Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/74

 me, they were continually helping me, and looked on it as a happiness to be able to. I need hardly say the same of Aley. He loved me perhaps as much as he loved his brothers. I shall never forget how he left the prison. He drew me away behind the prison, flung himself on my neck and cried. He had never before kissed me or shed tears. “You’ve done so much for me, so much for me,” he said, “that my father and my mother could not have done more you have made a man of me. God will repay you and I shall never forget you”

Where is he now, my good, dear, dear Aley?

Besides the Circassians there was a group of Poles in our room, and they made a family apart, and had hardly anything do with the other convicts. I have mentioned already that their exclusiveness and their hatred of the Russian prisoners made them hated by every one. There were six of them; they were men broken and made morbid by suffering. Some of them were educated men; I will speak of them more fully afterwards. During my later years in prison I used sometimes to get books from them. The first book I read made a great, strange and peculiar impression upon me. I will speak of these impressions more particularly later; they were most interesting to me, and I am sure that to many people they would be utterly unintelligible. Some things one cannot judge without experience. One thing I can say, that moral privation is harder to bear than any physical agonies. When a peasant goes to prison he finds there the company of his equals, perhaps even of his superiors. He has lost a great deal, of course-home, family, everything, but his environment is the same. The educated man condemned to the same punishment often loses infinitely more. He must overcome all his cravings, all his habits, live under conditions that are insufficient for him; must learn to breathe a different air He is a fish out of water And often a punishment supposed to be equal in law is ten times as cruel for him. This is the truth, even if we consider only the material habits which have to be sacrificed.

But the Poles formed a group apart. There were six of them and they kept together. The only other person they liked in our room was a Jew, and him they liked perhaps simply because he amused them. He was liked indeed by the other convicts too, though every one without exception laughed at him. He was the only Jew among us, and I can’t think of him even now without laughing. Every time I looked at him I could not