Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/296

284 heard a noise in the yard, the evidently enthusiastic cries of the prisoners, women's voices and, later in the evening and during the whole night, whistlings and telegraphic signals running through the walls. It seemed as though the whole prison had lost its head. Raps on the walls came from everywhere in such a confusion that I could not distinguish and read the separate signals, and I finally went to sleep to the accompaniment of this continual whistling and knocking.

In the morning it all became clear to me. À large group of women had been brought in, all of them culprits condemned to long terms of imprisonment. They had been put on the ground floor directly under the cell of the Ivans, in which I had been wont to set up my moving university, as this was the most populated room in the building.

While I was watering some of the flowers in our garden, I watched a very unusual and impressive, though entirely unrehearsed, scene from life's ever-moving drama. Some of the women prisoners sat in the windows and talked quite loudly with the men on the floor above them. The stories were always serious and usually carried a note of sadness or despair running through them. They told about their lives and the causes of their coming to prison—and what varied causes they were! Betrayed love and jealousy; the brutalities of drunken husbands; harsh material conditions; everyday caprices; the fear of death from hunger for themselves and for their children; degeneracy; natural criminal propensities; discontent with life or some quite distinct psychic deviations, which are tantamount to a terrible and incurable malady—all these were cited as causes that had started these women along the path of crime, which finally led into the prison yard. They spoke of all these things with