The Enormous Room Read online

  for as much as half a minute;then turning suddenly his round-shouldered big back he adjusted his cuffs,muttering PROSTI-TUTES and WHORES and DIRTY FILTH OF WOMEN, crammed his big fists into his trousers,pulled in his chin till his fattish jowl rippled along the square jaws,panted,grunted,very completely satisfied,very contented,rather proud of himself,took a strutting stride or two in his expensive shiny boots,and shot all at once through the open door which he SLAMMED after him.

  A propos the particular incident described for purposes of illustration,I wish to state that I believe in miracles : the miracle being that I did not knock the spit-covered mouthful of teeth and jabbering brutish outthrust jowl( which certainly were not farther than eighteen inches from me )through the bullneck bulging in its spotless collar. For there are times when one almost decides not to merely observe...besides which,never in my life before had I wanted to kill to thoroughly extinguish and to entirely murder. Perhaps some day. Unto God I hope so.

  Amen.

  Now I will try to give the reader a glimpse of the Women of La Ferté-Macé.

  The little Machine-Fixer,as I said in the preceding chapter,divided them into Good and Bad. He said there were as much as three Good ones,of which three he had talked to one and knew her story. Another of the three Good Women obviously was Margherite—a big,strong female who did washing,and who was a permanent resident because she had been careless enough to be born of German parents. I think I spoke with number three on the day I waited to be examined by the Commission—a Belgian girl,whom I shall mention later along with that incident. Whereat,by process of elimination,we arrive at les putains,whereof God may know how many there were at La Ferté,but I certainly do not. To les putains in general I have already made my deep and sincere bow. I should like to speak here of four individuals. They are Celina,Lena,Lily,Renée.

  Celina Tek was an extraordinary beautiful animal. Her firm girl’s body emanated a supreme vitality. It was neither tall nor short,its movements neither graceful nor awkward. It came and went with a certain sexual velocity,a velocity whose health and vigour made everyone in La Ferté seem puny and old. Her deep sensual voice had a coarse richness. Her face,dark and young,annihilated easily the ancient and greyish walls. Her wonderful hair was shockingly black. Her perfect teeth,when she smiled,reminded you of an animal. The cult of Isis never worshipped a more deep luxurious smile. This face,framed in the night of its hair,seemed( as it moved at the window overlooking the cour des femmes )inexorably and colossally young. The body was absolutely and fearlessly alive. In the impeccable and altogether admirable desolation of La Ferté and the Normandy Autumn Celina,easily and fiercely moving,was a kinesis.

  The French government must have already recognized this;it called her incorrigible.

  Lena,also a Belgian,always and fortunately just missed being a type which in the American language( sometimes called “Slang” )has a definite nomenclature. Lena had the makings of an ordinary broad. And yet,thanks to La Misère,a certain indubitable personality became gradually rescued. A tall hard face about which was loosely pitched some haycoloured hair. Strenuous and mutilated hands. A loose,raucous way of laughing,which contrasted well with Celina’s definite gurgling titter. Energy rather than vitality. A certain power and roughness about her laughter. She never smiled. She laughed loudly and obscenely and always. A woman.

  Lily was a German girl,who looked unbelievably old,wore white or once white dresses,had a sort of drawling scream in her throat besides a thick deadly cough,and floundered leanly under the eyes of men. Upon the skinny neck of Lily a face had been set for all the world to look upon and be afraid. The face itself was made of flesh green and almost putrescent. In each cheek a bloody spot. Which was not rouge,but the flower which consumption plants in the cheek of its favorite. A face vulgar and vast and heavy-featured,about which a smile was always slopping uselessly. Occasionally Lily grinned,showing several monstrously decayed and perfectly yellow teeth,which teeth usually were smoking a cigarette. Her bluish hands were very interestingly dead;the fingers were nervous,they lived in cringing bags of freckled skin,they might almost be alive.

  She was perhaps eighteen years old.

