The Enormous Room - E. E. Cummings (sci fi books to read .TXT) 📗

sorry to find the way hilly, and in places bad underfoot; yet the unknown adventure lying before me, and the delicious silence of the night (in which our words rattled queerly like tin soldiers in a plush-lined box) boosted me into a condition of mysterious happiness. We talked, the older and I, of strange subjects. As I suspected, he had been not always a gendarme. He had seen service among the Arabs. He had always liked languages and had picked up Arabian with great ease⁠—of this he was very proud. For instance⁠—the Arabian way of saying “Give me to eat” was this; when you wanted wine you said so-and-so; “Nice day” was something else. He thought I could pick it up inasmuch as I had done so creditably with French. He was absolutely certain that English was much easier to learn than French, and would not be moved. Now what was the American language like? I explained that it was a sort of Argot-English. When I gave him some phrases he was astonished⁠—“It sounds like English!” he cried, and retailed his stock of English phrases for my approval. I tried hard to get his intonation of the Arabian, and he helped me on the difficult sounds. America must be a strange place, he thought.⁠ ⁠…

After two hours walking he called a halt, bidding us rest. We all lay flat on the grass by the roadside. The moon was still battling with clouds. The darkness of the fields on either side was total. I crawled on hands and knees to the sound of silver-trickling water and found a little spring-fed stream. Prone, weight on elbows, I drank heavily of its perfect blackness. It was icy, talkative, minutely alive.

The older presently gave a perfunctory “alors”; we got up; I hoisted my suspicious utterances upon my shoulder, which recognized the renewal of hostilities with a neuralgic throb. I banged forward with bigger and bigger feet. A bird, scared, swooped almost into my face. Occasionally some night-noise pricked a futile, minute hole in the enormous curtain of soggy darkness. Uphill now. Every muscle thoroughly aching, head spinning, I half-straightened my no longer obedient body; and jumped: face to face with a little wooden man hanging all by itself in a grove of low trees.

—The wooden body, clumsy with pain, burst into fragile legs with absurdly large feet and funny writhing toes; its little stiff arms made abrupt cruel equal angles with the road. About its stunted loins clung a ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There was in this complete silent doll a gruesome truth of instinct, a success of uncanny poignancy, an unearthly ferocity of rectangular emotion.

For perhaps a minute the almost obliterated face and mine eyed one another in the silence of intolerable autumn.

Who was this wooden man? Like a sharp black mechanical cry in the spongy organism of gloom stood the coarse and sudden sculpture of his torment; the big mouth of night carefully spurted the angular actual language of his martyred body. I had seen him before in the dream of some medieval saint, with a thief sagging at either side, surrounded with crisp angels. Tonight he was alone; save for myself, and the moon’s minute flower pushing between slabs of fractured cloud.

I was wrong, the moon and I and he were not alone.⁠ ⁠… A glance up the road gave me two silhouettes at pause. The gendarmes were waiting. I must hurry to catch up or incur suspicions by my sloth. I hastened forward, with a last look over my shoulder⁠ ⁠… the wooden man was watching us.

When I came abreast of them, expecting abuse, I was surprised by the older’s saying quietly “We haven’t far to go,” and plunging forward imperturbably into the night.

Nor had we gone a half hour before several dark squat forms confronted us: houses. I decided that I did not like houses⁠—particularly as now my guardian’s manner abruptly changed; once more tunics were buttoned, holsters adjusted, and myself directed to walk between and keep always up with the others. Now the road became thoroughly afflicted with houses, houses not, however, so large and lively as I had expected from my dreams of Marseilles. Indeed we seemed to be entering an extremely small and rather disagreeable town. I ventured to ask what its name was. “Mah-say” was the response. By this I was fairly puzzled. However the street led us to a square, and I saw the towers of a church sitting in the sky; between them the round, yellow, big moon looked immensely and peacefully conscious⁠ ⁠… no one was stirring in the little streets, all the houses were keeping the moon’s secret.

We walked on.

I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew⁠—the moon’s picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon’s sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonlight.⁠—Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of colour. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.

We turned a corner, then another. My guides conferred concerning the location of something, I couldn’t make out what. Then the older nodded in the direction of a long dull dirty mass not a hundred yards away, which (as near as I could see) served either as a church or a tomb. Toward this we turned. All too soon I made out its entirely dismal exterior. Grey long stone walls, surrounded on the street side by a fence of ample proportions and uniformly dull colour. Now I perceived that we made toward a gate, singularly narrow and forbidding, in the grey long wall. No living