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 half way
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.
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