He would sweep off his pince-nez and gaze at you with a quizzical expression, telling you some perfectly impossible story with a straight face. He had a habit of walking with one arm curled round his back, pretending to be very old and tired, and very sad, and then he would straighten up and howl with laughter. In those days he was very ill, and his voice was the hoarse voice of a consumptive, but you soon forgot his illness. And what an actor he was! He could do the most extraordinary things with his pince-nez. He used them as actors use props. He was always sweeping them on and sweeping them off. He looked so young without them, and so old when they were on, that it was like seeing two different people. He would look down on me from his immense height, and I had the feeling that all his attention, all his humor, all his kindness, were being given to me.”

In the hot summer of 1904 Chekhov, accompanied by his actress wife, arrived in the German watering place of Badenweiler. He was already dying, but he was in good spirits. He sent off gay messages to his friends, telling them how delighted he was with the small villa where he was staying, and how he was looking forward to a trip to Italy, a country he had loved ever since he had journeyed through it after his return from the Far East. And then after Italy there would be a leisurely cruise through the Mediterranean, and so to the Black Sea and his house in Yalta. At seven o’clock on the evening of July 1 the dinner bell rang, but for some reason neither Chekhov nor his wife heard it. A few minutes later, when they realized their mistake, Chekhov characteristically invented a story on the theme of the unheard dinner bell.

The story he told concerned a fashionable watering place full of fat, well-fed bankers and ruddy-faced Englishmen and Americans, all of them hurrying back to dinner from their sight-seeing expeditions in the country, all of them exuding animal vigor and thinking only of their stomachs. But when they arrived at the hotel, there was no dinner bell, for there was no supper—the cook had fled. Then, gaily and happily, Chekhov went on to describe all those pampered visitors as they confronted the awful fact that there would be no supper. He described their horror, their stratagems, their mounting impatience, and he told the story kindly, as he had told so many similar stories in the past. His wife sat curled up on a sofa, laughing as one comic invention followed on another. He died shortly after midnight, falling suddenly on his side, and it was observed that in death he looked very young, contented, and almost happy. Through the wide windows the wind brought the scent of new-mown hay, and later into the terrible stillness of the night there came, like a messenger from another world, a huge black moth which burst into the room like a whirlwind and kept beating its wings madly against the electric lights.

The funeral took place a week later in Moscow. Gorky and others have related the strange circumstances of the funeral, usually with bitterness. They tell how the body arrived in Moscow in a freight train labeled with the words FOR OYSTERS in large letters, and how part of the crowd waiting for Chekhov followed the coffin of General Keller, who had been brought from Manchuria, and they were a little surprised that Chekhov was being buried with full military honors. When the confusion was straightened out, a sad little procession of about a hundred people accompanied Chekhov’s coffin to the Novodevichy Cemetery through the heat and dust of a Moscow summer. “I recall particularly two lawyers,” wrote Gorky. “They were both wearing new boots and spotted neckties, and I heard one of them discoursing on the intelligence of dogs and the other on the comforts of his country home and the beauty of the landscape all round it. Then there was a lady in a lilac dress with a lace-fringed umbrella who was trying to convince an old gentleman in large spectacles about the merits of the deceased. ‘Ah, he was so wonderfully charming, and so witty,’ she said, while the old gentleman coughed incredulously. At the head of the procession a big, fat policeman rode majestically on a fat white horse. It all seemed cruelly common and vulgar, and quite incompatible with the memory of a great and subtle artist.”

But was it so incompatible? Chekhov laughed gaily throughout his life, and he would have laughed at the human absurdities which accompanied his funeral. FOR OYSTERS would have pleased him, and it would have delighted him that he should have been mistaken for General Keller, and he would have listened entranced to all the inane conversations of the people following the coffin, and it would have rejoiced his heart to see the fat policeman on the fat horse. He would have swept off his pince-nez, thrown back his head, and hooted with joy when he discovered that he was being buried next to “the Cossack widow Olga Kookaretnikov,” a name as improbable as any he invented in his stories.