"Sit down, blockhead, and row," commanded Chelkash curtly, bottling up within him, somehow or other, a whole stream of burning abuse gushing into his throat.
Again they changed places, and as they did so Chelkash, as he crawled into the stern across the packages, felt a burning desire to give Gabriel a kick that would send him flying into the water, and at the same time could not muster up sufficient strength to look him in the face.
The short dialogue broke off; but now a breath of rusticity was wafted to Chelkash from the very silence of Gabriel. He began to think of the past, forgot to steer the boat, which was turned to and fro by the surge, and drifted seawards. The waves seemed to understand that this skiff had lost its purpose, and pitching her higher and higher, began lightly playing with her, flashing their friendly blue fire beneath her oars. And visions of the past rose quickly before Chelkash—visions of the long distant past, separated from his present purpose by a whole barrier of eleven years of a vagabond life. He succeeded in recalling himself as a child; he saw before him his village, his mother, a red-cheeked, plump woman, with good grey eyes, his father, a red-bearded giant with a stern face. He saw himself a husband, he saw his wife, black-haired Anfisa, with a long pig-tail, full-bodied, gentle, merry ... again he beheld himself, a handsome beau, a soldier in the Guards; again he saw his father, grey-headed and crooked by labour, and his mother all wrinkled and inclining earthwards; he conjured up, too, a picture of the meeting in the village when he returned from service; he saw how proud of his Gregory his father was before the whole village, his broad-shouldered, vigorous, handsome soldier-son.... Memory, that scourge of the unlucky, revived the very stories of the past, and even distilled a few drops of honey into the proffered draught of venom—and all this, too, simply to crush a man with the consciousness of his mistakes, and make him love this past and deprive him of hope in the future.
Chelkash felt himself fanned by the peaceful, friendly breezes of his native air, conveying with them to his ear the friendly words of his mother and the solid speeches of his sturdy peasant-father, and many forgotten sounds, and the sappy smell of his mother-earth, now just thawed, now just ploughed up, and now covered by the emerald-green silk of the winter crops. And he felt himself cast aside, rejected, wretched, and lonely, plucked forth from and flung for ever away from that order of life in which the blood that flowed in his veins had worked its way upwards.
"Hie! whither are we going?" asked Gabriel suddenly.
Chelkash started, and looked around with the uneasy glance of a bird of prey.
"Ugh! The devil only knows! It doesn't matter ... come, a steadier stroke! We shall be ashore immediately."
"Meditating, eh?" inquired Gabriel with a smile.
Chelkash looked at him angrily. The youth had quite recovered himself; he was calm, merry, and, in a way, even triumphant. He was very young, he had the whole of life still before him. And he knew nothing. That was stupid. Perhaps it was the land that kept him back. When such thoughts flashed through the head of Chelkash, he became still surlier, and in reply to Gabriel's question he growled:
"I was tired ... and there was the rocking of the sea...."