The Enormous Room Page 22

  The Wanderer was almost insane when he heard the judgment of la commission. And hereupon I must pay my respects to Monsieur Pet-airs;whom I had ever liked,but whose spirit I had not,up to the night preceding The Wanderer’s departure,fully appreciated. Monsieur Pet-airs sat for hours at the card-table,his glasses continually fogging,censuring The Wanderer in tones of apparent annoyance for his frightful weeping( and now and then himself sniffing faintly with his big red nose );sat for hours pretending to take dictation from Josef Demestre,in reality composing a great letter or series of great letters to the civil and I guess military authorities of Orne on the subject of the injustice done to the father of four children,one a baby at the breast,now about to be separated from all he held dear and good in this world. “I appeal”( Monsieur Pet-airs wrote,in his boisterously careful,not to say elegant,script )“to your sense of mercy and of fair play and of honour. It is not merely an unjust thing which is being done,not merely an unreasonable thing,it is an unnatural thing...” As he wrote I found it hard to believe that this was the aged and decrepit and fussing biped whom I had known,whom I had caricatured,with whom I had talked upon ponderous subjects( a comparison between Belgian and French cities with respect to their location as favoring progress and prosperity,for example );who had with a certain comic shyness revealed to me a secret scheme for reclaiming inundated territories by means of an extraordinary pump “of my invention”. Yet this was he,this was Monsieur Pet-airs Lui-Même : and I enjoyed peculiarly making his complete acquaintance for the first and only time.

  May the Heavens prosper him.

  The next day The Wanderer appeared in the cour walking proudly in a shirt of solid vermilion.

  He kissed his wife—excuse me,Monsieur Malvy,I should say the mother of his children—crying very bitterly and suddenly.

  The plantons yelled for him to line up with the rest,who were waiting outside the gate,bag and baggage. He covered his great king’s eyes with his long golden hands and went.

  With him disappeared unspeakable sunlight,and the dark keen bright strength of the earth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Zoo-loo

  This is the name of the second Delectable Mountain.

  Zulu is he called,partly because he looks like what I have never seen,partly because the sounds somehow relate to his personality and partly because they seemed to please him.

  He is,of all the indescribables whom I have known,definitely the most completely or entirely indescribable. Then( quoth my reader )you will not attempt to describe him,I trust.—Alas,in the medium which I am now using a certain amount or at least quality of description is disgustingly necessary. Were I free with a canvas and some colours...but I am not free. And so I will buck the impossible to the best of my ability. Which,after all,is one way of wasting your time.

  He did not come and he did not go. He drifted.

  His angular anatomy expended and collected itself with an effortless spontaneity which is the prerogative of perhaps fairies,or at any rate of those things in which we no longer believe. But he was more. There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort—things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them—are no longer things;they,and the us which they are,equals A Verb;an IS. The Zulu,then,I must perforce call an IS.

  In this chapter I shall pretend briefly to describe certain aspects and attributes of an IS. Which IS we have called The Zulu,who Himself intrinsically and indubitably escapes analysis. Allons!

  Let me first describe a Sunday morning when we lifted our heads to the fight of the stove-pipes.

  I was awakened by a roar,a human roar,a roar such as only a Hollander can make when a Hollander is honestly angry. As I rose from the domain of the subconscious,the idea that the roar belonged to Bill The Hollander became conviction. Bill The Hollander,alias America Lakes,slept next to The Young Pole( by whom I refer to that young stupid-looking farmer with that peaches-and-cream complexion and those black puttees who had formed the rear rank,with the aid of The Zulu Himself,upon the arrival of Babysnatcher,Bill,Box,Zulu,and Young Pole aforesaid ). Now this same Young Pole was a case. Insufferably vain and self-confident was he. Monsieur Auguste palliated most of his conceited offensiveness on the ground that he was un garçon;we,on the ground that he was obviously and unmistakably The Zulu’s friend. This Pole,I remember,had me design upon the wall over his paillasse( shortly after his arrival )a virile soldat clutching a somewhat dubious flag—I made the latter from descriptions furnished by Monsieur Auguste and The Young Pole himself—intended,I may add,to be the flag of Poland. Underneath which beautiful picture I was instructed to perpetrate the flourishing inscription

