Short Fiction Vsevolod Garshin (best e reader for epub .txt) 📖
- Author: Vsevolod Garshin
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When I came to myself she was standing before me, eady dressed in her own clothes.
“Au revoir.”
I rose and gave her my hand.
“Wait a little. … I want to say something to you.”
“What is it?” she asked anxiously.
“A great, great deal, Nadejda Nicolaievna. … Sit down, for goodness’ sake, for a little, if only for once not as a model.”
“Not as a model? What else can I be to you? God grant that if not a model, I may not be for you what I have been … what I am,” she added hurriedly. “Goodbye. Will you soon finish the picture, Andrei Nicolaievich?” she asked at the door.
“I don’t know. … I think I shall have to ask you to come to me for another two or three weeks.”
She remained silent, as if unable to make up her mind to say what she wanted to say.
“Do you want something, Nadejda Nicolaievna?”
“Do any of your friends want a …” she stammered.
“A model … ?” I interrupted. “I will try to arrange it. I will do all I can, Nadejda Nicolaievna.”
“Thank you. Goodbye.”
I had barely stretched out my hand, when the bell rang. She turned pale, and sat down on a chair. Bezsonow came in.
XHe entered with a free and jaunty air. He seemed at first to have grown thinner the few days we had not seen each other, but after a few minutes I changed my opinion. He greeted me merrily, bowed to Nadejda Nicolaievna, who remained seated in her chair, and spoke with great animation.
“I have come to have a look. Your work interests me very much. I want to find out if you really can do anything now when you have a model better than which you cannot want.”
He shot a glance at Nadejda Nicolaievna. She remained seated as before. I expected and wanted her to go, but she remained as if transfixed to her chair, and did not take her eyes off Bezsonow.
“That’s true,” I replied. “I do not want a better model. I am very grateful to Nadejda Nicolaievna for sitting to me.”
Saying this, I moved the easel from the wall and placed it as it ought to be.
“May I look?” said he.
He devoured the picture with his eyes. I saw that it astonished him, and my author’s pride was pleasantly tickled.
Nadejda Nicolaievna suddenly rose.
“Au revoir!” she said dully.
Bezsonow turned round impetuously, and made several steps towards her.
“Where are you off to, Nadejda Nicolaievna? I have not seen you for so long, and when I meet you almost by chance you apparently run away from me. Stop a little longer, if only five minutes more. We will go together and I will escort you home. I have not been able to find you. At your old lodging they told me you had left the town. I knew that wasn’t true. I tried at the Inquiry Bureau, but they had not your address. I meant to ask again tomorrow, hoping that by this time they had your address, but now, of course, it is not necessary. You will tell us where you live, and I will see you home.”
He spoke quickly and with a tenderness in his tone quite new and strange to me. How different this tone from that in which he had spoken to Nadejda Nicolaievna the evening I and Helfreich had chanced upon them.
“It is not necessary, Serge Vassilivich, thank you,” replied Nadejda Nicolaievna. “I can get home by myself. I do not want any escort, and … with you,” she added quietly, “I have nothing to talk about.”
He made a movement of the hand as if he wished to say something, but only a strange sort of noise came from his lips. I saw that he was restraining himself. … He made several paces, and then, turning towards her, said quietly:
“Go! … If you do not need me, so much the better for both of us … perhaps for all three. …”
She went, giving my hand a slight squeeze, and we were left alone. Soon Helfreich arrived. I asked Bezsonow to stay and dine with us. He did not answer at first, occupied with some thought, then suddenly remembered himself and said:
“Dine? Thank you. … I have not been here for a long time. I wanted to have a talk with you today.”
And he did. At the beginning of dinner, he, for the most part, was silent or gave disjointed replies to Senichka, who talked without ceasing about his cats, which he must certainly give up, and about the necessity of taking up serious work; but afterwards, perhaps under the influence of two glasses of wine, Helfreich’s spirits infected him, and I must say that I never saw him so animated and eloquent as he was at that dinner and on that evening. Towards the end he entirely monopolized the conversation, and read us whole lectures on Foreign and Home politics. Two years of “leader” writing on every conceivable kind of question had made him capable of talking with absolute freedom on all those matters about which Helfreich and I, engaged in our studies, knew little.
“Simon Ivanovich,” said I, when Bezsonow left, “I am sure Bezsonow knows Nadejda Nicolaievna’s surname.”
“How do you know?” inquired Helfreich. I told him of what had happened before he came in. “Why did you not ask him? But I understand, I know myself. …”
Why, indeed, had I not asked Bezsonow? Even now I cannot answer that question. Then I knew nothing of the relations between him and Nadejda Nicolaievna; but even then an uncomfortable premonition filled me of something unusual and mysterious which was to take place between these two persons. I wanted to stop Bezsonow in his impassioned speech about opportunism; I wanted to interrupt his dissertation as to whether capitalism was spreading in Russia or not, but every time the word died away on my tongue.
I told
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