Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/188

 my eyes looked lifeless, my face was blue, I stopped breathing and there was foam on my mouth. The doctor came up. ‘He’ll die directly,’ said he. They carried me to the hospital and I revived at once. Then they led me out twice again and they were angry with me too, awfully angry, and I cheated them twice again; the second time I looked like dead after one thousand; and when it came to the fourth thousand every blow was like a knife in my heart, every blow was as good as three, it hurt so! They were savage with me. That niggardly last thousand—damn it—was as bad as all the three thousand together and had I not died before the very end (there were only two hundred left) they would have beaten me to death. But I took my own part; I deceived them again and shammed death. Again they were taken in and how could they help being? The doctor believed I was dead. So they beat me for the last two hundred with all the fury they could, they beat me so that it was worse than two thousand, but yet they didn’t kill me, no fear! And why didn’t they kill me? Why, just because I’ve grown up from childhood under the lash. That’s why I am alive to this day. Ach, I have been beaten in my day!” he added at the end of the story in a sort of mournful reverie, as though trying to recall and reckon how many times he had been beaten. “But no,” he added, after a minute’s silence. “there’s no counting the beatings I’ve had! How could I? They’re beyond reckoning.” He glanced at me and laughed, but so good-naturedly that I could not help smiling in response. “Do you know, Alexandr Petrovitch, that whenever I dream at night now, I always dream that I am being beaten? I never have any other dreams.” He certainly often cried out at night and so loudly that the other convicts waked him up at once by prodding him, and saying, “What are you shouting for, you devil!” He was a short sturdy fellow of forty-five, good-humoured and restless; he got on well with every one and though he was very fond of stealing, and often got a beating among us for that, after all every one stole and every one was beaten for it.

I will add one other point. I was always amazed at the extraordinary good nature, the absence of vindictiveness, with which all these victims talked of how they had been beaten, and of the men who had beaten them. Often there was not the slightest trace of spite or hatred in their story, which gripped my heart at once, and made it throb violently. Yet they would tell the story and laugh like children.