Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/116

 to take Petrov lightly. The subject of the narrative was how the speaker, Luka Kuzmitch, for no motive but his own amuse ment had laid out a major. This Luka Kuzmitch was the little, thin, sharp-nosed young convict in our room, a Little Russian by birth, whom I have mentioned already. He was really a Great Russian, but had been born in the south; I believe he was a house-serf. There was really something pert and aggressive about him, “though the bird is small its claw is sharp.” But convicts instinctively see through a man. They had very little respect for him, or as the convicts say, “little respect to him.” He was fearfully vain. He was sitting that evening on the platform bed, sewing a shirt. Sewing undergarments was his trade. Beside him was sitting a convict called Kobylin, a tall, stalwart lad, stupid and dull-witted but good-natured and friendly, who slept next to him on the bed. As they were neighbours, Lutchka frequently quarrelled with him and generally treated him superciliously, ironically and despotically, of which Kobylin in his simplicity was not fully conscious. He was knitting a woollen stocking listening indifferently to Lutchka. The latter was telling his story rather loudly and distinctly. He wanted every one to hear, though he tried to pretend that he was telling no one but Kobylin.

“Well, brother, they sent me from our parts,” he began, sticking in his needle, “to Tch—v for being a tramp.”

“When was that, long ago?” asked Kobylin.

“It will be a year ago when the peas come in. Well, when we came to K. they put me in prison there for a little time. In prison with me there were a dozen fellows, all Little Russians, tall, healthy, and as strong as bulls. But they were such quiet chaps; the food was bad; the major did as he liked with them. I hadn’t been there two days before I saw they were a cowardly lot. ‘Why do you knock under to a fool like that?’ says I.

“‘You go and talk to him yourself!’ they said, and they fairly laughed at me. I didn’t say anything. One of those Little Russians was particularly funny, lads,” he added suddenly, abandoning Kobylin and addressing the company generally.

“He used to tell us how he was tried and what he said at the court, and kept crying as he told us; he had a wife and children left behind, he told us. And he was a big, stout, grey-headed old fellow. ‘I says to him: nay!’ he told us. And he, the devil’s son, kept on writing and writing. “Well,” says I to myself, “may you choke. I’d be pleased to see it.” And he kept on