What else can we desire?"
Filling their lungs with the aromatic air, they paced along, not
swiftly, but at a good, round gait. The mother felt she was on a
pilgrimage. She recollected her childhood, the fine joy with which
she used to leave the village on holidays to go to a distant
monastery, where there was a wonder-working icon.
Sometimes Sofya would hum some new unfamiliar songs about the sky
and about love, or suddenly she would begin to recite poems about
the fields and forests and the Volga. The mother listened, a smile
on her swinging her head to the measure of the tune or involuntarily
yielding to the music. Her breast was pervaded by a soft, melancholy
warmth, like the atmosphere in a little old garden on a summer night.
On the third day they arrived at the village, and the mother inquired
of a peasant at work in the field where the tar works were. Soon
they were descending a steep woody path, on which the exposed roots
of the trees formed steps through a small, round glade, which was
choked up with coal and chips of wood caked with tar.
Outside a shack built of poles and branches, at a table formed
simply of three unplaned boards laid on a trestle stuck firmly into
the ground, sat Rybin, all blackened, his shirt open at his breast,
Yefim, and two other young men.
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