The Enormous Room, E. E. Cummings [beautiful books to read txt] 📗

arose from the further end of the room. It was as if he had touched off six high explosives. Occasional pauses in the minutely crazy din were accurately punctuated by exploding bowels; to the great amusement of innumerable somebodies, whose precise whereabouts the gloom carefully guarded.

I felt that I was the focus of a group of indistinct recumbents 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 mattress the night before) a good sized pail, overflowing with urine, and surrounded by a large irregular puddle. My mattress was within an inch of the nearest puddle. What I took to be a man, an amazing distance off, got out of bed and succeeded in locating the pail nearest to him after several attempts. Ten invisible recumbents yelled at him in six languages.

All at once a handsome figure rose 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: ‘Too late for soup!’⁠—This is Campe de Triage de la Ferté Macé, Orne, France, and all these fine people were arrested as spies. 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 gendarmerie.”

“But this is M-a-c-é. It’s a little mean town, where everybody snickers and sneers at you if 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, and 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 la section Sanitaire Ving-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 doughtwanta 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 Americans 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 damn Polak!”⁠—“M’sieu, M’sieu!”⁠—“Over here!”⁠—“Mais non!”⁠—“Gott-ver-dummer!” I turned in terror to see my paillasse in the clutches of four men who were apparently rending it in as many directions.

One was a clean-shaven 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 mattress and was pulling against the possessor of the opposite corner: an incoherent personage enveloped in a buffoonery of amazing rags and patches, with a shabby head on which excited wisps of dirty hair stood upright in excitement, 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 tasseled 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 realised 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: “Put the mattress here! What are you trying to do? There’s no use destroy-ing a mat-tress!”⁠—at the same moment the mattress rushed with cobalt strides in