Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/235

Rh revolting accident was passed without protestation, owing to the fact that the thought-deadened colony was too enfeebled to have the stamina to protest. At another time, right in the warmth of summer, when a broken pane of glass was not immediately replaced, such a revolt developed among the prisoners that soldiers with fixed bayonets were stationed in each of the cells.

I often felt such psychologic changes within my own self. I can never forget some of these events which occurred during my sojourn in prison.

For a single example—although the door of my cell was never locked and I could consequently go, whenever I wished, into the corridor, to the kitchen for water or tea, out into the yard for tomatoes or beans from our little garden or to walk, I sometimes did not go out for days at a time. When, however, in preparation for the coming of some higher authorities, the doors of all the cells were locked, I found myself at once urged by a dozen reasons to quit the cell. As soon as I heard the key turn in the lock, I immediately ran to the door, hammered it with my fists and shouted to the keeper to open it, as I wanted to bring water and wood from the kitchen.

In such a moment of restriction I believe that the feeling of the loss of liberty is rendered markedly more acute and that there is at once awakened a violent spirit of protest in the whole organism, which subconsciously regards liberty as the highest form of happiness and as the primary, inviolate condition of conscious human life as a part of society, State and nation.

During the days when my soul was being washed by the ebbing and flowing tides of prison sentiment, I was called one afternoon into the prison office, where I found an officer and an official from the railway, whom I knew, waiting for me. They rose when I entered and presented