orest there, that lies
behind the creek. Now you can scarcely see it, the sun is setting
red behind it. I have been talking to you, and the horses have
stopped, as though they were listening too. Hey there, my beauties!
Move more briskly, the good gentleman will give us something extra.
Hey, you darlings!

THE FISH

A SUMMER morning. The air is still; there is no sound but the
churring of a grasshopper on the river bank, and somewhere the timid
cooing of a turtle-dove. Feathery clouds stand motionless in the
sky, looking like snow scattered about. . . . Gerassim, the carpenter,
a tall gaunt peasant, with a curly red head and a face overgrown
with hair, is floundering about in the water under the green willow
branches near an unfinished bathing shed. . . . He puffs and pants
and, blinking furiously, is trying to get hold of something under
the roots of the willows. His face is covered with perspiration. A
couple of yards from him, Lubim, the carpenter, a young hunchback
with a triangular face and narrow Chinese-looking eyes, is standing
up to his neck in water. Both Gerassim and Lubim are in shirts and
linen breeches. Both are blue with cold, for they have been more
than an hour already in the water.

"But why do you keep poking with your hand?" cries the hunchback
Lubim, shivering as though in a fever. "You blockhead! Hold him,
hold him, or else he'll get away, the anathema! Hold him, I tell
you!"

"He won't get away. . . . Where can he get to? He's under a root,"
says Gerassim in a hoarse, hollow bass, which seems to come not
from his throat, but from the depths of his stomach. "He's slippery,
the beggar, and there's nothing to catch hold of."

"Get him by the gills, by the gills!"

"There's no seeing his gills. . . . Stay, I've got hold of something
. . . . I've got him by the lip. . . He's biting, the brute!"

"Don't pull him out by the lip, don't--or you'll let him go! Take
him by the gills, take him by the gills. . . . You've begun poking
with your hand again! You are a senseless man, the Queen of Heaven
forgive me! Catch hold!"

"Catch hold!" Gerassim mimics him. "You're a fine one to give orders
. . . . You'd better come and catch hold of him yourself, you hunchback
devil. . . . What are you standing there for?"

"I would catch hold of him if it were possible. But can I stand by
the bank, and me as short as I am? It's deep there."

"It doesn't matter if it is deep. . . . You must swim."

The hun