—“Zola understands nothing and invents it all in his study,”—he said in agitation, coughing. “Let him come and see how our Zemstvo doctors work and what they do for the people.”
Every one knows how often—with what sympathy and love beneath an external hardness, he describes those superb workers, those obscure and inconspicuous heroes who deliberately doomed their names to oblivion. He described them, even without sparing them.
IX
There is a saying: the death of each man is like him. One recalls it involuntarily when one thinks of the last years of Chekhov's life, of the last days, even of the last minutes. Even into his funeral fate brought, by some fatal consistency, many purely Chekhovian traits.
He struggled long, terribly long, with an implacable disease, but bore it with manly simplicity and patience, without irritation, without complaints, almost in silence. Only just before his death, he mentions his disease, just by the way, in his letters. “My health is recovered, although I still walk with a compress on.” … “I have just got through a pleurisy, but am better now.” … “My health is not grand…. I write on.”
He did not like to talk of his disease and was annoyed when questioned about it. Only from Arseniy (the servant) one would learn. “This morning he was very bad—there was blood,” he would say in a whisper, shaking his head. Or Yevguenia Yakovlevna, Chekhov's mother, would say secretly with anguish in her voice:
“Antosha again coughed all night. I hear through the wall.”
Did he know the extent and meaning of his disease? I think he did, but intrepidly, like a doctor and a philosopher, he looked into the eyes of imminent death. There were various, trifling circumstances pointing to the fact that he knew. Thus, for instance, to a lady, who complained to him of insomnia and nervous breakdown, he said quietly, with an indefinable sadness:
“You see; whilst a man's lungs are right, everything is right.”
He died simply, pathetically, and fully conscious. They say his last words were: “Ich sterbe.” And his last days were darkened by a deep sorrow for Russia, and by the anxiety of the monstrous Japanese war.