'Yes, what a night!' she whispered, gazing into his eyes now bright with tears. Then she looked quickly round, embraced him and kissed him firmly on the lips.
'We're approaching Kineshma,' said someone on the far side of the deck.
Heavy footsteps were heard as the waiter came past them from the bar.
'Waiter!' said Olga, laughing and crying for joy. 'Would you bring us some wine?'
Pale with emotion, the artist sat on a bench and gazed at Olga in grateful adoration, then closed his eyes.
'I'm tired,' he said, smiling languidly.
He leant his head against the rail.
v
The second of September was a warm, calm, but overcast day. A thin early-morning mist drifted over the Volga, and at nine o'clock it began to drizzle. There was no chance of the sky clearing. Over morning tea Ryabovsky told Olga that painting was the most ungrateful and boring of the arts, that he was not an artist and that only idiots thought he was any good. Then suddenly, with absolutely no warning, he snatched up a knife and made scratches on his best sketch. After his tea he sat gloomily by a window, gazing at the Volga. No longer did the river glisten. It was dim and lustreless, it had a cold look to it. Everything around seemed to presage a melancholy, gloomy autumn. Sumptuous, green-carpeted banks, brilliantly reflected sunbeams, translucent blue distance . . . nature seemed to have taken everything showy and flamboyant from the Volga and packed it away until the corning spring, while crows flew above the river taunting its nakedness with their raucous caws. Hearing their noise, Ryabovsky reflected that he had gone to seed, that he was no good any more, that everything in this world is conditional, relative, idiotic—and that he should never have become involved with this woman.
He was in a bad mood, in other words, and felt depressed.
Olga sat on the bed behind a screen, running her fingers through her lovely flaxen hair and imagining herself first in her drawing-room, then in her bedroom, then in her husband's study. Her fancy bore her to the theatre, to her dressmaker's, to her famous friends. What were they up to now? Did they remember her? The season had started and it would have been time to think about her soirees. And what ofDymov? Dear old Dymov! How tenderly, in what childlike, pathetic terms his letters begged her to hurry home! He sent her seventy-five roubles each month, and when she wrote that she had borrowed a hundred roubles from the others he sent her the hundred too. How kind, how generous a man! Olga was weary of travelling, she was bored, she wanted to get away as fast as she could: away from these peasants, away from that damp river smell. She wanted to shed the sensation of physical impurity which she always felt while living in peasant huts and wandering from village to village. If Ryabovsky hadn't promised the others to stay till the twentieth of the month she could have left today, which would have been wonderful.
'Ye gods, will the sun never shine?' groaned Ryabovsky. 'How can I get on with my sunny landscape if it's not sunny?'
'But there is that cloud scene you're doing,' said Olga, coming out from behind the screen. 'With the wood in the right foreground, remember, and a herd of cows and some geese on the left. Now would be the time to finish that.'
'Oh, really!' Ryabovsky frownwned. 'Finish it! Do you really think I'm such an ass that I don't know my o^n mind?'
'How you have changed towards me,' sighed Olga.
'And a very good thing too.'
Olga's face trembled, she moved awayto the stove and burst into tears.
'Crying! Oh, this really is the limit. Stop it. I have umpteen reasons for tears, but you don't find me crying.'
'Reasons?' sobbed Olga. 'The chief one is that you're fed up with me.
'Yes,' she said, bursting into sobs. 'You are ashamed of our affair, truth to tell. You keep trying to hide it from the others, though it can't be concealed and they've known all about it for ages.'
'I ask only one thing of you, Olga,' begged the artist, laying his hand on his heart. Just this: stop tormenting me, that's all I want from you.'
'But swear you still love me.'
'Oh, this is sheer hell,' Ryabovsky muttered through clenched teeth and jumped to his feet. 'I'll end up throwing myself in the Volga or going mad. Leave me alone.'
'Then why don't you kill me?' shouted Olga. 'Kill me!'
