'Now, what is it, my dear?' he asked gently. 'Did you miss me?'
She lifted her face, red with shame, and looked at him guiltily and beseechingly, but fear and embarrassment stopped her telling the truth.
'It's all right', she said. 'It's nothing '
'Let's sit down,' he said, lifting her up and seating her at the table. 'There you are. Have some grouse. My poor darling, you're famished.'
She eagerly breathed in the air of home and ate the grouse, while he watched her tenderly and smiled happily.
VI
Half-way through winter Dymov evidently began to suspect that he was a deceived husband. It was as if he was the guilty party, for he could no longer look his wife in the face, nor did he smile happily when they met. So as to be alone with her less he often asked his colleague Korostelyov in for a meal. This was a small, dose-cropped person with a wrinkled face who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket in embarrassment when talking to Olga, and would then start tweaking the left side ofhis moustache with his right hand. Over their meal both doctors would talk about how an upward displacement of the diaphragm is sometimes accompanied by pulse irregularities, about how widespread compound neuritis is nowadays, and about how Dymov had found cancer of the pancreas when performing yesterday's autopsy on a cadaver bearing a diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. Doth apparently discussed medicine only to give Olga the chance to remain silent, and hence to avoid lying. After the meal Korostclyov would sit at the piano.
'Ah me, old chap,' Dymov would sigh. 'Ah, well. Play something melancholy.'
Hunching his shoulders and splaying his fmgers, Korostelyov would strike a few chords and start singing in his tenor voice:
'Do you know any place in all Russia Where no suffering peasantry groans ?'
Dymov would sigh again, prop his head on his fist and sink into thought.
Olga had been behaving most indiscreetly of late. Each morning she woke up in an appalling temper, with the notion that she no longer loved Ryabovsky and that the affair was over, thank God. By the time that she had finished her coffee she was fancying that Ryabovsky had taken her husband from her, that she was now bereft of both husband and Ryabovsky. Then she would recall her friends' talk about how Ryabovsky was working on something outstanding for exhibition, a mixture of landscape and genre a la Polenov—visitors to his studio were in ecstasies about it. But that work had been done under her influence, had it not ? It was her influence, by and large, that had changed him so much for the better. So beneficent, so vital was this influence that he might well come to grief should she abandon him. She also recalled that he had worn a kind of grey, flecked frock-coat and a new tie on his last visit.
'Am I handsome?' he had asked languorously.
Elegant he indeed was with his long curls and blue eyes, and very handsome too—unless that was just an illusion—and he had been nice to her.
After many rememberings and imaginings, Olga would dress and drive to Ryabovsky's studio in a great pother. She would fmd him cheerful and delighted with his picture, which really was marvellous. He would skip about and fool around, returning joke answers to serious questions. Olga was jealous of that picture, she hated it, but she would stand in front of it without speaking for five minutes out of politeness, then sigh like one contemplating a holy relic.
'No, you've never done anything like this before,' she would say quietly. 'It's positively awesome, actually.'
Then she would implore him to love her, not to desert her, and she begged him to pity poor, unhappy her. She would weep and kiss his hands as she insisted on him swearing that he loved her, arguing that he would go astray and come to grief without her good offices. Then, having spoilt his mood, feeling degraded, she would drive off to her dressmaker's or to an actress friend to wangle a theatre ticket.
Should she miss him in his studio she would leave a note swearing to poison herself without fail if he did not come and see her that day. He would panic, go along and stay to a meal. Ignoring her husband, he spoke to her rudely and she repaid him in kind. Each found the other a drag, a tyrant, an enemy. Growing angry, they failed to notice in their rage that both were being indiscreet, that even crop-headed Koro- stelyov knew what was going on. After the meal Ryabovsky was quick to say good-bye and leave.
'Where are you off to?' Olga would ask him in the hall, looking at him with hatred.
Scowling, screwing up his eyes, he would name some woman kno^n to them both, obviously mocking her jealousy and trying to annoy her. She would go to her bedroom and lie on the bed, biting the pillow and sobbing aloud in her jealousy, vexation, humiliation and shame. Dymov would leave Korostelyov in the drawing-room and come into the bedroom, embarrassed and frantic.
'Don't cry so loudly, my dear,' he would say gently. 'Why should you? You must say nothing about it. You mustn't let on. What's done can't be undone, you know.'
Not knowing how to tame this bothersome jealousy, which even gave her a headache, and thinking that matters might still be mended, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face and rush off to sec the woman friend in question. Not fmding Ryabovsky, she went to a second, then a third.
She was ashamed ofgoing about like this at first, but then it became a habit and there were times when she toured all her female acquaintanceship in a single evening—looking for Ryabovsky, as everyone very well knew.
She once told Ryabovsky that 'that man' (meaning her husband) 'overwhelms me with his magnanimity.'
Such a liking did she take to this sentence that she always used it on meeting artists who knew of her affair with Ryabovsky.
'That man ove^helms me with his magnanimity,' she would say with a sweeping gesture.
Her routine remained that of the year before. There were the Wednesday soirees. The actor recited, the artists sketched, the 'cellist played, the singer sang and at half past eleven without fail the dining- room door opened.
'Supper is served, gentlemen,' Dymov would smile.
As of old, Olga sought great men and found them—but then found them wanting and sought more. As of old, she came home late each night. Dymov would no longer be asleep as in the previous year, though, but sat in his study doing some work. He went to bed at about three o'clock and rose at eight.
One evening, when she was standing in front of her pier-glass before going to the theatre, Dymov came into the bedroom in his tails and white tie. He smiled gently and looked his wife in the eye as delightedly as of old. He was beaming.
'I've just been defending my thesis,' he said, sitting do^n and stroking his knees.
'And did you succeed?' Olga asked.
He chuckled and craned his neck to see his wife's face in the mirror, for she was still standing with her back to him, doing her hair.
He chuckled again. 'I shall very likely be offered a lectureship in general pathology, you know. It's in the air.'
His beatific, beaming expression showed that if Olga were to share his joy and triumph he would forgive her everything, both present and future, and would dismiss it from his mind. But she didn't know what a lectureship was or what general pathology was. And besides, she was afraid of being late for the theatre, so she said nothing.