DE PROFUNDIS.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLII, Issue 1736, 11 February 1921, Page 2

DE PROFUNDIS.

ROSA LUXEMBOURG, REMARKABLE LETTER FROM PRISON. [Here is a very remarkable letter by a woman in prison telling of the quenchless spirit of life which still burned within her. Her record also of the suffering of a buffalo and of her own sympathetic suffering for it is a remarkable unconscious tribute to her own nobility of soul. The letter was written some years ago by the late Rosa Luxembourg, then in Breslau Prison, to the wife of Karl Liebknecht.] "It is my third Christmas in my cell, but don’t take it tragically. I am ns calm and joyous as ever. Last night I lay awake a long time —I can never sleep nowadays before one o’clock, but htivo to be in bed by 10. then dream all sorts of things in the darkness. “Last bight, then. I thought how remarkable it is that I live always in a joyous intoxication without any particular reason. So, for instance, I lie here in the dark cell on a mattress hard as stone. About me in the building reigns the usual deathly stillness. One imagines one’s self tombed. “A light-spot from the lantern which burns before the prison all night long patterns, itself on the ceiling. Now and then I hear the muffled vibration of a train passing in the distance, or, very near, beneath the window the throaty cough of the guard as he takes half a dozen slow steps in his heavy boots to ease his stiff legs. “The sand crunches so hopelessly under his footfall that the whole desolation and inescapability of existence ring through the damp, dark night. I Lie Alone,, “So I lie alone, quietly, wrapped in the manifold black sheath of winter—the darkness, the boredom, the ' unfreedom of it—and yet my heart beats with an unknown, incomprehensible, inner joy, as though I walked through meadows in radiant sunlight. And in the darkness I lie smiling on life, as though I knew some secret charm which would give the lie to everything that is mean and dreary, turning it into sheer radiance and joy. “And all this time I search within me for the cause of this joy, find nothing, and have to smile again at. myselfv I believe the secret is nothing. but life itself; the impenetrable darkness is as beautifully smooth as velvet, if one will only see it rightly. And in the grinding of the wet sand under the slow, heavy footfall of the guard, there rises a wonderful song of life —if one only knows how to listen. “In such moments I think of you and wish I might share this magic key with you, so that you might always, under all conditions realise the beauty and fullness of life, that you might live in the same intoxication, walking as through meadows. My Inexhaustible Inward Cheer. “I don’t mean to tempt you to asceticisnt and to imaginary joys. I welcome for you all real joys of the senses. It is pnly that I would give you, if I could, 'my inexhaustible inward cheer, that I might know that you walked through life wrapped in a star-embroidered cloak,, sheltering you from all that is small and trivial and disheartening. “O, Sonitchka, I recently suffered a keen anguish here. In the court, where I go walking, military trucks often come packed full with bags of soldiers’ coats and shirts, often bloodstained. These are unloaded here, distributed among the cells, mended, then reloaded and returned to the army. Recently such a wagon came, spanned with buffaloes instead of horses They came from Rumania—war trophies. The soldiers who drive these wagons tell .that it was very difficult to break them in for dragging loads. They were frightfully beaten . . . receive only miserable and scanty fodder . . . dragging every possible burden, and so quickly perish The Beaten Buffaloes. “Several days ago a wagon laden with bags came in so heavily loaded that the buffaloes were unable to pass the threshold of the portal. The soldier who was driving, a brutal fellow, began belabouring the beasts with the thick end of his whip until the prison superintendent, outraged, called him to task, asking whether he had no compassion for the animals. ‘No one has any compassion for us men either,’ ho answered, with an ugly laugh, and went on more brutally still. “At last the beasts drew up over the hill, but one was bleeding Sonitchka, the hide of the buffalo is proverbially tough, and cycn this was bleeding. “During the unloading the beasts that bled looked before him with the expression over his black face and in ins dark, soft eyes of a weeping child. It was exactly the look of a child which has been severely punished and knows not why; knows not how to escape the brutal violence and the agony of it. His Own Tears They Wens. “I.stftod before him and the beast looked upon me. My tears rolled down. His own tears they were. One cannot for his dearest brother quiver in anguish greater than I, in my helplessness, did at this mute wee. “How far, how utterly beyond reach, lost, the free, opulent. pastures of Rumania! How otherwise the sun shone there, the winds blew! How otherwise were the bird-song and tiro musical calls of the headsmen! And here —this alien, hideous town, the dark stables, tire nauseating hay mingled with rotting straw, strange, terrible men, and blows—tire blood running from the fresh wound “O, buffalo brother, we two stand together here, so helpless under the yoke—one only in our suffering, our impotence, our longing. . . .”