Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [94]
Andrey often tore himself away from his business affairs or from a fashionable crowd, a party or a ball, and went to sit on Oblomov’s wide sofa and unburden his weary heart and find relief for his agitated spirits in a lazy conversation, and he always experienced the soothing feeling a man experiences on coming from magnificent halls to his own humble home or returning from the beautiful South to the birch wood where he used to walk as a child.
3
‘GOOD MORNING, llya, I’m so glad to see you! Well, how are you? All right?’ asked Stolz.
‘Oh dear, no, Andrey, old man,’ Oblomov said with a sigh. ‘I’m not at all well.’
‘Why, you’re not ill, are you?’ Stolz asked solicitously.
‘Styes have got me down: last week I got rid of one on my right eye and now I’m getting one on the left.’
Stolz laughed.
‘Is that all?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got them from sleeping too much.’
‘All? Good heavens – no! I’ve awful heartburn. You should have heard what the doctor said this morning. He told me to go abroad or it would be the worse for me: I might have a stroke.’
‘Well, are you going?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Good Lord, you should have heard all he told me! I have to live somewhere on a mountain, go to Egypt, or to America.…’
‘Well, what about it?’ Stolz said coolly. ‘You can be in Egypt in a fortnight and in America in three weeks.’
‘You, too, old man? You were the only sensible man I knew and you, too, have gone off your head. Who goes to America and Egypt? The English – but they have been made like that by the good Lord and, besides, they have not enough room at home. But who in Russia would dream of going? Some desperate fellow, perhaps, who doesn’t value his own life.’
‘But, good heavens, it’s nothing: you get into a carriage or go on board ship, breathe pure air, look at foreign countries, cities, customs, at all the marvels.… Oh, you funny fellow! Well, tell me how you are getting on? How are things at Oblomovka?’
‘Oh!’ Oblomov said with a despairing wave of the hand.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Why, life doesn’t leave me alone.’
‘Thank goodness it doesn’t!’ said Stolz.
‘Thank goodness indeed! if it just went on patting me on the head, but it keeps pestering me just as naughty boys pester a quiet boy at school, pinching him on the sly or rushing up to him and throwing sand in his face – I can’t stand it any more!’
‘You’re much too quiet. What’s happened?’ asked Stolz.
‘Two misfortunes.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m utterly ruined.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Let me read to you what my bailiff writes – where’s the letter? Zakhar, Zakhar!’
Zakhar found the letter. Stolz read it and laughed, probably at the bailiff’s style.
‘What a rogue that bailiff is!’ he said. ‘He has let the peasants go and now he complains! He might as well have given them passports and let them go where they like.’
‘Good Lord, if he did that, they might all want to go,’ Oblomov retorted.
‘Let them!’ Stolz said with complete unconcern. ‘Those who are happy and find it to their advantage to stay, will not go, and those who do not want to stay are of no use to you, anyway. Why keep them in that case?’
‘What an idea!’ said Oblomov. ‘The Oblomovka peasants are quiet people who like to stay at home. What do they want to roam about for?’
‘I don’t suppose you know,’ Stolz interrupted, ‘they’re going to build a landing-stage at Verkhlyovo and they also plan to make a highroad there, so that Oblomovka will be within a mile of it, and they’re going to hold an annual fair in the town, too.’
‘Dear me,’ said Oblomov, ‘that would be the last straw! Oblomovka used to be in a backwater, away from everything, and now there’s going to be a fair, a highroad! The peasants will start going regularly to the town, merchants will be coming to us – it’s the end! What a nuisance!’
Stolz laughed.
‘Of course it’s a nuisance!’ Oblomov went on. ‘The peasants