swore that if he did not come to see her that day she would poison
herself. He was scared, came to see her, and stayed to dinner.
Regardless of her husband's presence, he would say rude things to her,
and she would answer him in the same way. Both felt they were a burden
to each other, that they were tyrants and enemies, and were wrathful,
and in their wrath did not notice that their behaviour was unseemly, and
that even Korostelev, with his close-cropped head, saw it all. After
dinner Ryabovsky made haste to say good-bye and get away.
"Where are you off to?" Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the hall, looking
at him with hatred.
Scowling and screwing up his eyes, he mentioned some lady of their
acquaintance, and it was evident that he was laughing at her jealousy
and wanted to annoy her. She went to her bedroom and lay down on her
bed; from jealousy, anger, a sense of humiliation and shame, she bit the
pillow and began sobbing aloud. Dymov left Korostelev in the drawing-
room, went into the bedroom, and with a desperate and embarrassed face
said softly:
"Don't cry so loud, little mother; there's no need. You must be quiet
about it. You must not let people see.... You know what is done is done,
and can't be mended."
Not knowing how to ease the burden of her jealousy, which actually set
her temples throbbing with pain, and thinking still that things might be
set right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face, and fly off to
the lady mentioned.
Not finding Ryabovsky with her, she would drive off to a second, then to
a third. At first she was ashamed to go about like this, but afterwards
she got used to it, and it would happen that in one evening she would
make the round of all her female acquaintances in search of Ryabovsky,
and they all understood it.
One day she said to Ryabovsky of her husband:
"That man crushes me with his magnanimity."
This phrase pleased her so much that when she met the artists who knew
of her affair with Ryabovsky she said every time of her husband, with a
vigorous movement of her arm:
"That man crushes me with his magnanimity."
Their manner of life was the same as it had been the year before. On
Wednesdays they were "At Home"; an actor recited, the artists sketched.
The violoncellist played, a singer sang, and invariably at half-past
eleven the door leading to the dining-room opened and Dymov, smiling,
said:
"Come to supper, gentlemen."
As before, Olga Ivanovna hunted celebrities, found them, was not
satisfied, and went in pursuit of fresh ones. As before, she came back
late every night; but now Dymov was not, as last year, asleep, but
sitting in his study at work of some sort. He went to bed at three
o'clock and got up at eight.
One evening when she was getting ready to go to the theatre and standing
before the pier glass, Dymov came into her bedroom, wearing his dress-
coat and a white tie. He was smiling gently and looked into his wife's
face joyfully, as in old days; his face was radiant.
"I have just been defending my thesis," he said, sitting down and
smoothing his knees.
"Defending?" asked Olga Ivanovna.
"Oh, oh!" he laughed, and he craned his neck to see his wife's face in
the mirror, for she was still standing with her back to him, doing up
her hair. "Oh, oh," he repeated, "do you know it's very possible they
may offer me the Readership in General Pathology? It seems like it."
It was evident from his beaming, blissful face that if Olga Ivanovna had
shared with him his joy and triumph he would have forgiven her
everything, both the present and the future, and would have forgotten
everything, but she did not understand what was meant by a "readership"
or by "general pathology"; besides, she was afraid of being late for the
theatre, and she said nothing.
He sat there another two minutes, and with a guilty smile went away.
VII
It had been a very troubled day.
Dymov had a very bad headache; he had no breakfast, and did not go to
the hospital, but spent the whole time lying on his sofa in the study.
Olga Ivanovna went as usual at midday to see Ryabovsky, to show him her
still-life sketch, and to ask him why he had not been to see her the
evening before. The sketch seemed to her worthless, and she had painted
it only in order to have an additional reason for going to the artist.
She went in to him without ringing, and as she was taking off her
goloshes in the entry she heard a sound as of something running softly
in the studio, with a feminine rustle of skirts; and as she hastened to
peep in she caught a momentary glimpse of a bit of brown petticoat,
which vanished behind a big picture draped, together with the easel,
with black calico, to the floor. There could be no doubt that a woman
was hiding there. How often Olga Ivanovna herself had taken refuge
behind that picture!