  “VIVE LA POLOGNE”

  which I did to the best of my limited ability and for Monsieur Auguste’s sake. No sooner was the photographie complete than The Young Pole,patriotically elated,set out to demonstrate the superiority of his race and nation by making himself obnoxious. I will give him this credit : he was pas méchant,he was in fact a stupid boy. The Fighting Sheeney took him down a peg by flooring him in the nightly “Boxe” which The Fighting Sheeney instituted immediately upon the arrival of The Trick Raincoat—a previous acquaintance of The Sheeney’s at La Santé;the similarity of occupations( or non-occupation;I refer to the profession of pimp )having cemented a friendship between these two. But,for all that The Young Pole’s Sunday-best clothes were covered with filth,and for all that his polished puttees were soiled and scratched by the splintery floor of The Enormous Room( he having rolled well off the blanket upon which the wrestling was supposed to occur ),his spirit was dashed but for the moment. He set about cleaning and polishing himself,combing his hair,smoothing his cap—and was as cocky as ever next morning. In fact I think he was cockier;for he took to guying Bill The Hollander in French,with which tongue Bill was only faintly familiar and of which,consequently,he was doubly suspicious. As The Young Pole lay in bed of an evening after lumières éteintes,he would guy his somewhat massive neighbor in a childish almost girlish voice,shouting with laughter when The Triangle rose on one arm and volleyed Dutch at him,pausing whenever The Triangle’s good-nature threatened to approach the breaking-point,resuming after a minute or two when The Triangle appeared to be on the point of falling into the arms of Morpheus. This sort of blaguing had gone on for several nights without dangerous results. It was,however,inevitable that sooner or later something would happen—and as we lifted our heads on this particular Sunday morn we were not surprised to see The Hollander himself standing over The Young Pole,with clenched paws,wringing shoulders,and an apocalyptic face whiter than Death’s horse.

  The Young Pole seemed incapable of realizing that the climax had come. He lay on his back,cringing a little and laughing foolishly. The Zulu( who slept next to him on our side )had,apparently,just lighted a cigarette which projected upward from a slender holder. The Zulu’s face was as always absolutely expressionless. His chin,with a goodly growth of beard,protruded tranquilly from the blanket which concealed the rest of him with the exception of his feet—feet which were ensconced in large somewhat clumsy leather boots. As The Zulu wore no socks,the X’s of the rawhide lacings on his bare flesh( blue,of course,with cold )presented a rather fascinating kinesis. The Zulu was,to all intents and purposes,gazing at the ceiling...

  Zulu

  Bill The Hollander,clad only in his shirt,his long lean muscled legs planted far apart,shook one fist after another at the recumbent Young Pole,thundering( curiously enough in English )

  “Come on you Gottverdummer son of a bitch of a Polak and fight! Get up out o’there you Polak hoor and I’ll kill you,you Gott­verdummer bastard you! I stood enough o’ your Gottverdummer nonsense you Gottverdummer” etc.

  As Bill The Hollander’s thunder crescendoed steadily,cramming the utmost corners of The Enormous Room with Gott
verdummers which echoingly telescoped one another producing a dim huge shaggy mass of vocal anger,The Young Pole began to laugh less and less;began to plead and excuse and palliate and demonstrate—and all the while the triangular tower in its naked legs and its palpitating chemise brandished its vast fists nearer and nearer,its ghastly yellow lips hurling cumulative volumes of rhythmic profanity,its blue eyes snapping like fire-crackers,its enormous hairy chest heaving and tumbling like a monstrous hunk of sea-weed,its flat soiled feet curling and uncurling their ten sour mutilated toes.

  The Zulu puffed gently as he lay.

  Bill The Hollander’s jaw,sticking into the direction of The Young Pole’s helpless gestures,looked( with the pitiless scorching face behind it )like some square house carried in the fore of a white cyclone. The Zulu depressed his chin;his eyes( poking slowly from beneath the visor of the cap which he always wore,in bed or out of it )regarded the vomiting tower with an abstracted interest. He allowed one hand delicately to escape from the blanket and quietly to remove from his lips the holder with its ­gently-burning cigarette.

