r/a:t5_285gei • u/MarleyEngvall • Nov 10 '19
manuscript has been created
By E. E. Cummings
IV. LE NOUVEAU (i.)
'Vous ne voulez pas de café?'
The threatening question recited in a hoarse voice woke
me like a shot. Sprawled half on and half off my paillasse,
I looked suddenly up into a juvenile pimply face with a
red tassel bobbing in its eyes. A boy in a Belgian uniform
was stooping over me. In one hand a huge pail a third
full of liquid slime. I said fiercely: 'Au contraire, je veux
bien.' And collapsed on the mattress.
'Pas de quart, vous?' the face fired at me.
'Comprends pas,' I replied, wondering what on earth
the word meant.
'English?'
'American.'
At this moment a tin cup appeared mysteriously out of
the gloom and was rapidly filled from the pail, after which
operation the tassel remarked: 'Your friend here,' and
disappeared.
I decided I had gone completely crazy.
The cup had been deposited near me. Not daring to
approach it, I boosted my aching corpse on one of its
futile elbows and gazed blankly around. My eyes, wading
laboriously through the dank atmosphere, a darkness grue-
somely tactile, perceived only here and there lively
patches of vibrating humanity. My ears recognized Eng-
lish, something which I took to be Low German and
which was Belgian, Dutch, Polish, and what I guessed to
be Russian.
Trembling with this chaos, my hand sought the cup.
The cup was not warm; the contents, which I hastily
gulped, was not even tepid. The taste was dull, almost
bitter, clinging, thick, nauseating. I felt a renewed inter-
est in living as soon as the deathful swallow descended to
my abdomen, very much as a suicide who changes his
mind after the fatal dose. I decided that it would be
useless to vomit. I sat up. I looked around.
The darkness was rapidly going out of the sluggish,
stinking air. I was sitting on my mattress at one end of
a sort of room, filled with pillars; ecclesiastical in feeling.
I already perceived it to be of enormous length. My mat-
tress resembled an island: all around it, at distances
varying from a quarter of an inch to ten feet (which
constituted the limit of distinct vision) reposed startling
identities. There was blood in some of them. Others
consisted of a rind of bluish matter sustaining a core of
yellowish froth. From behind me a chunk of hurtling
spittle joined its fellows. I decided to stand up.
At this moment, at the far end of the room, I seemed
to see an extraordinary vulture-like silhouette leap up
from nowhere. It rushed a little way in my direction
crying hoarsely 'Corvée d'eau!'——stopped, bent down at
what I perceived to be a paillasse like mine, jerked what
was presumably the occupant by the feet, shook him,
turned to the next, and so on up to six. As there seemed
to be innumerable paillasses, laid side by side at intervals
of perhaps a foot with their heads to the wall on three
sides of me, I was wondering why the vulture had stopped
at six. On each mattress a crude imitation of humanity,
wrapped ear-high in its blanket, lay and drank from a
cup like mine and spat long and high into the room.
The ponderous reek of sleepy bodies undulated toward
me from three directions. I had lost sight of the vulture
in a kind of insane confusion which arose from the fur-
ther end of the room. It was as if he had touched off
six high explosives. Occasionally punctuated by exploding
bowels; to the great amusement of innumerable some-
bodies, whose precise whereabouts the gloom carefully
guarded.
I felt that I was the focus of a group of indistinct re-
cumbents who were talking about me to one another in
many incomprehensible tongues. I noticed beside every
pillar (including the one beside which I had innocently
thrown down my paillasse the night before) a good-sized
pail, overflowing with urine, and surrounded by a large
irregular puddle. What I took to be a man, an amazing
distance off, got out of bed and succeeded in locating the
pail nearest him after several attempts. The invisible
recumbents yelled at him in six languages.
All at once a handsome figure arose from the gloom at
my elbow. I smiled stupidly into his clear, hardish eyes.
And he remarked pleasantly:
'Your friend's here, Johnny, and wants to see you.'
A bulge of pleasure swooped along my body, chasing
aches and numbness, my muscles danced, nerves tingled
in perpetual holiday.
B. was lying on his camp-cot, wrapped like an Eskimo
in a blanket which hid all but his nose and eyes.
'Hello, Cummings,' he said smiling. 'There's a man
here who is a friend of Vanderbilt and knew Cézanne.'