  Renée,the fourth member of the circle,was always well-dressed and somehow chic. Her silhouette had character,from the waved coiffure to the enormously high heels. Had Renée been able to restrain a perfectly toothless smile she might possibly have passed for a jeune gonzesse. She was not. The smile was ample and black. You saw through it into the back of her neck. You felt as if her life was in danger when she smiled,as it probably was. Her skin was not particularly tired. But Renée was old,older than Lena by several years;perhaps twenty-five,which for a lady of her profession is very old. Also about Renée there was a certain dangerous fragility,the fragility of unhealthy. And yet Renée was hard,immeasurably hard. And accurate. Her exact movements were the movements of a mechanism. Including her voice,which had a purely mechanical timbre. She could do two things with this voice and two only—screech and boom. At times she tried to chuckle and almost fell apart. Renée was in fact dead. In looking at her for the first time,I realized that there may be something stylish about death.

  This first time was interesting in the extreme. It was Lily’s birthday. We looked out of the windows which composed one side of the otherwise windowless Enormous Room;looked down,and saw—just outside the wall of the building—Celina Lena Lily and a new girl who was Renée. They were all individually intoxicated. Celina was joyously tight. Renée was stiffly bunnied. Lena was raucously pickled. Lily,floundering and staggering and tumbling and whirling,was utterly soused. She was all tricked out in an erstwhile dainty dress,white,and with ribbons. Celina( as always )wore black. Lena had on a rather heavy striped sweater and skirt. Renée was immaculate in tightfitting satin or something of the sort;she seemed to have somehow escaped from a doll’s house overnight. About the group were a number of plantons,roaring with laughter,teasing,insulting,encouraging,from time to time attempting to embrace the ladies. Celina gave one of them a terrific box on the ear. The mirth of the others was redoubled. Lily spun about and fell down,moaning and coughing,and screaming about her fiancé in Belgium : what a handsome young fellow he was,how he had promised to marry her...shouts of enjoyment from the plantons. Lena had to sit down or else fall down,so she sat down with a good deal of dignity,her back against the wall,and in that position attempted to execute a kind of dance. Les plantons rocked and applauded. Celina smiled beautifully at the men who were staring from every window of The Enormous Room and,with a supreme effort,went over and dragged Renée( who had neatly and accurately folded up with machinelike rapidity in the mud )through the doorway and into the house. Eventually Lena followed her example,capturing Lily en route. The scene must have consumed all of twenty minutes. The plantons were so mirth-stricken that they had to sit down and rest under the washing-shed. Of all the inhabitants of The Enormous Room,Fritz and Harree and Pompom and Bathhouse John enjoyed it most. I should include Jan,whose chin nearly rested on the window-sill with the little body belonging to it fluttering in an ugly interested way all the time. That Bathhouse John’s interest was largely cynical is evidenced by the remarks which he threw out between spittings—“Une section mesdames!” “A la gare!” “Aux armes tout le monde!” etc. With the exception of these enthusiastic watchers,the other captives evidenced vague ­amusement—excepting Count Bragard who said with lofty disgust that it was “no better than a bloody knocking ’ouse,Mr. Cummings” and Monsieur Pet-airs whose annoyance amounted to agony. Of course these twain were,comparatively speaking,old men...

