Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/275

 by no means out of the question with our major: he often did fight. When the convicts heard of this their delight knew no bounds. “As though old Eight-eyes could get on with a man like him! He is an eagle, but the major a ” and here usually followed a word quite unfit for print. The prisoners were fearfully interested to know which had given the other a beating. If the rumours of the fight had turned out to be false (which was perhaps the case) I believe our convicts would have been very much annoyed. “You may be sure the colonel got the best of it,” they used to say; “he’s a plucky one, though he is small, and the major crawled under the bed to get away from him, they say.”

But G. soon left us and the convicts sank into despondency again. Our engineering commanders were all good, however: three or four succeeded one another in my time. “But we shall never have another like him,” the convicts used to say; “he was an eagle, an eagle and our champion.” This G. was very fond of us political prisoners, and towards the end he used to make B. and me come to work in his office sometimes. After he went away this was put on a more regular footing. Some in the engineering department (especially one of them) were very sympathetic with us. We used to go there and copy papers, our handwriting began to improve even, when suddenly there came a peremptory order from the higher authorities that we were to be sent back to our former tasks: some one had already played the spy. It was a good thing, however we had both begun to be fearfully sick of the office! Afterwards for two years B. and I went almost inseparably to the same tasks, most frequently to the workshops. We used to chat together, talk of our hopes and convictions. He was a splendid fellow; but his ideas were sometimes very strange and exceptional. There is a certain class of people, very intelligent indeed, who sometimes have utterly paradoxical ideas. But they have suffered so much for them in their lives, they have paid such a heavy price for them, that it would be too painful, almost impossible, to give them up. B. listened to every criticism with pain and answered with bitterness. I dare say he was more right than I was in many things—I don’t know; but at last we parted, and I was very sad about it: we had shared so many things together.

Meanwhile M. seemed to become more melancholy and gloomy every year. He was overwhelmed by depression. During my