Ryabovsky, evidently much embarrassed, held out both hands to her, as
though surprised at her arrival, and said with a forced smile:
"Aha! Very glad to see you! Anything nice to tell me?"
Olga Ivanovna's eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed and bitter, and
would not for a million roubles have consented to speak in the presence
of the outsider, the rival, the deceitful woman who was standing now
behind the picture, and probably giggling malignantly.
"I have brought you a sketch," she said timidly in a thin voice, and her
lips quivered. "Nature morte."
"Ah--ah!... A sketch?"
The artist took the sketch in his hands, and as he examined it walked,
as it were mechanically, into the other room.
Olga Ivanovna followed him humbly.
"Nature morte... first-rate sort," he muttered, falling into rhyme.
"Kurort... sport... port..."
From the studio came the sound of hurried footsteps and the rustle of a
skirt.
So she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to scream aloud, to hit the artist
on the head with something heavy, but she could see nothing through her
tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt herself, not Olga Ivanovna,
not an artist, but a little insect.
"I am tired..." said the artist languidly, looking at the sketch and
tossing his head as though struggling with drowsiness. "It's very nice,
of course, but here a sketch today, a sketch last year, another sketch
in a month... I wonder you are not bored with them. If I were you I
should give up painting and work seriously at music or something. You're
not an artist, you know, but a musician. But you can't think how tired I
am! I'll tell them to bring us some tea, shall I?"
He went out of the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some order to
his footman. To avoid farewells and explanations, and above all to avoid
bursting into sobs, she ran as fast as she could, before Ryabovsky came
back, to the entry, put on her goloshes, and went out into the street;
then she breathed easily, and felt she was free for ever from Ryabovsky
and from painting and from the burden of shame which had so crushed her
in the studio. It was all over!
She drove to her dressmaker's; then to see Barnay, who had only arrived
the day before; from Barnay to a music-shop, and all the time she was
thinking how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, cruel letter full of
personal dignity, and how in the spring or the summer she would go with
Dymov to the Crimea, free herself finally from the past there, and begin
a new life.
On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the drawing-room,
without taking off her things, to begin the letter. Ryabovsky had told
her she was not an artist, and to pay him out she wrote to him now that
he painted the same thing every year, and said exactly the same thing
every day; that he was at a standstill, and that nothing more would come
of him than had come already. She wanted to write, too, that he owed a
great deal to her good influence, and that if he was going wrong it was
only because her influence was paralysed by various dubious persons like
the one who had been hiding behind the picture that day.
"Little mother!" Dymov called from the study, without opening the door.
"What is it?"
"Don't come in to me, but only come to the door--that's right.... The day
before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital, and
now... I am ill. Make haste and send for Korostelev."
Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as she did all
the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian name, Osip,
because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol and the silly pun on his
name. But now she cried:
"Osip, it cannot be!"
"Send for him; I feel ill," Dymov said behind the door, and she could
hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. "Send!" she heard his voice
faintly.
"Good Heavens!" thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with horror. "Why,
it's dangerous!"
For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom, and there,
reflecting what she must do, glanced casually at herself in the pier
glass. With her pale, frightened face, in a jacket with sleeves high on
the shoulders, with yellow ruches on her bosom, and with stripes running
in unusual directions on her skirt, she seemed to herself horrible and
disgusting. She suddenly felt poignantly sorry for Dymov, for his
boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for the desolate
little bed in which he had not slept for so long; and she remembered his
habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept bitterly, and wrote an
imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o'clock in the night.
VIII
When towards eight o'clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy
from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of her bedroom,
looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on her face, a
gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor, passed by her into
the entry. There was a smell of drugs. Korostelev was standing near the
study door, twisting his left moustache with his right hand.
