Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/259

 it all meant, and beginning to guess that something extraordinary was happening.

“Yes, what need have you to stand here? Go indoors,” said a young convict of the military division, a quiet, good-natured fellow whom I knew nothing of. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

“But they are all forming up, I thought there was an inspection,” I said.

“I say, so he has crawled out too!” shouted another.

“Iron beak!” said another. “Fly-crushers!” said a third with ineffable contempt. This new nickname evoked general laughter.

“He sits with us in the kitchen as a favour,” answered some one.

“They’re in clover everywhere. This is prison, but they have rolls to eat and buy sucking-pig. You eat your own provisions, why are you poking in here?”

“This is not the place for you, Alexandr Petrovitch,” said Kulikov, approaching me in a nonchalant way; he took me by the arm and led me out of the ranks.

He was pale, his black eyes were gleaming, and he was biting his lower lip. He was not awaiting the major with indifference. I particularly liked looking at Kulikov, by the way, on all such occasions, that is, on all occasions when he had to show what he was. He posed fearfully, but he did what had to be done. I believe he would have gone to the scaffold with a certain style and gallantry. At this moment, when every one was being rude and familiar to me, he with evident intention redoubled his courtesy to me, and at the same time his words were peculiarly, as it were disdainfully, emphatic and admitted of no protest.

“This is our affair, Alexandr Petrovitch, and you’ve nothing to do with it. You go away and wait. All your friends are in the kitchen, you go there.”

“Under the ninth beam, where Antipka nimble heels lives!” some one put in.

Through the open window of the kitchen I did in fact see our Poles. I fancied, however, that there were a good many people there besides. Disconcerted, I went into the kitchen, I was pursued by laughter, oaths, and cries of tyu-tyu-tyu (the sound which took the place of whistling in prison).

“He didn’t like it! Tyu-tyu-tyu! At him!” I had never before been so insulted in the prison, and this time I felt it very bitterly. But I had turned up at the wrong moment. In the