One criticised or praised in
order to justify some personal disappointment or pleasure. There was
nothing that gave our company greater pleasure than to declare in full
voice that "So-and-so was a dear, most sympathetic, a fine man."
Public praise was continuous and the most honest and spontaneous
affair; if criticism sometimes followed with surprising quickness that
was spontaneous too; all the emotions in our Otriad were spontaneous
to the very extreme of spontaneity. But we were not real students of
one another; we were content to call things by their names, to call
silence silence, obstinacy obstinacy, good temper good temper, and
leave it at that.
No one, I think, really considered Nikitin at all deeply. They admired
him for his "quiet" but would have liked him better had he shared some
of their frankness--and that was all.
It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room
directly under Nikitin. The work had a peculiar and really
unanalysable fascination for me.
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