"Excuse me, I can't let you go in," he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna;
"it's catching. Besides, it's no use, really; he is delirious, anyway."
"Has he really got diphtheria?" Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.
"People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled up and punished
for it," muttered Korostelev, not answering Olga Ivanovna's question.
"Do you know why he caught it? On Tuesday he was sucking up the mucus
through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was
stupid.... Just from folly...."
"Is it dangerous, very?" asked Olga Ivanovna.
"Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send for Shrek
really."
A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent arrived;
then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked like a head deacon;
then a stout young man with a red face and spectacles. These were
doctors who came to watch by turns beside their colleague. Korostelev
did not go home when his turn was over, but remained and wandered about
the rooms like an uneasy spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the
various doctors, and was constantly running to the chemist, and there
was no one to do the rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat.
Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was punishing her
for having deceived her husband. That silent, unrepining, uncomprehended
creature, robbed by his mildness of all personality and will, weak from
excessive kindness, had been suffering in obscurity somewhere on his
sofa, and had not complained. And if he were to complain even in
delirium, the doctors watching by his bedside would learn that
diphtheria was not the only cause of his sufferings. They would ask
Korostelev. He knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he
looked at his friend's wife with eyes that seemed to say that she was
the real chief criminal and diphtheria was only her accomplice. She did
not think now of the moonlight evening on the Volga, nor the words of
love, nor their poetical life in the peasant's hut. She thought only
that from an idle whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself
all over from head to foot in something filthy, sticky, which one could
never wash off....
"Oh, how fearfully false I've been!" she thought, recalling the troubled
passion she had known with Ryabovsky. "Curse it all!..."
At four o'clock she dined with Korostelev. He did nothing but scowl and
drink red wine, and did not eat a morsel. She ate nothing, either. At
one minute she was praying inwardly and vowing to God that if Dymov
recovered she would love him again and be a faithful wife to him. Then,
forgetting herself for a minute, she would look at Korostelev, and
think: "Surely it must be dull to be a humble, obscure person, not
remarkable in any way, especially with such a wrinkled face and bad
manners!"
Then it seemed to her that God would strike her dead that minute for not
having once been in her husband's study, for fear of infection. And
altogether she had a dull, despondent feeling and a conviction that her
life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it right anyhow....
After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-
room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa, with a gold-embroidered silk
cushion under his head.
"Khee-poo-ah," he snored--"khee-poo-ah."
And the doctors as they came to sit up and went away again did not
notice this disorder. The fact that a strange man was asleep and snoring
in the drawing-room, and the sketches on the walls and the exquisite
decoration of the room, and the fact that the lady of the house was
dishevelled and untidy--all that aroused not the slightest interest now.
One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and the laugh had a
strange and timid sound that made one's heart ache.
When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next time, Korostelev was
not asleep, but sitting up and smoking.
"He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity," he said in a low voice, "and
the heart is not working properly now. Things are in a bad way, really."
"But you will send for Shrek?" said Olga Ivanovna.
"He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had passed
into the nose. What's the use of Shrek! Shrek's no use at all, really.
He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more."
The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay down in her
clothes on her bed, that had not been made all day, and sank into a
doze. She dreamed that the whole flat was filled up from floor to
ceiling with a huge piece of iron, and that if they could only get the
iron out they would all be light-hearted and happy. Waking, she realized
that it was not the iron but Dymov's illness that was weighing on her.
"Nature morte, port..." she thought, sinking into forgetfulness again.
"Sport... Kurort... and what of Shrek? Shrek... trek... wreck.... And
where are my friends now? Do they know that we are in trouble? Lord,
save... spare! Shrek... trek..."
And again the iron was there.... The time dragged on slowly, though the
clock on the lower storey struck frequently. And bells were continually
ringing as the doctors arrived.... The house-maid came in with an empty
glass on a tray, and asked, "Shall I make the bed, madam?" and getting
no answer, went away.
