Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/117

 overwhelming. I had made up my mind to write as little as possible to those who were dear to me. but I wrote still less,—I am well, I am thinking of you, don't expect me, it certainly isn't pleasant here, enough.

And I was already back again in our cell and discovered that it was possible to heave a sigh of content even in jail.

Mr. Fels was sitting at our table with Mr. Goldenstein and they both had their heads propped up in their hands. A batch was just doing its turn of marching until the floor rattled. I sat down on the bed opposite the two brooders, and indulged in memories and thoughts,—nothing great,—only of the scratchy pen today. You see, forty and more years ago something of the same kind had irritated me. It was when I was beginning to learn to write. It was at Brandeis,—I was a poor schoolboy who did not venture to ask his poor parents for a farthing. Once by chance I discovered a store of pens,—there were always several of them lying beneath a window of the Archduke's castle at Brandeis. The revenue office was up there and the clerks used to throw them away when they were no longer fit for use. And I collected them and wrote with them in school and wrote my exercises at home with them. I wrote cumbersomely; the figures involuntarily acquired small pairs of slippers, the letters little black paunches. The teacher grumbled at me and threatened and finally also punished me,—it was no use, I could not help it. And I could not help it even when he sternly commanded me to buy new pens. Today a scratchy pen had returned into my life, and would come again a week later, a fortnight later, a year later, two years later,—now that I have learnt to write and have been put here for writing in a certain way. Fate has a confounded instinct for making circles in human life, and closes them exactly where they were begun.