Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/86

 failed to observe what might have reconciled him to them, and did not get on with them. They repaid him with the same hatred. The position of people like M. in prison is awful as a rule. M. knew nothing of the crime that had brought A. to prison. On the contrary, seeing the sort of man he had to do with, A. at once assured him that he was being punished for the very opposite of treachery, almost the same thing in fact as the charge for which M. was suffering. The latter was greatly delighted at having a comrade, a friend. He waited upon him, comforted him in the first days of prison, imagining that he must be in great distress, gave him his last penny, fed him, and shared the most necessary things with him. But A. conceived a hatred for him at once, just because he was a fine man, just because he looked with horror on anything mean, because he was utterly unlike himself; and all that M. told A. about the major and the prison, A. hastened at the first opportunity to report to the major. The major took an intense dislike to M. in consequence and persecuted him. Had it not been for the governor of the prison, it would have ended in a tragedy. A. was not in the least disconcerted when M. found out later on how base he had been; on the contrary he liked meeting him and looked at him ironically. It evidently gave him gratification. M. himself pointed this out to me several times. This abject creature afterwards ran away from the prison with another convict and a guard, but that escape I will describe later. At first he made up to me, thinking I had heard nothing of his story. I repeat, he poisoned my first days in prison and made them even more miserable. I was terrified at the awful baseness and degradation into which I had been cast, and in the midst of which I found myself. I imagined that everything here was as base and as degraded. But I was mistaken, I judged of all by A.

I spent those three days wandering miserably about the prison and lying on the bed. I gave the stuff that was served out to me to a trustworthy convict recommended to me by Akim Akimitch, and asked him to make it into shirts, for payment, of course (a few halfpence a shirt). I provided myself at Akim Akimitch’s urgent advice with a folding mattress made of felt encased in linen, but as thin as a pancake, and also got a pillow stuffed with wool, terribly hard till one was used to it. Akim Akimitch was quite in a bustle arranging all these things for me, and helped to get them himself. With his own hands he