Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,82

but a little bug.

“I’m tired …” the artist said languidly, looking at the study and shaking his head to overcome his drowsiness. “It’s sweet, of course, but it’s a study today, and a study last year, and in a month another study … Aren’t you bored? If I were you, I’d drop painting and take up something seriously, music or whatever. You’re not an artist, you’re a musician. Anyhow, I’m so tired! I’ll have tea served … Eh?”

He left the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some order to his servant. So as not to say good-bye, not to explain, and, above all, not to burst into tears, she quickly ran to the front hall before Ryabovsky came back, put on her galoshes, and went outside. There she breathed easily and felt herself free forever from Ryabovsky, and from painting, and from the heavy shame that had so oppressed her in the studio. It was all finished!

She went to her dressmaker, then to the actor Barnay,6 who had arrived the day before, from Barnay to a music shop, thinking all the while of how she was going to write Ryabovsky a cold, stern letter, filled with dignity, and how in the spring or summer she and Dymov would go to the Crimea, there definitively free themselves of the past, and start a new life.

She returned home late in the evening and, without changing her clothes, sat down in the drawing room to write the letter. Ryabovsky had told her that she was not an artist, and she, in revenge, would write to him that he painted the same thing every year and said the same thing every day, that he was stuck, and nothing would come from him except what had already come. She also wanted to write that he owed a lot to her good influence, and if he acted badly, it was only because her influence was paralyzed by various ambiguous persons, like the one who had been hiding behind the painting that day.

“Mama!” Dymov called from the study, without opening the door. “Mama!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Mama, don’t come in, just come to the door. The thing is … Two days ago I caught diphtheria in the hospital, and now … I’m not well. Send for Korostelev quickly.”

Olga Ivanovna had always called her husband, as she did all the men she knew, not by his first but by his last name. She did not like his first name, Osip, because it reminded her of Gogol’s Osip7 and of the tongue twister: “Osip’s hoarse, his horse has pip.” But now she cried out:

“Osip, it can’t be!”

“Send quickly! I’m not well …” Dymov said behind the door, and she heard him go to the divan and lie down. “Send quickly!” came his muted voice.

“What does it mean?” thought Olga Ivanovna, turning cold with terror. “But this is dangerous!”

Quite unnecessarily she took a candle and went to her bedroom, and there, trying to think what she must do, she accidentally looked at herself in the pier glass. With a pale, frightened face, in a puff-sleeved jacket, yellow flounces on her breast, and an unusual pattern of stripes on her skirt, she appeared dreadful and vile to herself. She suddenly felt painfully sorry for Dymov, for his boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for this orphaned bed of his, in which he had not slept for a long time, and she remembered his usual meek, obedient smile. She wept bitterly and wrote an imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o’clock in the morning.

VIII

As Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy after a sleepless night, her hair undone, looking guilty and unattractive, emerged from the bedroom at around eight in the morning, some black-bearded gentleman, apparently a doctor, passed her on his way to the front hall. There was a smell of medications. Korostelev stood by the door of the study, twisting his left mustache with his right hand.

“Sorry, I can’t let you see him,” he said glumly to Olga Ivanovna. “You might catch it. And in fact there’s no need. He’s delirious anyway.”

“He has real diphtheria?” Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.

“Those who ask for trouble really should be taken to court,” Korostelev muttered without answering Olga Ivanovna’s question. “Do you know how he caught it? On Tuesday he sucked diphtherial membranes from a sick boy’s throat with a tube. And what for? Stupid … Just like that, foolishly …”

“Is it dangerous? Very?” asked Olga Ivanovna.

“Yes, they say it’s