She sobbed again and went behind the screen. Rain swished on the thatch, Ryabovsky clutched his head and paced the room. Then, with the resolute air of one bent on proving a point, he put on his cap, slung his gun over his shoulder and left the hut.
For some time after he had gone Olga lay on the bed crying. Her first thought was to take poison so that Ryabovsky should find her dead when he came back, but then her fancies swept her into her drawing-room, into her husband's study. She saw herself sitting quite still by Dymov's side, enjoying physical calm and cleanliness, she imagined hearing Masini in the theatre one evening. And a pang of longing for civilization, for the bustle of the city, for famous people, plucked at her heart. A local woman came into the hut and began slowly lighting the stove so that she could cook dinner. There was a fumy smell, and the air filled with blue smoke. The artists arrived in muddy top-boots, their faces wet with rain. They looked over their sketches and consoled themselves by saying that the Volga had a charm of its o^n, even in bad weather. The cheap clock on the wall ticked monotonously. Cold flies crowded and buzzed in the corner by the icons, and cockroaches were heard scuttling in the thick portfolios under the benches.
Ryabovsky came home at sunset and flung his cap on the table. Pale, exhausted, in muddy boots, he sank on to a bench and closed his eyes.
'I'm tired,' he said, and twitched his brows, trying to lift his eyelids.
Olga wanted to be nice to him and show that she wasn't angry, so she went up, silently kissed him and ran a comb through his fair hair. She wanted to do his hair properly.
'What's this?' he asked, staning as if from a cold touch.
He opened his eyes. 'What's going on? Oh, leave me alone, for heaven's sake.'
Pushing her away, he moved off—looking disgusted and dismayed, she felt. Then the peasant woman brought him a bowl of cabbage stew, carrying it with great care in both hands, and Olga saw the stew wetting her thumbs. The dirty woman with her tightly belted stomach, the stew so greedily gulped by Ryabovsky, the hut, this whole way of life so adored at first for its simplicity and Bohemian disorder ... it all struck her as perfectly odious now. She suddenly felt insulted.
'We must separate for a bit,' she said coldly, 'or else we may quarrel seriously out of sheer boredom. I'm fed up with this, I shall leave today.'
'How, pray? By broom-stick?'
'It's Thursday today so there's a boat at half past nine.'
'Eh? Yes, quite so. All right then, you go,' said Ryabovsky gently, wiping his mouth on a towel instead of a napkin. 'You're bored here, you're at a loose end and it would be most selfish of me to keep you. So go, and we'll meet after the twentieth.'
Olga cheerfully packed her things, her cheeks positively glowing with pleasure. Could it really be true, she wondered, that she would soon be painting in a drawing-room, sleeping in a bedroom, dining with a cloth on the table? She felt relieved and was no longer angry with the artist.
'I am leaving you my paints and brushes, Ryabovsky dear,' said she. 'You can bring me anything I leave behind. Now, mind you aren't lazy when I'm gone, and don't mope. You do some work. You're a good chap, Ryabovsky old sport.'
Ryabovsky kissed her good-bye at ten o'clock—this was so that he needn't kiss her on the boat in front of the others, she thought—and took her to the landing-stage. The steamer soon came and bore her off.
Two and a half days later she arrived home. Breathless with excitement, she went into her drawing-room without removing hat or raincoat and thence into her dining-room. Dymov was sitting at the table in his shirt-sleeves with his waistcoat unbuttoned and was sharpening a knife on a fork. There was a grouse on the plate in front of him. At the time of entering her apartment Olga had been quite sure that she must keep her husband in ignorance and that she possessed the requisite wit and strength to do so, but now that she saw his broad, gentle, happy smile and his eyes alight with pleasure, she felt that deceiving the man would be mean, odious, out of the question—and as far beyond her as bearing false witness, robbing or murdering. So she made a sudden decision to tell him all. She let him kiss and embrace her, then knelt before him and covered her face.