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Nikitin's size would have compelled attention anywhere, even in Russia, which is, of course, a country of big men. He looked now immensely fine in his uniform, which admirably suited him. He stood, without his greatcoat, his hand on his sword, his eyes half-closed as though he were almost asleep, and a faint half-smile on his face as though he were amused at his thoughts.
But in spite of bad weather Nikitin's life was as happy as in summer. And, indeed, he acquired another source of pleasure; he learned to play vint. Only one thing troubled him, moved him to anger, and seemed to prevent him from being perfectly happy: the cats and dogs which formed part of his wife's dowry.
"Not so ardently!" cried Shelestov with tears of laughter. "Not so ardently!" It was Nikitin's "fate" to hear the confessions of all. He sat on a chair in the middle of the drawing-room. A shawl was brought and put over his head. The first who came to confess to him was Varya. "I know your sins," Nikitin began, looking in the darkness at her stern profile.
It was the chairman, Nikitin's, honest conviction that his opinions of the officials of the two upper classes with which he was in connection would furnish valuable material for the historians.
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.
It was pathetic to see the flaming pleasure in the man's eyes when Nikitin permitted him to wait upon him, and how ironically, upon such an occasion, would Semyonov watch them both! In spite of Nikitin's passivity he did, I fancied, more than merely suffer this unequal alliance. It seemed to me that there was behind his silence some active wish that the affair should continue.
This fixes the time of his start so far that it must have taken place subsequent to 1462, and the author of the "Bombay Gazetteer," RE Poonah, assigns the period 1468 to 1474 as that of Nikitin's stay in India. Nikitin first went to Chaul, and thence travelled by land to Junir.
From the very first the two men had been opponents. It seemed as though Nikitin's great stature and fine air, as of a king travelling in disguise from some foreign country, made him the only man in the world to put out Semyonov's sinister blaze. Nikitin was an idealist, a mystic, a dreamer everything that Semyonov was not.
His attitude to the man had changed since Trenchard's night at the Position; he was vexed, I think, to hear that the fellow had proved himself a man and a practical man with common sense. Semyonov was honest about this. He did not doubt Nikitin's word, he even congratulated Trenchard, but he certainly disliked him more than ever.
I was so happy that I felt now afraid of nothing. I held Nikitin's arm, babbling something about kitchens and Germans. "Well, I don't understand what you say," I remember Nikitin replied; "but you must come and work. There's plenty of it." We moved to a cottage on the very boundary of the forest, where a little common ran down to the moonlight.
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