Chapter 8 : The Thief

The other case. In the summer, while repairs were making in the building, a Leyden jar was taken from the physical laboratory, pencils several times were missing, and books also were missing at a time when no carpenter or painter was at work in the building.

We questioned the boys. The best scholars, the first scholars at that time, old friends of ours, reddened and grew so confused that any magistrate would have been convinced that their confusion was proof positive of their guilt. But I knew them, and could depend on them as on myself.

I comprehended that the mere thought of suspicion deeply and painfully wounded them. One lad, whom I will call Feodor, a gifted and opulent nature, turned quite white and burst into tears. They declared that they would tell if they knew, but they refused to search.

After a few days the thief was detected a lad[5] belonging to a distant village. He made an accomplice of a peasant lad who came with him from the same village) and they together had secreted the stolen articles in a box.

This discovery brought a strange feeling of relief and even pleasure among the scholars, and at the same time contempt and pity for the thieves. We imposed on the boys the task of naming the punishment. Some wanted to have the thieves whipped, but, of course, by themselves; others proposed that they should wear a placard ticketed THIEF.

This punishment, I am ashamed to say, had been proposed by ourselves once before, and the very lad who a year before had worn a placard inscribed LIAR, now of all others was the one to propose the placards for the thieves.

We decided on the placards, and when one of the girls had embroidered them, all the scholars looked on with angry pleasure, and ridiculed the offenders. They proposed a still more severe punishment: "To take them to the village, and make an exhibition of them with the placards on during the holiday," was their proposal.

The offenders wept.

The peasant lad who had been led away by the other was a talented story-teller and humorist, a fat, white-haired little snipper-snapper, and he cried as if his heart would break, as hard as a child could cry. The other, the principal criminal, a boy with a hawk nose, with dry features, and an intelligent face, grew pale, his lips trembled, his eyes glared wildly and angrily at his gay companions, and he occasionally hid his face on account of tears that were unnatural to him. His cap, with torn visor, was pulled down to the nape of his neck; his hair was in disorder; his clothes were soiled with chalk. His whole appearance struck me and all of us with the same surprise, as if we had seen it for the first time.

The contemptuous looks of all rested on him. And this stung him to the quick. When, without looking round, but hanging his head, and with that mien peculiar to criminals, as it seemed to me, he went off home, with the pack of boys chasing him, and nagging him in an unnatural and strangely pitiless fashion, as if some evil spirit influenced them against their will, something told me that it was all wrong.

But things went on as before, and the thief came for several days with his placard. But it seemed to me that from that time he began to degenerate in his studies, and he was no longer seen to take part in the games and converse of his companions outside the class-room.

When, one day, I went into class, all the scholars told me with horror that he had been stealing again.

He had stolen twenty copper kopecks from the teacher's room, and they had caught him as he was hiding the money under the stairs.

Again we decorated him with the placard; again began the same ugly scene. I gave him a lecture, as all disciplinarians are accustomed to do. Now there happened to be present a grown-up boy, a chatterer, and he began to lecture him, repeating words such as he had unquestionably heard from his father, who was a farmer.[6]

"He has stolen once, he has stolen twice," he said in a clear and deliberate voice. "It has become a habit; it won't do any good."

I began to grow vexed. I felt almost angry against the thief.

But as I looked into the culprit's face, which was more pale, wretched, passionate, and hard than ever, I seemed to see the face of a convict, and it suddenly appeared to me so wrong and odious, that I took off the stupid placard; I told him to go wherever he pleased, and I suddenly felt the conviction felt it, not through my intellect, but in my whole being that I had no right to punish this unhappy lad, and that it was not in my power to make of him what I and the dvornik's son might like to make of him. I felt a conviction that there are soul-secrets hidden from us on which life, but not regulations and punishments, may act.

And what nonsense! A boy had stolen a book, by what a long, complicated process of feelings, thoughts, mistaken judgments he was induced to take a book that did not belong to him! and hid it in his box,. and I fasten to him a tag with the word "THIEF" on it, which means something entirely different.

Why?

To punish him by making him ashamed, some one will say.

Why? What is shame? And have I any proof that that shame will put an end to his inclination to steal?

Perhaps it will strengthen it. What was expressed in his face was very likely not shame at all. Indeed, I may be very certain that it was not shame, but something entirely different which might have been always latent in his face, and would better not have been brought out.

Here in this world which is called practical, in the world of Palmerstons and Cains, in the world where not that which is reasonable, but which is practical, is regarded as reasonable, here in this world, I say, we have men, themselves under sentence, arrogating to themselves the right and duty of punishing others! Our world of children simple, independent beings must remain free from self-deceptions and from the criminal belief in the legality of punishments, from the belief and delusion that the feeling of vengeance becomes just as soon as we call it punishment

Let us proceed with the daily order of our description of exercises.