The rain scourged the timbers of the skiff incessantly, and its soft patter induced melancholy thoughts, and the wind whistled as it flew down into the boat’s battered bottom through a rift, where some loose splinters of wood were rattling together—­a disquieting and depressing sound.  The waves of the river were splashing on the shore, and sounded so monotonous and hopeless, just as if they were telling something unbearably dull and heavy, which was boring them into utter disgust, something from which they wanted to run away and yet were obliged to talk about all the same.  The sound of the rain blended with their splashing, and a long-drawn sigh seemed to be floating above the overturned skiff—­the endless, labouring sigh of the earth, injured and exhausted by the eternal changes from the bright and warm summer to the cold misty and damp autumn.  The wind blew continually over the desolate shore and the foaming river—­blew and sang its melancholy songs...

Our position beneath the shelter of the skiff was utterly devoid of comfort; it was narrow and damp, tiny cold drops of rain dribbled through the damaged bottom; gusts of wind penetrated it.  We sat in silence and shivered with cold.  I remembered that I wanted to go to sleep.  Natasha leaned her back against the hull of the boat and curled herself up into a tiny ball.  Embracing her knees with her hands, and resting her chin upon them, she stared doggedly at the river with wide-open eyes; on the pale patch of her face they seemed immense, because of the blue marks below them.  She never moved, and this immobility and silence—­I felt it—­gradually produced within me a terror of my neighbour.  I wanted to talk to her, but I knew not how to begin.

It was she herself who spoke.

“What a cursed thing life is!” she exclaimed plainly, abstractedly, and in a tone of deep conviction.

But this was no complaint.  In these words there was too much of indifference for a complaint.  This simple soul thought according to her understanding—­thought and proceeded to form a certain conclusion which she expressed aloud, and which I could not confute for fear of contradicting myself.  Therefore I was silent, and she, as if she had not noticed me, continued to sit there immovable.

“Even if we croaked ... what then...?” Natasha began again, this time quietly and reflectively, and still there was not one note of complaint in her words.  It was plain that this person, in the course of her reflections on life, was regarding her own case, and had arrived at the conviction that in order to preserve herself from the mockeries of life, she was not in a position to do anything else but simply “croak”—­to use her own expression.

The clearness of this line of thought was inexpressibly sad and painful to me, and I felt that if I kept silence any longer I was really bound to weep...  And it would have been shameful to have done this before a woman, especially as she was not weeping herself.  I resolved to speak to her.