The Enormous Room Page 13

  Soi-même reminds me of a pleasant spirit who graced our little company with a good deal of wit and elegance. He was called by B and myself,after a somewhat exciting incident which I must not describe but rather outline,by the agreeable title of Même le Balayeur. Only a few days after my arrival the incident in question happened. It seems( I was in la cour promenading for the afternoon )that certain more virile inhabitants of The Enormous Room,among them Harree and Pompom bien entendu,declined se promener and kept their habitat. Now this was in fulfilment of a little understanding with three or more girls—such as Celina Lily and Renée—who,having also declined the promenade,managed in the course of the afternoon to escape from their quarters on the second floor,rush down the hall and upstairs,and gain that landing on which was the only and well-locked door to The Enormous Room. The next act of this little comedy( or tragedy,as it proved for the participants,who got cabinet and pain sec—male and female alike—for numerous days thereafter )might well be entitled “Love will find a way.” Just how the door was opened,the lock picked,etc.,from the inside is( of course )a considerable mystery to anyone possessing a limited acquaintance with the art of burglary. Anyway it was accomplished,and that in several fifths of a second. Now let the curtain fall,and the reader be satisfied with the significant word “Asbestos” which is part of all first-rate performances.

  The Surveillant,I fear,distrusted his balayeur. Balayeurs were always being changed because balayeurs were( in shameful contrast to plantons )invariably human beings. For this deplorable reason they inevitably carried notes to and fro between les hommes and les femmes. Upon which ground the balayeur in this case—a well-knit keen-eyed agile man,with a sense of humor and sharp perception of men women and things in particular and in general—was called before the bar of an impromptu court,held by M. le Surveillant in The Enormous Room after the promenade. I shall not enter in detail into the nature of the charges pressed in certain cases,but confine myself to quoting the close of a peroration which would have done Demosthenes credit:

  “Même le balayeur a tiré un coup!”

  The individual in question mildly deprecated M. le Surveillant’s opinion,while the audience roared and rocked with laughter of a somewhat ferocious sort. I have rarely seen the Surveillant so pleased with himself as after producing this bon mot. Only fear of his superior,the ogrelike Directeur,kept him from letting off entirely all concerned in what after all( from the European point of view )was an essentially human proceeding. As nobody could prove anything about Même,he was not locked up in a dungeon;but he lost his job of sweeper—which was quite as bad,I am sure,from his point of view—and from that day became a common inhabitant of The Enormous Room like any of the rest of us.

  His successor,Garibaldi,was a corker.

  How the Almighty French Government in its Almighty Wisdom ever found Garibaldi a place among us is more than I understand or ever will. He was a little tot in a faded blue-grey French uniform;and when he perspired he pushed a képi up and back from his worried forehead which a lock of heavy hair threateningly overhung. As I recollect Garibaldi’s terribly difficult not to say complicated lineage,his English mother had presented him to his Italian father in the country of France. However this trilogy may be,he had served at various times in the Italian French and English armies. As there was( unless we call Garibaldi Italian,which he obviously was not )nary a subject of King Ponzi or Caruso or whatever be his name residing at La Ferté-Macé,nor yet a suitable citizen of Merry England,Garibaldi was in the habit of expressing himself—chiefly at the card table,be it said—in a curious language which might have been mistaken for French. To B and me he spoke an equally curious language,but a perfectly recognizable one,i.e. Cockney Whitechapel English. He showed us a perfectly authentic mission-card which certified that his family had received a pittance from some charitable organization situated in the Whitechapel neighborhood,and that,moreover,they were in the habit of receiving same pittance;and that,finally,their claim to such pittance was amply justified by the poverty of their circumstances. Beyond this valuable certificate,Garibaldi( which everyone called him )attained great incoherence. He had been wronged. He was always being misunderstood. His life had been a series of mysterious tribulations. I for one have the merest idea that Garibaldi was arrested for the theft of some peculiarly worthless trifle,and sent to the Limbo of La Ferté as a penance. This merest idea is suggested by something which happened when The Clever Man instituted a search for his missing knife—but I must introduce The Clever Man to my reader before describing that rather beguiling incident.

  Conceive a tall,well-dressed,rather athletic,carefully kept,clean and neat,intelligent,not for a moment despondent,altogether superior man fairly young( perhaps twenty-nine )and quite bald. He wins enough every night at banque to enable him to pay the less fortunate to perform his corvée d’eau for him. As a consequence he takes his vile coffee in bed every morning,then smokes a cigarette or two lazily,then drops off for a nap,and gets up about the middle of the morning promenade. Upon arising he strops a razor of his own( nobody knows how he gets away with a regular razor),carefully lathers his face and neck—while gazing into a rather classy mirror which hangs night and day over his head,above a little shelf on which he displays at such times a complete toilet outfit—and proceeds to annihilate the inconsiderable growth of beard which his mirror reveals to him. Having completed the annihilation,he performs the most extensive ablutions per one of the three or four pails which The Enormous Room boasts,which pail is by common consent dedicated to his personal and exclusive use. All this time he has been singing loudly and musically the following sumptuously imaginative ditty :

  “mEEt me tonIght in DREAmland,

  Under the SIL-v’ry mOOn,

  Meet me in DREAmland

  Sweet dreamy DREAmland

  There all my DRE-ams come trUE.”

