Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/94

 indignation in some of our party; it was almost taken as an insult.

“He is setting up a howl!” a convict said reproachfully, though it was no concern of his.

“The wolf has only one note and that you’ve cribbed, you Tula fellow!” observed another of the gloomy ones, with a Little Russian accent.

“I may be a Tula man,” Skuratov retorted promptly, “but you choke yourselves with dumplings in Poltava.”

“Lie away! What do you eat? Used to ladle out cabbage soup with a shoe.”

“And now it might be the devil feeding us with cannon balls,” added a third.

“I know I am a pampered fellow, mates,” Skuratov answered with a faint sigh, as though regretting he had been pampered and addressing himself to all in general and to no one in particular, “from my earliest childhood bred up—(that is brought up, he intentionally distorted his words)—on prunes and fancy bread; my brothers have a shop of their own in Moscow to this day, they sell fiddlesticks in No Man’s street, very rich shopkeepers they are.”

“And did you keep shop too?”

“I, too, carried on in various qualities. It was then, mates, I got my first two hundred ”

“You don’t mean roubles?” broke in one inquisitive listener, positively starting at the mention of so much money.

“No, my dear soul, not roubles—sticks. Luka, hey, Luka!”

“To some I am Luka but to you I am Luka Kuzmitch,” a thin little sharp-nosed convict answered reluctantly.

“Well, Luka Kuzmitch then, hang you, so be it.”

“To some people I am Luka Kuzmitch, but you should call me uncle.”

“Well, hang you then, uncle, you are not worth talking to! But there was a good thing I wanted to say. That’s how it happened, mates, I did not make much in Moscow; they gave me fifteen lashes as a parting present and sent me packing. So then I ”

“But why were you sent packing?” inquired one who had been carefully following the speaker.

“Why, it’s against the rules to go into quarantine and to drink tin-tacks and to play the jingle-jangle. So I hadn’t time to get