Short Stories by Chekhov
boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for the desolate
little bed in which he had not slept for so long; and she remembered his
habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept bitterly, and wrote an
imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o'clock in the night.
VIII
When towards eight o'clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy
from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of her bedroom,
looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on her face, a
gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor, passed by her into
the entry. There was a smell of drugs. Korostelev was standing near the
study door, twisting his left moustache with his right hand.
"Excuse me, I can't let you go in," he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna;
"it's catching. Besides, it's no use, really; he is delirious, anyway."
"Has he really got diphtheria?" Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.
"People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled up and punished
for it," muttered Korostelev, not answering Olga Ivanovna's question.
"Do you know why he caught it? On Tuesday he was sucking up the mucus
through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was
stupid.... Just from folly...."
"Is it dangerous, very?" asked Olga Ivanovna.
"Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send for Shrek
really."
A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent arrived;
then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked like a head deacon;
then a stout young man with a red face and spectacles. These were
doctors who came to watch by turns beside their colleague. Korostelev
did not go home when his turn was over, but remained and wandered about
the rooms like an uneasy spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the
various doctors, and was constantly running to the chemist, and there
was no one to do the rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat.
Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was punishing her
for having deceived her husband. That silent, unrepining, uncomprehended
creature, robbed by his mildness of all personality and will, weak from
excessive kindness, had been suffering in obscurity somewhere on his
sofa, and had not complained. And if he were to complain even in
delirium, the doctors watching by his bedside would learn that
diphtheria was not the only cause of his sufferings. They would ask
Korostelev. He knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he
looked at his friend's wife with eyes that seemed to say that she was
the real chief criminal and diphtheria was only her accomplice. She did
not think now of the moonlight evening on the Volga, nor the words of
love, nor their poetical life in the peasant's hut. She thought only
that from an idle whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself
all over from head to foot in something filthy, sticky, which one could
never wash off....
"Oh, how fearfully false I've been!" she thought, recalling the troubled
passion she had known with Ryabovsky. "Curse it all!..."
At four o'clock she dined with Korostelev. He did nothing but scowl and
drink red wine, and did not eat a morsel. She ate nothing, either. At
one minute she was praying inwardly and vowing to God that if Dymov
recovered she would love him again and be a faithful wife to him. Then,
forgetting herself for a minute, she would look at Korostelev, and
think: "Surely it must be dull to be a humble, obscure person, not
remarkable in any way, especially with such a wrinkled face and bad
manners!"
Then it seemed to her that God would strike her dead that minute for not
having once been in her husband's study, for fear of infection. And
altogether she had a dull, despondent feeling and a conviction that her
life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it right anyhow....
After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-
room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa, with a gold-embroidered silk
cushion under his head.
"Khee-poo-ah," he snored--"khee-poo-ah."
And the doctors as they came to sit up and went away again did not
notice this disorder. The fact that a strange man was asleep and snoring
in the drawing-room, and the sketches on the walls and the exquisite
decoration of the room, and the fact that the lady of the house was
dishevelled and untidy--all that aroused not the slightest interest now.
One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and the laugh had a
strange and timid sound that made one's heart ache.
When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next time, Korostelev was
not asleep, but sitting up and smoking.
"He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity," he said in a low voice, "and
the heart is not working properly now. Things are in a bad way, really."
"But you will send for Shrek?" said Olga Ivanovna.
"He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had passed
into the nose. What's the use of Shrek! Shrek's no use at all, really.
He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more."
The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay down in her
clothes on her bed, that had not been made all day, and sank into a
doze. She dreamed that the whole flat was filled up from floor to
ceiling with a huge piece of iron, and that if they could only get the
iron out they would all be light-hearted and happy. Waking, she realized
that it was not the iron but Dymov's illness that was weighing on her.
"Nature morte, port..." she thought, sinking into forgetfulness again.
"Sport... Kurort... and what of Shrek? Shrek... trek... wreck.... And
where are my friends now? Do they know that we are in trouble? Lord,
save... spare! Shrek... trek..."
And again the iron was there.... The time dragged on slowly, though the
clock on the lower storey struck frequently. And bells were continually
ringing as the doctors arrived.... The house-maid came in with an empty
glass on a tray, and asked, "Shall I make the bed, madam?" and getting
no answer, went away.
The clock below struck the hour. She dreamed of the rain on the Volga;
and again some one came into her bedroom, she thought a stranger. Olga
Ivanovna jumped up, and recognized Korostelev.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"About three."
"Well, what is it?"