  “You won’t eh? You bloody Polak coward!”

  and with a speed in comparison to which lightning is snail-like the tower reached twice for the peaches-and-cream cheeks of the prone victim;who set up a tragic bellowing of his own,writhed upon his somewhat dislocated paillasse,raised his elbows shieldingly,and started to get to his feet by way of his trembling knees—to be promptly knocked flat. Such a howling as The Young Pole set up I have rarely heard : he crawled sideways;he got on one knee;he made a dart forward—and was caught cleanly by an uppercut,lifted through the air a yard,and spread-eagled against the stove which collapsed with an unearthly crash yielding an inky shower of soot upon the combatants and almost crowning The Hollander simultaneously with three four-foot sections of pipe. The Young Pole hit the floor shouting on his head at the apogee of a neatly executed back-somersault,collapsed;rose yelling,and with flashing eyes picked up a length of the ruined tuyau which he lifted high in air—at which The Hollander seized in both fists a similar piece,brought it instantly forward and sideways with incognizable velocity and delivered such an immense wallop as smoothed The Young Pole horizontally to a distance of six feet;where he suddenly landed stove-pipe and all in a crash of entire collapse,having passed clear over The Zulu’s bed. The Zulu,remarking

  “Muh”

  floated hingingly to a sitting position and was saluted by

  “Lie down you Gottverdummer Polaker,I’ll get you next”—in spite of which he gathered himself to rise upward,catching as he did so a swish of The Hollander’s pipe-length which made his cigarette leap neatly,holder and all,upward and outward. The Young Pole had by this time recovered sufficiently to get upon his hands and knees behind The Zulu;who was hurriedly but calmly propelling himself in the direction of the cherished cig­arette-holder,which had rolled under the remains of the stove. Bill The Hollander made for his enemy,raising perpendicularly ten feet in air the unrecognizably dented summit of the pipe which his colossal fists easily encompassed,the muscles in his treelike arms rolling beneath the chemise like balloons. The Young Pole with a shriek of fear climbed The Zulu—receiving just as he had compassed this human hurdle a crack on the seat of his black pants that stood him directly upon his head. Pivoting slightly for an instant he fell loosely at full length on his own paillasse,and lay sobbing and roaring,one elbow protectingly raised,interspersing the inarticulations of woe with a number of sincerely uttered “Assez!”s. Meanwhile The Zulu had discovered the whereabouts of his treasure,had driftingly resumed his original position;and was quietly inserting the also-captured cigarette which appeared somewhat confused by its violent aerial journey. Over The Young Pole stood toweringly Bill The Hollander,his shirt almost in ribbons about his thick bulging neck,thundering as only Hollanders thunder

  “Have you got enough you Gottverdummer Polak?”

  and The Young Pole,alternating nursing the mutilated pulp where his face had been and guarding it with futile and helpless and almost infantile gestures of his quivering hands,was sobbing

  “Oui,Oui,Oui,Assez!”

  And Bill The Hollander hugely turned to The Zulu,stepping accurately to the paillasse of that individual,and demanded

  “And you,you Gottverdummer Polaker,do you want t’fight?” at which The Zulu gently waved in recognition of the compliment and delicately and hastily replied,between slow puffs,

  “Mog.”

  Whereat Bill The Hollander registered a disgusted kick in The Young Pole’s direction and swearingly resumed his paillasse.

  America Lakes,Bathhouse John and The Young Skipper’s Mate

  All this,the reader understands,having taken place in the terribly cold darkness of the half-dawn.

  That very day,after a great deal of examination( on the part of the Surveillant )of the participants in this Homeric ­struggle—said examination failing to reveal the particular guilt or the particular innocence of either—Judas,immaculately attired in a white coat,arrived from downstairs with a step-ladder and proceeded with everyone’s assistance to reconstruct the original tuyau. And a pretty picture Judas made. And a pretty bum job he made. But anyway the stove-pipe drew;and everyone thanked God and fought for places about le poêle. And Monsieur Pet-airs hoped there would be no more fights for a while.

