Oscar Wilde Read Online Free PDF Page B

continued:
    â€œYes—then we had a charming warden, aoh! quite charming! but the first six months I was terribly unhappy. There was a very nasty warden, a German, who was very cruel because he was completely lacking in imagination.” This last remark, said very fast, was irresistibly comical, and as I burst out laughing, he laughed too, repeated it, and then continued:
    â€œHe didn’t know what to imagine to make us suffer … You’ll see how lacking he was in imagination … You have to know that in prison you’re allowed to go outside only an hour a day; you then walk around a court behind one another, and it’s absolutely forbidden to speak to one another. There are guards watching you and there are terrible punishments for the one they catch.—Those who are in prison for the first time can be recognized by their not knowing how to speak without moving their lips … I had already been locked up six weeks and hadn’t yet said a word to anybody—to anybody. One evening we were walking behind one another that way during the recreation hour, and suddenly, behind me, I heard my name uttered: it was the prisoner behind me who was saying, ‘Oscar Wilde, I pity you because you must be suffering more than we.’ So I made an enormous effort not to be noticed (I thought I was going to faint), and Isaid without turning around, ‘No, my friend, we are all suffering equally.’—and that day I no longer had any desire to kill myself.
    â€œWe talked like that for several days. I knew his name and what he did. His name was P …; he was an excellent chap; aoh! excellent!… But I still didn’t know how to talk without moving my lips, and one evening: ‘C.33! (C.33, that was I)—C.33 and C.48, step out of line!’ So we stepped out of line and the guard said, “You’re going to be brought up before the warden…”—And as pity had already entered my heart, I was afraid only for him; indeed, I was happy to suffer because of him.—But the warden was quite terrible. He had P … brought in first; he wanted to question us separately—because you have to know that the penalty for the one who starts speaking and the one who answers is not the same; the penalty of the one who speaks first is double that of the other; ordinarily, the first gets two weeks of solitary confinement, the second, only one; so the warden wanted to know which of us two had spoken first, and, of course, Pα …, who was an excellent chap, said that it was he. And, when, afterward, the warden sent for me to question me, of course I said that it was I. The warden then got very red, because he no longer understood.—‘But P … also says that he’s the one who started! I can’t understand …’
    â€œImagine that, dear!! He couldn’t understand! He was very embarrassed; he kept saying, ‘But I gave him two weeks …’ and then he added, ‘All right, if that’s how things stand, I’m going to give both of you two weeks.’ Isn’t that extraordinary! That man had no sort of imagination.”
    Wilde was enormously amused at what he was saying; he was laughing; he was happy to be telling a story:
    â€œAnd naturally, after the two weeks, we had a greater desire to talk to one another than before. You don’t know how sweet that can seem, to feel that we were suffering for each other.—Little by little, as we weren’t in the same line every day, little by little I was able to speak to each of the others; to all! to all!… I knew each one’s name, each one’s history, and when he was to leave prison … And to each one of them I would say, ‘When you get out of prison, the first thing you’re to do is to go to the post-office; there will be a letter for you with some money.’—With the result that, in that way, I continue to know them, because I love them