The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

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СКАЧАТЬ whether at our place or at Oblomovka.”

      Then Schtoltz departed.

      Not for some years did he visit the capital again, for Olga’s health necessitated a lengthy sojourn in the Crimea. For some reason or other her recovery after the birth of a child had been slow.

      “How happy I am!” was her frequent reflection. Yet, no sooner had she passed her life in admiring review than she would find herself relapsing into a meditative mood. What a curious person she was!—a person who, in proportion as her felicity became more, complete, plunged ever deeper and deeper into a brooding over the past! Delving mto the recesses of her own mind, she began to realize that this peaceful existence, this halting at various stages of felicity, annoyed her. However, with an effort of will she shook her soul clear of this despondency, and quickened her steps through life in a feverish desire to seek noise and movement and occupation. Yet the bustle of society brought her small relief, and she would retire again into her corner—there to rid her spirit of the unwonted sense of depression. Then she would go out once more, and busy herself with petty household cares which confined her to the nursery and the duties of a nurse and a mother, or join her husband in reading and discussing serious books or poetry. Her main fear was lest she should fall ill of the disease, the apathetic malady, of Oblomovka. Yet, for all her efforts to slough these phases of torpor and of spiritual coma, a dream of happiness other than the present used to steal upon her, and wrap her in a haze of inertia, and cause her whole being to halt, as for a rest from the exertions of lire. Again, to this mood there would succeed a phase of torture and weariness and apprehension—a phase of dull sorrowfulness which kept asking itself dim, indefinite questions and ceaselessly pondering upon them. And as she listened to those questions she would examine herself, yet never discover what it was she yearned for, nor why, at times, she seemed to tire of her comfortable existence, to demand of it new and unfamiliar impressions, and to be gazing ahead in search of something.

      “What does it all mean?” she would say to herself with a shudder. “Is there really anything more that I require, or that I need wish for? Whither am I travelling? I have no farther to go—my journey is ended. Yet have I really completed my cycle of existence? Is this really all—all?” Then she would glance timidly around her, and wonder, in doubt and trembling, what such whispers of the soul might portend. With anxious eyes she would scan the earth, the heavens, and the wilds, yet find therein no answer, but merely gloom, profundity, and remoteness. All nature seemed to be saying the same thing; in nature she could perceive only a ceaseless, uniform current of life to which there was neither a beginning nor an ending. Of course, she knew whom she could consult concerning these tremors—she knew who could return the needed answers to her questionings. But what would those answers import? What if Schtoltz should say that her self-questionings represented the murmurings of an unsympathetic, an unwomanly, heart—that his quondam idol possessed but a blasé, dissatisfied soul from which nothing good was to be looked for? Yes, how greatly she might fall in his estimation, were he to discover these new and unwonted pangs of hers! Consequently, whenever, in spite of her best efforts to conceal the fact, her eyes lost their velvety softness, and acquired a dry and feverish glitter; whenever, too, a heavy cloud overspread her face, and she could not force herself to smile, and to talk, and to listen indifferently to the latest news in the political world, or to descriptions of interesting phenomena in some new walk of learning, or to remarks upon some new creation of art—well, then she hid herself away, on the plea of illness.

      Yet she felt no desire to give way to tears; she experienced none of those sudden alarms which had been hers during the period when her girlish nerves had been excited even to the point of self-expression. So if, while resting on some calm, beautiful evening, there came stealing upon her, even amid her husband’s talk and caresses, a feeling of weariness and indifference to everything, she would merely ask herself despairingly what it all meant. At one moment she would become, as it were, turned to stone, and sit silent; at another she would make feverish attempts to conceal her strange malady. Finally a headache would supervene, and she would retire to rest. Yet all the while it was a difficult matter for her to evade the keen eyes of her husband. This she knew well, and therefore prepared herself for conversation with him as nervously as she would have done for confession to a priest.

II

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      One evening she and Schtoltz were pacing the poplar avenue in their garden. She was suffering from her usual inexplicable lack of energy, and finding herself able to return but the briefest of answers to what he said.

      “By the way,” he remarked, “the nurse tells me that Olinka is troubled with a night cough. Ought we not to send for the doctor to-morrow?”

      “No. I have given her some hot medicine, and am going to keep her indoors for the present,” answered Olga dully.

      In silence they walked to the end of the avenue.

      “Why have you sent no reply to that letter from your friend Sonichka?” he inquired. “This is the third letter that you have left unanswered.”

      “I would rather forget her altogether,” was Olga’s brief rejoinder.

      “Then you are not well?” he continued after a pause.

      “Oh yes; nothing is the matter with me. Why should you think otherwise’?”

      “Then you are ennuyée?”

      She clasped her hands upon his shoulder.

      “No,” she said, in a tone of assumed cheerfulness—yet a tone in which the note of ennui was only too plainly apparent.

      He led her clear of the shade of the trees, and turned her face to the moonlight.

      “Look at me,” he commanded. He gazed intently into her eyes.

      “One would say that you were unhappy,” he commented. “Your eyes have a strange expression in them which I have noticed more than once before. What is the matter with you, Olga?”

      She took him by the sleeve and drew him back into the shade.

      “Are you aware,” she said with forced gaiety, “that I am hungry for supper?”

      “No, no,” he protested. “Do not make a jest of this.”

      “Unhappy, indeed?” she said reproachfully, halting in front of him. “Yes, I am unhappy—but only from excess of happiness.” So tender was her tone, and so caressing the note in her voice, that he bent down and kissed her.

      With that she grew bolder. The jesting supposition that she could be unhappy inspired her to greater frankness.

      “No, I am not ennuyée,” she went on; “nor should I ever be so. You know that well, yet you refuse to believe my words. Nor am I ill. It is merely that, that well, that sometimes a feeling of depression comes over me. You are a difficult man to conceal things from. Sometimes I feel depressed, though I could not say why.”

      She laid her head upon his shoulder.

      “Nevertheless, what is the reason of it?” he asked her gently as he bent over her.

      “I do not know,” she repeated.

      “Yet there must be a reason of some sort. If that reason lies neither in me nor in your surroundings, СКАЧАТЬ