The Enormous Room Read online

  —And he made a rush at us,and we dodged in the smoke and passed slowly up the hall,looking behind us,speechless to a man with the admiration of Terror,till we reached the further flight of stairs;and mounted slowly with the din falling below us,ringing in our ears,beating upon our brains—mounted slowly with quickened blood and pale faces—to the peace of The Enormous Room.

  I spoke with both balayeurs that night. They told me,independently,the same story : the four incorrigibles had been locked in the cabinot ensemble. They made so much noise,particularly Lily,that the plantons were afraid the Directeur would be disturbed. Accordingly the plantons got together and stuffed the contents of a paillasse in the cracks around the door,and particularly in the crack under the door wherein cigarettes were commonly inserted by friends of the entombed. This process made the cabinot air-tight. But the plantons were not taking any chances on disturbing Monsieur le Directeur. They carefully lighted the paillasse at a number of points and stood back to see the results of their efforts. So soon as the smoke found its way inward the singing was supplanted by coughing;then the coughing stopped. Then nothing was heard. Then Celina began crying out within—“Open the door,Lily and Renée are dead”—and the plantons were frightened. After some debate they decided to open the door—out poured the smoke,and in it Celina,whose voice in a fraction of a second roused everyone in the building. The Black Holster wrestled with her and tried to knock her down by a blow on the mouth;but she escaped,bleeding a little,to the foot of the stairs—simultaneously with the advent of the Directeur who for once had found someone beyond the power of his weapon—Fear,someone in contact with whose indescribable Youth the puny threats of death withered between his lips,someone finally completely and unutterably Alive whom the Lie upon his slavering tongue could not kill.

  I do not need to say that,as soon as the girls who had fainted could be brought to,they joined Lena in pain sec for many days to come;and that Celina was overpowered by six plantons—at the order of Monsieur le Directeur—and reincarcerated in the cabinot adjoining that from which she had made her velocitous exit—reincarcerated without food for twenty-four hours. “Mais,M’sieu’Jean” the Machine-Fixer said trembling,“Vous savez elle est forte. She gave the six of them a fight,I tell you. And three of them went to the doctor as a result of their efforts,including le vieux( the Black Holster ). But of course they succeeded in beating her up,six men upon one woman. She was beaten badly I tell you before she gave in. M’sieu’Jean,ils sont tous—les plantons et le Directeur Lui-Même et le Surveillant et le Gestionnaire et tous—ils sont des—” and he said very nicely what they were,and lit his little black pipe with a crisp curving upward gesture,and shook like a blade of grass.

  With which specimen of purely mediaeval torture I leave the subject of Women,and embark upon the quieter if no less enlightening subject of Sunday.

  Sunday,it will be recalled,was Monsieur le Directeur’s third weapon. That is to say : lest the ordinarily tantalizing proximity of les femmes should not inspire les hommes to deeds which placed the doers automatically in the clutches of himself,his subordinates,and la punition,it was arranged that once a week the tantalizing proximity aforesaid should be supplanted by a positively maddening approach to coincidence. Or in other words,les hommes and les femmes might for an hour or less enjoy the same exceedingly small room;for purposes of course of devotion—it being obvious to Monsieur le Directeur that the representatives of both sexes at La Ferté-Macé were inherently of a strongly devotional nature. And lest the temptation to err in such moments be deprived,through a certain aspect of compulsion,of its complete force,the attendance of such strictly devotional services was made optional.

  The uplifting services to which I refer took place in that very room which( the night of my arrival )had yielded me my paillasse under the Surveillant’s direction. It may have been thirty feet long and twenty wide. At one end was an altar at the top of several wooden stairs,with a large candle on each side. To the right as you entered a number of benches were placed to accommodate les femmes. Les hommes upon entering took off their caps and stood over against the left wall so as to leave between them and les femmes an alley perhaps five feet wide. In this alley stood the Black Holster with his képi firmly resting upon his head,his arms folded,his eyes spying to left and right in order to intercept any signals exchanged between the sheep and goats. Those who elected to enjoy spiritual things left the cour and their morning promenade after about an hour of promenading,while the materially minded remained to finish the promenade;or if one declined the promenade entirely( as frequently occurred owing to the fact that weather conditions on Sunday were invariably more indescribable than usual )a planton mounted to The Enormous Room and shouted

  “La Messe!”

  several times;whereat the devotees lined up and were carefully conducted to the scene of spiritual operations.

