he did not fall asleep at once. He kept thinking and thinking, and got more and more agitated.
‘Two misfortunes at once!’ he said, pulling the blanket over his head. ‘How is one to stand up to it?’
But actually those two misfortunes – that is, the bailiff’s ominous letter and the moving – no longer worried Oblomov and were already becoming mere disturbing memories.
‘The troubles the bailiff is threatening me with are still far off,’ he thought. ‘All sorts of things can happen before that: the rains may save the crops, the bailiff may make good the arrears, the runaway peasants may be returned to their “place of domicile” as he writes.… And where could those peasants have gone to?’ he thought, getting more and more absorbed in an artistic examination of that circumstance. ‘They could not have gone off at night, in the damp and without provisions. Where would they sleep? Not in the woods, surely? They just can’t stay there! There may be a bad smell in a peasant’s cottage but at least it’s warm.… And what am I so worried about?’ he thought. ‘Soon my plan will be ready – why be frightened before I need to? Oh, you – –’
He was a little more troubled by the thought of moving. That was the new and the latest misfortune. But in his present hopeful mood that fact, too, was already pushed into the background. Though he vaguely realized that he would have to move, particularly as Tarantyev had taken a hand in this business, he postponed it in his mind for at least a week, and thus gained a whole week of peace! ‘And perhaps Zakhar will succeed in coming to some arrangement so that it will not be necessary to move at all. Perhaps it could be arranged somehow! They might agree to put it off till next summer or give up the idea of conversion altogether; well, arrange it in one way or another! After all, I really can’t – move!’
So he kept agitating and composing himself in turn, and, as always, found