You have a face.... You can demand respect from everybody. ... Isn’t that so?” he concluded feelingly.

Gavrila stared at him with curiosity, and he too was carried away by the same feeling. In the course of this conversation he forgot the kind of man he was dealing with and saw before him a peasant, like himself, stuck to the land forever by the sweat of many generations, bound to it by the recollections of childhood, but who had voluntarily run away from it and its cares, and was suffering due punishment for this truancy.

“Yes, brother, what you say is true!” he said. “Oh how true! Look at yourself. What are you now without land? Land is like a mother, you can’t forget it so easily.”

Chelkash awoke from his musing.... He was conscious of that irritating heartburn which he always felt whenever his pride—the pride of the reckless daredevil—was touched by anybody, particularly by one whom he despised.

“Stop sermonizing!” he said fiercely. “Did you think I was talking seriously? ... You must take me for a fool!”

“You’re a funny chap!” Gavrila blurted out, feeling crushed again. “I wasn’t talking about you, was I? There’s lots of men like you. Lots of them! Ekh! How many unhappy people there are in the world! ... Roaming around! ...”

“Here, come and take the oars, you boob!” commanded Chelkash, for some reason restraining the flood of oaths that came rushing up into his throat.

They changed places again, and as he stepped over the bales in the bottom of the boat to reach the stern, Chelkash felt an almost irresistible desire to give Gavrila a push that would send him tumbling into the sea.

The conversation was not resumed, but Chelkash felt the breath of the village even in Gavrila’s silence.... Musing over the past, he forgot to steer, with the result that the boat, turned by current, drifted out to sea. The waves seemed to understand that the boat had lost its way and began to toss it higher and higher, lightly playing with it, causing kindly blue lights to flash under the oars. And before Chelkash’s mental vision floated pictures of the past, of the distant past which was separated from the present by a wall of eleven years of hobo life. He saw himself as a child; he saw his village; his mother, a plump ruddy-cheeked woman with kind grey eyes; he saw his father, a red-bearded giant with a stern face; he saw himself as a bridegroom, and he saw his wife, black-eyed Anfisa, a soft, buxom, cheerful girl with a long plait of hair; he saw himself again as the handsome Guardsman; again he saw his father, now grey and bent by toil, and his mother wrinkled and bowed; he also saw the vision of his return to his village from the army, and how proud his father was of his Grigori, of this handsome, sturdy, bewhiskered soldier.... Memory, that scourge of the unhappy, reanimates even the stones of the past, and even pours a drop of honey into the poison that one had once to drink....

Chelkash felt as if he were being fanned by the tender, soothing breath of his native air, which wafted to his ears the kind words of his mother, the grave speech of his earnest peasant father, many forgotten sounds and many fragrant smells of mother earth which has only just thawed, which has only just been ploughed, and is only just being covered with the emerald silken carpet of winter wheat.... He felt lonely, uprooted and isolated forever from the way of life which had produced the blood that now flowed in his veins.

“Hey! Where are we going?” suddenly exclaimed Gavrila.

Chelkash started and looked round with the alert gaze of a bird of prey.

“Christ, look where we have drifted to! Lay to the oars! Pull! Pull harder!”

“You’ve been dreaming, eh,” Gavrila asked with a smile.

“I’m tired....”

“So now we won’t get caught with these, will we?” Gavrila asked, kicking at the bales at the bottom of the boat.

“No.... You can ease your mind on that score. I’ll deliver them and get the money.... Y-e-s!”

“Five hundred?”

“No less.”

“A tidy sum! Wish I had it! Ekh, wouldn’t I play a tune with it!”

“On the farm?”

“I should say so! I’d....”

And Gavrila flew off on winged dreams. Chelkash remained silent. His moustache drooped; his right side, splashed by the spray, was dripping wet. His eyes were now sunken and had lost their brightness. Everything rapacious in him had sagged, subdued by humiliating thoughts, which were reflected even from the folds of his grimy blouse.

He swung the boat round abruptly and steered towards something black that loomed out of the water.

The sky was again overcast and rain fell, a fine, warm rain, which pattered merrily as the drops struck the backs of the waves.

“Stop! Be quiet!” commanded Chelkash.

The boat’s nose struck the side of a barge.

“Are they asleep, or what, the devils?” growled Chelkash, catching hold with a boat hook of some ropes that were dangling from the deck. “Drop the ladder! Blast it! It must go and rain now! Why couldn’t it have rained before! Hey, you swabs! Hey!”

“Is that you, Selkash?” came a voice from above that sounded like the mewing of a cat.

“Come on, drop the ladder!”

“Kalimera, Selkash!”

“Drop the ladder, you hell-smoked devil!” roared Chelkash.

“Oh how angry he eez tonight.... Eloy!”

“Up you go, Gavrila!” said Chelkash to his mate.

Within a moment they were on the deck, where three dark-bearded figures were animatedly chattering to each other in a strange lisping tongue and looking over the gunwale down at Chelkash’s boat. A fourth, wrapped in a long chlamys, went up to Chelkash, silently shook hands with him, and then glanced suspiciously at Gavrila.

“Get the money by the morning,” said Chelkash to him curtly. “I’ll turn in now.