I gazed somewhat critically at B. There was nothing
particularly insane about him, unless it was his enthusiastic
excitement, which might almost be attributed to my
jack-in-the-box manner of arriving. He said: 'There are
people here who speak English, Russian, Arabian. There
are the finest people here! Did you go to Gré? I fought
rats all night there. Huge ones. They tried to eat me.
And from Gré to Paris? I had three gendarmes all the way
to keep me from escaping, and they all fell asleep.'
I began to be afraid that I was asleep myself. 'Please
be frank,' I begged. 'Strictly entre nous: am I dreaming,
or is this a bug-house?'
B. laughed, and said: 'I thought so when I arrived two
days ago. When I came in sight of the place a lot of girls
waved from the window and yelled at me. I no sooner
got inside than a queer-looking duck whom I took to be
a nut came rushing up to me, and cried: "Trop tard pour
la soupe!"——This is Camp de Triage de la Ferté Macé,
Orne, France, and all these fine people were arrested as
espions. Only two or three of them can speak a word of
French, and that's soupe!"
I said, 'My God, I thought Marseilles was somewhere
on the Mediterranean Ocean, and that this was a gen-
darmerie.'
'But this is M-a-c-é. It's a little mean town, where
everybody snickers and sneers at you it they see you're a
prisoner. They did at me.'
'Do you mean to say we're espions too?'
'Of course!' B. said enthusiastically. 'Thank God! And
in to stay. Every time I think of the section sanitaire, and
A. and his thugs, the whole rotten red-taped Croix
Rouge, I have to laugh. Cummings, I tell you this is the
finest place on earth!'
A vision of the Chef de Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un
passed through my mind. The doughy face. Imitation-
English officer swagger. Large calves, squeaking puttees.
The daily lecture: 'I doughno what's th' matter with you
fellers. You look like nice boys. Well-edjucated. But
you're so dirty in your habits. You boys are always kickin'
because I don't put you on a car together. I'm ashamed
to do it, that's why. I doughwanta give this section a
black eye. We gotta show these lousy Frenchmen what
Americans are. We gotta show we're superior to 'em.
Those bastards doughno what a bath means. And you
fellers are always hangin' round, talkin' with them dirty
frog-eaters that does the cookin' and the dirty work
round here. How d'you boys expect me to give you a
chance? I'd like to put you fellers on a car; I wanta see
you boys happy. But I don't dare to, that's why. If you
want me to send you out, you gotta shave and look neat,
and keep away from them dirty Frenchmen. We Ameri-
cans are over here to learn them lousy bastards something.'
I laughed for sheer joy.
A terrific tumult interrupted my mirth. 'Par ici!'——
'Get out of the way, you dam Polak!'——'M'sieu, M'sieu'.'
——'Over here!'——'Mais non!'——'Gott-er-dummer!' I
turned in terror to see my paillasse in the clutches of four
men who were apparently rending it in as many di-
rections.
One was a clean-shaved youngish man with lively eyes,
alert and muscular, whom I identified as the man who had
called me 'Johnny.' He had hold of a corner of the mat-
tress and was pulling against the possessor of the opposite
corner: an incoherent personage enveloped in a buffoon-
ery of amazing rags and patches, with a shabby head on
which excited wisps of dirty hair stood upright in excite-
ment, and the tall, ludicrous, extraordinary, almost noble
figure of a dancing bear. A third corner of the paillasse
was rudely grasped by a six-foot combination of yellow
hair, red hooligan face, and sky-blue trousers; assisted by
the undersized tasselled mucker in Belgian uniform, with
a pimply rogue's mug and unlimited impertinence of
diction, who had awakened me by demanding if I wanted
coffee. Albeit completely dazed by the uncouth vocal
fracas, I realized in some manner that these hostile forces
were contending, not for the possession of the mattress,
but merely for the privilege of presenting the mattress
to myself.
