They changed places again, and Chelkash, as he crept across the bales to the stern, felt an intense desire to give Gavrila a kick that would send him flying into the water.

The brief conversation dropped, but now Gavrila’s silence even was eloquent of the country to Chelkash. He recalled the past, and forgot to steer the boat, which was turned by the current and floated away out to sea. The waves seemed to understand that this boat had missed its way, and played lightly with it, tossing it higher and higher, and kindling their gay blue light under its oars. While before Chelkash’s eyes floated pictures of the past, the far past, separated from the present by the whole barrier of eleven years of vagrant life. He saw himself a child, his village, his mother, a red-cheeked plump woman, with kindly gray eyes, his father, a red-bearded giant with a stern face. He saw himself betrothed, and saw his wife, black-eyed Anfisa, with her long braid, plump, soft, and good-humored; again himself a handsome soldier in the Guards; again his father, gray now and bent with toil, and his mother wrinkled and bowed to the ground; he saw, too, the picture of his welcome in the village when he returned from the service; saw how proud his father was before all the village of his Grigory, the bewhiskered, stalwart soldier, so smart and handsome. Memory, the scourge of the unhappy, gives life to the very stones of the past, and even into poison drunk long ago pours drops of honey.…

Chelkash felt a rush of the softening, caressing air of home, bringing back to him the tender words of his mother and the weighty utterances of the venerable peasant, his father; many a forgotten sound and many a lush smell of mother-earth, freshly thawing, freshly plowed, and freshly covered with the emerald silk of the corn. And he felt crushed, lost, pitiful, and solitary, torn up and cast out for ever from that life which had distilled the very blood that flowed in his veins.

“Hey! But where are we going?” Gavrila asked suddenly.

Chelkash started and looked round with the wary look of a bird of prey.

“Ah, the devil’s taken the boat! No matter. Row a bit harder. We’ll be there directly.”

“You were dreaming?” Gavrila inquired, smiling.

“I’m tired,” said Chelkash.

“But now, I suppose, we shan’t get caught with this?” Gavrila kicked the bale with his foot. ‘No. You can be easy. I shall hand it over directly and get the money. Oh, yes!”

“Five hundred?”

“Not less, I dare say.”

“I say—that’s a sum! If I, poor wretch, had that! Ah, I’d have a fine time with it.”

“On your land?”

“To be sure! Why, I’d be off—”

And Gavrila floated off into daydreams. Chelkash was silent. His mustaches drooped, his right side was soaked by the splashing of the waves, his eyes looked sunken and had lost their brightness. All that bird-of-prey look in his figure seemed somehow eclipsed under a humiliated moodiness, that showed itself in the very folds of his dirty shirt.

He turned the boat sharply about, and steered it toward something black that stood up out of the water.

The sky was again all covered with clouds, and fine, warm rain had come on, pattering gaily on the crests of the waves.