The clock below struck the hour. She dreamed of the rain on the Volga;
and again some one came into her bedroom, she thought a stranger. Olga
Ivanovna jumped up, and recognized Korostelev.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"About three."
"Well, what is it?"
"What, indeed!... I've come to tell you he is passing...."
He gave a sob, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped away the tears
with his sleeve. She could not grasp it at once, but turned cold all
over and began slowly crossing herself.
"He is passing," he repeated in a shrill voice, and again he gave a sob.
"He is dying because he sacrificed himself. What a loss for science!" he
said bitterly. "Compare him with all of us. He was a great man, an
extraordinary man! What gifts! What hopes we all had of him!" Korostelev
went on, wringing his hands: "Merciful God, he was a man of science; we
shall never look on his like again. Osip Dymov, what have you done--aie,
aie, my God!"
Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair, and shook his
head.
"And his moral force," he went on, seeming to grow more and more
exasperated against some one. "Not a man, but a pure, good, loving soul,
and clean as crystal. He served science and died for science. And he
worked like an ox night and day--no one spared him--and with his youth and
his learning he had to take a private practice and work at translations
at night to pay for these... vile rags!"
Korostelev looked with hatred at Olga Ivanovna, snatched at the sheet
with both hands and angrily tore it, as though it were to blame.
"He did not spare himself, and others did not spare him. Oh, what's the
use of talking!"
"Yes, he was a rare man," said a bass voice in the drawing-room.
Olga Ivanovna remembered her whole life with him from the beginning to
the end, with all its details, and suddenly she understood that he
really was an extraordinary, rare, and, compared with every one else she
knew, a great man. And remembering how her father, now dead, and all the
other doctors had behaved to him, she realized that they really had seen
in him a future celebrity. The walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and the
carpet on the floor, seemed to be winking at her sarcastically, as
though they would say, "You were blind! you were blind!" With a wail she
flung herself out of the bedroom, dashed by some unknown man in the
drawing-room, and ran into her husband's study. He was lying motionless
on the sofa, covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was fearfully
thin and sunken, and was of a greyish-yellow colour such as is never
seen in the living; only from the forehead, from the black eyebrows and
from the familiar smile, could he be recognized as Dymov. Olga Ivanovna
hurriedly felt his chest, his forehead, and his hands. The chest was
still warm, but the forehead and hands were unpleasantly cold, and the
half-open eyes looked, not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the quilt.
"Dymov!" she called aloud, "Dymov!" She wanted to explain to him that it
had been a mistake, that all was not lost, that life might still be
beautiful and happy, that he was an extraordinary, rare, great man, and
that she would all her life worship him and bow down in homage and holy
awe before him....
"Dymov!" she called him, patting him on the shoulder, unable to believe
that he would never wake again. "Dymov! Dymov!"
In the drawing-room Korostelev was saying to the housemaid:
"Why keep asking? Go to the church beadle and enquire where they live.
They'll wash the body and lay it out, and do everything that is
necessary."
A DREARY STORY FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN OLD MAN
T HERE is in Russia an emeritus Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch, a
chevalier and privy councillor; he has so many Russian and foreign
decorations that when he has occasion to put them on the students
nickname him "The Ikonstand." His acquaintances are of the most
aristocratic; for the last twenty-five or thirty years, at any rate,
there has not been one single distinguished man of learning in Russia
with whom he has not been intimately acquainted. There is no one for him
to make friends with nowadays; but if we turn to the past, the long list
of his famous friends winds up with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and
the poet Nekrasov, all of whom bestowed upon him a warm and sincere
affection. He is a member of all the Russian and of three foreign
universities. And so on, and so on. All that and a great deal more that
might be said makes up what is called my "name."
