“It’s from walking,” observed Vassya.

“No, lad, no.  It’s not from walking.  When I walk it seems easier; when I lie down and get warm, . . . it’s deadly.  Walking is easier for me.”

Emelyan, in his reddish-brown coat, walked between Panteley and Vassya and waved his arms, as though they were going to sing.  After waving them a little while he dropped them, and croaked out hopelessly: 

“I have no voice.  It’s a real misfortune.  All last night and this morning I have been haunted by the trio ‘Lord, have Mercy’ that we sang at the wedding at Marionovsky’s.  It’s in my head and in my throat.  It seems as though I could sing it, but I can’t; I have no voice.”

He paused for a minute, thinking, then went on: 

“For fifteen years I was in the choir.  In all the Lugansky works there was, maybe, no one with a voice like mine.  But, confound it, I bathed two years ago in the Donets, and I can’t get a single note true ever since.  I took cold in my throat.  And without a voice I am like a workman without hands.”

“That’s true,” Panteley agreed.

“I think of myself as a ruined man and nothing more.”

At that moment Vassya chanced to catch sight of Yegorushka.  His eyes grew moist and smaller than ever.

“There’s a little gentleman driving with us,” and he covered his nose with his sleeve as though he were bashful.  “What a grand driver!  Stay with us and you shall drive the waggons and sell wool.”

The incongruity of one person being at once a little gentleman and a waggon driver seemed to strike him as very queer and funny, for he burst into a loud guffaw, and went on enlarging upon the idea.  Emelyan glanced upwards at Yegorushka, too, but coldly and cursorily.  He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and had it not been for Vassya, would not have noticed Yegorushka’s presence.  Before five minutes had passed he was waving his arms again, then describing to his companions the beauties of the wedding anthem, “Lord, have Mercy,” which he had remembered in the night.  He put the whip under his arm and waved both hands.

A mile from the village the waggons stopped by a well with a crane.  Letting his pail down into the well, black-bearded Kiruha lay on his stomach on the framework and thrust his shaggy head, his shoulders, and part of his chest into the black hole, so that Yegorushka could see nothing but his short legs, which scarcely touched the ground.  Seeing the reflection of his head far down at the bottom of the well, he was delighted and went off into his deep bass stupid laugh, and the echo from the well answered him.  When he got up his neck and face were as red as beetroot.  The first to run up and drink was Dymov.  He drank laughing, often turning from the pail to tell Kiruha something funny, then he turned round, and uttered aloud, to be heard all over the steppe, five very bad words.  Yegorushka did not understand the meaning