Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/235

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
TRANSIENTS AND TUNDRAS
223

revolting accident was passed without protestation, owing to the fact that the thought-deadened colony was too enfeebled to have the stamina to protest. At another time, right in the warmth of summer, when a broken pane of glass was not immediately replaced, such a revolt developed among the prisoners that soldiers with fixed bayonets were stationed in each of the cells.

I often felt such psychologic changes within my own self. I can never forget some of these events which occurred during my sojourn in prison.

For a single example—although the door of my cell was never locked and I could consequently go, whenever I wished, into the corridor, to the kitchen for water or tea, out into the yard for tomatoes or beans from our little garden or to walk, I sometimes did not go out for days at a time. When, however, in preparation for the coming of some higher authorities, the doors of all the cells were locked, I found myself at once urged by a dozen reasons to quit the cell. As soon as I heard the key turn in the lock, I immediately ran to the door, hammered it with my fists and shouted to the keeper to open it, as I wanted to bring water and wood from the kitchen.

In such a moment of restriction I believe that the feeling of the loss of liberty is rendered markedly more acute and that there is at once awakened a violent spirit of protest in the whole organism, which subconsciously regards liberty as the highest form of happiness and as the primary, inviolate condition of conscious human life as a part of society, State and nation.

During the days when my soul was being washed by the ebbing and flowing tides of prison sentiment, I was called one afternoon into the prison office, where I found an officer and an official from the railway, whom I knew, waiting for me. They rose when I entered and presented