“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

I

THERE 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.”