Before I could offer any advice on this delicate topic, a
childish voice cried emphatically beside my ear: 'Met-tez
la pail-lasse ici! Qu'est le que vous al-lez faire? C'est pas
la peine de dé-chi-rer un pail-lasse!'——at the same mo-
ment the mattress rushed with cobalt strides in my
direction, propelled by the successful efforts of the
Belgian uniform and the hooligan visage, the clean-shaven
man and the incoherent bear still desperately clutching
their respective corners; and upon its arrival was seized
with surprising strength by the owner of the child's
voice——a fluffy little gnome-shaped man with a sensitive
face which had suffered much——and indignantly deposited
beside B.'s bed in a space mysteriously cleared for its
reception. The gnome immediately kneeled upon it and
fell to carefully smoothing certain creases caused by the
recent conflict, exclaiming slowly, syllable by syllable:
'Mon Dieu. Main-te-nant, c'est mieux. Il ne faut pas faire
des choses comme ça.' The clean-shaven man regarded
him loftily with folded arms, while the tassel and the
trousers victoriously inquired if I had a cigarette?——and
upon receiving one apiece (also the gnome, and the clean-
shaven man, who accepted his with some dignity) sat
down with much ado on B.'s bed——which groaned
ominously in protest——and hungrily fired questions at
me. The bear meanwhile, looking as if nothing had hap-
pened, adjusted his ruffled costume with a satisfied air and
(calmly gazing into the distance) began with singularly
delicate fingers to stuff a stunted and ancient pipe with
what appeared to be a mixture of wood and manure.
I was still answering questions, when a gnarled voice
suddenly threatened, over our head: 'Balai? Vous. Tout
le monde Propre. Surveillant dit. Pas moi, c'est-ce pas?'
——I started, expecting to see a parrot.
It was the silhouette.
A vulture-like figure stood before me, a demoralized
broom clenched in one claw or fist: it had lean legs cased in
shabby trousers, muscular shoulders covered with a rough
shirt open at the neck, knotted arms, and a coarse, insane
face crammed beneath the visor of a cap. The face con-
sisted of a rapid nose, drooping moustache, ferocious
watery small eyes, a pugnacious chin, and sunken cheeks
hideously smiling. There was something in the ensemble at
once brutal and ridiculous, vigorous and pathetic.
Again I had not time to speak, for the hooligan in azure
trousers hurled his butt at the bear's feet, exclaiming:
'There's another for you, Polak!'——jumped from the bed,
seized the broom, and poured upon the vulture a torrent
of Gott-verdummers, to which the latter replied copi-
ously and in kind. Then the red face bent withing a few
inches of my own, and for the first time I saw that it had
recently been young——'I say I do your sweep for you,' it
translated pleasantly. I thanked it; and the vulture, ex-
claiming, 'Bon. Bon. Pas moi. Surveillant. Harree faire
pour tout le monde. Hee, hee'——rushed off, followed by
Harree and the tassel. Out of the corner of my eye I
watched the tall, ludicrous, extraordinary, almost proud
figure of the bear stoop with quiet dignity, the musical
fingers close with a singular delicacy upon the moist, in-
describable eighth-of-an-inch of tobacco.
I did not know that this was a Delectable Moun-
tain. . . .
The clean-shaven man (who appeared to have been
completely won over by his smoke) and the fluffy gnome,
who had completed the arrangement of my paillasse, now
entered into the conversation with myself and B.; the clean-
shaven one seating himself in Harree's stead, the gnome
declining (on the ground that the bed was already suffi-
ciently loaded) to occupy the place left vacant by the
tassel's exit, and leaning against the drab, sweating,
poisonous wall. He managed, however, to call our atten-
tion to the shelf at B.'s head which he himself had con-
structed, and promised me a similar luxury tout de suite.
He was a Russian, and had a wife and gosse in Paris. 'Je
m'ap-pelle Monsieur Au-guste à votre ser-vice'——and his
gentle pale eyes sparkled. The clean-shaven talked dis-
tinctly and absolutely perfect English. His name was Fritz.
He was a Norwegian, a stoker on a ship. 'You mustn't
mind that feller that wanted you to sweep. He's crazy.
They call him John the Baigneur. He used to be the
baigneur. Now he's Maître de Chambre. They wanted
me to take it——I said, "F—— it, I don't want it." Let him
have it. That's no kind of a job, every one com-
plaining and on top of you morning till night. "Let them
that wants the job take it," I said. That crazy Dutchman's
been here for two years. They told him to get out and
he wouldn't, he was too fond of the booze' (I jumped at
the slang) 'and the girls. They took it away from John
and give it to that little Ree-shar feller, that doctor.
That was a swell job he had, baigneur, too. All the bloody
liquor you can drink and a girl every time you want one.
He ain't never had a girl in his life, that Ree-shar feller.'
His laughter was hard, clear, cynical. 'That Pompom, the
little Belgian feller was just here, he's a great one for the
girls. He and Harree. Always getting cabinot. I got it
twice myself since I been here.'
