Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,78

he should not have tied himself to this woman … In short, he was in a foul and splenetic mood.

Olga Ivanovna sat on the bed behind the partition and, fingering her beautiful flaxen hair, imagined herself now in the drawing room, now in the bedroom, now in her husband’s study; her imagination carried her to the theater, to the dressmaker’s, and to her famous friends. What were they doing now? Did they remember her? The season had already begun, and it was time to be thinking of soirées. And Dymov? Dear Dymov! How meekly and with what childlike plaintiveness he asked her in his letters to come home soon! Every month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she wrote to him that she owed the artists a hundred roubles, he sent her the hundred as well. What a kind, generous man! Olga Ivanovna was tired of traveling, she was bored and wanted to get away quickly from these peasants, from the smell of river dampness, and to shake off the feeling of physical uncleanness she had experienced all the while she had been living in peasant cottages and migrating from village to village. If Ryabovsky had not given the artists his word of honor that he would stay with them till the twentieth of September, they might have left that same day. And how good it would be!

“My God,” moaned Ryabovsky, “but when will there finally be some sun? I can’t go on working on a sunny landscape without the sun!…

“But you have a study with a cloudy sky,” said Olga Ivanovna, appearing from behind the partition. “Remember, a woods to the right and a herd of cows or some geese to the left. You could finish it now.”

“Eh!” the artist winced. “Finish it! Maybe you think I myself am so stupid that I don’t know what I should do!”

“How you’ve changed towards me!” Olga Ivanovna sighed.

“Well, splendid.”

Olga Ivanovna’s face trembled, she went over to the stove and began to cry.

“Yes, we only lacked tears. Stop it! I have a thousand reasons to cry, but I don’t cry.”

“A thousand reasons!” Olga Ivanovna sobbed. “The main reason is that I’m already a burden to you. Yes!” she said, and burst into tears. “If the truth were told, you’re ashamed of our love. You try to keep the artists from noticing it, though it’s impossible to hide it and they’ve all known for a long time.”

“Olga, I ask one thing of you,” the artist said pleadingly, placing his hand on his heart, “just one thing: don’t torture me! I don’t need anything else from you!”

“But swear that you still love me!”

“This is torture!” the artist said through his teeth and jumped up. “It will end with me throwing myself into the Volga or losing my mind! Let me be!”

“Then kill me, kill me!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “Kill me!”

She burst into tears again and went behind the partition. Rain began to patter on the thatched roof of the cottage. Ryabovsky clutched his head and paced from corner to corner, then, with a resolute face, as if wishing to prove something to someone, he put on his cap, shouldered his gun, and walked out of the cottage.

After he left, Olga Ivanovna lay on the bed for a long time and cried. First she thought it would be good to poison herself, so that Ryabovsky would find her dead when he came back, then she was carried in her thoughts to the drawing room, to her husband’s study, and she imagined herself sitting motionless beside Dymov, enjoying the physical peace and cleanness, and sitting in the theater in the evening listening to Mazzini.3 And the longing for civilization, for city noise and famous people, wrung her heart. A peasant woman came into the cottage and began unhurriedly to fire the stove in order to cook supper. There was a smell of burning, and the air turned blue with smoke. Artists in dirty high boots and with rain-wet faces came in, looked at their studies and said, to comfort themselves, that the Volga had its charm even in bad weather. And the cheap clock on the wall said: tick, tick, tick … Chilled flies crowded into the front corner by the icons and buzzed there, and cockroaches could be heard stirring in the fat portfolios under the benches …

Ryabovsky returned home as the sun was going down. He threw his cap on the table and, pale, worn out, in dirty boots, sank onto a bench