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

a loudly stinking single mound at the door. Brooms were stacked against the wall in the corner. The men strolled back to their mattresses.

Monsieur Auguste, whose French had not been able to keep pace with Fritz’s English, saw his chance, and proposed “now that the Room is all clean, let us go take a little walk, the three of us.” 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, unmistakably 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 identical 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 neighborhood of the booth and pails was of a dark colour, obviously owing to the continual 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 windows in the remaining walls; or they had been carefully rendered useless. In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had contrived a couple of peepholes⁠—one in the door-end and one in the left-hand long wall; the former commanding the gate by which I had entered, the latter a portion of the street by which I had reached the gate. The blocking of all windows on three sides had an obvious significance: 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 barbwire 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 girl’s 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 dry bread or cabinot for any of either sex who were caught communicating with each other. Moreover the promenades of the men and the women occurred at roughly speaking the same hour, so that a man or woman 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 today?” And I looked across Monsieur Auguste, anticipating another Harree or at least a Fritz. What was my surprise to see a spare majestic figure of manifest refinement, 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 swallowtail coat, and newly varnished (if somewhat ancient) 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 gentleman who had seen better days. There was about him, moreover, something irretrievably English, nay even pathetically 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., someone congenial and intelligent in contrast to these swine”⁠—he indicated the room with a gesture of complete contempt. “I see you were strolling. Let us take a turn.” Monsieur Auguste said tactfully, “I’ll see you soon, friends,” and left us with an affectionate shake of the hand and a sidelong glance of jealousy and mistrust at B.’s respectable friend.

“You’re looking pretty well today, Count Bragard,” B. said amiably.

“I do well enough,” the Count answered. “It is a frightful strain⁠—you of course realise that⁠—for anyone who has been accustomed to the decencies, let alone the luxuries, of life. This filth”⁠—he pronounced the word with indescribable 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