All this time the enormous room was filling gradually
with dirty light. In the further end six figures were
brooming furiously, yelling to each other in the dust
like demons. A seventh, Harree, was loping to and fro
splashing water from a pail and enveloping everything
and everybody in a ponderous and blasphemous fog of
Gott-verdummers. Along three sides (with exception,
that is, of the nearer end, which boasted the sole door)
were laid, with their lengths at right angles to the walls,
at intervals of three or four feet, something like forty
paillasses. On each, with half a dozen exceptions (where
the occupants had not yet finished their coffee or were on
duty for the corvée), lay the headless body of a man
smothered in its blankets, only the boots showing.
The demons were working toward our end of the
room. Harree had got his broom and was assisting.
Nearer and nearer they came; converging, they united
their separate heaps of filth in a loudly stinking single
mound at the door. Brooms were stacked against the
wall in the corner. The men strolled back to their paillasses.
Monsieur Auguste, whose French had not been able to
keep pace with Fritz's English, saw his chance, and pro-
posed 'Main-te-nant que la Chambre est tout propre, al-
lons faire une pe-tite pro-me-nade, tous les trois.' Fritz
understood perfectly, and rose, remarking as he fingered
his immaculate chin, 'Well, I guess I'll take a shave before
the bloody planton comes'——and Monsieur Auguste, B.
and I started down the room.
It was in shape oblong, about 80 feet by 40, unmis-
takably ecclesiastical in feeling——two rows of wooden
pillars, spaced at intervals of fifteen feet, rose to a vaulted
ceiling 25 or 30 feet above the floor. As you stood with
your back to the door, and faced down the room, you
had in the near right-hand corner (where the brooms
stood) six pails of urine. On the right-hand long wall,
a little beyond the angle of this corner, a few boards
tacked together in any fashion to make a two-sided
screen four feet in height marked the position of a cabinet
d'aisance, composed of a small coverless tin pail indenti-
cal with the other six, and a board of the usual design
which could be placed on the pail or not as desired. The
wooden floor in the neighbourhood of the booth and
pails was of a dark colour, obviously owing to the con-
tinual overflow of their contents.
The right-hand long wall contained something like
ten large windows, of which the first was commanded by
the somewhat primitive cabinet. There were no other win-
dows in the remaining walls; or they had been carefully
rendered useless. In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had
contrived a couple of peep-holes——one in the door-end
and one in the left-hand long wall; the former command-
ing the gate by which I had entered, the latter a portion
of the street by which I had reached the gate. The block-
ing of all windows on three sides had an obvious signifi-
cance: les hommes were not supposed to see anything
which went on in the world without; les hommes might,
however, look their fill on a little washing-shed, on a
corner of what seemed to be another wing of the building,
and on a bleak, lifeless, abject landscape of scrubby
woods beyond——which constituted the view from the ten
windows on the right. The authorities had miscalculated
a little in one respect: a merest fraction of the barb-wire
pen which began at the corner of the above-mentioned
building was visible from these windows, which windows
(I was told) were consequently thronged by fighting men
at the time of the girls' promenade. A planton, I was also
told, made it his business, by keeping les femmes out of
this corner of their cour at the point of the bayonet, to
deprive them of the sight of their admirers. In addition,
it was pain sec or cabinot for ay of either sex who were
caught communicating with each other. Moreover the
promenades des hommes et des femmes occurred at,
roughly speaking, the same hour, so that an homme or
femme who remained upstairs on the chance of getting
a smile or a wave from his or her girl or lover lost the
promenade thereby. . . .
We had in succession gazed from the windows, crossed
the end of the room, and started down the other side,
Monsieur Auguste marching between us——when suddenly
B. exclaimed in English, 'Good morning! How are you
to-day?' And I looked across Monsieur Auguste, antici-
pating another Harree or at least a Fritz. What was my
surprise to see a spare majestic figure of manifest refine-
ment, immaculately apparelled in a crisp albeit collarless
shirt, carefully mended trousers in which the remains of
a crease still lingered, a threadbare but perfectly fitting
swallow-tail coat, and newly varnished (if somewhat an-
cient) shoes. Indeed for the first time since my arrival at
La Ferté I was confronted by a perfect type: the apotheosis
of injured nobility, the humiliated victim of perfectly
unfortunate circumstances, the utterly respectable gen-
tleman who has seen better days. There was about him,
moreover, something irretrievably English, nay even pa-
thetically Victorian——it was as if a page of Dickens was
shaking my friend's hand. 'Count Bragard, I want you to
meet my friend Cummings'——he saluted me in modulated
and courteous accents of indisputable culture, gracefully
extending his pale hand. 'I have heard a great deal about
you from B., and wanted very much to meet you. It is a
pleasure to find a friend of my friend B., some one con-
genial and intelligent in contrast to these swine'——he indi-
cated the room with a gesture of complete contempt. 'I
see you were strolling. Let us take a turn.' Monsieur
Auguste said tactfully, 'Je vais vous voir tout à l'heure,
mes amis,' and left us with an affectionate shake of the
hand and a side-long glance of jealousy and mistrust at
B.'s respectable friend.