  The priest was changed every week. His assistant( whom I had the indescribable pleasure of seeing only upon Sundays )was always the same. It was his function to pick the priest up when he fell down after tripping upon his robe,to hand him things before he wanted them,to ring a huge bell,to interrupt the peculiarly divine portions of the service with a squeaking of his shoes,to gaze about from time to time upon the worshippers for purposes of intimidation,and finally—most important of all—to blow out the two big candles at the very earliest opportunity,in the interests( doubtless )of economy. As he was a short fattish ancient strangely soggy creature and as his longish black suit was somewhat too big for him,he executed a series of profound efforts in extinguishing the candles. In fact he had to climb part way up the candles before he could get at the flames;at which moment,he looked very much like a weakly and fat boy( for he was obviously in his second or fourth childhood )climbing a flag-pole. At moments of leisure he abased his fatty whitish jowl and contemplated with watery eyes the floor in front of his highly polished boots,having first placed his ugly chubby hands together behind his most ample back.

  Dimanche : green murmurs in coldness. Surplice fiercely fearful,praying on his bony both knees,crossing himself...The Fake French Soldier,alias Garibaldi,beside him,a little face filled with terror...the Bell cranks the sharp-nosed curé on his knees...titter from bench of whores—

  and that reminds me of a Sunday afternoon on our backs spent with the wholeness of a hill in Chevincourt,discovering a great apple pie,B and Jean Stahl and Maurice le Menuisier and myself;and the sun falling roundly before us.

  —And then One Dimanche a new high old man with a sharp violet face and green hair—“Vous êtes libres,mes enfants,de faire l’immortalité—Songez,songez donc—L’Eternité est une existence sans durée—Toujours le Paradis,toujours l’Enfer”( to the silently roaring whores )“Le ciel est fait pour vous”—and the Belgian ten-foot farmer spat three times and wiped them with his foot,his nose dripping;and the nigger shot a white oyster into a far-off scarlet handkerchief—and the Man’s strings came untied and he sidled crablike down the steps—the two candles wiggle a strenuous softness...

  In another chapter I will tell you about the nigger.

  And another Sunday I saw three tiny old females stumble forward,three very formerly and even once bonnets perched upon three wizened skulls,and flop clumsily before the Man,and take the wafer hungrily into their leathery faces.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  An Approach to The Delectable Mountains

  “Sunday( says Mr. Pound,with infinite penetration )is a dreadful day,

  Monday is much pleasanter.

  Then let us muse a little space

  Upon fond Nature’s morbid grace.”

  It is a great and distinct pleasure to have penetrated and arrived upon the outside of Le Dimanche. We may now—Nature’s morbid grace being a topic whereof the reader has already heard much and will necessarily hear more—turn to the “much pleasanter”,the in fact “Monday”,aspect of La Ferté;by which I mean les nouveaux whose arrivals and reactions constit
uted the actual or kinetic aspect of our otherwise merely real Nonexistence. So let us tighten our belts( everyone used to tighten his belt at least twice a day at La Ferté,but for another reason—to follow and keep track of his surely shrinking anatomy )seize our staffs into our hands,and continue the ascent begun with the first pages of the story.

  One day I found myself expecting La Soupe Number 1 with something like avidity. My appetite faded,however,upon perceiving a vision en route to the empty place at my left. It slightly resembled a tall youth not more than sixteen or seventeen years old,having flaxen hair,a face whose whiteness I have never seen equalled,and an expression of intense starvation which might have been well enough in a human being but was somewhat unnecessarily uncanny in a ghost. The ghost,floatingly and slenderly,made for the place beside me,seated himself suddenly and gently like a morsel of white wind,and regarded the wall before him. La soupe arrived. He obtained a plate( after some protest on the part of certain members of our table to whom the advent of a newcomer meant only that everyone would get less for lunch),and after gazing at his portion for a second in apparent wonderment at its size caused it gently and suddenly to disappear. I was no sluggard as a rule,but found myself outclassed by minutes—which,said I to myself,is not to be worried over since ’tis sheer vanity to compete with the supernatural. But( even as I lugged the last spoonful of luke-warm greasy water to my lips )this ghost turned to me for all the world as if I too were a ghost,and remarked softly

  “Voulez-vous me prêter dix sous? Je vais acheter du tabac à la cantine.”

