To Constance Staes every rule was a challenge.  That’s the reason he had been put in jail.  He had trespassed on forbidden way in front of the East Station.  Here in prison smoking was forbidden.  So Staes, with one eye upon the listless guard, would slip beneath a blanket, take a pull at his cigarette, and come up again as innocent as though he had been saying his prayers.  I refused the offer of a pull at his cigarette, but not the morsel of white bread which he drew from behind a picture and shared with me.  That bread, broken and shared between us in that upper room, is to me an eternal sacrament.  It fed my body hunger then; never shall it cease to feed the hunger of my soul.

Whenever temptation to play the cynic or think meanly of my fellow-man shall come, my mind will hark back to those two unpretending fellows and bow in reverence before the selflessness and immensity of the human soul.  Needing bread, they gave it freely away; needing strength, they poured themselves out unsparingly; needing encouragement, they became the ministers thereof.  For not to me alone, but to all, they played this role of servant, priest, and comforter.

As I write these lines I wonder where their spirits are now.  Speeded thence, they may have already made the next world richer by their coming.  I do not know that; but I do know that they have made my soul infinitely richer by their sojourn here; I do not know whether they were Catholic or Atheist, but I do know how truly the Master of all souls could say to these two brave little Belgians:  “When I was an hungered, ye gave me food; when I was thirsty, ye gave me drink; when I was a stranger, ye took me in; when I was sick and in prison, ye visited me.”

The prison is the real maker of democracy.  I saw that clearly when, at five o’clock, joy came marching into the room.  It was an officer who was its herald with the simple words, “The theater manager is free.”  That was a trumpet blast annihilating all rank and caste.  The manager, forgetting his office and his dignity, and embracing with his right arm a peasant and with his left an artisan, danced round the room in a delirium of delight.  Twenty men were at one time besieging him to grasp his hand, and tears, not rhetorically, but actually, were streaming down their faces—­Russian, German, Belgian, and American, high and low, countrymen and citymen, smocked and frocked.  We were fused altogether in the common emotion of joy and hope.  For hope was now rampant.  “If one man can be liberated,” we argued, “why not another?  Perhaps the General was thus giving vent to a temporary vein of good humor.”  Each man figured that he might be the fortunate one upon whom this good luck would alight.

At five-thirty there was much murmuring in the corridor, and presently my Ehrenwort lad of the previous night came bursting into the room, crying, “The American!  The American!” I do not have to describe the thrill of joy that those words shot through me; but I wish that I might do justice to the beaming face of my young officer friend.  I am sure that I could not have looked more radiant than he did when, almost like a mother, he led me forth to greet de Leval and two other assistants from the American Ambassador.  Now de Leval is not built on any sylph-like plan, but he looked to me then like an ethereal being from another world—­the angel who opened the prison door.