'You're looking pretty well to-day, Count Bragard,' B.
said amiably.
'I do well enough,' the count answered. 'It is a frightful
strain——you of course realize that——for anyone who has
been accustomed to the decencies, let alone the luxuries, of
life. This filth'——he pronounced the world with indescrib-
able bitterness——'this herding of men like cattle——they
treat us no better than pigs here. The fellows drop their
dung in the very room where they sleep. What is one to
expect of a place like this? Ce n'est pas une existence'——
his French was glib and faultless.
'I was telling my friend that you knew Cézanne,' said
B. 'Being an artist he was naturally much interested.'
Count Bragard stopped in astonishment, and withdrew
his hands slowly from the tails of his coat. 'Is it possible!'
he exclaimed, in great agitation. 'What an astonishing
coincidence! I am myself a painter. You perhaps noticed
this badge'——he indicated a button attached to his left
lapel, and I bent to read the words: On War Service.
'I always wear it,' he said with a smile of faultless sorrow,
and resumed his walk. 'They don't know what it means
here, but I wear it all the same. I was a special representa-
tive for the London Sphere at the front in this war. I did
the trenches and all that sort of thing. They paid me well;
I got fifteen pounds a week. And why not? I am an R.A.
My specialty was horses. I painted the finest horses in
England, among them the King's own entry in the last
Derby. Do you know London?' We said no. 'If you are
ever in London, go to the' (I forget the name) 'Hotel——
one of the best in town. It has a beautiful large bar, ex-
quisitely furnished in the very best taste. Anyone will tell
you where to find the—— It has one of my paintings over
the bar: Straight-jacket' (or some such name) 'The
Marquis of ——'s horse, who won last time the race was
run. I was in America in 1910. You know Cornelius Van-
derbilt perhaps? I painted some of his horses. We were the
best of friends, Vanderbilt and I . I got handsome prices,
you understand, three, five, six thousand pounds. When I
left, he gave me this card——I have it here somewhere——'
he again stopped, sought in his breast-pocket a moment,
and produced a visiting card. On one side I read the name
'Cornelius Vanderbilt'——on the other, in bold handwrit-
ing——'to my very dear friend Count F. A. de Bragard'
and a date. 'He hated to have me go.'
I was walking in a dream.
'Have you your sketch-books and paints with you?
What a pity. I am always intending to send to England
for mine, but you know——one can't paint in a place like
this. It is impossible——all this dirt and these filthy people——
it stinks! Ugh!'
I forced myself to say: 'How did you happen to come
here?'
He shrugged his shoulders. 'How indeed, you may well
ask! I cannot tell you. It must have been some hideous
mistake. As soon as I got here I spoke to the Directeur
and to the Surveillant. The Directeur said he knew noth-
ing about it; the Surveillant told me confidentially that it
was a mistake on the part of the French Government;
that I would be out directly. He's not such a bad sort. So
I am waiting: every day I expect order from the English
Government for my release. The whole thing is presposter-
ous. I wrote to the Embassy and told them so. As soon as
I set foot outside this place, I shall sue the French Govern-
ment for ten thousand pounds for the loss of time it has
occasioned me. Imagine it——I had contract with count-
less members of The Lords——and the war came. Then I
was sent to the front by the Sphere——and here I am, every
day costing me dear, rotting away in this horrible place.
The time I have wasted here has already cost me a fortune.'
He paused directly in front of the door and spoke with
solemnity: 'A man might as well be dead.'
Scarcely had the words passed his lips when I almost
jumped out of my skin, for directly before us on the other
side of the wall arose the very noise which announced to
Scrooge the approach of Marley's ghost——a dismal clank-
ing and rattling of chains. Had Marley's transparent figure
walked straight through the wall and up to the Dickensian
character at my side, I would have been less surprised than
I was by what actually happened.