That is my name as known to the public. In Russia it is known to every
educated man, and abroad it is mentioned in the lecture-room with the
addition "honoured and distinguished." It is one of those fortunate
names to abuse which or to take which in vain, in public or in print, is
considered a sign of bad taste. And that is as it should be. You see, my
name is closely associated with the conception of a highly distinguished
man of great gifts and unquestionable usefulness. I have the industry
and power of endurance of a camel, and that is important, and I have
talent, which is even more important. Moreover, while I am on this
subject, I am a well-educated, modest, and honest fellow. I have never
poked my nose into literature or politics; I have never sought
popularity in polemics with the ignorant; I have never made speeches
either at public dinners or at the funerals of my friends.... In fact,
there is no slur on my learned name, and there is no complaint one can
make against it. It is fortunate.
The bearer of that name, that is I, see myself as a man of sixty-two,
with a bald head, with false teeth, and with an incurable tic
douloureux. I am myself as dingy and unsightly as my name is brilliant
and splendid. My head and my hands tremble with weakness; my neck, as
Turgenev says of one of his heroines, is like the handle of a double
bass; my chest is hollow; my shoulders narrow; when I talk or lecture,
my mouth turns down at one corner; when I smile, my whole face is
covered with aged-looking, deathly wrinkles. There is nothing impressive
about my pitiful figure; only, perhaps, when I have an attack of tic
douloureux my face wears a peculiar expression, the sight of which must
have roused in every one the grim and impressive thought, "Evidently
that man will soon die."
I still, as in the past, lecture fairly well; I can still, as in the
past, hold the attention of my listeners for a couple of hours. My
fervour, the literary skill of my exposition, and my humour, almost
efface the defects of my voice, though it is harsh, dry, and monotonous
as a praying beggar's. I write poorly. That bit of my brain which
presides over the faculty of authorship refuses to work. My memory has
grown weak; there is a lack of sequence in my ideas, and when I put them
on paper it always seems to me that I have lost the instinct for their
organic connection; my construction is monotonous; my language is poor
and timid. Often I write what I do not mean; I have forgotten the
beginning when I am writing the end. Often I forget ordinary words, and
I always have to waste a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous
phrases and unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both unmistakable
proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is noteworthy that the
simpler the letter the more painful the effort to write it. At a
scientific article I feel far more intelligent and at ease than at a
letter of congratulation or a minute of proceedings. Another point: I
find it easier to write German or English than to write Russian.
As regards my present manner of life, I must give a foremost place to
the insomnia from which I have suffered of late. If I were asked what
constituted the chief and fundamental feature of my existence now, I
should answer, Insomnia. As in the past, from habit I undress and go to
bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but before two o'clock I
wake up and feel as though I had not slept at all. Sometimes I get out
of bed and light a lamp. For an hour or two I walk up and down the room
looking at the familiar photographs and pictures. When I am weary of
walking about, I sit down to my table. I sit motionless, thinking of
nothing, conscious of no inclination; if a book is lying before me, I
mechanically move it closer and read it without any interest--in that way
not long ago I mechanically read through in one night a whole novel,
with the strange title "The Song the Lark was Singing"; or to occupy my
attention I force myself to count to a thousand; or I imagine the face
of one of my colleagues and begin trying to remember in what year and
under what circumstances he entered the service. I like listening to
sounds. Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something rapidly
in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room with a candle and
invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped cupboard creaks; or the
burner of the lamp suddenly begins to hum--and all these sounds, for some
reason, excite me.
To lie awake at night means to be at every moment conscious of being
abnormal, and so I look forward with impatience to the morning and the
day when I have a right to be awake. Many wearisome hours pass before
the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bringer of good tidings. As
soon as he crows I know that within an hour the porter will wake up
below, and, coughing angrily, will go upstairs to fetch something. And
then a pale light will begin gradually glimmering at the windows, voices
will sound in the street....
The day begins for me with the entrance of my wife. She comes in to me
in her petticoat, before she has done her hair, but after she has
washed, smelling of flower-scented eau-de-Cologne, looking as though she
had come in by chance. Every time she says exactly the same thing:
"Excuse me, I have just come in for a minute.... Have you had a bad
night again?"