Greece. Chekhov listened with rapt attention. "It seemed to me," Rossolimo wrote later, "that I relieved his depression and drove away the phantom of the 'Black Monk' by directing his thoughts to this enchanted region, far from his immediate situation."
Toward the end of May, surprisingly enough, Chekhov's temperature went down to normal and the doctor gave in to his entreaties to be allowed to take a drive on the first good day. Masha had been informing him of the lush season at Yalta, but at the same time expressing her fears over his condition: "Please write more often about your health, for I'm terribly anxious when I don't know. I'm especially anxious in the evenings. When you are feeling up to it, darling, write, please. If I only knew that you enjoyed my letters, I'd write more often." He had kept her and his mother only vaguely informed of his condition; and he tried to urge Ivan to join them at Yalta, but Ivan, worried about his brother, insisted upon remaining in Moscow. However, once he had good news, Chekhov wrote it to Masha on May 31: "Dear Masha: Just imagine, today for the first time I dressed in my best boots and frock coat . . . and for the first time also I went out for a drive." With Olga by his side he felt proud of his accomplishment. She had tended him faithfully over these weeks of confining illness. In his correspondence with others, Chekhov hardly ever mentions his wife except in passing. He seemed to regard their life together as their own intimate secret of the heart. But in writing of his illness to their mutual friend Dr. Sredin, he added: "My wife waits on her sick husband —this is pure gold. I've never seen such a nurse. It means that it is fine, very fine that I married, otherwise I don't know what I would do now." (May 22, I904.)
It is possible that on this drive, or earlier at his apartment, Chekhov saw Stanislavsky and some of the actors of the Art Theater, for as Stanislavsky mentions in his memoirs, Chekhov was intensely interested at just this time in their preparations to produce the plays of Maeterlinck, an idea that he had long favored, and he wanted to be shown the designs for the staging and to have the mise-en-scene explained. And both Olga and Stanislavsky mention that Chekhov outlined roughly to them the theme of a new play he had in mind. The hero was to be a scientific man. He goes off to the far north because of his disillusion over a woman who either does not love him or is unfaithful to him. The last act was to present an ice-bound steamer. The hero stands alone on the deck amid the complete stillness and grandeur of the
Arctic night. And against the background of the northern lights, he sees floating the shadow of the woman he loves.
By the end of May it seemed to Dr. Taube that his patient had gained enough strength to be permitted to travel to Badenweiler on June 3. Adequate funds for the journey worried Chekhov, and he was also concerned with taking care of the household expenses at Yalta. Mirolyubov fortunately paid him the three hundred roubles for The Betrothed, and Chekhov made bold to ask K. P. Pyatnitsky, managing the Znanie publishing firm, to send his honorarium for The Cherry Orchard. He promptly received the generous sum of forty-five hundred roubles. His pleasure at such munificence, however, was somewhat spoiled by the controversy that arose at this point over the timing of the publication of his play in the Znanie Annual and the separate reprint edition of Marx. Largely because of the censorship, the Znanie volume was delayed, and Marx, despite Chekhov's protestations, insisted upon bringing out his edition very close to that of the Znanie Annual. In a sense, Marx, by this action, violated the spirit if not the letter of his contract with Chekhov, who promptly broke off relations with him. Later Chekhov wrote to Pyatnitsky that he felt himself somewhat responsible for the situation, insisted on refunding his honorarium and on assuming part of any losses which the firm may have suffered, and urged a suit against Marx to recover damages. In Chekhov's weakened state and on the eve of his departure for Europe, no misfortune could have been more ill-timed.
Shortly before leaving, Chekhov apparently had another upset. What he described as severe rheumatic pains troubled him so much that he dispatched a note to Vishnevsky to send a masseur to him. He curiously asked that this be done in secret, with no hint to Dr. Taube — perhaps Chekhov wished to avoid alarming his physician and thus delaying the trip to Europe. On July 2 his old friend Olga Kundasova, "the Astronomer," came to say farewell. She later wrote Suvorin: "I saw Anton on the eve of his departure and had with him one of the most distressing meetings, the kind which fall to the lot of only those on the threshold of death, but I cannot write about it."
Teleshov also came that day, leaving simply a farewell note, for he did not wish to trouble him with a visit at such a time. But Chekhov sent the servant to call him back. Teleshov was appalled at the transformation in Chekhov's appearance as he saw him propped up on the divan with pillows —a withered, narrow-shouldered little man with a small, bloodless face. After their greeting Chekhov said, with eyes that no longer smiled: "Tomorrow I leave. Good-by. I'm going away to die."
Chekhov employed a harsher word than "to die," Teleshov remarked, but he did not wish to repeat it in his account.
"Convey my greetings to your comrades in the Wednesday Club. You have brought together a fine group of people. Tell them that I remember them, and some of them I love. Wish them for me happiness and success."
A quiet, conscious submissiveness, Teleshov observed, was reflected in his eyes.
"Tell Bunin that he must write and write. A great author will emerge from him. Yes, tell him that for me. Don't forget."
And Teleshov concludes his recollections of this meeting: "It did not occur to me to doubt that we were seeing each other for the last time. It was so clear. I was afraid to begin speaking out loud again at that moment and I feared to make a sound with my shoes. Some tender stillness was essential, those few words had to be taken in with an open heart, because for me, without question, they were the last that would come from the pure and beautiful heart of Chekhov."
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This sad, foreboding frame of mind in which Teleshov found Chekhov the day before he left Moscow was quickly forgotten in the joy of the journey to Berlin. As always, traveling was his elixir of life. He and Olga took a comfortable room in the fashionable Savoy Hotel, and from the comments and impressions in his letters to Masha one would imagine that a miracle had taken place. They were thoroughly enjoying themselves, he wrote; it was long since he had eaten so well and with so much appetite, and he was already beginning to fill out. The pains in his legs had disappeared and so had the diarrhea. He was on his feet all day, "dashing around Berlin," to the Tiergarten, to the shops. Nor did he fail to be jauntily critical of what appeared to him foreign deficiencies — he had not seen a single handsome German woman, they all dressed abominably, and he now could understand why taste was grafted so slowly and painfully upon the Moscow Germans. An indication of his irrational hopefulness was the comment in his first letter to Masha on June 6 that he expected to be back in Yalta in August if not earlier.