Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [88]
She had been a governess in a rich family and had had an opportunity of going abroad, travelled all over Germany, and gained the impression that all Germans were just one mass of shop assistants, artisans, and store-keepers, smoking short pipes and spitting through their teeth; army officers straight as sticks with faces of common soldiers; and ordinary-looking officials – men who were capable only of hard work, of earning a living by the sweat of their brows, of keeping commonplace order, living dull lives and fulfilling their duties in a pedantic manner – all of them middle-class citizens with angular manners, large, coarse hands, plebeian freshness of complexion, and coarse speech. ‘However well you dress a German,’ she thought, ‘even if he wears the finest and whitest shirt, patent-leather boots and even yellow gloves, he still looks as though he had been made of boot leather; his rough, red hands would protrude from the white cuffs, and however elegant the clothes he wears, he looks always, if not like a baker, then like a barman. His rough hands seem to be asking for an awl or at least for a fiddle in an orchestra.’ In her son she hoped to see an ideal gentleman, for though he was the son of a middle-class German and a parvenu, his mother was a Russian lady, and he was a fair-skinned, well-built boy, with small hands and feet, a clear face and bright, alert eyes, such as she had often seen in rich Russian families and abroad, too, though not of course among the Germans. And this son of hers would be turning the mill-stones in the flour-mill, return home from the factory and the fields, like his father, covered in oil and manure, with rough, red, filthy hands and a wolfish appetite! She began cutting her son’s nails, curling his hair, making him elegant collars and cuffs, ordering his coats in the town; she taught him to listen to the wistful melodies of Herz, sang to him about flowers, about the poetry of life, whispered to him about the brilliant calling of a soldier or a writer, and dreamed with him of the exalted part some men are destined to play. And all these prospects were to be ruined by the clicking of an abacus, the sorting out of the greasy receipts of the peasants, his dealings with factory workers! She grew to hate even the trap in which her darling Andrey drove to the town, and the oilskin cap his father had given him, and the green chamois-leather gloves – all of them coarse attributes of a life of labour. Unfortunately, Andrey was a good scholar, and his father made him coach the other boys in his small boarding-school. But this perhaps would not have mattered so much if he did not pay him a salary, just like a German, as if he were some artisan, often roubles a month, and made him sign a receipt for it.
Be comforted, good mother: your son has grown up on Russian soil and not in a crowd of humdrum people with middle-class bovine horns and hands turning mill-stones. Oblomovka was nearby: there it was a perpetual holiday! There they looked upon work as a heavy burden; there the master did not get up at dawn and go to factories and spend his time near oily wheels and springs. In Verkhlyovo itself there was a big mansion, shut up for most of the year, and the high-spirited boy often found his way in, and there he saw large halls and galleries hung with dark portraits of people who did not have fresh, plebeian complexions and big, rough hands – he saw languid, light-blue