'For the last three days I've been away, seeing typhus patients,
and I'm exhausted and ill myself. . . . I simply can't! Absolutely!
I've caught it myself! There!'
And the doctor thrust before her eyes a clinical thermometer.
'My temperature is nearly forty. . . . I absolutely can't. I can scarcely sit up. Excuse me. I'll lie down. . . .'
The doctor lay down.
'But I implore you, doctor,' Nellie moaned in despair. 'I beseech you! Help me, for mercy's sake! Make a great effort and come! I will repay you, doctor!'
'Oh, dear! . . . Why, I have told you already. Ah!'
Nellie leapt up and walked nervously up and down the bedroom. She longed to explain to the doctor, to bring him to reason. . . . She thought if only he knew how dear her husband was to her and how unhappy she was, he would forget his exhaustion and his illness. But how could she be eloquent enough?
'Go to the Zemstvo doctor,' she heard Stepan Lukitch's voice.
'That's impossible! He lives more than twenty miles from here, and time is precious. And the horses can't stand it. It is thirty miles from us to you, and as much from here to the Zemstvo doctor. No, it's impossible! Come along, Stepan Lukitch. I ask of you an heroic deed. Come, perform that heroic deed! Have pity on us!'
'It's beyond everything. . . . I'm in a fever . . . my head's in a whirl . . . and she won't understand! Leave me alone!'
'But you are in duty bound to come! You cannot refuse to come! It's egoism! A man is bound to sacrifice his life for his neighbour, and you . . . you refuse to come! I will summon you before the Court.'
Nellie felt that she was uttering a false and undeserved insult, but for her husband's sake she was capable of forgetting logic, tact, sympathy for others. . . . In reply to her threats, the doctor greedily gulped a glass of cold water. Nellie fell to entreating and imploring like the very lowest beggar. . . . At last the doctor gave way. He slowly got up, puffing and panting, looking for his coat.
'Here it is!' cried Nellie, helping him. 'Let me put it on to you. Come along! I will repay you. . . . All my life I shall be grateful to you. . . .'
But what agony! After putting on his coat the doctor lay down again. Nellie got him up and dragged him to the hall. Then there was an agonizing to-do over his goloshes, his overcoat. . . . His cap was lost. . . . But at last Nellie was in the carriage with the doctor. Now they had only to drive thirty miles and her husband would have a doctor's help. The earth was wrapped in darkness. One could not see one's hand before one's face. . . . A cold winter wind was blowing. There were frozen lumps under their wheels. The coachman was continually stopping and wondering which road to take.
Nellie and the doctor sat silent all the way. It was fearfully jolting, but they felt neither the cold nor the jolts.
'Get on, get on!' Nellie implored the driver.
At five in the morning the exhausted horses drove into the yard. Nellie saw the familiar gates, the well with the crane, the long row of stables and barns. At last she was at home.
'Wait a moment, I will be back directly,' she said to Stepan Lukitch, making him sit down on the sofa in the dining-room. 'Sit still and wait a little, and I'll see how he is going on.'
On her return from her husband, Nellie found the doctor lying down.
He was lying on the sofa and muttering.
'Doctor, please! . . . doctor!'
'Eh? Ask Domna!' muttered Stepan Lukitch.
'What?'
'They said at the meeting . . . Vlassov said . . . Who? . . . what?'
And to her horror Nellie saw that the doctor was as delirious as her husband. What was to be done?
'I must go for the Zemstvo doctor,' she decided.
Then again there followed darkness, a cutting cold wind, lumps of frozen earth. She was suffering in body and in soul, and delusive nature has no arts, no deceptions to compensate these sufferings. . . .
Then she saw against the grey background how her husband every spring was in straits for money to pay the interest for the mortgage to the bank. He could not sleep, she could not sleep, and both racked their brains till their heads ached, thinking how to avoid being visited by the clerk of the Court.
She saw her children: the everlasting apprehension of colds, scarlet fever, diphtheria, bad marks at school, separation. Out of a brood of five or six one was sure to die.
The grey background was not untouched by death. That might well be. A husband and wife cannot die simultaneously. Whatever happened one must bury the other. And Nellie saw her husband dying. This terrible event presented itself to her in every detail. She saw the coffin, the candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the undertaker.
'Why is it, what is it for?' she asked, looking blankly at her husband's face.
And all the previous life with her husband seemed to her a stupid prelude to this.
Something fell from Nellie's hand and knocked on the floor. She started, jumped up, and opened her eyes wide. One looking-glass she saw lying at her feet. The other was standing as before on the table.
She looked into the looking-glass and saw a pale, tear-stained face.
There was no grey background now.
'I must have fallen asleep,' she thought with a sigh of relief.
OLD AGE
UZELKOV, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the cemetery. He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up and married in it. But when he got out of the train he scarcely recognized it. Everything was changed. . . . Eighteen years ago when he had moved to Petersburg the street-boys used to catch marmots, for instance, on the spot where now the station was standing; now when one drove into the chief street, a hotel of four storeys stood facing one; in old days there was an ugly grey fence just there; but nothing—neither fences nor houses —had changed as much as the people. From his enquiries of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten.
'And do you remember Uzelkov?' he asked the old waiter about himself. 'Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife? He used to have a house in Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember.'
'I don't remember, sir.'
'How is it you don't remember? The case made a lot of noise, even the cabmen all knew about it. Think, now! Shapkin the attorney managed my divorce for me, the rascal . . . the notorious cardsharper, the fellow who got a thrashing at the club. . . .'
'Ivan Nikolaitch?'
'Yes, yes. . . . Well, is he alive? Is he dead?'
'Alive, sir, thank God. He is a notary now and has an office. He is very well off. He has two houses in Kirpitchny Street. . . . His daughter was married the other day.'
Uzelkov paced up and down the room, thought a bit, and in his boredom made up his mind to go and see Shapkin at his office. When he walked out of the hotel and sauntered slowly towards Kirpitchny Street it was midday. He found Shapkin at his office and scarcely recognized him. From the once well-made, adroit attorney with
