failed me. When the second lash came, you may not believe it, I did not hear them count two. And when I came to I heard them call ‘seventeen.’ Four times, lad, they took me off the donkey, and gave me half an hour’s rest and poured water over me. I looked at them all with my eyes starting out of my head and thought ‘I shall die on the spot. . . .’”
“And you didn’t die?” Kobylin asked naively.
Lutchka scanned him with a glance of immense contempt; there was a sound of laughter.
“He is a regular block!”
“He is not quite right in the top storey,” observed Lutchka, as though regretting he had deigned to converse with such a man.
“He is a natural,” Vassya summed up conclusively. Though Lutchka had murdered six people no one was ever afraid of him in the prison, yet perhaps it was his cherished desire to be considered a terrible man.
Christmas was approaching. The convicts looked forward to it with a sort of solemnity, and looking at them, I too began to expect something unusual. Four days before Christmas Day they took us to the bath-house. In my time, especially in the early years, the convicts were rarely taken to the bath-house. All were pleased and began to get ready. It was arranged to go after dinner, and that afternoon there was no work. The one who was most pleased and excited in our room was Isay Fomitch Bumshtein, a Jewish convict whom I have mentioned in the fourth chapter of my story. He liked to steam himself into a state of stupefaction, of unconsciousness; and whenever going over old memories I recall our prison baths (which deserve to be remembered), the blissful countenance of that prison comrade whom I shall never forget, takes a foremost place in the picture. Heavens, how killingly funny he was! I have already said something about his appearance: he was a thin, feeble, puny man of fifty, with a wrinkled white body like a chicken’s and on his cheeks and forehead awful scars left from being branded. His face wore a continual expression
