Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/98

86 ones, even closing schools and commandeering their buildings for this purpose.

After having completed my business in town, I returned to Udzimi and found everything as I had left it, save that Sergeant Shum confidentially informed me that numerous bands of hunghutzes had again appeared in the neighbourhood and that it had been learned that disguised Japanese soldiers were among them. With this warning in mind, I decided not to venture away from the immediate territory of our operations, the more so because I had now no shooting companion.

On my return I was greatly pleased with the appearance of our establishment, for it was already a real factory, employing about one thousand men. Two railroads transported the supplies of wood, while the staff houses, labourers' barracks, stores and shops made up a whole town that had sprung up here in the forest near the quite unknown village of Ho Lin, which had low come to be a suburb of my charcoal town.

But it was not ordained of Fate that I was long to enjoy the pleasurable contemplation of my new city. No man knows what the morrow will bring him—a fact which seems to me to be the best justification for optimism and altruism and which is really the great attraction of life, which thus always remains a riddle. In this connection I never shall forget the words of a fellow- prisoner, when we were serving sentences, mine for revolution and his for burning the house of an enemy:

"To-morrow is never like to-day. If life is difficult to-day, it will be easier to live to-morrow. If to-morrow be worse, then to-day one is already a little accustomed to difficulty and will not suffer so much from the change for the worse. If to-morrow be successful, it will seem a magnificent day."