They seemed to understand that this boat had no
aim, and they played with it and lightly tossed it, while their blue
fires flamed up under the oars. Before Tchelkache's inward vision, was
rapidly unfolded a series of pictures of the past--that far distant
past separated from the present by a wall of eleven years of vagrancy.
He saw himself again a child, in the village, he saw his mother,
red-cheeked, fat, with kind gray eyes,--his father, a giant with a
tawny beard and stern countenance,--himself betrothed to Amphissa,
black-eyed with a long braid down her back, plump, easy-going, gay. . .
And then, himself, a handsome soldier of the guard; later, his father,
gray and bent by work, and his mother, wrinkled and bowed. What a
merry-making there was at the village when he had returned after the
expiration of his service! How proud the father was of his Gregori,
the moustached, broad-shouldered soldier, the cock of the village!
Memory, that scourge of the unfortunate, brings to life even the stones
of the past, and, even to the poison, drunk in former days, adds drops
of honey; and all this only to kill man by the consciousness of his
faults, and to destroy in his soul all faith in the future by causing
him to love the past too well.
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