Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/195

Rh because I was surfeited with those words, "It is not allowed! I shall shoot."

As I arose and began to walk, taking four steps for the length of the cell and four steps back, I remembered vividly a bear I had watched in the St. Petersburg Zoo, travelling over in the same manner from one corner of his cage to the other, swaying his head as though in deep despair and casting about glances of inquiry from his little bloodshot eyes.

"I also must have bloodshot eyes, as I have not slept at all," I suddenly thought and even smiled quite involuntarily.

Meantime my guard had been changed, and I found the new one was a young, thin, fair-haired boy, in whose smiling face I was surprised to discover a look of evident good will toward me. I walked for some time, finally becoming giddy with the constant turning motion. For relief I stopped and began to read the scribblings on the dirty wall. For the most part they were in handwritings that were without skill and showed little aptitude in the use of the pen. Many of them were simply curses and oaths, others were love-verses, while one inscription, made with a sharp-pointed instrument in the plaster, arrested my attention and roused within me some indistinct but unbalancing thoughts. Some inmate of the cell, unknown and now dead, had graven in this plaster his final message of despair to the world:

"In an hour's time I shall be shot. &hellip; I shall disappear, but my written words shall remain. After all, what is a human life worth?"

A tornado of thought and sentiment swept my mind and heart. Out of it all there came one thought clearer than the rest, and this was my feeling that, if the