Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/194

 what if the same man is really good-natured, too, even though in a peculiar way of his own? Then he is beyond all price.

Lieutenant Smekalov, as I have said already, sometimes punished severely, but he knew how to do it so that, far from being resented, his jokes on the occasion were, even in my day when it was all long past, remembered with enjoyment and laughter. He had not many such jokes, however: he was lacking in artistic fancy. In fact, he really had one solitary joke which was his mainstay for nearly a year; perhaps its charm lay in its uniqueness. There was much simplicity in it. The guilty convict would be brought in to be flogged. Smekalov comes in with a laugh and a joke, he asks the culprit some irrelevant questions about his personal life in the prison not with any sort of object, not to make up to him, but simply because he really wants to know. The birch-rods are brought and a chair for Smekalov. He sits down and even lights his pipe; he had a very long pipe. The convict begins to entreat him “No, brother, lie down it’s no use,” says Smekalov. The convict sighs and lies down.

“Come, my dear fellow, do you know this prayer by heart?”

“To be sure, your honour, we are Christians, we learnt it from childhood.”

“Well then, repeat it.”

And the convict knows what to say and knows beforehand what will happen when he says it, because this trick has been repeated thirty times already with others. And Smekalov himself knows that the convict knows it, knows that even the soldiers who stand with lifted rods over the prostrate victim have heard of this joke long ago and yet he repeats it again—it has taken such a hold on him once for all, perhaps from the vanity of an author, just because it is his own composition. The convict begins to repeat the prayer, the soldiers wait with their rods while Smekalov bends forward, raises his hand, leaves off smoking, and waits for the familiar word. After the first lines of the well-known prayer, the convict at last comes to the words, “Thy Kingdom come.” That’s all he is waiting for. “Stay,” cries the inspired lieutenant and instantly turning with an ecstatic gesture to a soldier he cries, “Now give him some.”

And he explodes with laughter. The soldiers standing round grin too, the man who thrashes grins, even the man who is being thrashed almost grins, although at the word of command, “Now give him some,” the rod whistles in the air to cut a minute later like a razor through his guilty flesh. And Smekalov is delighted,