Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/229

 more than mine. But why enlarge on this? I was very glad to get thoroughly tired: I might go to sleep when I got home. For the nights were an agony in the summer, almost worse than in the winter. The evenings, it is true, were sometimes very nice. The sun, which had been on the prison yard all day, set at last. Then followed the cool freshness of evening and then the comparatively cold night of the steppes. The convicts wandered in groups about the yard, waiting to be locked in. The chief mass, it is true, were crowding into the kitchen. There some burning question of the hour was always being agitated; they argued about this and that, sometimes discussed some rumour, often absurd, though it aroused extraordinary interest in these men cut off from the outer world; a report came for instance that our major was being turned out. Convicts are as credulous as children; they know themselves that the story is ridiculous, that it has been brought by a notorious gossip, an “absurd person”—the convict Kvasov whom it had long been an accepted rule not to believe, and who could never open his mouth without telling a lie; yet every one pounced on his story, talked it over and discussed it, amusing themselves and ending by being angry with themselves and ashamed of themselves for having believed Kvasov.

“Why, who’s going to send him away?” shouted one. “No fear, his neck is thick, he can hold his own.”

“But there are others over him, surely!” protested another, an eager and intelligent fellow who had seen something of life, but was the most argumentative man in the world.

“One raven won’t pick out another’s eyes!” a third, a grey-headed old man who was finishing his soup in the corner in solitude, muttered sullenly as though to himself.

“I suppose his superior officers will come to ask you whether they’re to sack him?” a fourth added casually, strumming lightly on the balalaika.

“And why not?” answered the second furiously. “All the poor people could petition for it, you must all come forward if they begin questioning. To be sure, with us it’s all outcry, but when it comes to deeds we back out.”

“What would you have?” said the balalaika player. “That’s what prison’s for!”

“The other day,” the excited speaker went on, not heeding him, “there was some flour left. We scraped together what little there was and were sending it to be sold. But no, he heard of it;