As always, in the midst of her triumph, Olga's elation was tinctured with remorse as she thought of herself out in the world of light and her husband sitting back in Yalta, alone. She wrote him: "At times I violently hate the theater, at others I madly love it. It has given me life, much grief, much joy, and it gave me you and made me into a person. Perhaps you think this is a false life, something imaginary. Perhaps. But all the same, it is life. Before the theater I vegetated, life was alien to me, and people and their feelings were strange."
Olga need not have worried. Chekhov gloried in her success, avidly read the reviews, and pressed her constantly to give him full reports of her performances. So she would soon become a famous actress, he wrote, a Sarah Bernhardt. Would she dismiss him, he jokingly asked, or take him about with her to keep her accounts? Then, with the wisdom of one who had enjoyed and perhaps was weary of fame, he gently reminded her: "My darling, there is nothing better in the world than to sit on a green bank and fish or stroll about the fields." And to this comment he added a footnote at the bottom of his letter: "I have nothing against your becoming famous and earning twenty-five to forty thousand a year, only first do your best for little Pam'fil." (March ij, 1902.)
Olga was sought out by a number of Chekhov's old Petersburg friends. Though she liked to listen to their stories of the gay doings of his youth, she admitted to being jealous of his former life, which she surmised must have been much pleasanter than his present existence. "Why did we not meet when we were young?" she futilely asked him. But now it was her turn to be gay. Though from the very beginning of her Petersburg tour Olga complained of feeling badly and often depressed, as at Moscow she could not resist invitations to dinners and parties despite her intensive work schedule.
Chekhov anxiously warned "his tippler" not to wear herself out, and jestingly threatened that he would divorce her if she did not get enough rest. As an antidote to her despondency, his letters glowed with plans for the summer when her tour was over. They would rent a dacha near Moscow where he could fish, or better a little place on the Volga where they could be all alone and she could play at housekeeping. Or perhaps it would be nicer to go to Finland. Olga responded joyfully. She would go anywhere only to be with him — the Volga, Finland, even to Yalta where she now imagined him sitting in the garden, looking at the mountains and the sea, feeling the sun warming him, and thinking, thinking.
Then the blow fell. Chekhov received a letter from Olga, dated March 31: "I haven't written you for two days, my Antonchik! Here is what has happened to me: when I left Yalta it was with the hope of presenting Pamfil to you, but I was not aware of this. All the time that I felt unwell I thought it was a stomach upset, although I wanted to be but did not realize that I was pregnant. . . . They sent for doctors. Then for the first time I began to guess what it was and I cried bitterly — I was so heartbroken over my miscarriage with Pamfil." Olga next described how she was taken to the hospital and operated on, how all her friends in the Art Theater had rallied around, and her only thought now was to get back to him at Yalta. And she signed the letter: "Your unsuccessful dog."
For the next ten days, as she lay recuperating, Olga wrote her husband often, and the anguished burden of her letters was her sense of failure: "How I would have taken care of myself if I had only known I was pregnant!" "Will you receive your disgraced wife? She has disgraced herself! And how sorry I am for Pamfil!" ". . . Wire me, don't forget me, don't scorn me for my failure."
On April 14 Olga arrived at the Yalta house on a stretcher, pale and very weak.
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A little more than two weeks after Olga reached Yalta, she was well enough to write Stanislavsky about herself and Chekhov: "During all this time he has been ill and only today has he had an appetite and shown signs of improvement. He has been much upset over my illness and this has been really bad for him." Very likely the gloomy atmosphere in the household contributed to Chekhov's condition. Though there is no evidence that he ever blamed his wife's "failure" on her way of life, apparently his mother and sister were not so charitable. Masha already had had words with Olga about burning the candle at both ends, and now here were the sorry consequences. At any rate, it is significant that on May 25, while Olga was still weak and ailing, she and Chekhov left for Moscow, although Yalta, in ordinary circumstances, would appear to have been the best place for her to convalesce fully. Masha's first letter to him three days after their departure was a terse little note which included a single chilly reference to Olga: "Greetings to your spouse and be well."5
Indeed, the doctor ordered Olga to bed when she arrived in Moscow, a fact which at first did not prevent numerous theatrical folk from dropping in at the new apartment on Neglinny Lane. Rather petulantly Chekhov wrote Masha that at the moment Olga was lying down in the living room listening to Nemirovich-Danchenko and Vishnevsky read a play which bored him so that he had to retreat to the dining room. Olga's condition fluctuated. On June 1 Chekhov was up all night with her as she screamed from an acute pain in her stomach; he hurriedly scribbled notes to her mother and Vishnevsky to find a doctor — most of them appeared to have left town during this holiday period. The pain eased. But ten days later the symptoms appeared in a more severe form, and this time the doctors, diagnosing peritonitis, advised an operation.
Chekhov, with his own wretched health, was worn out physically and spiritually by this ordeal. Olga suffers and all around her suffer, he wrote Gorky in some despair. Fortunately her mother and Stanislavsky and Vishnevsky stood by to aid. "She was near death," Stanislavsky recalled in his memoirs, "and we even thought the situation hopeless. Anton Pavlovich did not leave the bedside of his sick wife day or night and he made poultices for her, and so forth." In fact, Stanislavsky was worried as much about Chekhov's health as about Olga's. His endless care for her when she had fallen ill in Petersburg had claimed Chekhov's gratitude, and it was in the course of his patient attentiveness now in the sickroom that the two men discovered a community of interests and simplicity in intercourse which had previously been lacking in their relations. They became close enough for Chekhov to ask him one day to perform a rather intimate service, an injection of
6 Masha appears to have been at Yalta when Olga arrived on April 14, but after ten days she had to return to Moscow. However, she came back to Yalta for her summer vacation about May 13.
arscnic which lie required — Stanislavsky had assured him that he was proficient in this operation. As it turned out he could not get through the skin 011 Chekhov's back — in his account of the episode Stanislavsky claiincd that the needle was dull. Then, losing his nerve when Chekhov coughcd, this consummate actor faked the injection. Chekhov thanked him warmly, for, if he was aware of the deception, which was probably the ease, delicacy would have prevented him from calling into question this assumed expertise of the morbidly proud Stanislavsky.
In this crisis of Olga's illness, the faithful Masha once again bccamc Chekhov's confidantc. "If you only knew, Antosha, how your letter saddened mc!" she wrote 011 June 6. "Would it not be better, if only Olga improves, to bring her to Yalta? We will look after her and Alt- schulcr will tend her. . . . And it will be better for you in Yalta. Should I not comc to Moscow? Write more often, darling, about the course of Olga's illness, for wc arc very worried and every clay we wait for news." Perhaps a bit sclf-conscious over having contributed to their sudden departure for Moscow, she added that she had bought Olga a large basin, pitcher, and pail in order that she might wash in comfort at Yalta. Chekhov, however, made it very clear that neither of them would return to Yalta that summer, and that lie himself might not get there during the remainder of the year. Obviously their rcccnt experience of trying to live together had been too much for him, and probably Olga's feelings had been deeply hurt over the attitude of Masha and her mother to her miscarriage. I Ic was uncertain about his plans, lie informed Masha, but when Olga recovered lie would seek a rest at the estate of Savva Morozov in Perm, and upon his return would accept the invitation of Stanislavsky to stay at the estate of his mother near Moscow with Olga, or alone if she decided to go abroad as the doctor had suggested.