was about to be increased, a bell from somewhere afar (as a matter of fact the gate which had admitted my weary self to La Ferté upon a memorable night, as already has been faithfully recounted) tanged audibly—whereat up jumped the more strenuous inhabitants of The Enormous Room and made pell-mell for the common peephole, situated at the door end or nearer end of our habitat and commanding a somewhat fragmentary view of the gate together with the arrivals, male and female, whom the bell announced. In one particular case the watchers appeared almost unduly excited, shouting “four!”—“big box”—“five gendarmes!” and other incoherences with a loudness which predicted great things. As nearly always, I had declined to participate in the melee; and was still lying comfortably horizontal on my bed (thanking God that it had been well and thoroughly mended by a fellow prisoner whom we called The Frog and Le Coiffeur—a tremendously keen-eyed man with a large drooping moustache, whose boon companion, chiefly on account of his shape and gait, we knew as The Lobster) when the usual noises attendant upon the unlocking of the door began with exceptional violence. I sat up. The door shot open, there was a moment’s pause, a series of grunting remarks uttered by two rather terrible voices; then in came four nouveaux of a decidedly interesting appearance. They entered in two ranks of two each. The front rank was made up of an immensely broad shouldered hipless and consequently triangular man in blue trousers belted with a piece of ordinary rope, plus a thickset ruffianly personage the most prominent part of whose accoutrements were a pair of hideous whiskers. I leaped to my feet and made for the door, thrilled in spite of myself. By the, in this case, shifty blue eyes, the pallid hair, the well-knit form of the rope’s owner I knew instantly a Hollander. By the coarse brutal features half-hidden in the piratical whiskers, as well as by the heavy mean wandering eyes, I recognised with equal speed a Belgian. Upon his shoulders the front rank bore a large box, blackish, well-made, obviously very weighty, which box it set down with a grunt of relief hard by the cabinet. The rear rank marched behind in a somewhat asymmetrical manner: a young, stupid-looking, clear-complexioned fellow (obviously a farmer, and having expensive black puttees and a handsome cap with a shiny black leather visor) slightly preceded a tall, gliding, thinnish, unjudgeable personage who peeped at everyone quietly and solemnly from beneath the visor of a somewhat large slovenly cloth cap showing portions of a lean, long, incognisable face upon which sat, or rather drooped, a pair of mustachios identical in character with those which are sometimes pictorially attributed to a Chinese dignitary—in other words, the mustachios were exquisitely narrow, homogeneously downward, and made of something like black corn-silk. Behind les nouveaux staggered four paillasses motivated mysteriously by two pair of small legs belonging (as it proved) to Garibaldi and the little Machine-Fixer; who, coincident with the tumbling of the mattresses to the floor, perspiringly emerged to sight.
The first thing the shifty-eyed Hollander did was to exclaim Gottverdummer. The first thing the whiskery Belgian did was to grab his paillasse and stand guard over it. The first thing the youth in the leggings did was to stare helplessly about him, murmuring something whimperingly in Polish. The first thing the fourth nouveau did was pay no attention to anybody; lighting a cigarette in an unhurried manner as he did so, and puffing silently and slowly as if in all the universe nothing whatever save the taste of tobacco existed.
A bevy of Hollanders were by this time about the triangle, asking him all at once Was he from so-and-so, What was in his box. How long had he been in coming, etc. Half a dozen stooped over the box itself, and at least three pairs of hands were on the point of trying the lock—when suddenly with incredible agility the unperturbed smoker shot a yard forward, landing quietly beside them; and exclaimed rapidly and briefly through his nose.
“Mang.”
He said it almost petulantly, or as a child says “Tag! You’re it.”
The onlookers recoiled, completely surprised. Whereat the frightened youth in black puttees sidled over and explained with a pathetic, at once ingratiating and patronising, accent:
“He is not nasty. He’s a good fellow. He’s my friend. He wants to say that it’s his, that box. He doesn’t speak French.”
“It’s the Gottverdummer Polak’s box,” said the Triangular Man exploding in Dutch. “They’re a pair of Polakers; and this man” (with a twist of his pale-blue eyes in the direction of the Bewhiskered One) “and I had to carry it all the Gottverdummer way to this Gottverdummer place.”
All this time the incognizable nouveau was smoking slowly and calmly, and looking at nothing at all with his black buttonlike eyes. Upon his face no faintest suggestion of expression could be discovered by the hungry minds which focused unanimously upon its almost stern contours. The deep furrows in the cardboardlike cheeks (furrows which resembled slightly the gills of some extraordinary fish, some unbreathing fish) moved not an atom. The moustache drooped in something like mechanical tranquillity. The lips closed occasionally with a gesture at once abstracted and sensitive upon the lightly and carefully held cigarette; whose curling smoke accentuated the poise of the head, at once alert and uninterested.
Monsieur Auguste broke in, speaking, as I thought, Russian—and in an instant he and the youth in puttees and the Unknowable’s cigarette and the box and the Unknowable had disappeared through the crowd in the direction of Monsieur Auguste’s paillasse, which was also the direction of the paillasse belonging to the Cordonnier as he was sometimes called—a diminutive man with immense mustachios of his own who promenaded with Monsieur Auguste, speaking sometimes French but, as a general rule, Russian or Polish.
Which was my first glimpse, and is the reader’s, of
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