Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/350

338 A crowd of friends awaited me in front of the prison entrance and soon changed my mood with their greetings and congratulations. One of the men presented me with a beautiful travelling case and in it an address, citing my services during the Revolution and carrying the signatures of some six thousand persons of all grades of society in the population of the Far East.

But life's drama will always have its antithesis—and one came now to give me a most uncomfortable moment, when a police officer stepped up and handed me a document from the Prosecutor, informing me that I had just three days' time in which to liquidate my affairs and leave the territory of the Far East.

Within the given time I was already aboard the train and on my way to St. Petersburg. Once more I was alone, as I was surrounded by those who knew nothing of my life and with whom I felt little inclination to converse about these matters which were filling my soul. I could not understand how they could laugh so carelessly, jest and busy themselves with such trivial matters as they did. I felt that I had come up out of another world and that this darker cosmos had left an ineradicable trace in my soul.

Before my eyes passed the faces of Wierzbicki, Mironoff, the Eagle, Lapin, Barabash and my comrades in the political section. Like a moving picture there glided across the screen of memory a long film of presentations of the bloody, fatally dramatic or touching events of my prison life, each as clear as a tear—the prisoners in movement, in action, with burning or brimming eyes; the disgusting parashas; soldiers on guard; the grey walls of my cell and the barred windows; the keepers pacing the corridors and gazing in through the wickets in the doors. I even heard distinct sounds of life, awakening