vexation. Just then the woman was carefully carrying a plate of cabbage soup to him with both hands, and Olga Ivanovna saw her thumbs dip into the soup. The dirty woman with her cross-tied belly, and the soup that Ryabovsky began eating greedily, and the cottage, and that whole life, which she had liked so much at the beginning for its simplicity and artistic disorder, now seemed horrible to her. She suddenly felt offended and said coldly:
“We must part for a time, otherwise we may quarrel seriously out of boredom. I’m sick of it. I’ll leave today.”
“How? Riding on a stick?”
“Today is Thursday, which means the steamer will be coming at nine-thirty”
“Ah, yes, yes … Well, go then …” Ryabovsky said gently, wiping his mouth with a towel instead of a napkin. “You’re bored here and have nothing to do, and one would have to be a great egoist to keep you here. Go, and we’ll see each other after the twentieth.”
Olga Ivanovna packed cheerfully, and her cheeks even burned with pleasure. Could it be true, she asked herself, that she would soon sit painting in a living room, and sleep in a bedroom, and dine on a tablecloth? Her heart felt relieved, and she was no longer angry with the artist.
“I’ll leave the paints and brushes for you, Ryabusha,” she said. “Bring back whatever’s left … See that you don’t get lazy here without me, or splenetic, but work. I think you’re a fine fellow, Ryabusha.”
At nine o’clock Ryabovsky kissed her good-bye, to avoid, as she thought, having to kiss her on the steamer, in front of the artists, and brought her to the wharf The steamer soon came and took her away
She arrived home two and a half days later. Not taking off her hat and waterproof, breathless with excitement, she went to the drawing room and from there to the dining room. Dymov, in his shirtsleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, was sitting at the table and sharpening his knife on his fork; on a plate in front of him lay a grouse. As Olga Ivanovna was entering the apartment, she felt convinced that it was necessary to hide everything from her husband, and that she would have skill and strength enough to do it, but now, when she saw his broad, meek, happy smile and his shining, joyful eyes, she felt that to hide anything from this man was as base, as loathsome, and as impossible and beyond her strength, as to slander, steal, or kill, and she instantly resolved to tell him all that had happened. After letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank to her knees before him and covered her face.
“What? What is it, mama?” he asked tenderly. “You missed me?”
She raised her face, red with shame, and looked at him guiltily and imploringly, but fear and shame prevented her from telling the truth.
“Never mind …” she said. “I’m just so …”
“Let’s sit down,” he said, raising her up and sitting her at the table. “There … Have some grouse. You must be hungry, poor little thing.”
She greedily breathed in the air of her home and ate the grouse, and he gazed at her lovingly and laughed with joy.
VI
Apparently, by the middle of winter Dymov began to suspect that he was being deceived. As if his own conscience were not clean, he could no longer look his wife straight in the eye, did not smile joyfully when he met her, and, to avoid being alone with her, often brought to dinner his friend Korostelev, a crop-headed little man with a crumpled face, who, as he spoke with Olga Ivanovna, in his embarrassment would undo all the buttons of his jacket and button them up again, and then would start twisting his left mustache with his right hand. Over dinner the two doctors spoke of the irregular heartbeat that sometimes occurs if the diaphragm is positioned high, or of how multiple neuritis had become more prevalent lately, or how the day before, having dissected a corpse diagnosed as having “malignant anemia,” Dymov had found cancer of the pancreas. And it looked as if the two men conducted a medical conversation only so that Olga Ivanovna could keep silent—that is, not lie. After dinner Korostelev sat down at the piano, and Dymov sighed and said to him:
“Eh, brother! Well, now! Play us something sad.”
Hunching his shoulders and spreading his fingers wide, Korostelev played a few chords and began singing “Show me such a haven where the Russian muzhik does not groan”4 in a tenor voice, and Dymov sighed again, propped his head on his fist, and fell to thinking.
Lately Olga Ivanovna had been behaving very imprudently. She woke up every morning in a bad mood and with the thought that she no longer loved Ryabovsky, and thank God it was all over. But after coffee she would realize that Ryabovsky had taken her husband from her, and that she now had neither husband nor Ryabovsky; then she would recall what her acquaintances had said about Ryabovsky preparing something astounding for the exhibition, a mixture of landscape and genre painting in the style of Polenov,5 over which everyone who visited his studio was in ecstasies; but this, she thought, he had created under her influence, and generally, thanks to her influence, he had changed greatly for the better. Her influence was so beneficial and essential that, if she were to leave him, he might even perish. And she also recalled that he had come to her last time in some gray little frock coat with flecks and a new tie, and had asked languidly: “Am I handsome?” And, graceful, with his long hair and blue eyes, he was indeed very handsome (or perhaps only seemed so), and he was tender with her.
Having recalled and realized many things, Olga Ivanovna would get dressed and, in great agitation, go to see Ryabovsky in his studio. She would find him cheerful and delighted with his indeed magnificent painting; he would clown, hop about, and answer serious questions with jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the painting and hated it, but out of politeness she would stand silently before it for some five minutes and, sighing as one sighs before some sacred thing, say softly:
“Yes, you’ve never yet painted anything like that. You know, it’s even frightening.”
Then she would begin imploring him to love her, not to abandon her, to have pity on her, poor and unhappy as she was. She would weep, kiss his hands, demand that he swear his love for her, insist that without her good influence he would go astray and perish. And, having ruined his good spirits and feeling humiliated herself, she would go to her dressmaker or to some actress acquaintance to obtain a ticket.
If she did not find him in his studio, she would leave a note for him, in which she swore that if he did not come to her that day, she would certainly poison herself. He would get alarmed, come to her, and stay for dinner. Unembarrassed by her husband’s presence, he would say impertinent things to her, and she would respond in kind. They both felt that they were hampering each other, that they were despots and enemies, and they were angry. And in their anger, they did not notice that they were being indecent, and that even crop-headed Korostelev understood everything. After dinner, Ryabovsky would hurriedly say good-bye and leave.
“Where are you going?” Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the front hall, looking at him with hatred.
Wincing and narrowing his eyes, he would name some lady of their acquaintance, and it was clear that he was