  Le Poêle

  The four female incorrigibles encountered less difficulty in attaining cabinot than any four specimens of incorrigibility among les hommes. Not only were they placed in dungeon vile with a frequency which amounted to continuity;their sentences were far more severe than those handed out to the men. Up to the time of my little visit to La Ferté I had innocently supposed that in referring to wo
men as “the weaker sex” a man was strictly within his rights. La Ferté,if it did nothing else for my intelligence,rid it of this overpowering error. I recall,for example,a period of sixteen days and nights spent( during my stay )by the woman Lena in the cabinot. It was either toward the latter part of October or the early part of November that this occurred,I will not be sure which. The dampness of the autumn was as terrible,under normal conditions—that is to say in The Enormous Room—as any climatic eccentricity which I have ever experienced. We had a wood-burning stove in the middle of the room,which antiquated apparatus was kept going all day to the vast discomfort of eyes and noses not to mention throats and lungs—the pungent smoke filling the room with an atmosphere next to unbreathable,but tolerated for the simple reason that it stood between ourselves and death. For even with the stove going full blast the walls never ceased to sweat and even trickle,so overpowering was the dampness. By night the chill was to myself—fortunately bedded at least eighteen inches from the floor and sleeping in my clothes;bed-roll,blankets,and all,under and over me and around me—not merely perceptible but desolating. Once my bed broke,and I spent the night perforce on the floor with only my paillasse under me;to awake finally in the whitish dawn perfectly helpless with rheumatism. Yet with the exception of my bed and B’s bed and a wooden bunk which belonged to Bathhouse John,every paillasse lay directly on the floor;moreover the men who slept thus were three-quarters of them miserably clad,nor had they anything beyond their light-weight blankets—whereas I had a complete outfit including a big fur coat,which I had taken with me( as previously described )from the Section Sanitaire. The morning after my night spent on the floor I pondered,having nothing to do and being unable to move,upon the subject of my physical endurance—wondering just how the men about me,many of them beyond middle age,some extremely delicate,in all not more than five or six as rugged constitutionally as myself,lived through the nights in The Enormous Room. Also I recollected glancing through an open door into the women’s quarters,at the risk of being noticed by the planton in whose charge I was at the time( who,fortunately,was stupid even for a planton,else I should have been well punished for my curiosity )and beholding paillasses identical in all respects with ours reposing on the floor;and I thought,if it is marvellous that old men and sick men can stand this and not die,it is certainly miraculous that girls of eleven and fifteen,and the baby which I saw once being caressed out in the women’s cour with unspeakable gentleness by a little putain whose name I do not know,and the dozen or so oldish females whom I have often seen on promenade—can stand this and not die. These things I mention not to excite the reader’s pity nor yet his indignation;I mention them because I do not know of any other way to indicate—it is no more than indicating—the significance of the torture perpetrated under the Directeur’s direction in the case of the girl Lena. If incidentally it throws light on the personality of the torturer I shall be gratified.

  Lena’s confinement in the cabinot—which dungeon I have already attempted to describe but to whose filth and slime no words can begin to do justice—was in this case solitary. Once a day,of an afternoon and always at the time when all the men were upstairs after the second promenade( which gave the writer of this history an exquisite chance to see an atrocity at first-hand),Lena was taken out of the cabinot by three plantons and permitted a half-hour promenade just outside the door of the building,or in the same locality—delimited by barbed-wire on one side and the washing-shed on another—made famous by the scene of inebriety above described. Punctually at the expiration of thirty minutes she was shoved back into the cabinot by the plantons. Every day for sixteen days I saw her;noted the indestructible bravado of her gait and carriage,the unchanging timbre of her terrible laughter in response to the salutation of an inhabitant of The Enormous Room( for there were at least six men who spoke to her daily,and took their pain sec and their cabinot in punishment therefor with the pride of a soldier who takes the médaille militaire in recompense for his valor );noted the increasing pallor of her flesh;watched the skin gradually assume a distinct greenish tint( a greenishness which I cannot describe save that it suggested putrefaction );heard the coughing to which she had been always subject grow thicker and deeper till it doubled her up every few minutes,creasing her body as you crease a piece of paper with your thumb-nail,preparatory to tearing it in two—and I realized fully and irrevocably and for perhaps the first time the meaning of civilization. And I realized that it was true—as I had previously only suspected it to be true—that in finding us unworthy of helping to carry forward the banner of progress,alias the tricolour,the inimitable and excellent French government was conferring upon B and myself—albeit with other intent—the ultimate compliment.

  And the Machine-Fixer,whose opinion of this blond putain grew and increased and soared with every day of her martyrdom till the Machine-Fixer’s former classification of les femmes exploded and disappeared entirely—the Machine-Fixer who would have fallen on his little knees to Lena had she given him a chance,and kissed the hem of her striped skirt in an ecstasy of adoration—told me that Lena on being finally released walked upstairs herself,holding hard to the banister without a look for anyone,“having eyes as big as tea-cups.” He added,with tears in his own eyes

  “M’sieu’Jean,a woman.”