  His English accent is excellent. He pronounces his native language,which is the language of the Hollanders,crisply and firmly. He is not given to Gottverdummering. In addition to Dutch and English he speaks French clearly and Belgian distinctly. I daresay he knows half a dozen languages in all. He gives me the impression of a man who would never be at a loss,in whatever circumstances he might find himself. A man capable of extricating himself from the most difficult situation;and that with the greatest ease. A man who bides his time;and improves the present by separating,one after one,his monied fellow-prisoners from their bank-notes. He is,by all odds,the coolest player that I have ever watched. Nothing worries him. If he loses two-hundred francs tonight,I am sure he will win it and fifty in addition tomorrow. He accepts opponents without distinction—the stupid,the wily,the vain,the cautious,the desperate,the hopeless. He had not the slightest pity,not the least fear. In one of my numerous note-books I have this perfectly direct paragraph :

  Card table : 4 stares play banque with 2 cigarettes( 1 dead )& A pipe the clashing faces yanked by a leanness of one candle bottle-stuck( Birth of X )where sits The Clever Man who pyramids,sings( mornings )“Meet Me...”

  which specimen of telegraphic technique,being interpreted,means Judas,Garibaldi,and The Holland Skipper( whom the reader will meet de suite)—Garibaldi’s cigarette having gone out,so greatly is he absorbed—play banque with four intent and highly focussed individuals who may or may not be The Schoolmaster,Monsieur Auguste,The Barber,and Même;with The Clever Man( as nearly always )acting as banker. The candle by whose somewhat uncorpulent illumination the various physiognomies are yanked into ferocious unity is stuck into the mouth of a bottle. The lighting of the whole,the rhythmic disposition of the figures,construct a sensuous integration suggestive of The Birth of Christ by one of the Old Masters. The Clever Man,having had his usual morning warble,is extremely quiet. He will win,he pyramids—and he pyramids because he had the cash and can afford to make every play a big one. All he needs is the rake of a croupier to complete his disinterested and wholly nerveless poise. He is a born gambler,
is The Clever Man—and I dare say that to play cards in time of war constituted a heinous crime and I am certain that he played cards before he arrived at La Ferté;moreover,I suppose that to win at cards in time of war is an unutterable crime,and I know that he has won at cards before in his life—so now we have a perfectly good and valid explanation of the presence of The Clever Man in our midst. The Clever Man’s chief opponent was Judas. It was a real pleasure to us whenever of an evening Judas sweated and mopped and sweated and lost more and more and was finally cleaned out.

  But The Skipper,I learned from certain prisoners who escorted the baggage of The Clever Man from The Enormous Room when he left us one day( as he did for some reason,to enjoy the benefits of freedom),paid the master-mind of the card table 150 francs at the gare—poor Skipper! upon whose vacant bed lay down luxuriously the Lobster,immediately to be wheeled fiercely all around The Enormous Room by the Garde Champêtre and Judas,to the boisterous plaudits of tout le monde—but I started to tell about the afternoon when the master-mind lost his knife;and tell it I will forthwith. B and I were lying prone upon our respective beds when—presto,a storm arose at the further end of The Enormous Room. We looked,and beheld The Clever Man,thoroughly and efficiently angry,addressing threatening and frightening generally a constantly increasing group of fellow-prisoners. After dismissing with a few sharp linguistic cracks of the whip certain theories which seemed to be advanced by bolder auditors with a view to palliating persuading and tranquilizing his just wrath,he made for the nearest paillasse,turned it topsy-turvy,slit it neatly and suddenly from stem to stern with a jack-knife,banged the hay about,and then went with careful haste through the pitifully minute baggage of the paillasse’s owner. Silence fell. No one,least of all the owner,said anything. From this bed The Clever Man turned to the next,treated it in the same fashion,searched it thoroughly,and made for the third. His motions were those of a perfectly oiled machine. He proceeded up the length of the room,varying his procedure only by sparing an occasional mattress,throwing paillasses about,tumbling sacs and boxes inside out;his face somewhat paler than usual but otherwise immaculate and expressionless. B and I waited with some interest to see what would happen to our belongings. Arriving at our beds he paused,seemed to consider a moment,then,not touching our paillasses proper,proceeded to open our duffle-bags and hunt half-heartedly,remarking that “somebody might have put it in”;and so passed on. “What in hell is the matter with that guy?” I asked of Fritz,who stood near us with a careless air,some scorn and considerable amusement in his eyes. “The bloody fool’s lost his knife” was Fritz’s answer. After completing his rounds The Clever Man searched almost everyone except ourselves and Fritz,and absolutely subsided on his own paillasse muttering occasionally “if he found it” what he’d do. I think he never did find it. It was a “beautiful” knife,John the Baigneur said. “What did it look like?” I demanded with some curiosity. “It had a naked woman on the handle” Fritz said,his eyes sharp with amusement.

