Shuddering and faltering, she, with a man’s courageous curiosity, continued to gaze at this unfamiliar presentment of life, and timidly to review and to estimate her ability to cope with it. Only love, she saw, would never fail her—only love would over this new existence keep ever-faithful watch and ward. Yet it would be love of a different kind. From it there would be absent all ardent sighs and shining days and rapturous nights; as the years went on such things would come to seem children’s sport compared with the non-intimate affection which life, now grown profound and menacing, would cause her to adopt for her guide. From that life came to her ears no sound of laughter and kisses and tremulous, soulful intercourse amid groves and flowers, while life and nature kept high holiday. No, such things were “withered and gone.” The love beheld in that vision was a love which, unfading and indestructible, expressed itself on the features of husband and wife only during seasons of mutual sorrow, and shone forth only in slow, silent glances of mutual sympathy, and voiced itself only in a constant, joint endurance of the trials of life as he and she restrained the tears, and choked back the sobs, which those trials called forth. With that there came stealing into the midst of the doubts and fears which beset her other visions—visions remote but clear, inspiring but definite....
Her husband’s calm, assured reasoning, added to her own implicit confidence in him, helped Olga to succeed in shaking off both her enigmatical, singular misgivings and her visionary, menacing dreams concerning the future. Once more, therefore, she strode boldly forward. To the night of doubt there succeeded a brilliant morning of maternal and housewifely duties. On the one hand, there beckoned to her the flower garden and the meadows; on the other hand there beckoned to her her husband’s study. No longer did she play with life as with a means of carefree indulgence. Rather, life had become a season of mysterious, systematic waiting, and of getting ready.
Yet once, when Schtoltz happened to mention Oblomov’s name, she let fall her sewing, and sank into a reverie.
“What of him?” later she asked. “Could we not find out how he is through some of his friends?”
“Even so, we should find out no more than we know already. Independently of his friends, I happen to be aware that he is alive and well, and living in the same rooms as formerly. But how he is spending his days, and whether he is morally dead or still there is flickering in him a last spark of vitality, it is impossible for an outsider to ascertain.”
“Do not speak like that, Andrei,” said Olga. “It hurts me to hear you do so. Were I not afraid, I would go in person to glean news of him.” The tears had risen very near to her eyes.
“Next spring we ourselves shall be in Petrograd,” the husband remarked. “Then we will find out.”
“But it is not sufficient merely to find out: we ought also to do all we can for him!”
“Already I have done what is possible. When one is with him he is ready to take any steps desired; but directly one’s back is turned he relapses into slumber. ’Tis like trying to deal with a drunken man.”
“Then why turn your back upon him ever? He ought to be treated firmly—he ought to, be removed from his rooms and taken away. Were I to ask him, he would come with us into the country. I feel sure I should never get over it if I were to see him sink to rack and ruin. Perhaps my tears——”
“Might revive him, you think?”
“No, but at least compel him to look around him, and to exchange his life for something better. With us he would be out of the mire, and living among his equals.”
“Surely you do not love him as you used to do?” Schtoltz asked half-jestingly.
“No, I do not,” she replied (and as she did so her grave eyes seemed to be gazing back into the past). “Yet in him there is something for which I have an abiding affection, and to which I shall ever remain true.”
“Shall I tell you what that something is?” She nodded an assent.“’Tis an honourable, trustworthy heart. That heart is the nugget given him of Nature, and he has carried it unsullied through all his life. Under life’s stress he fell, lost his enthusiasm, and ended by going to sleep—a broken, disenchanted man who had lost his power to live, but not his purity and his intrinsic worth. Never a false note has that heart sounded; never a particle of mire has there clung to his soul; never a specious lie has he heeded; never to the false road has he been seduced by any possible attraction. Even were a whole ocean of evil and rascality to come seething about him, and even were the whole world to become infected with poison and be turned upside down, Oblomov would yet refuse to bow to the false image, and his soul would remain as clean, as radiant, and as without spot as ever. That soul is a soul of crystal transparency. Of men like him but few exist, so that they shine amid the mob like pearls. No price could be high enough to purchase his heart. Everywhere and always that heart would remain true to its trust. It is to this element in him that you have always remained true; and it is owing to the same element in him that my task of keeping watch will never become a burden. In my day I have known many men with splendid qualities. Never have I known a man cleaner, brighter, and more simple than Oblomov. For many a man have I cherished an affection. Never for a man have I cherished an affection more ardent and lasting than that which I cherish for Oblomov. Once known, his personality is an entity for which one’s love could never die.... Is that so? Have I divined aright?”
She said nothing: her eyes were fixed intently upon her work. Ar length she arose, ran to her husband, gazed into his eyes for a moment as she embraced him, and let her head sink forward upon his shoulder. During those few moments there had arisen to her memory Oblomov’s kindly, pensive face, his tender, deprecating gaze, and the shy, wistful smile with which, at their last parting, he had met her reproaches. As she saw those things her heart ached with pity.
“You will never abandon him—you will never let him leave your sight?” she asked with her arms around her husband’s neck.
“No, never!—not though an abyss should open between us, and a dividing wall arise!”
She kissed him.
“Nor shall I ever forget the words which you have just spoken,” she murmured.
III
In the Veaborg Quarter peace and quietness reigned supreme. They reigned in its unwashed streets, with their wooden sidewalks, and in its lean gardens amid the nettle-encumbered ditches, where a goat with a ragged cord around its neck was diligently engaged in cropping the herbage and snatching dull intervals of slumber. At midday, however, the high, smart boots of a clerk clattered along a sidewalk, the muslin curtain at a window was pulled aside to admit the features of a Civil Service official’s lady, and for a brief moment there showed itself over a garden fence the fresh young face of a girl—then the face of a companion—then the face which had first appeared, as two maidens laughed and tittered during the process cf swinging each other on a garden swing.
Also in the abode of Oblomov’s landlady all was quiet. Had you entered the little courtyard, you would have happened upon an idyllic scene. The poultry would have started running hither and thither in fussy alarm, and the dogs given tongue in furious accents, while Akulina would have paused in her pursuit of milking the cow, and the dvornik in his task of chopping firewood, in order that they might gaze unhampered at the visitor. “Whom do you