  One might think that The Young Pole had learned a lesson. But no. He had learned( it is true )to leave his immediate neighbor America Lakes to himself;but that is all he had learned. In a few days he was up and about,as full de la blague as ever. The Zulu seemed at times almost worried about him. They spoke together in Polish frequently and—on The Zulu’s part—earnestly. As subsequent events proved,whatever counsel The Zulu imparted was wasted upon his youthful friend. But let us turn for a moment to The Zulu himself.

  He could not,of course,write any language whatever. Two words of French he knew : they were fromage and chapeau. The former he pronounced “grumidge”. In English his vocabulary was even more simple,consisting of the single word “po-lees-man”. Neither B nor myself understood a syllable of Polish( tho’ we subsequently learned Jin-dobri,nima-Zatz,zampni-pisk and shimay pisk,and used to delight The Zulu hugely by giving him

  “Jin-dobri,pan”

  every morning,also by asking him if he had a “papierosa”);consequently in that direction the path of communication was to all intents shut. And withal—I say this not to astonish my reader but merely in the interests of truth—I have never in my life so perfectly understood( even to the most exquisite nuances )whatever idea another human being desired at any moment to communicate to me,as I have in the case of The Zulu. And if I had one-third the command over the written word that he had over the unwritten and the unspoken—not merely that;over the unspeakable and the unwritable—God knows this history would rank with the deep art of all time.

  It may be supposed that he was master of an intricate and delicate system whereby ideas were conveyed through signs of various sorts. On the contrary. He employed signs more or less,but they were in every case extraordinarily simple. The secret of his means of complete and unutterable communication lay in that very essence which I have only defined as an IS;ended and began with an innate and unlearnable control over all which one can only describe as the homogeneously tactile. The Zulu,for example,communicated the following facts in a very few minutes,with unspeakable ease,one day shortly after his arrival:

  He had been formerly a Polish farmer,with a wife and four children. He had left Poland to come to France,where one earned more money. His friend( The Young Pole )accompanied him. They were enjoying life placidly in it may have been Brest—I forget—when one night the gendarmes suddenly broke into their room,raided it,turned it bottomside up,handcuffed the two arch-criminals wrist to wrist,and said “Come with us.” Neither The Zulu nor The Young Pole had the ghost of an idea what all this meant or where they were going. They had no choice but to obey,and obey they did. Everyone boarded a train. Everyone go
t out. Bill The Hollander and The Babysnatcher appeared under escort,handcuffed to each other. They were immediately re-handcuffed to the Polish delegation. The four culprits were hustled,by rapid stages,through several small prisons to La Ferté-Macé. During this journey( which consumed several nights and days )the handcuffs were not once removed. The prisoners slept sitting up or falling over one another. They urinated and defecated with the handcuffs on,all of them hitched together. At various times they complained to their captors that the agony caused by the swelling of their wrists was unbearable—this agony,being the result of over-tightness of the handcuffs,might easily have been relieved by one of the plantons without loss of time or prestige. Their complaints were greeted by commands to keep their mouths shut or they’d get it worse than they had it. Finally they hove in sight of La Ferté and the handcuffs were removed in order to enable two of the prisoners to escort The Zulu’s box upon their shoulders,which said prisoners were only too happy to do under the circumstances. This box,containing not only The Zulu’s personal effects but also a great array of cartridges knives and heaven knows what extraordinary souvenirs which he had gathered from God knows where,was a strong point in the disfavor of The Zulu from the beginning;and was consequently brought along as evidence. Upon arriving all had been searched,the box included,and sent to The Enormous Room. The Zulu( at the conclusion of this dumb and eloquent recital )slipped his sleeve gently above his wrist and exhibited a bluish ring,at whose persistence upon the flesh he evinced great surprise and pleasure,winking happily to us. Several days later I got the same story from The Young Pole in French;but after some little difficulty due to linguistic misunderstandings,and only after a half-hour’s intensive conversation. So far as directness accuracy and speed are concerned,between the method of language and the method of The Zulu there was not the slightest comparison.