  And everyone agreed that it was a great pity that The Clever Man had lost it,and everyone began timidly to restore order and put his personal belongings back in place and say nothing at all.

  But what amused me was to see the little tot in a bluish-grey French uniform,who—about when the search approached his paillasse—suddenly hurried over to B( his perspiring forehead more perspiring than usual,his képi set at an angle of insanity )and hurriedly presented B with a long-lost German silver folding camp-knife,purchased by B from a fellow-member of Vingt-et-Un who was known to us as “Lord Algie”—a lanky,effeminate,brittle,spotless creature who was en route to becoming an officer and to whose finicky tastes the fat-jowled A. tirelessly pandered for,doubtless,financial considerations—which knife according to the trembling and altogether miserable Garibaldi had “been found” by him that day in the cour;which was eminently and above all things curious,as the treasure had been lost weeks before.

  Which again brings us to The Skipper,whose elaborate couch has already been mentioned—he was a Hollander and one of the strongest most gentle and altogether most pleasant of men,who used to sit on the water-wagon under the shed in the cour and smoke his pipe quietly of an afternoon. His stocky even ­tightly-knit person,in its heavy trousers and jersey sweater,culminated in a bronzed face which was at once as kind and firm a piece of supernatural work as I think I ever knew. His voice was agreeably modulated. He was utterly without affectation. He had three sons. One evening a number of gendarmes came to his house and told him that he was arrested,“so my three sons and I threw them all out the window into the canal.”

  I can still see the opening smile,squared kindness of cheeks,eyes like cool keys—his heart always with the Sea.

  The little Machine-Fixer( le petit bonhomme avec le bras cassé as he styled himself,referring to his little paralyzed left arm )was so perfectly different that I must let you see him next. He was slightly taller than Garibaldi,about of a size with Monsieur Auguste. He and Monsieur Auguste together were a fine sight,a sight which made me feel that I came of a race of giants. I am afraid it was more or less as giants that B and I pitied the Machine-Fixer—still this was not really our fault,since the Machine-Fixer came to us with his troubles much as a very ­minute and helpless child comes to a very large and omnipotent one. And God knows we did not only pity him,we liked him—and if we could in some often ridiculous manner assist the Machine-Fixer I think we nearly always did. The assistance to which I refer was wholly spiritual;since the minute Machine-Fixer’s colossal self-pride eliminated any possibility of material assistance. What we did,about every other night,was to entertain him( as we entertained our other friends )chez nous;that is to say,he would come up late every evening or every other evening,after his day’s toil—for he worked as co-balayeur with Garibaldi and he was a tremendous worker;never have I seen a man who took his work so seriously and made so much of it—to sit,with great care and very respectfully,upon one or the other of our beds at the upper end of The Enormous Room,and smoke a black small pipe,talking excitedly and strenuously and fiercely about La Misère and himself and ourselves,often crying a little but very bitterly,and from time to time striking matches with a short angry gesture on the sole of his big almost square boot. His little abrupt conscientious relentless difficult self lived always in a single dimension—the somewhat beautiful dimension of Sorrow. He was a Belgian,and one of two Belgians in whom I have ever felt the least or slightest interest;for the Machine-Fixer might have been a Polak or an Idol or an Eskimo so far as his nationality affected his soul. By and large,that was the trouble—the Machine-Fixer had a soul. Put the bracelets on an ordinary man,tell him he’s a bad egg,treat him rough,shove him into the jug or its equivalent( you see I have regard always for M. le Surveillant’s delicate but no doubt necessary distinction between La Ferté and Prison ),and he will become one of three animals—a rabbit,that is to say timid;a mole,that is to say stupid;or a hyena,that is to say Harree the Hollander. But if,by some fatal,some incomparably fatal accident,this man has a soul—ah,then we have and truly have and have most horribly what is called in La Ferté-Macé by those who have known it : La Misère. Monsieur Auguste’s valiant attempts at cheerfulness and the natural buoyancy of his gentle disposition in a slight degree protected him from La Misère. The Machine-Fixer was lost. By nature he was tremendously sensible,he was the very apotheosis of l’âme sensible in fact. His sensibilité made him shoulder not only the inexcusable injustice which he had suffered but the incomparable and overwhelming total injustice which everyone had suffered and was suffering en masse day and night in The Enormous Room. His woes,had they not sprung from perfectly real causes,might have suggested a persecution complex. As it happened there was no possible method of relieving them—they could be relieved in only one way : by Liberty. Not simply by his personal liberty,but by the liberation of every single fellow-captive as well. His extraordinarily personal anguish could not be selfishly appeased by a merely partial righting,in his own case,of t
he Wrong—the ineffable and terrific and to be perfectly avenged Wrong—done to those who ate and slept and wept and played cards within that abominable and unyielding Symbol which enclosed the immutable vileness of our common life. It was necessary,for its appeasement,that a shaft of bright lightning suddenly and entirely should wither the human and material structures which stood always between our filthy and pitiful selves and the unspeakable cleanness of Liberty.