  One has no business crossing a spirit,I thought;and produced the sum cheerfully—which sum disappeared,the ghost arose slenderly and soundlessly,and I was left with emptiness beside me.

  Later I discovered that this ghost was called Pete.

  Pete was a Hollander,and therefore found firm and staunch friends in Harree John O’The Bathhouse and the other Hollander. In three days Pete discarded the immateriality which had constituted the exquisite definiteness of his advent,and donned the garb of flesh-and-blood. This change was due equally to La Soupe and the canteen,and to the finding of friends. For Pete had been in solitary confinement for three months and had had nothing to eat but bread and water during that time,having been told by the jailors( as he informed us,without a trace of bitterness )that they would shorten his sentence provided he did not partake of La Soupe during his incarceration—that is to say,le gouvernement français had a little joke at Pete’s expense. Also he had known nobody during that time but the five fingers which deposited said bread and water with conscientious regularity on the ground beside him. Being a Hollander neither of these things killed him—on the contrary,he merely turned into a ghost,thereby fooling the excellent French government within an inch of its foolable life. He was a very excellent friend of ours—I refer as usual to B and myself—and from the day of his arrival until the day of his departure to Précigné along with B and three others I never ceased to like and to admire him. He was naturally sensitive,extremely the antithesis of coarse( which “refined” somehow does not imply ),had not in the least suffered from a “good”,as we say,education,and possessed an at once frank and unobstreperous personality. Very little that had happened to Pete’s physique had escaped Pete’s mind. This mind of his quietly and firmly had expanded in proportion as its owner’s trousers had become too big around the waist—altogether not so extraordinary as was the fact that,after being physically transformed as I have never seen a human being transformed by food and friends,Pete thought and acted with exactly the same quietness and firmness as before. He was a rare spirit,and I salute him where he is.

  Mexique was a good friend of Pete’s,as he was of ours. He had been introduced to us by a man we called One Eyed David,who was married and had a wife downstairs,with which wife he was allowed to live all day—being conducted to and from her society by a planton. He spoke Spanish well and French passably;had black hair,bright Jewish eyes,a dead-fish expression,and a both amiable and courteous disposition. One Eyed Dah-veed( as it was pronounced of course )had been in prison at Noyon during the German occupation,which he described fully and without hyperbole—stating that no one could have been more considerate or just than the commander of the invading troops. Dah-veed had seen with his own eyes a French girl extend an apple to one of the common soldiers as the German army entered the outskirts of the city : “Prenez,elle dit,vous êtes fatigué.—Madame,répondit le soldat allemand en français,je vous remercie—et il cherchait dans la poche et trouvait dix sous. Non,non,dit la jeune fille,je ne veux pas d’argent;je vous donne de bonne volonté—Pardon,madame,dit le soldat,il vous faut savoir qu’il est défendu pour un soldat allemand de prendre quelque chose sans payer.”—And before that,One Eyed Dah-veed had talked at Noyon with a barber whose brother was an aviator with the French army : “Mon frère,me dit le coiffeur,m’a raconté une belle histoire il y a quelques jours. Il volait au-dessus des lignes,et s’étonnait,un jour,de remarquer que les canons français ne tiraient pas sur les boches mais sur les français eux-mêmes. Précipitamment il atterissait,sautait de l’appareil,allait de suite au bureau du général. Il donnait le salut,et criait,bien excité : Mon général,vous tirez sur les français! Le général le regardait sans intérêt,sans bouger,puis il disait tout simplement : On a commencé,il faut finir.” Which is why perhaps,said One Eyed Dah-veed,looking two ways at once with his uncorrelated eyes,the Germans entered Noyon...But to return to Mexique.

