"Come, tell me," began Chelkash, "you'll go home to the village, and you'll marry and begin digging the earth and sowing corn, your wife will bear you children, food won't be too plentiful, and so you'll grind away all your life. Well? Is there such sweetness in that?"
"Sweetness!" Gavrilo answered, timid and trembling, "what, indeed?"
The wind tore a rent in the clouds and through the gap peeped blue bits of sky, with one or two stars. Reflected in the frolicking sea, these stars danced on the waves, vanishing and shining out again.
"More to the right!" said Chelkash. "Soon we shall be there.
Well, well! It's over. A haul that's worth it! See here.
One night, and I've made five hundred roubles! Eh? What do you
say to that?"
"Five hundred?" Gavrilo, drawled, incredulously, but he was seared at once, and quickly asked, prodding the bundle in the boat with his foot. "Why, what sort of thing may this be?"
"That's silk. A costly thing. All that, if one sold it for its value, would fetch a thousand. But I sell cheap. Is that smart business?"
"I sa—ay?" Gavrilo drawled dubiously. "If only I'd all that!" be sighed, recalling all at once the village, his poor little bit of land, his poverty, his mother, and all that was so far away and so near his heart; for the sake of which he bad gone to seek work, for the sake of which he had suffered such agonies that night. A flood of memories came back to him of his village, running down the steep slope to the river and losing itself in a whole forest of birch trees, willows, and mountain-ashes. These memories breathed something warm into him and cheered him up. "Ah, it would be grand!" he sighed mournfully.
"To be sure! I expect you'd bolt home by the railway!
And wouldn't the girls make love to you at home, aye, aye!
You could choose which you liked! You'd build yourself a house.
No, the money, maybe, would hardly be enough for a house."
"That's true—it wouldn't do for a house. Wood's dear down our way."
"Well, never mind. You'd mend up the old one. How about a horse?
Have you got one?"