Sometimes the reflections of distant rockets would shudder and
fade across the pale blue; incessantly, from every corner of the
world, came the screaming rattle of carts, a sound like many pencils
drawn across a gigantic slate--and always the dust rose and fell in
webs and curtains of filmy gold, under the evening sun.
At last Trenchard found himself with Molozov and Ivan Mihailovitch,
the student like a fish, in the old black carriage. Molozov had "flung
the world to the devil," Trenchard afterwards said, "and I sat there,
you know, looking at his white face and wondering what I ought to talk
about." Trenchard suddenly found himself narrowly and aggressively
English--and it is certain that every Englishman in Russia on Tuesday
thanks God that he is a practical man and has some common sense, and
on Wednesday wonders whether any one in England knows the true value
of anything at all and is ashamed of a country so miserably without a
passion for "ideas."
To-night Trenchard was an Englishman.
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