"What, indeed!... I've come to tell you he is passing...."
He gave a sob, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped away the tears
with his sleeve. She could not grasp it at once, but turned cold all
over and began slowly crossing herself.
"He is passing," he repeated in a shrill voice, and again he gave a sob.
"He is dying because he sacrificed himself. What a loss for science!" he
said bitterly. "Compare him with all of us. He was a great man, an
extraordinary man! What gifts! What hopes we all had of him!" Korostelev
went on, wringing his hands: "Merciful God, he was a man of science; we
shall never look on his like again. Osip Dymov, what have you done--aie,
aie, my God!"
Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair, and shook his
head.
"And his moral force," he went on, seeming to grow more and more
exasperated against some one. "Not a man, but a pure, good, loving soul,
and clean as crystal. He served science and died for science. And he
worked like an ox night and day--no one spared him--and with his youth and
his learning he had to take a private practice and work at translations
at night to pay for these... vile rags!"
Korostelev looked with hatred at Olga Ivanovna, snatched at the sheet
with both hands and angrily tore it, as though it were to blame.
"He did not spare himself, and others did not spare him. Oh, what's the
use of talking!"
"Yes, he was a rare man," said a bass voice in the drawing-room.
Olga Ivanovna remembered her whole life with him from the beginning to
the end, with all its details, and suddenly she understood that he
really was an extraordinary, rare, and, compared with every one else she
knew, a great man. And remembering how her father, now dead, and all the
other doctors had behaved to him, she realized that they really had seen
in him a future celebrity. The walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and the
carpet on the floor, seemed to be winking at her sarcastically, as
though they would say, "You were blind! you were blind!" With a wail she
flung herself out of the bedroom, dashed by some unknown man in the
drawing-room, and ran into her husband's study. He was lying motionless
on the sofa, covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was fearfully
thin and sunken, and was of a greyish-yellow colour such as is never
seen in the living; only from the forehead, from the black eyebrows and
from the familiar smile, could he be recognized as Dymov. Olga Ivanovna
hurriedly felt his chest, his forehead, and his hands. The chest was
still warm, but the forehead and hands were unpleasantly cold, and the
half-open eyes looked, not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the quilt.
"Dymov!" she called aloud, "Dymov!" She wanted to explain to him that it
had been a mistake, that all was not lost, that life might still be
beautiful and happy, that he was an extraordinary, rare, great man, and
that she would all her life worship him and bow down in homage and holy
awe before him....
"Dymov!" she called him, patting him on the shoulder, unable to believe
that he would never wake again. "Dymov! Dymov!"
In the drawing-room Korostelev was saying to the housemaid:
"Why keep asking? Go to the church beadle and enquire where they live.
They'll wash the body and lay it out, and do everything that is
necessary."
A DREARY STORY FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN OLD MAN
T HERE is in Russia an emeritus Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch, a
chevalier and privy councillor; he has so many Russian and foreign
decorations that when he has occasion to put them on the students
nickname him "The Ikonstand." His acquaintances are of the most
aristocratic; for the last twenty-five or thirty years, at any rate,
there has not been one single distinguished man of learning in Russia
with whom he has not been intimately acquainted. There is no one for him
to make friends with nowadays; but if we turn to the past, the long list
of his famous friends winds up with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and
the poet Nekrasov, all of whom bestowed upon him a warm and sincere
affection. He is a member of all the Russian and of three foreign
universities. And so on, and so on. All that and a great deal more that
might be said makes up what is called my "name."
That is my name as known to the public. In Russia it is known to every
educated man, and abroad it is mentioned in the lecture-room with the
addition "honoured and distinguished." It is one of those fortunate
names to abuse which or to take which in vain, in public or in print, is
considered a sign of bad taste. And that is as it should be. You see, my
name is closely associated with the conception of a highly distinguished
man of great gifts and unquestionable usefulness. I have the industry
and power of endurance of a camel, and that is important, and I have
talent, which is even more important. Moreover, while I am on this
subject, I am a well-educated, modest, and honest fellow. I have never
poked my nose into literature or politics; I have never sought
popularity in polemics with the ignorant; I have never made speeches
either at public dinners or at the funerals of my friends.... In fact,
there is no slur on my learned name, and there is no complaint one can
make against it. It is fortunate.
The bearer of that name, that is I, see myself as a man of sixty-two,
with a bald head, with false teeth, and with an incurable tic
douloureux. I am myself as dingy and unsightly as my name is brilliant
and splendid. My head and my hands tremble with weakness; my neck, as