ikitin quite obviously
avoided the little man whenever it was possible. But then he avoided
us all.

Upon a lovely afternoon Nikitin and I were alone in the wild little
garden, he lying full length on the grass, I reading a very ancient
English newspaper, with my back against a tree.

He looked up at me with a swift penetrating glance, as though he were
seeing me for the first time and would wish at once to weigh my
character and abilities.

"Your Englishman," he said. "He's not happy, I'm afraid."

"No," I said, feeling the surprise of his question--it had become
almost a tradition with me that he never spoke unless he were first
spoken to. "He feels strange and a little lonely, perhaps ... it's
natural enough!"

"Yes," repeated Nikitin, "it's natural enough. What did he come for?"

"Oh, he'll be all right," I said hastily, "in a day or two."

Nikitin lay on his back looking at the green, layer upon layer, light
and dark, with golden fragments of broken light leaping in the breeze
from branch to branch. "Why did he come? What did he expect to see? I
know what he expected to see--romantic Russia, romantic war. He
expected to find us, our hearts exploding with love, God's smile on
our simple faces, God's simple faith in our souls.... He has been told
by his cleverest writers that Russia is the last stronghold of God.
And war? He thought that he would be plunged into a scene of smoke and
flame, shrapnel, horror upon horror, danger upon danger. He finds
instead a country house, meals long and large, no sounds of cannon,
not even an aeroplane. Are we kind to him? Not at all.... We are not
unkind but we simply have other things to think about, and because we
are primitive people we do what we want to do, feel what we want to
feel, and show quite frankly our feelings. He is not what we expected,
so that we prefer to fill our minds with things that do not give us
trouble. Later, like all Englishmen, he will dismiss us as savages,
or, if he is of the intellectual kind, he will talk about our
confusing subtleties and contradictions. But we are neither savages
nor confusing. We have simply a skin less than you.... We are a very
young people, a real and genuine Democracy, and we care for quite
simple things, women, food, sleep, money, quite simply and without
restraint. We show our eagerness, our disgust, our disappointment, our
amusement simply as the mood moves us. In Moscow they eat all day and
are not ashamed. Why sho