With Tarantiev’s departure a calm of ten minutes reigned in the apartment. Oblomov was feeling greatly upset, both by the starostas letter and by the prospect of the impending removal. Also, the tumultuous Tarantiev had thoroughly tired him out.
“Why do you not sit down and write the letter?” asked Alexiev. “If you wish I will clean the inkstand for you.”
“Clean it, and the Lord bless you!” sighed Oblomov. “Let me write the letter alone, and then you shall fair-copy it after dinner.”
“Very well,” replied Alexiev. “But now I must be off, or I shall be delaying the Ekaterinhov party. Good-bye!”
Oblomov did not heed him, but, sinking back into a recumbent position in the armchair, relapsed into a state of meditative lethargy.
IV
Zakhar, after closing the dour successively behind Tarantiev and Alexiev, stood expecting to receive a summons from his master, inasmuch as he had overheard the fact that the latter had undertaken to write a letter. But in Oblomov’s study all remained silent as the tomb. Zakhar peeped through the chink of the door, and perceived that his master was lying prone on the sofa, with his head resting on the palm of his hand. The valet entered the room.
“Why have you lain down again?” he asked.
“Do not disturb me: cannot you see that I am reading?” was Oblomov’s abrupt reply.
“Nay, but you ought to wash, and then to write that letter,” urged Zakhar, determined not to be shaken on.
“Yes, I suppose I ought. I will do so presently. Just now I am engaged in thought.”
As a matter of fact, he did read a page of the book which was lying open—a page which had turned yellow with a month’s exposure. That done, he laid it down and yawned.
“How it all wearies me!” he whispered, stretching, and then drawing up, his legs. Glancing at the ceiling as once more he relapsed into a voluptuous state of coma, he said to himself with momentary sternness: “No—business first.” Then he rolled over, and clasped his hands behind his head.
As he lay there he thought of his plans for improving his property. Swiftly he passed in review certain grave and fundamental schemes affecting his plough-land and its taxation; after which he elaborated a new and stricter course to be taken against laziness and vagrancy on the part of the peasantry, and then passed to sundry ideas for ordering his own life in the country.
First of all, he became engrossed in a design for a new house. Eagerly he lingered over a probable disposition of the rooms, and fixed in his mind the dimensions of the dining-room and the billiard-room, and determined which way the windows of his study must face. Indeed, he even gave a thought to the furniture and to the carpets. Next, he designed a wing for the building, calculated the number of guests whom that wing would accommodate, and set aside proper sites for the stables, the coachhouses, and the servants’ quarters. Finally he turned his attention to the garden. The old lime and oak-trees should all be left as they were, but the apple-trees and pear-trees should be done away with, and succeeded by acacias. Also, he gave a moment’s consideration to the idea of a park, but, after calculating the cost of its upkeep, came to the conclusion that such a luxury would prove too expensive—wherefore he passed to the designing of orangeries and aviaries.
So vividly did these attractive visions of the future development of his estate flit before his eyes that he came to fancy himself already settled there, and engaged in witnessing the result of several years’ working of his schemes.
On a fair summer’s evening he seemed to be sitting at a tea-table on the terrace of Oblomovka—sitting under a canopy of leafy shade which the sun was powerless to penetrate. From a long pipe in his hand he was lazily inhaling smoke, and revelling both in the delightful view which stretched beyond the circle of the trees and in the coolness and the quiet of his surroundings. In the distance some fields were turning to gold as the sun, setting behind a familiar birch-grove, tinged to red the mirror-like surface of the lake. From the fields a mist had risen, for the chill of evening was falling, and dusk approaching apace. To his ears, at intervals, came the clatter of peasantry as they returned homewards, and at the entrance gates the servants of the establishment were sitting at ease, while from their vicinity came the sound of echoing voices and laughter, the playing of balalaiki, 9 and the chattering of girls as they pursued the sport of goriclki. 10 Around him, also, his little ones were frisking at times climbing on to his knee and hanging about his neck; while behind the samovar 11 was seated the real ruler of all that his eyes were beholding his divinity, a woman, his wife!... And in the dining-room—a room at once elegant and simply appointed—a cheerful fire was glowing, and Zakhar, now promoted to the dignity of a major-domo, and adorned with whiskers turned wholly grey, was laying a large, round table to a pleasant accompanying tinkle of crystal and silver as he arranged, here a decanter and there a fork.
Presently the dreamer saw his wife and himself sit down to a bountiful supper. Yes, and with them was Schtoltz, the comrade of his youth, his unchanging friend, with other well-known faces. Lastly, he could see the inmates of the house retiring to rest....
Oblomov’s features blushed with delight at the vision. So clear, so vivid, so poetical was it all that for a moment he lay with his face buried in the sofa cushions. Suddenly there had come upon him a dim longing for love and quiet happiness; suddenly he had become athirst for the fields and the hills of his native place, for his home, for a wife, for children....
After lying face downwards for a moment or two, he turned upon his back. His features were alight with generous emotion, and for the time being he was—happy.
Again the charming seductiveness of sleep-waking enfolded him in its embrace. He pictured to himself a small colony of friends who should come and settle in the villages and farms within a radius of fifteen or twenty versts of his country house. Every day they should visit one another’s houses—whether to dine or to sup or to dance; until everywhere around him he would be able to see only bright faces framed in sunny days—faces which should be ever free of care and wrinkles, and round, and merry, and ruddy, and double-chinned, and of unfailing appetite. In all his neighbourhood there should be constant summertide, constant gaiety, unfailing good fare, the joys of perennial lassitude.... “My God, my God!” he cried in the fullness of his delight: and with that he awoke. Once more to his ears came the cries of hawkers in the courtyard as they vended coal, sand, and potatoes; once more he could hear some one begging for subscriptions to build a church; once more from a neighbouring building which was in course of erection there streamed a babel of workmen’s shouts, mingled with the clatter of tools.
“Ah!” he sighed with a sense of pain. “Such is real life! What ugliness there is in the roar of the capital! When shall I attain the life of paradise—the life for which I yearn? Shall I ever see my own fields, my own forests? Would that at this moment I were lying on the grass under a tree, and gazing upwards at the sun through the boughs, and trying to count the birds which come and go over my head!”
But what about the plans for improving the estate? And what about the starosta and the flat? Once again these things knocked at his memory.
“Yes, yes,” he answered them. “Seichass—presently.”
With that he rose to a sitting posture on the sofa, lowered his legs to the level of his slippers, and slipped the latter on to his