Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/44

 “Always being with the soldiers, eh?”

“No, that’s a lie that spiteful tongues have told you; though what of it? Though I’m thin as any rake, the soldier-lads I’ll ne’er forsake!”

“You chuck them and love us; we’ve got cash”

To complete the picture, imagine this gallant with a shaven head, in parti-coloured clothes, guarded and in fetters.

I took leave of Akim Akimitch, and hearing that I might go back to the prison, I went back escorted by a guard. The convicts were already coming home. The men on piece-work are the first to return. The only way of making a convict work hard is to put him on piece-work. Sometimes huge tasks are set them, but they always do the work twice as quickly as when they are working by the day. When he finishes his task the convict goes home without hindrance and no one prevents his doing so.

They don’t dine altogether, but as they come in, just as it happens; indeed there would not have been room for them all at once in the kitchen. I tried the soup, but not being used to it I could not eat it, and I made myself some tea. We sat down at the end of the table. With me was a comrade of the same social class as myself.

Convicts kept going and coming. There was plenty of room however; they were not yet all in. A group of five men sat down together at the big table. The cook poured them out two bowls of soup and put on the table a whole dish of fried fish. They were keeping some sort of fête and eating their own food. They cast unfriendly glances in our direction. One of the Poles came in and sat down beside us.

“I’ve not been at home, but I know all the news,” a tall convict shouted aloud as he walked into the kitchen and looked round at every one present.

He was a thin muscular man of fifty. There was something sly, and at the same time merry, about his face. What was particularly striking about him was his thick protruding lower lip; it gave a peculiarly comic look to his face.

“Well, have you had a good night? Why don’t you say good morning? Hullo, my Kursk friends!” he added, sitting down beside the group who were eating their own food. “A good appetite to you! Give a welcome to a friend.”

“We are not Kursk men, brother.”

“Tambov, then?”