Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/91

 were the greeting of one acquaintance to another. Nobody heard it, I alone, and it pleased me. The bird, I suppose, had flown from distant fields, it had passed over the outskirts of the city, had settled upon the jail roof, and uttered a call, a greeting. It was as if it knew that down below, behind the bars, there was a poet sitting, a lover of freedom who was watching the last flashes of day in the windows opposite.

And in the following night I had another beautiful dream. I was somewhere with people dear to me. The sun was gleaming magnificently, and the world was fresh and magical. And I had a feeling of freedom, we were all free, and that was why the world was so delightful. The tall figure of an antique Goddess—Artemis, I said to myself—proceeded from a grove near by, stood at the edge, pulled aside the bough of a birch tree with which she veiled her eyes, gazed upon me and smiled—

In the morning Dušek went off to the office. The superintendent needed an additional man to help him, Mr. Fiedler was not enough, the agenda had increased enormously—there were more of us than had been arranged for: he had placed the management of the rooms in the hands of a sergeant of Uhlans. In civil life the sergeant had been a coffee-house keeper in some out-of-the-way street of the fifth circuit; during the war he retained his military rank in a hospital where he had some duties in connection with the commissariat; and there it was alleged that certain cigarettes had been ordered which the patients did not receive. It was supposed that the greater part of them had been smoked by the customers of the coffee-house in the fifth circuit—but this was not true—the sergeant beat his breast and vowed that his honour was everything to him, and he called as a witness Mr. Karl, an infantryman who was also accused (and of course also unjustly) of having had an