He sat there for two minutes, then went out with a guilty smile.
VII
It was a very disturbed day.
Dymov had a bad headache. He took no breakfast, stayed away from hospital and just lay there on his study sofa. Olga set off for Ryabovsky's at about half past twelve as usual to show him her still-life sketch and ask why he hadn't visited her on the previous day. She didn't think the sketch was very good and she had only done it to give herself an excuse for visiting the artist.
Entering his apartment without ringing, and removing her galoshes in the hall, she heard the sound of someone running quietly through the studio and the rustle of a woman's dress. She quickly peeped inside and just glimpsed a flash of bro^n petticoat whisking past to vanish behind the large picture draped downwn to the floor with black calico, easel and all. That a woman was hiding there was beyond doubt —Olga herself had taken refuge behind that picture often enough! Obviously much embarrassed, Ryabovsky held out both hands as if surprised at her arrival.
'Aha, delighted to see you,' he said with a forced smile. 'And what news do we bring ?'
Olga's eyes brimmed with tears and she felt bitterly ashamed. Not for a million roubles would she have consented to speak before that strange woman, her rivaclass="underline" the false creature who now stood behind the picture, probably giggling at her discomfiture.
'I have brought you a sketch,' she said timidly in a thin little voice, her lips trembling. 'A still life.'
'Aha, a sketch?'
The artist picked up the sketch. As he examined it he went into the next room, affecting a disinterested air.
Olga followed him-submissively.
'A nature morte, the frnest sort,' he muttered, seeking a rhyme. 'Resort, port '
From the studio came the sound of hurried steps and the rustle of a skirt. So the creature had left. Olga felt like shouting aloud, hitting the artist with a blunt instrument and leaving, but she could see nothing for tears and she was overwhelmed with shame, feeling as if she were no longer Olga, no longer an artist, but a small insect.
'I'm tired,' said Ryabovsky languidly, looking at the sketch and shaking his head to conquer his drowsiness. 'It's all very charming, of course, but a sketch today, a sketch last year and another sketch in a month's time ... I wonder you don't get bored with it. I'd give up painting ifl were you and take up music really seriously, or something. You're no artist, after all, you're a musician. I say, I am tired, you know. I'll have tea served, shall I?'
He left the room and Olga heard him giving orders to his servant. To avoid farewells and explanations, and above all to avoid bursting into tears, she darted into the hall before Ryabovsky came back, put on her galoshes and went into the street. There she breathed more easily and felt free once and for alclass="underline" free from Ryabovsky, from painting, from the load ofshame which had so overwhelmed her in the studio. It was all over.
She drove to her dressmaker's and then to see the actor Barnay, who had only arrived the day before. From Barnay she went to a music shop, brooding the while on how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, harsh letter full of her o^n dignity. That spring or summer she and Dymov would go to the Crimea, where she would shake off the past once and for all and start a new life.
Reaching home late that night, she sat down in the drawing-room without changing her clothes in order to write her letter. Ryabovsky had said that she was no good at painting, so she would revenge herself by telling him that he painted the same picture year in year out and said the same thing day in day out, that he was stagnating, and that he would achieve nothing beyond what he had already achieved. She also felt like telling him how much he owed to her good offices, whereas if he behaved badly it was only because her influence was paralysed by sundry dubious personages such as the one who had hidden behind the picture today.
'My dear,' Dyrnov called from the study, not opening the door. 'My dear!'
'What is it?'
'Don't come into my room, dear, just come to the door. Look, I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital the day before yesterday, and now I'm feeling awful. Send for Korostclyov as quick as you can.'
Olga always called her husband by his surname, as she did all the other men she knew. She disliked the name Osip because it reminded her of Gogol' s Osip. And wasn't there that jingle about the old fellow called Osip, who 'grew hoarse from a surfeit ofgossip', or something vaguely like that? Now, however, Olga shouted: 'That's not possible, Osip!'
'Send for him, I'm in a bad way,' Dyrnov said behind the door, and was heard going back to the sofa and lying do^.
'Send for him.' His voice had a hollow ring.
Cold with fear, Olga wondered whatever the matter could be. 'Why, this is dangerous!' she thought.
For no special reason she took a candle and went into her bedroom, where, as she tried to work out what to do, she chanced to glimpse herself in the pier-glass. Her pale, frightened face, her jacket with its high sleeves, the yellow flounces at her breast, her skirt with the stripes running in unorthodox directions . . . these things made her seem horrible and disgusting in her o^ eyes. She felt a sudden stab ofpity: for Dyrnov, for his boundless love ofher, for his young life and even for this orphaned bed in which he had not slept for so long, and she remembered his usual smile, so gentle and so meek. She wept bitterly and 'wrote a note imploring Korostelyov to come. It was two o'clock in the morning.
VIII
When Olga carne out ofher bedroom at about half past seven, her head heavy from lack of sleep, her hair unbrushed, ugly, and guilty- looking, some gentleman with a black beard—a doctor, apparently— went past her into the hall. There was a smell of medicine. Near the study door Korostelyov stood twisting the left side of his moustache with his right hand.
'I can't let you go in, I'm sorry,' he told Olga grimly. 'It's catching. And actually there's no point, he's delirious anyway.'
'Is it really diphtheria?' Olga whispered.
'It should be a criminal offence, actually, asking for trouble like that,' muttered Korostelyov without answering Olga's question. 'You know how he caught it ? He sucked some diphtherial membrane from a boy's throat on Tuesday, through a tube. Whatever for? It was so stupid, sheer folly '
'Is it dangerous? Very?' asked Olga.
'Yes, it's the malignant kind, they say. We should really send for Schreck.'
There arrived a red-haired little man with a long nose and a Jewish accent, then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual who looked like an archdeacon, then a very stout, bespectacled young man with a red face. These were doctors coming to take their turns at their colleague's bedside. Korostelyov had done his stint, but stayed on instead of going home, positively haunting the flat. The maid served tea to the doctors on watch and was constantly running to the chemist's. There was no one to tidy the rooms. It was quiet and gloomy.
Olga sat in her bedroom and thought how God was punishing her for deceiving her husband. A silent, uncomplaining, mysterious creature, robbed of individuality by its very gentleness, characterless, weak from superfluity of kindness, was dumbly suffering without complaint somewhere in there on the sofa. And were it to complain, even in delirium, the doctors at the bedside would know that the fault was more than just diphtheria alone. They could ask Korostelyov: he knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he looked at his friend's wife as if she were the true, the chief culprit, the diphtheria being merely her accomplice. Oblivious now of that moonlit evening on the Volga, of declarations of love, of their romantic life in the peasant's hut, she remembered only that an idle whim, sheer self-indulgence, had made her smear herself all over, hand and foot, with sticky filth that would never wash off.
'Oh, how horribly false I have been,' she thought, remembering her turbulent affair with Ryabovsky. 'Damn, damn, damn all that!'