Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/154



middle of summer is over, and authors, poets, journalists begin to return to Warsaw. It is impossible to show oneself in a restaurant without being overwhelmed with embraces and men's kisses on both cheeks, always to the same tune: "What treason to come to Warsaw when everybody is absent!" And then all sluices of conversation are opened, and the stranger, so long solitary, is at once initiated into all sorts of literary affairs, hundreds of family stories, scores of political misfortunes and intrigues, and international farrago concerning remuneration, publishers, rivalries, and what not. Many half-forgotten and half-effaced figures, fates and names, rise anew in one's memory, and at last it appears as if one's absence had been but of a few weeks, though it covers a space of seven years.

The latest event is the arrest of a young medical man. At four o'clock in the morning two police officials arrived with their subordinates and set on foot an investigation in his home, rummaged everything, seized all his papers, even tore off the green cloth on his writing-table in order to look for papers beneath it, and then carried him off to the citadel. The two officials have since remained in the dwelling, of which they have made a kind of a trap; the first few days they arrested every one who entered the house—patients, friends, and acquaintances, to examine them.

Nobody knows why; but they fear that he has collected money for the young men and young girls who were banished on account of the procession in memory of the revolt in 1794. These raids are always made during the night. Sometimes the matter takes on a certain humour,