Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/211

 that our weary hours were spent. Good God, how wearisome it was! The days were long, stifling, exactly like one another. If one had only a book! And yet I was constantly going to the hospital, especially at first, sometimes because I was ill and sometimes simply for a rest; to get away from the prison. It was unbearable there, more unbearable than here, morally more unbearable. The hatred, enmity, quarrelling, envy, the continual attacks on us “the gentlemen,” the spiteful, menacing faces! Here in the hospital all were more on an equal footing and lived more amicably. The saddest time of the whole day was the beginning of the evening when the candles were lit and night was coming on. They settled down to sleep early. The dim night-lamp gleamed, a spot of brightness in the distance near the door, while at our end it was half dark. The air grew close and fetid. Some patient unable to sleep would get up and sit for a couple of hours on his bed, his head bent forward in his nightcap, as though pondering something. One looks at him for an hour to pass the time and wonders what he is thinking about, or one begins to dream and think of the past, while fancy draws pictures in vivid colours with wide horizons. One recalls details which one would not remember at another time, and which one would not feel as one does then. And one speculates on the future, how one will get out of prison. Where will one go? When will that be? Whether one will return to one’s native place? One muses and muses, and hope begins to stir in one’s heart At other times one simply begins counting one, two, three, and so on, to put oneself to sleep. I have sometimes counted to three thousand and not slept. Some one would stir. Ustyantsev would cough his sickly consumptive cough, and then groan feebly, and every time would add, “Lord, I have sinned!” And it is strange to hear this sick, broken, moaning voice in the complete stillness. In another corner there are others awake, talking together from their beds. One begins to tell something of his past, some event long gone by, of his tramping, of his children, of his wife, of the old days. You feel from the very sound of the far-away whisper that all he is telling is long over and can never return, and that he, the speaker, has cut off all connexion with it. The other listens. One can hear nothing but a soft measured whisper, like water trickling far away. I remember one long winter night I heard a story. It seemed to me at first like a nightmare, as though I had been lying in fever and had dreamed it all in delirium.