  One night we had a soirée,as Dah-veed called it,à propos a pot of hot tea which Dah-veed’s wife had given him to take upstairs,it being damnably damp and cold( as usual )in The Enormous Room. Dah-veed,cautiously and in a low voice,invited us to his paillasse to enjoy this extraordinary pleasure;and we accepted,B and I,with huge joy;and sitting on Dah-veed’s paillasse we found somebody who turned out to be Mexique—to whom,by his right name,our host introduced us with all the poise and courtesy vulgarly associated with a French salon.

  For Mexique I cherish and always will cherish unmitigated affection. He was perhaps nineteen years old,very chubby,extremely good-natured;and possessed of an unruffled disposition which extended to the most violent and obvious discomforts a subtle and placid illumination. He spoke beautiful Spanish,had been born in Mexico,and was really called Philippe Burgos. He had been in New York. He criticized some one for saying “Yes” to us,one day,stating that no American said “Yes” but “Yuh”;which—whatever the reader may think—is to my mind a very profound observation. In New York he had worked nights as a fireman in some big building or other and slept days,and this method of seeing America he had enjoyed extremely. Mexique had one day taken ship( being curious to see the world )and worked as chauffeur—that is to say in the stoke-hole. He had landed in,I think,Havre;had missed his ship;had inquired something of a gendarme in French( which he spoke not at all,with the exception of a phrase or two like “quelle heure qu’il est?” );had been kindly treated and told that he would be taken to a ship de suite—had boarded a train in the company of two or three kind gendarmes,ridden a prodigious distance,got off the train finally with high hopes,walked a little distance,come in sight of the grey perspiring wall of La Ferté,and—“So,I ask them : Where is the Ship? He point to here and tell me,There is the ship. I say : This is a God Dam Funny Ship”—quoth Mexique,laughing.

  Mexique played dominoes with us( B having devised a set from cardboard ),strolled The Enormous Room with us,telling of his father and brother in Mexico,of the people,of the customs;and—when we were in the cour—wrote the entire conjugation of tengo in the deep mud with a little stick,squatting and chuckling and explaining. He and his brother had both participated in the revolution which made Carranza president. His description of which affair was utterly delightful.

  “Every-body run a-round with guns” Mexique said. “And bye-and-bye no see to shoot everybody,so everybody go home.” We asked if he had shot anybody himself. “Sure. I shoot everybody I
do’no” Mexique answered laughing. “I t’ink every-body no hit me” he added,regarding his stocky person with great and quiet amusement. When we asked him once what he thought about the war,he replied “I t’ink lotta bullshit” which,upon copious reflection,I decided absolutely expressed my own point of view.

  Mexique was generous,incapable of either stupidity or despondency,and mannered as a gentleman is supposed to be. Upon his arrival he wrote almost immediately to the Mexican or is it Spanish consul—“He know my fader in Mexico”—stating in perfect and unambiguous Spanish the facts leading to his arrest;and when I said good-bye to La Misère Mexique was expecting a favorable reply at any moment,as indeed he had been cheerfully expecting for some time. If he reads this history I hope he will not be too angry with me for whatever injustice it does to one of the altogether pleasantest companions I have ever had. My note-books,one in particular,are covered with conjugations which bear witness to Mexique’s ineffable good-nature. I also have a somewhat superficial portrait of his back sitting on a bench by the poêle. I wish I had another of Mexique out in le jardin with a man who worked there,who was a Spaniard,and whom the Surveillant had considerately allowed Mexique to assist;with the perfectly correct idea that it would be pleasant for Mexique to talk to someone who could speak Spanish—if not as well as he,Mexique,could,at least passably well. As it is,I must be content to see my very good friend sitting with his hands in his pockets by the stove with Bill the Hollander beside him. And I hope it was not many days after my departure that Mexique went free. Somehow I feel that he went free...and if I am right,I will only say about Mexique’s freedom what I have heard him slowly and placidly say many times concerning not only the troubles which were common property to us all but his own peculiar troubles as well

  “That’s fine.”