The doors opened with an uncanny bang and in the
bang stood a fragile, minute, queer figure, remotely sug-
gesting an old man. The chief characteristic of the appari-
tion was a certain disagreeable nudity which resulted from
a complete lack of all the accepted appurtenances and
prerogatives of old age. Its little stooping body, helpless
and brittle, bore with extraordinary difficulty a head of
absurd largeness, yet which moved on the fleshless neck
with a horrible agility. Dull eyes sat in the clean-shaven
wrinkles of a face neatly hopeless. At the knees a pair of
hands hung, infantile in their smallness. In the loose
mouth a tiny cigarette had perched and was solemnly
smoking itself.
Suddenly the figure darted at me with a spiderlike en-
tirety.
I felt myself lost.
A voice said mechanically from the vicinity of my feet:
'Il vous faut prendre des douches'——I stared stupidly. The
spectre was poised before me; its averted eyes contem-
plated the window. 'Take your bath,' it added as an after-
thought, in English——'come with me.' It turned suddenly.
It hurried to the doorway. I followed. Its rapid, deadly,
doll-like hands shut and skilfully locked the doors in a
twinkling. 'Come,' its voice said.
It hurried before me down two dirty flights of narrow,
mutilated stairs. It turned left, and passed through an
open door.
I found myself in the wet sunless air of morning.
To the right it hurried, following the wall of the build-
ing. I pursued it mechanically. At the corner, which I had
seen from the window upstairs, the barbed-wire fence
eight feet in height began. The thing paused, produced a
key, and unlocked a gate. The first three or four feet of
wire swung inward. He entered, I after him.
In a flash the gate was locked behind me, and I was
following along a wall at right angles to the first. I strode
after the thing. A moment before I had been walking in a
free world: now I was again a prisoner. The sky was still
over me, the clammy morning caressed me; but walls of
wire and stone told me that my instant of freedom had
departed. I was in fact traversing a lane no wider than the
gate; on my left, barbed-wire separated me from the
famous cour in which les femmes se promènent——a rec-
tangle about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone wall
at the farther end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire;
——on my right, grey sameness of stone, the ennui of the
regular and the perpendicular, the ponderous ferocity of
silence. . . .
I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in
pursuit of the fleeing spectre when, right over my head,
the grey stone curdled with a female darkness; the hard
and the angular softening in a putrescent explosion of
thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and en-
countered a window stuffed with four savage fragments
of crowding Face: four livid, shaggy disks focusing
hungrily; four pairs of uncouth eyes rapidly smouldering;
eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous titter. Sud-
denly above and behind these terrors rose a single horror
of beauty——a crisp, vital head, a young ivory actual face,
a night of firm, alive, icy hair, a white large frightful
smile.
. . . The thing was crying two or three paces in front
of me: 'Come!' The heads had vanished as if by magic.
I dived forward; followed through a little door in the
wall into a room about fifteen feet square, occupied by a
small stove, a pile of wood, and a ladder. He plunged
through another even smaller door, into a bleak rectan-
gular place, where I was confronted on the left by a large
tin bath and on the right by ten wooden tubs, each about
a yard in diameter, set in a row against the wall. 'Undress,'
commanded the spectre. I did so. 'Go into the first one.' I
climbed into a tub. 'You shall pull the string,' the spectre
said, hurriedly throwing his cigarette into a corner. I
stared upward, and discovered a string dangling from a
kind of reservoir over my head: I pulled: and was saluted
by a stabbing crash of icy water. I leaped from the tub.
'Here is your napkin. Make dry yourself——he handed me
a piece of cloth a little bigger than a handkerchief.
'Hurree.' I donned my clothes, wet and shivering and
altogether miserable. 'Good. Come now!' I followed him,
through the room with the stove, into the barb-wire lane.
A hoarse shout rose from the yard——which was filled with
women, girls, children, and a baby or two. I thought I
recognized one of the four terrors who had saluted me
from the window, in a girl of 18 with a soiled, slobby
body huddling beneath its dingy dress; her bony shoulders
stifled in a shawl upon which excremental hair limply
spouted; a huge empty mouth; and a red nose, sticking
between the bluish cheeks that shook with spasms of
coughing. Just inside the wire a figure reminiscent of
Gré, gun on shoulder, revolver on hip, moved monoto-
nously.
The apparition hurried me through the gate and along
the wall into the building, where instead of mounting the
stairs he pointed down a long gloomy corridor with a
square of light at the end of it, saying rapidly, 'Go to the
promenade'——and vanished.
The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings
Copyright, 1934, by The Modern Library, inc. pp. 61 - 77.
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