Apparently, by the middle of the winter Dymov began to suspect that he
was being deceived. As though his conscience was not clear, he could not
look his wife straight in the face, did not smile with delight when he
met her, and to avoid being left alone with her, he often brought in
to dinner his colleague, Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a
wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with
embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with his right
hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about
the fact that a displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied
by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic
complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before
found a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with
the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were
talking of medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being silent--that
is, of not lying. After dinner Korostelev sat down to the piano, while
Dymov sighed and said to him:
“Ech, brother--well, well! Play something melancholy.”
Hunching up his shoulders and stretching his fingers wide apart,
Korostelev played some chords and began singing in a tenor voice, “Show
me the abode where the Russian peasant would not groan,” while Dymov
sighed once more, propped his head on his fist, and sank into thought.
Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct of late. Every
morning she woke up in a very bad humour and with the thought that she
no longer cared for Ryabovsky, and that, thank God, it was all over now.
But as she drank her coffee she reflected that Ryabovsky had robbed her
of her husband, and that now she was left with neither her husband
nor Ryabovsky; then she remembered talks she had heard among her
acquaintances of a picture Ryabovsky was preparing for the exhibition,
something striking, a mixture of genre and landscape, in the style of
Polyenov, about which every one who had been into his studio went into
raptures; and this, of course, she mused, he had created under her
influence, and altogether, thanks to her influence, he had greatly
changed for the better. Her influence was so beneficent and essential
that if she were to leave him he might perhaps go to ruin. And she
remembered, too, that the last time he had come to see her in a
great-coat with flecks on it and a new tie, he had asked her languidly:
“Am I beautiful?”
And with his elegance, his long curls, and his blue eyes, he really
was very beautiful (or perhaps it only seemed so), and he had been
affectionate to her.
Considering and remembering many things Olga Ivanovna dressed and in
great agitation drove to Ryabovsky’s studio. She found him in high
spirits, and enchanted with his really magnificent picture. He was
dancing about and playing the fool and answering serious questions with
jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the picture and hated it, but from
politeness she stood before the picture for five minutes in silence,
and, heaving a sigh, as though before a holy shrine, said softly:
“Yes, you have never painted anything like it before. Do you know, it is
positively awe-inspiring?”
And then she began beseeching him to love her and not to cast her off,
to have pity on her in her misery and her wretchedness. She shed tears,
kissed his hands, insisted on his swearing that he loved her, told him
that without her good influence he would go astray and be ruined. And,
when she had spoilt his good-humour, feeling herself humiliated, she
would drive off to her dressmaker or to an actress of her acquaintance
to try and get theatre tickets.
If she did not find him at his studio she left a letter in which she
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.