Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/210

 “‘And what about the winter?’

“‘I haven’t seen the winter, your honour.’

“‘And you, what’s your name?’

“‘Hatchet, your honour.’

“‘And you?’

“‘Quick-sharpener, your honour.’

“‘And you?’

“‘Sharpener—for sure, your honour.’

“‘You none of you remember anything?’

“‘None of us, your honour.’

“He stands and laughs and they look at him and laugh. But another time he might give you one in the jaw, it’s all luck. And they were such a fat sturdy lot. ‘Take them to prison,’ says he, ‘I’ll talk to them later but you stay here,’ says he to me. ‘Come this way, sit down.’ I look—there’s a table, paper and pen. What is he up to now, thinks I. ‘Sit down on the chair,’ says he, ‘take the pen, write,’ and he took hold of my ear and pulled it. I looked at him as the devil looked at the priest: ‘I can’t, your honour,’ says I. ‘Write!’ says he. ‘Have mercy, your honour!’ ‘Write,’ says he, ‘write as best you can’. And he kept pulling and pulling my ear and suddenly gave it a twist. Well, I tell you, lads, I’d rather have had three hundred lashes. There were stars before my eyes! ‘You write, and that’s all about it.’”

“Why, was he crazy or what?”

“No, he wasn’t crazy. But not long before a clerk at T. had played a fine prank: he nabbed the government money and made off with it, and he had ears that stuck out too. Well, they sent word of it in all directions and I seemed like the description. So he was trying whether I knew how to write and how I wrote.”

“What a position, lad! And did it hurt?”

“I tell you it did.”

There was a general burst of laughter.

“Well, and did you write?”

“Why, how could I write? I began moving the pen and I moved it about over the paper; he gave it up. He gave me a dozen swipes in the face and then let me go, to prison too, of course.

“And do you know how to write?”

“I did once, but since folks began writing with pens I lost the art.”

Well, it was in tales like these or rather in chatter like this