Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/172

 judgment of such moralists; if I had been king, and had given him baronies and orders, they would have bowed and scraped before him, he would have been an ornament to society, a celebrity, a man "of high renown", "one of our own" etc.

"But don't these lines ridicule the orders a little?" asked Frank.

"I would ridicule only my own orders, but otherwise there is no ridicule in them. The proof is that in the first draft of this poem which was printed in the "Beseda Času", the third line ran:

But when I arranged the poem for the book, I changed this verse to its present form, precisely in order to avoid even the shadow of such a suspicion, although even in its first form it contains no ridicule, and I had no intention of investing this poem with it".

By chance the cadet-interpreter knew Pardubice, and corroborated the accuracy of my statements.

And Frank again dictated,—a man, truly a man. But it occurred to me that we should wait till the end. That this was the only thing they had against me, that they had imprisoned and detained me only for this,—it was impossible. But I would see what was coming.

Fourth crime: "Twenty Years Later". Verses dedicated to the memory of the Omladina.

I translated them. Frank corrected his translation which had been prepared by God knows whom, and then we discussed what the Omladina really was. Frank thought that it consisted of young men who smeared over the eagles on pillar-boxes; my view was the young literary and political generation which had promised much, had fulfilled something, had failed in other things, but which had not yet spoken its last word. Frank mentioned the names of Mrva, Dragoun, I those of Dr. Rašín, the Hajns, F. V. Krejčí, Dr. Preiss, Soukup, Groš. Frank supposed it was a secret society which had