CHAPTER XXIV
Prokop wandered about the park, irritable and yawning through lack of sleep. He wondered what they wanted with him and contemplated with dissatisfaction his huge, ungainly boots and wornout trousers. Absorbed in these reflections he very nearly walked on to the tennis court, where the Princess was playing with two girls in white dresses. He hastily turned aside and set off towards what he imagined was the end of the park. But in that direction the park ended in a sort of terrace; a stone balustrade and below it a wall nearly forty feet high. From the terrace one had a view of the pine woods and of a soldier who was pacing up and down below with a fixed bayonet.
Prokop then set off to the part of the park which sloped away from the castle. There he found a lake with some bathing sheds, but overcoming the temptation to bathe, he went on into a beautiful coppice of birch trees. Here he came upon a lattice-work fence and a half effaced path leading to a gate; the gate was not completely closed and it was possible to pass through it into a pine wood. He walked quietly along over the slippery pine cones until he reached the edge of the wood. And there, damnation, was a fence surmounted by barbed wire, a good twelve feet high. How strong, he wondered, was the wire? He tested it carefully with his hands and
166
