Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/178

 The defence-corps man laid a small bundle on the table, and looked around him.

"What have you been up to?“ Sergeant Kretzer asked him from his straw mattress.

"Nix dajtch" replied the soldier bashfully. "Me bemisch".

"Why have they locked you up?" said Karl mustering his small supply of Czech.

"I have murdered my wife and mother-in-law" sighed the defence-corps man.

"As far as the mother-in-law goes, he'll get off scot-free" remarked Mr. Fels in German.

Number 60 burst out laughing. A feeble jest,—but after midnight in this grey and monotonous jail existence, it nevertheless kindled a flame and flashed up.

"And how was that?" enquired Karl further.

"I came home on leave and saw that while I was away she had been carrying on with somebody else" he began in a slow and tedious manner. "I said to her: Wife, stop that, you'll bring disgrace on yourself and me too. But she said to me: Why, you fool, are you going to believe what the people say? And her mother, or, if you like, my mother-in-law, went for me too: Son-in-law, you're like a little child; anybody can fool you with a story, and you believe it. My Liza is respectable. When they talked like that, I said no more. That was in the morning. And towards evening, Liza ran off; I sat and waited for an hour, for two hours,—Liza didn't come back. So I said to her mother-in-law: Where's the woman got to? Where should she be? She's gone out. And then she went for me and said that I'd like to tie her up by her leg to the table. I said I didn't want to tie her up, but that I thought when a man came home on leave after eighteen months at the front, his wife