Nikitin, seeming gigantic in the failing candlelight, stood back against the window. He did not keep, as did Semyonov, perfect neatness. A night of work left him with his hair on end, his black beard rough and disordered; his shirtsleeves were turned up, his arms stained with blood, and in his white apron he looked like some kingly butcher. I was tired, the cold headache was upon me. I wished that I could go, but I knew that both he and I must stay until eight o’clock. While there was work to do nothing mattered, but now in the silence the whole world seemed as empty and foul as a drained and stinking tub.
Nikitin looked at me.
“You’re tired,” he said.
“No, I’m not tired,” I answered. “I shouldn’t sleep if I went to bed. But I’ve got a headache that is not a headache, I smell a smell that isn’t a smell, I’m going to be sick—and yet I’m not going to be sick.”
“Come outside,” he said, “and get rid of this air.” We went out and sat down on a wooden bench that bordered the yard. Before us was the high road that ran from the town of S⸺ into the very heart of the Carpathians. As the cold grey faded we could catch the thin outline of those mountains, faint, like pencil-lines upon the sky now washed with pink, covered in their nearer reaches by thick forests, insubstantial, although they were close at hand, like water or long clouds. We could see the road, white and clear at our feet, melting into shadow beyond us, and catching in the little misty pools the coloured reflection of the morning sky.
The air was very fresh; a cock behind me welcomed the sun; the cold band withdrew from my forehead.
Nikitin was silent and I, silent also, sat there, almost asleep, happy and tranquil. It seemed to me very natural to him that he should neither move nor speak, but after a time he began to talk. I had in that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I was listening to some history. I know that I did not sleep and yet even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours. I know that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact. And yet it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist of all that slumber Nikitin’s voice, soft, measured, itself like an echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated—but to my heart rather than to my brain. Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard in the train. … And now as I sit here, in so different a place, amongst men so different, those other two come back to me, happy ghosts. Yes, happy I know that one at least of them is!
Like water behind glass, like music behind a screen, Nikitin’s voice comes back to me—dim but so close, mysterious but so intimate. Ah, the questions that I would ask him now if only I might have those morning hours over again!
“You’re a solemn man altogether, Durward. Perhaps all Englishmen seem so to us, and it may be only your tranquillity, so unlike our moods and nerves by which we kill ourselves dead before we’re halfway through life. … I had an English tutor for a year when I was a boy. He didn’t teach me much: ‘all right’ and ‘Tank you’ is the only English I’ve kept, but I think of him now as the very quietest man in all the universe. He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods and tempers killed him when he was just over forty. … We have a proverb, ‘In the still marshes there are devils,’ and we admire and fear quiet men because they have something that we have not. And I like the way that you watch us, Durward. Your friend Trenchard does not watch us at all and one could be his friend. For you one has quite another feeling. It is as though I had something to give you that you really want. Why should I not give it you? My giving it will do me no harm, it may even yield me pleasure. You will not throw it away. You are an Englishman and will not for a moment’s temper or passion reveal secrets. And there are no secrets. What I tell you you may tell the world—but I warn you that it will neither interest them nor will they believe it. … There is, you see, no climax to my story. I have no story, indeed; like an old feldsher in my village who hates our village Pope. ‘Why, Georg Georgevitch,’ I say, ‘do you hate him? He is a worthy man.’ ‘Your Honour,’ he says, ‘there is nothing there; a fat man, but God has the rest of him—I hate him for his emptiness.’ I’m in a humour to talk. I have, in a way, fulfilled the purpose that my English tutor created in me. I’ve grown a sort of quiet skin, you know, but under that skin the heart pounds away, the veins swell to bursting. I’m a fool behind it all—just a fool as every Russian is a fool with more in hand than he knows how to deal with. You don’t understand Russia, do you? No, and I don’t and no one does. But we can all talk about her—and
