She liked the phrase so much that, whenever she met artists who knew about her affair with Ryabovsky, she would say of her husband, with an energetic gesture of the hand:
“The man crushes me with his magnanimity!”
The order of life was the same as the year before. There were soirées on Wednesdays. The actor recited, the artists painted, the cellist played, the singer sang, and at half-past eleven, unfailingly, the door to the dining room would open, and Dymov, smiling, would say:
“A bite to eat, gentlemen.”
As before, Olga Ivanovna sought great people, found them and was unsatisfied, and sought again. As before, she returned home late every night, but Dymov would not be asleep, as last year, but sitting in his study and working on something. He would go to bed at around three and get up at eight.
One evening, as she was standing in front of the pier glass getting ready for the theater, Dymov came into the bedroom in a tailcoat and white tie. He was smiling meekly and, as before, looked joyfully straight into his wife’s eyes. His face was beaming.
“I’ve just defended my thesis,” he said, sitting down and patting his knees.
“Successfully?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“Uh-huh!” he laughed and craned his neck so as to see his wife’s face in the mirror, as she went on standing with her back to him, straightening her hair. “Uh-huh!” he repeated. “You know, it’s very likely I’ll be offered a post as assistant professor of general pathology. It’s in the air.”
It was clear from his blissfully beaming face that, if Olga Ivanovna could share his joy and triumph with him, he would forgive her anything, both present and future, and forget everything, but she did not understand what an assistant professor of general pathology was, and besides she was afraid to be late to the theater, and so she said nothing.
He sat for a couple of minutes, smiled guiltily, and left.
VII
This was a most troublesome day.
Dymov had a bad headache. He did not have tea in the morning, did not go to the hospital, and spent the whole time lying on the Turkish divan in his study. After twelve, as usual, Olga Ivanovna went to Ryabovsky to show him her study for a nature morte and ask him why he had not come the day before. The study was nothing to her, and she had painted it only so as to have a further pretext for calling on the artist.
She went in without ringing the bell, and as she was removing her galoshes in the front hall, she seemed to hear something run softly across the studio, a rustling as of a woman’s dress, and when she hastened to peek into the studio, she saw just a bit of brown skirt flash for a moment and disappear behind a big painting which, together with its easel, was covered to the floor with black cloth. There was no possible doubt, it was a woman hiding. How often Olga Ivanovna herself had taken refuge behind that painting! Ryabovsky, obviously quite embarrassed, seemed surprised by her visit, gave her both hands, and said with a forced smile:
“A-a-ah! Very glad to see you. What’s the good news?”
Olga Ivanovna’s eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed, bitter, and not for any amount would she have consented to speak in the presence of a strange woman, a rival, a liar, who was now standing behind the painting, probably tittering gleefully.
“I’ve brought you a study …” she said timidly, in a thin little voice, and her lips trembled, “a nature morte.”
“A-a-ah … a study?”
The artist took the study and, as he examined it, went as if mechanically into the other room.
Olga Ivanovna obediently followed him.
“Nature morte… best sort,” he muttered, choosing a rhyme, “resort… port… wart…”
Hurried footsteps were heard in the studio and the rustle of a dress. It meant she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to shout loudly, hit the artist on the head with something heavy, and leave, but she could see nothing through her tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt herself no longer an Olga Ivanovna, nor an artist, but a little bug.
“I’m tired …” the artist said languidly, looking at the study and shaking his head to overcome his drowsiness. “It’s sweet, of course, but it’s a study today, and a study last year, and in a month another study … Aren’t you bored? If I were you, I’d drop painting and take up something seriously, music or whatever. You’re not an artist, you’re a musician. Anyhow, I’m so tired! I’ll have tea served … Eh?”
He left the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some order to his servant. So as not to say good-bye, not to explain, and, above all, not to burst into tears, she quickly ran to the front hall before Ryabovsky came back, put on her galoshes, and went outside. There she breathed easily and felt herself free forever from Ryabovsky, and from painting, and from the heavy shame that had so oppressed her in the studio. It was all finished!
She went to her dressmaker, then to the actor Barnay,6 who had arrived the day before, from Barnay to a music shop, thinking all the while of how she was going to write Ryabovsky a cold, stern letter, filled with dignity, and how in the spring or summer she and Dymov would go to the Crimea, there definitively free themselves of the past, and start a new life.
She returned home late in the evening and, without changing her clothes, sat down in the drawing room to write the letter. Ryabovsky had told her that she was not an artist, and she, in revenge, would write to him that he painted the same thing every year and said the same thing every day, that he was stuck, and nothing would come from him except what had already come. She also wanted to write that he owed a lot to her good influence, and if he acted badly, it was only because her influence was paralyzed by various ambiguous persons, like the one who had been hiding behind the painting that day.
“Mama!” Dymov called from the study, without opening the door. “Mama!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Mama, don’t come in, just come to the door. The thing is … Two days ago I caught diphtheria in the hospital, and now … I’m not well. Send for Korostelev quickly.”
Olga Ivanovna had always called her husband, as she did all the men she knew, not by his first but by his last name. She did not like his first name, Osip, because it reminded her of Gogol’s Osip7 and of the tongue twister: “Osip’s hoarse, his horse has pip.” But now she cried out:
“Osip, it can’t be!”
“Send quickly! I’m not well …” Dymov said behind the door, and she heard him go to the divan and lie down. “Send quickly!” came his muted voice.
“What does it mean?” thought Olga Ivanovna, turning cold with terror. “But this is dangerous!”
Quite unnecessarily she took a candle and went to her bedroom, and there, trying to think what she must do, she accidentally looked at herself in the pier glass. With a pale, frightened face, in a puff-sleeved jacket, yellow flounces on her breast, and an unusual pattern of stripes on her skirt, she appeared dreadful and vile to herself. She suddenly felt painfully sorry for Dymov, for his boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for this orphaned bed of his, in which he had not slept for a long time, and she remembered his usual meek, obedient smile. She wept bitterly and wrote an imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o’clock in the morning.
VIII
As Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy after a sleepless night, her hair undone, looking guilty and unattractive, emerged from the bedroom at around eight in the morning, some black-bearded gentleman, apparently a doctor, passed her on his way to the front hall. There was a smell of medications. Korostelev stood by the door of the study, twisting his left mustache with his right hand.
“Sorry, I can’t let you see him,” he said glumly to Olga Ivanovna. “You might catch it. And in fact there’s no need. He’s delirious anyway.”