Short Fiction by Vsevolod Garshin (always you kirsty moseley TXT) 📕

Another three or four sittings passed by. Nadejda Nicolaievna used to come to me at ten or eleven o’clock, and remain until it was dark. Time and again I begged her to stay and have dinner with us, but as soon as the sitting was ended she invariably hurried off into the next room, changed the dark blue dress for her black dress, and left.

Her face changed greatly during these few days. A melancholy and wistful expression became noticeable about her mouth and in the depths of her grey eyes. She seldom spoke to me, and only brightened up a little when Helfreich, who continued⁠—in spite of my efforts to make him take up something seriously⁠—to paint one cat after another, sat in the studio at his easel. Besides his ginger model, some five or six cats of various ages, sex, and colour appeared from somewhere in our flat, which Agatha Alexeievna invariably fed, although she waged a never-ending war with them, consisting principally in taking several of them up under her arm and throwing them out on to the backstairs. But the cats used to mew piteously at the door, and the soft heart of our faithful domestic could not withstand such appeals; the door would open, and the models again take possession of our flat.

How dearly I remember those long quiet sittings! The picture was nearing completion, and an indefinable feeling of depression was gradually stealing into my heart. I felt that when Nadejda Nicolaievna ceased to be necessary for me as a model we should part. I recalled my conversation with Helfreich on the day he came to live with me. Often when I looked at her pale, melancholy face, his words, “Ah, Andrei, Andrei, take her out of it,” would ring in my ears.

Take her out of it! I knew almost nothing about her. I did not even know where she lived. She had left her old address, to which Helfreich escorted her the evening after our first meeting, and was living in another lodging, but where neither Senia nor I could discover. Neither of us knew her surname.

I remember once I asked her it at a sitting, when Helfreich was absent. He had gone that morning to the Academy (I made him go, if only rarely, to the study class), and we spent the whole day alone. Nadejda Nicolaievna was a little brighter than usual, and a little more talkative. Encouraged by this, I dared to say:

“Nadejda Nicolaievna, even now I do not know your surname.”

She took no apparent notice of my question. An almost imperceptible shadow crossed her face, and for a second her lips compressed, as if something had taken her by surprise; then she went on talking. She spoke of Helfreich, and I saw that she was thinking of what to say in order to direct my attention and evade my question. Finally she stopped.

“Nadejda Nicolaievna,” I said, “tell me why you do not trust me. Have I ever shown even⁠ ⁠…”

“Stop!” she replied sadly. “I not trust you! Nonsense.⁠ ⁠… Why should I not trust you? What harm can you do me?”

“Why do you⁠ ⁠…”

“Because it is not necessary. Paint, paint; it will soon be dark,” she said, trying to speak more brightly. “Simon Ivanovich will soon be here, and what will you be able to show him? You have done almost nothing today. We spend the whole time in talking.”

“It will be all right.⁠ ⁠… I am tired.⁠ ⁠… If you like, get down and rest a little.”

She came down and sat on a stool which stood in the corner. I sat at the other end of the room. I had a wild longing to talk with her and question her, but I felt it was becoming more difhcult with every sitting. I noted how she sat, bending forward and holding her knees with her hands, and her lowered eyes fixed on some spot on the floor. One of Senia’s cats was rubbing against her dress, and looking up in a friendly way into her face, purring quietly and kindly. She seemed to have become frozen in this pose.⁠ ⁠… What was happening in that proud and unhappy soul?

Proud! Yes, it was no idle word which my pen has torn from me. At that time I already felt that her ruin had come from her refusal to bend. Perhaps, had she made some concession, she would have lived like the rest, would have been an interesting girl “with inscrutable eyes”; then she would have married and have become engulfed in the sea of a colourless existence side by side with her husband, occupied in some unusually important business in some service. She would have become a lady of fashion, have had her jour fixe, have educated her children (son at the Gymnasium and daughter at the Institute); she would have dabbled in “good works,” and, going along the path ordained by the Almighty, would have given her husband an opportunity of making public on the next day in the Novoe Vremia his “deep affliction.” But she had gone off the track. What had compelled her to leave the mapped-out life of a “decent woman”? I did not know, and tormentingly endeavoured to read the reason in her face. But it remained immobile. Her eyes were all the time fixed on one spot.

“I have had a rest, Andrei Nicolaievich,” she said, suddenly raising her head.

I got up, looked at her, then at the canvas, and answered:

“I cannot work any more today, Nadejda Nicolaievna.”

She glanced at me, seemed about to say something, but refrained, and without a word went out of the room to dress. I remember I threw myself into an armchair and covered my face with my hands. An unintelligible longing feeling filled me; a vague expectancy of something unknown and terrible; a passionate longing to do something for which I could not account, and a tenderness towards this unfortunate being, together