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

button attached to his left lapel, and I bent and 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 representative 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, exquisitely furnished in the very best taste. Anyone will tell you where to find the ⸻. It has one of my paintings over the bar: Straightjacket” (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 Vanderbilt 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 breastpocket a moment, and produced a visiting card. On one side I read the name “Cornelius Vanderbilt”⁠—on the other, in bold handwriting⁠—“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 sketchbooks 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 nothing 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 orders from the English government for my release. The whole thing is preposterous. I wrote to the Embassy and told them so. As soon as I set foot outside this place, I shall sue the French government for ten thousand pounds for the loss of time it has occasioned me. Imagine it⁠—I had contracts with countless 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 clanking 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 suggesting an old man. The chief characteristic of the apparition was a certain disagreeable nudity which resulted from its 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 entirety.

I felt myself lost.

A voice said mechanically from the vicinity of my feet: “Il vous faut prendre la douche”⁠—I stared stupidly. The spectre was poised before me; its averted eyes contemplated the window. “Take your bath,” it added as an afterthought, in English⁠—“Come with me.” It turned suddenly. It hurried to the doorway. I followed. Its rapid deadly doll-like hands shut and skillfully 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 building. 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 promenent⁠—a rectangle