Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/226

 We were relieved of work. We went to the church, which was not far from the prison, twice or three times a day. It was long since I had been to church. The Lenten service so familiar to me from far-away days of childhood in my father’s house, the solemn prayers, the prostrations—all this stirred in my heart the far, far-away past, bringing back the days of my childhood, and I remember how pleasant it was walking over the frozen ground in the early morning to the house of God, escorted by guards with loaded guns. The guards did not, however, go into the church. We stood all together in a group close to the church door, so far back that we could only hear the loud-voiced deacon and from time to time catch a glimpse of the black cope and the bald head of the priest through the crowd. I remembered how sometimes standing in church as a child I looked at the peasants crowding near the entrance and slavishly parting to make way for a thickly epauletted officer, a stout gentleman, or an over-dressed but pious lady, who invariably made for the best places and were ready to quarrel over them. I used to fancy then that at the church door they did not pray as we did, that they prayed humbly, zealously, abasing themselves and fully conscious of their humble state.

Now I, too, had to stand in the background, and not only in the background; we were fettered and branded as felons; every one avoided us, every one seemed to be even afraid of us, alms were always given to us, and I remember that this was positively pleasing to me in a way; there was a special subtlety in this strange pleasure. “So be it,” I thought. The convicts prayed very earnestly and every one of them brought his poor farthing to the church every time to buy a candle, or to put in the collection. “I, too, am a man,” he thought, and felt perhaps as he gave it; “in God’s eyes we are all equal” We took the sacrament at the early mass. When with the chalice in his hands the priest read the words, “ accept me, O Lord, even as the thief,” almost all of them bowed down to the ground with a clanking of chains, apparently applying the words literally to themselves.

And now Easter had come. We received from the authorities an egg each and a piece of white bread made with milk and eggs. Loads of offerings for the prisoners were brought from the town again. Again there was a visit from the priest with a cross, again a visit of the authorities, again a cabbage soup with plenty of meat in it, again drinking and desultory idleness—exactly as at