Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/322

310 could, rearranging its simple appointments and my books and mending my garments for me. When the lamp was lighted and I saw the beloved head of my mother bent over the table, there came back before me, as in a dream, my childhood, free from pain and care, and a great sadness crept into my heart. I wanted to weep then and to ask, as my mother had:

"And why, why all this?"

Mother evidently sensed the depressing thoughts that were dominating me, because she quickly raised her head, looked into my saddened face and, grasping my hands, said in a commanding, almost severe tone of voice:

"You will withstand everything, my son. You will endure &hellip;"

At that moment I felt that I first understood the soul of my mother, a soul, proud, strong and not to be held in bondage to anything. I realized then what the captivity of our country and its oppression by Russia had given to the Polish woman. My mother as a young girl had seen the bloody times of the rising for liberty of 1863, when her father was shot down and she and her mother were forced to hide for long weeks in the forest, as the families of those who fought were hunted and persecuted by the Russian Cossacks. She saw the death of hundreds of the ill-fated insurrectionists, then watched hundreds more of these fighters for Polish liberty being manacled and driven off to banishment in Siberia; she saw the mothers, daughters and wives of insurrectionists thrashed with whips by the Cossacks. With her own fortune confiscated by the Government, she was compelled, after having been accustomed to wealth, to live through years of want and unhappiness; but, by hard work and dominating will, she managed to finish the middle and high schools and, after the few years of married life before the