Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/79

 with; in fact he completely threw in his lot with mine, and took all my business on himself. He would never say, for instance, “You have so many shirts, your jacket is torn,” and so on, but always “We have so many shirts now, our jacket is torn.” He watched me to forestall every want, and seemed to make it the chief object of his life. He had no trade, and I think he earned nothing except from me. I paid him what I could, that is in halfpence, and he was always meekly satisfied. He could not help serving some one, and pitched upon me, I fancy, as being more considerate than others and more honest in paying. He was one of those men who could never grow rich and get on, and who undertook to act as sentry for card players, standing all night in the freezing cold passage, listening to every sound in the yard, on the alert for the major. They charged five farthings for spending almost the whole night in this way, while if they blundered they lost everything and had to pay for it with a beating. I have mentioned them already. It is the leading characteristic of such men to efface their personality always, everywhere, and before almost every one, and to play not even a secondary, but a tertiary part in everything done in common. All this is innate in them.

Sushilov was a very pitiful fellow, utterly spiritless and humbled, hopelessly down-trodden, though no one used to ill-treat him, but he was down-trodden by nature. I always for some reason felt sorry for him. I could not look at him without feeling so, but why I was sorry for him I could not have said myself. I could not talk to him either; he, too, was no good at conversation, and it was evidently a great labour to him. He only recovered his spirits when I ended the conversation by giving him something to do, asking him to go somewhere, or to run some errand. I was convinced at last that I was bestowing a pleasure upon him by doing so. He was neither tall nor short, neither good-looking nor ugly, neither stupid nor clever, somewhat pockmarked and rather light-haired. One could never say anything quite definite about him. Only one other point: he belonged, I believe, as far as I could guess, to the same section as Sirotkin and belonged to it simply through his submissiveness and spiritlessness. The convicts sometimes jeered at him, chiefly because he had exchanged on the way to Siberia, and had exchanged for the sake of a red shirt and a rouble. It was because of the smallness of the price for which he had sold himself that the convicts jeered at him. To exchange meant to change names,