At four o'clock she joined Korostelyov for a meal. He ate nothing, just drank red wine and frowned. She too ate nothing. At times she prayed silently, vowing to God that, should Dymov recover, she would love him again and be a faithful wife. At times she lost track of things and gazed at Korostelyov.
'How boring,' thought she, 'to be an ordinary, utterly obscure nonentity, besides having a wrinkled face and no social graces.'
At other times she felt that God would strike her dead that very instant because she had never once been in her husband's room, fearing infection. There was also a general sensation of hopelessness, a certainty that her life already lay in ruins beyond all hope of recovery.
After the meal it grew dark. Olga went into the drawing-room and Korostclyov slept on a couch with a gold-embroidered silk cushion under his head. He snored raucously and rhythmically.
The doctors came to do their stint and went away again without noticing this disarray. A snoring stranger asleep in the drawing-room, the sketches on the walls, the quaint furnishings, the mistress of the house with her dishevelled hair and slovenly dress . . . none of that aroused the faintest interest now. One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and his laugh had a ring strange, timid and positively unnerving.
When Olga returned to the drawing-room Korostelyov had woken up and sat smoking.
'He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity,' he said in a low voice. 'His heart's not too good either. Things are pretty bad, reaUy.'
'Then send for Schreck,' said Olga.
'He's been. It was he who noticed that the infection had passed to the nose. What is Schreck, anyway? He's nothing, really, Schreck isn't. He's Schreck, I'm Korostelyov—and that's that.' •
Time dragged on terribly slowly. Olga lay fully-clothed on her unmade bed and dozed. She fancied that the whole apartment was jammed from floor to ceiling with a huge chunk of iron, that if only one could remove this iron everyone would be happy and cheerful. Then she woke and realized that it was not iron that weighed her do^n, it was Dymov's illness.
'Nature morte, port,' she thought, lapsing into forgetfulness again. 'Sport, resort—. And what ofSchreck? Schreck, greek, Greek, shriek—. But where are my friends now? Do they know we're in trouble? Lord, help us, save us! Schreck, greek '
And again the iron appeared. Time dragged terribly, a clock on the gronnd floor kept striking. The door-bell was continually ringing as doctors arrived. The housemaid came in with an empty glass on a tray.
'Shall I make the bed, ma'am?' she asked, and went out after receiving no answer.
The clock struck do^rntairs, Olga dreamt of rain on the Volga and once again someone came into the bedroom: a stranger, it seemed. Olga jumped up and saw that it was Korostelyov.
'What's the time?' she asked.
'About three.'
'Well, what is it?'
'What indeed? I've come to tell you that he's sinking.'
He gulped, sat by her on the bed and wiped his tears with his sleeve. Unable to grasp it all at once, she turned cold all over and began slowly crossing herself.
'He's sinking,' he repeated in a shrill voice and sobbed again. 'He's dying because he martyred himself
'What a loss to science!' he said bitterly. 'Compared with the rest of us he was a great man, he was quite outstanding. What gifts!
'What hopes we all had for him,' Korostelyov continued, wrwringing his hands. 'Lord above us, he was a real scientist..you don't find his sort any more. Osip, Osip Dymov, how could you? Oh, oh, my God!'
Frantic, Korostelyov covered his face with both hands and shook his head.
'And what moral strength!' he went on, his anger moWlting. 'That kind, pure, loving heart as clear as crystal. He served science, he died for science. He slaved away day in day out, nobody spared him—and a young scholar, a budding professor, had to tout for private patients and spend his nights translating to pay for these . . . disgusting rags!'
Korostelyov glared at Olga with hatred, snatched the sheet in both hands and tore it angrily as if he blamed the sheet.
'He didn't spare himself and no one spared him. Oh, what's the usc of talking ?'
'Yes, he was quite outstanding,' said a deep voice in the drawing- room.
Olga remembered their life together from beginning to end in all its details and she suddenly saw that he really had been an outstanding, rare person: a great man compared with everyone else she had known. Recalling what her dead father and all his doctor-colleagues had thought ofDymov, she realized that they had all seen him as a future notability. Walls, ceiling, lamp, the carpet on the floor ... all seemed to wink at her sardonically.
'You're too late now,' they seemed to say. 'You've lost your chance.'
She rushed wailing out ofthe bedroom, darted past some stranger in the dining-room and ran to her husband's study. He lay quite still on the sofa, covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was 'terribly thin and sunken, with a greyish-yellow hue never seen on living man. Only the forehead, black brows and familiar smile showed that this was Dymov. Olga quickly felt his chest, forehead, hands. His chest was still warm, but his forehead and hands were disagreeably cold. And his half open eyes gazed at the quilt, not at Olga.
'Dymov !' she called aloud. 'Dymov !'
She wanted to tell him that there had been a mistake, that all was not yet lost, that life could still be wonderfully happy, that he was a rare, an outstanding, a great man—and that she would worship him all her life, adore him, revere him and do him homage.
'Dymov!' she called, feeling his shoulder, unable to believe that he would never wake again. 'Dymov! Answer me, Dymov!'
In the drawing-room Korostelyov was speaking to the maid.
'It's perfectly simple. Go to the church lodge and ask for the almshouse women. They'll wash the body, they'll lay it out and do whatever needs doing.'
WARD NUMBER SIX
I
In the hospital courtyard stands a small building surrounded by a jungle of burdock, nettle and wild hemp. The roof is rusty, the chimney halfcollapsed. The porch steps have rotted and are overgrown with grass, and only a few traces of plaster are left. The front faces the hospital and the rear looks into open country, cut off from it by a grey hospital fence with nails on top. Those nails with spikes uppermost, the fence, the hut itself ... all have the melancholy, doomed air peculiar to hospital and prison buildings.
Unless you are afraid of nettle stings, let us take the narrow path to this shack and see what goes on inside. Opening the first door we enter the lobby, where great stacks of hospital rubbish are piled by walls and stove. Mattresses, tattered old smocks, trousers, blue-striped shirts and useless, dilapidated footwear ... all this junk is dumped around any old how, mouldering and giving off an acrid stench.
On the rubbish, a pipe always clenched between his teeth, lies the warder Nikita, an old soldier with faded chevrons. He has a red nose and a stern, haggard visage to which pendulous eyebrows give the look of a prairie sheepdog. Short of stature, he appears gaunt and sinewy, but has an air of authority and knows how to use his fists. He is one of those dull, self-assured, punctilious simpletons who believe in discipline above all things and who are therefore convinced that people need hitting.' He hits them on face, chest, back or anywhere handy, being firmly convinced that this is the only way to keep order in the place.
Next you enter a large, capacious room which is all the hut consists of, apart from the lobby. Its walls are daubed with dirty-blue paint, the ceiling is caked with soot as in a chimneylcss peasant hut, and you can tell that these stoves smoke and fill the place with fumes in winter. The windows are disfigured by iron bars on the inside, the floor is grey and splintery, and there is such a stink of sour cabbage, burnt wicks, bedbugs and ammonia that your first impression is of entering a zoo.