The face of the loquacious deputy assumed an aspect of distraught pensiveness. He gazed upwards, whence sounded the trills of the larks, and with them whistled between his teeth, at the same time swinging his stick to the measure of his steps.
They approached the edge of the forest. It stood there like an immovable, dark wall. Not a sound came from it to greet the travellers. The sun already had set, and its oblique rays colored the tops of the trees purple and gold. The trees exhumed a fragrant dampness; and the gloom and the concentrated silence which filled the forest gave birth to sombre feelings.
When a forest stands before us dark and immovable, when it is all plunged in a mysterious silence, and every tree assumes the attitude as of listening to something, then it seems that the entire forest is filled with something alive, and that that something is only hiding for a time. And you await the next moment in the expectation that it will bring forth something huge and incomprehensible to the human mind, and that it will speak in a mighty voice about the great mysteries of creation.
II
At the edge of the wood, Efimushka and his companion decided to rest, and so they sat themselves on the grass beside the trunk of a huge oak. The prisoner slowly took down the bag from his shoulder and asked his convoy indifferently:
“Do you want some bread?”
“If you’ll give me, I’ll not refuse,” Efimushka replied with a smile.
And in silence they began to eat their bread. Efimushka ate slowly and sighed continually, directing his gaze across the field to his left, somewhere into the distance, while his companion was all absorbed in the process of gratifying his appetite. He ate rapidly and munched audibly, measuring with his eyes his crust of bread. The dusk began to settle upon the field, and the corn had already lost its golden lustre and assumed a rose-yellow hue. Towards the southwest small fleecy clouds advanced across the sky; they cast shadows upon the field and crept across the ears of corn towards the forest, where sat two dark human figures. Other shadows were cast on the ground by the trees, and they breathed melancholy into the soul.
“Glory be to Thee, O Lord!” exclaimed Efimushka, gathering up the crumbs of his piece of bread and licking them up from the palm of his hand with his tongue. “The Lord hath fed us—no one hath seen us; and He who hath seen us, His eye was unoffended! Comrade, what do you say to sitting here another hour or so? Plenty time for the cold cell, eh?”
His comrade nodded his assent.