delighted just because he has had such a happy thought, and has himself found the word to rhyme to “come.”
And Smekalov goes away perfectly satisfied with himself and, indeed, the man who has been flogged goes away almost satisfied with himself and with Smekalov, and half an hour later he will be telling the story in the prison of how the joke that had been repeated thirty times before had now been repeated for the thirty-first time. “He is a jolly good fellow! He loves a joke!”
There was even a flavour of maudlin sentimentality about some reminiscences of the good-natured lieutenant.
“Sometimes one would go by, brothers,” a convict would tell us, his face all smiles at the recollection, “and he’d be sitting in the window in his dressing-gown, drinking his tea and smoking his pipe. I’d take off my cap. ‘Where are you off to, Aksyonov?’ he’d say. ‘Why, to work, Mihail Vassilitch, first thing I must go to the work-room.’ He’d laugh to himself. He was a jolly good fellow! Jolly is the only word!”
“We shall never see his like again,” one of his listeners would add.
I Have spoken about corporal punishment and the various officers who had to perform this interesting duty, because it was only when I went into the hospital that I formed an idea from actual acquaintance of these matters, of which, till then, I had only known by hearsay. From all the battalions, disciplinary and otherwise, stationed in our town and in the whole surrounding district, all who had received the punishment of the “sticks” were brought into our two wards. In those early days when I still looked so eagerly at everything about me, all these strange proceedings, all these victims who had been punished, or were preparing for punishment, naturally made a very strong impression on me. I was excited, overwhelmed and terrified. I remember that at the same time I began suddenly and impatiently going into all the details of these new facts, listening to the talk and tales of the other convicts on this
- ↑ All that I am writing here about corporal punishment was true in my time. Now I am told that all this is changed and still changing.
