“No.”

“Do you know ’Our Father’?”

“I do.”

“Since you do, read it in the Gospels.  Here it is,” said the guard, showing him the prayer in the Gospels.  Stepan began to read it, comparing the letters he knew with the familiar sounds.

And all of a sudden the mystery of the syllables was revealed to him, and he began to read.  This was a great joy.  From that moment he could read, and the meaning of the words, spelt out with such great pains, became more significant.

Stepan did not mind any more being alone.  He was so full of his work that he did not feel glad when he was transferred back to the common cell, his private cell being needed for a political prisoner who had been just sent to prison.

V

In the meantime Mahin, the schoolboy who had taught his friend Smokovnikov to forge the coupon, had finished his career at school and then at the university, where he had studied law.  He had the advantage of being liked by women, and as he had won favour with a vice-minister’s former mistress, he was appointed when still young as examining magistrate.  He was dishonest, had debts, had gambled, and had seduced many women; but he was clever, sagacious, and a good magistrate.  He was appointed to the court of the district where Stepan Pelageushkine had been tried.  When Stepan was brought to him the first time to give evidence, his sincere and quiet answers puzzled the magistrate.  He somehow unconsciously felt that this man, brought to him in fetters and with a shorn head, guarded by two soldiers who were waiting to take him back to prison, had a free soul and was immeasurably superior to himself.  He was in consequence somewhat troubled, and had to summon up all his courage in order to go on with the inquiry and not blunder in his questions.  He was amazed that Stepan should narrate the story of his crimes as if they had been things of long ago, and committed not by him but by some different man.

“Had you no pity for them?” asked Mahin.

“No.  I did not know then.”

“Well, and now?”

Stepan smiled with a sad smile.  “Now,” he said, “I would not do it even if I were to be burned alive.”

“But why?

“Because I have come to know that all men are brethren.”

“What about me?  Am I your brother also?”

“Of course you are.”

“And how is it that I, your brother, am sending you to hard labour?”

“It is because you don’t know.”

“What do I not know?”

“Since you judge, it means obviously that you don’t know.”

“Go on. . . .  What next?”

VI

Now it was not Chouev, but Stepan who used to read the gospel in the common cell.  Some of the prisoners were singing coarse songs, while others listened to Stepan reading the gospel and talking about what he had read.  The most attentive among those who listened were two of the prisoners, Vassily, and a convict called Mahorkin, a murderer who had become a hangman.  Twice during his stay in this prison he was called upon to do duty as hangman, and both times in far-away places where nobody could be found to execute the sentences.