  I recall perfectly being in the kitchen one day,hiding from the eagle-eye of the Black Holster and enjoying a talk on the economic consequences of war,said talk being delivered by Afrique. As a matter of fact,I was not in the cuisine proper but in the little room which I have mentioned previously. The door into the cuisine was shut. The sweetly soft odour of newly-cut wood was around me. And all the time that Afrique was talking I heard clearly,through the shut door and through the kitchen wall and through the locked door of the cabinot situated directly across the hall from la cuisine,the insane gasping voice of a girl singing and yelling and screeching and laughing. Finally I interrupted my speaker to ask what on earth was the matter in the cabinot?—“C’est la femme allemande qui s’appelle Lily” Afrique briefly answered. A little later BANG went the cabinot door,and ROAR went the familiar coarse voice of the Directeur. It disturbs him,the noise,Afrique said. The cabinot door slammed. There was silence. Heavily steps ascended. Then the song began again,a little more insane than before;the laughter a little wilder...You can’t stop her,Afrique said admiringly. A great voice Mademoiselle has,eh? So,as I was saying,the national debt being conditioned—

  But the experience,à propos les femmes,which meant and will always mean more to me than any other,the scene which is a little more unbelievable than perhaps any scene that it has ever been my privilege to witness,the incident which( possibly more than any other )revealed to me those unspeakable foundations upon which are builded with infinite care such at once ornate and comfortable structures as La Gloire and Le Patriotisme—occurred in this wise.

  Les hommes,myself among them,were leaving la cour for The Enormous Room under the watchful eye( as always )of a planton. As we defiled through the little gate in the barbed-wire fence we heard,apparently just inside the building whither we were proceeding on our way to The Great Upstairs,a tremendous sound of mingled screams curses and crashings. The planton of the day was not only stupid—he was a little deaf;to his ears this hideous racket had not,as nearly as one could see,penetrated. At all events he marched us along toward the door with utmost plantonic satisfaction and composure. I managed to insert myself in the fore of the procession,being eager to witness the scene within;and reached the door almost simultaneously with Fritz Harree and two or three others. I forget which of us opened it. I will never forget what I saw as I crossed the threshold.

  The hall was filled with stifling smoke;the smoke which straw makes when it is set on fire,a peculiarly nauseous choking ­whitish-blue smoke. This smoke was so dense that only after some moments could I make out,with bleeding eyes and wounded lungs,anything whatever. What I saw was this : five or six plantons were engaged in carrying
out of the nearest cabinot two girls,who looked perfectly dead. Their bodies were absolutely limp. Their hands dragged foolishly along the floor as they were carried. Their upward white faces dangled loosely upon their necks. Their crumpled figures sagged in the plantons’ arms. I recognized Lily and Renée. Lena I made out at a little distance tottering against the door of the cuisine opposite the cabinot,her haycoloured head drooping and swaying slowly upon the open breast of her shirt-waist,her legs far apart and propping with difficulty her hinging body,her hands spasmodically searching for the knob of the door. The smoke proceeded from the open cabinot in great ponderous murdering clouds. In one of these clouds,erect and tense and beautiful as an angel—her wildly shouting face framed in its huge night of dishevelled hair,her deep sexual voice,hoarsely strident above the din and smoke,shouting fiercely through the darkness—stood,triumphantly and colossally young,Celina. Facing her,its clenched pinkish fists raised high above its savagely bristling head in a big brutal gesture of impotence and rage and anguish—the Fiend Himself paused,quivering,on the fourth stair from the bottom of the flight leading to the women’s quarters. Through the smoke the great bright voice of Celina rose at him,hoarse and rich and sudden and intensely luxurious,a quick throaty accurate slaying deepness:

  CHIEZ,SI VOUS VOULEZ,CHIEZ

  and over and beneath and around the voice I saw frightened faces of women hanging in the smoke,some screaming with their lips apart and their eyes closed,some staring with wide eyes;and among the women’s faces I discovered the large placid interested expression of the Gestionnaire and the nervous clicking eyes of the Surveillant. And there was a shout—it was the Black Holster shouting at us as we stood transfixed—

  “Who the devil brought les hommes in here? Get up with you where you belong,you...”