Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/39

 fellow as this Akim Akimitch. I have still a vivid recollection of him. He was tall, lean, dull-witted, awfully illiterate, very prosy and as precise as a German. The convicts used to laugh at him, but some of them were positively afraid to have anything to do with him, owing to his fault-finding, his exactingness and his readiness to take offence. He got on to familiar terms with them from the first, he quarrelled and even fought with them. He was phenomenally honest. If he noticed any injustice he always interfered, though it might have nothing to do with him. He was naïve in the extreme; when he quarrelled with the convicts he sometimes reproached them with being thieves and seriously exhorted them not to steal. He had been a lieutenant in the Caucasus. We were friendly from the first day, and he immediately told me about his case. He began as a cadet in an infantry regiment in the Caucasus, plodded on steadily for a long time, was promoted to be an officer at last, and was sent as senior in command to a fortress. One of the allied chieftains burnt his fortress and made a night assault upon it. This was unsuccessful. Akim Akimitch was wily and gave no sign of knowing who had done it. The attack was attributed to the hostile tribes, and a month later Akim Akimitch invited the chieftain to visit him in a friendly way. The latter came, suspecting nothing. Akim Akimitch drew up his company, proved the chieftain’s guilt and upbraided him before them all, pointing out to him that it was shameful to burn fortresses. He discoursed to him in great detail on the way allied chiefs should behave in the future, and, in conclusion, shot him and at once sent in a full report of the proceedings to the authorities. For all this he was court martialled and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted and he was sent to Siberia to penal servitude in the second division for twelve years. He fully recognized that he had acted irregularly. He told me he knew it even before he shot the chieftain, he knew that an ally ought to be legally tried; but, although he knew this, he seemed unable to see his guilt in its true light.

“Why, upon my word! Hadn’t he burnt my fortress? Was I to say thank you to him for it?” he said to me in reply to my objections.

But, although the convicts laughed at Akim Akimitch’s foolishness, they respected him for his preciseness and practical ability.

There was no handicraft which Akim Akimitch did not