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

about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone wall at the further end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire;⁠—on my right, grey sameness of stone, the ennui of the regular and the perpendicular, the ponderous ferocity of silence.⁠ ⁠…

I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of the fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with a female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and encountered a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding Face: four livid, shaggy disks focusing hungrily; four pair of uncouth eyes rapidly smouldering; eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous titter. Suddenly above and behind these terrors rose a single horror of beauty⁠—a crisp vital head, a young ivory actual face, a night of firm, alive, icy hair, a white, large, frightful smile.

… The thing was crying two or three paces in front of me: “Come!” The heads had vanished as by magic.

I dived forward; followed through a little door in the wall into a room about fifteen feet square, occupied by a small stove, a pile of wood, and a ladder. He plunged through another even smaller door, into a bleak rectangular place, where I was confronted on the left by a large tin bath and on the right by ten wooden tubs, each about a yard in diameter, set in a row against the wall. “Undress” commanded the spectre. I did so. “Go into the first one.” I climbed into the tub. “You shall pull the string,” the spectre said, hurriedly throwing his cigarette into a corner. I stared upward, and discovered a string dangling from a kind of reservoir over my head: I pulled: and was saluted by a stabbing crash of icy water. I leaped from the tub. “Here is your napkin. Make dry yourself”⁠—he handed me a piece of cloth a little bigger than a handkerchief. “Hurree.” I donned my clothes, wet and shivering and altogether miserable. “Good. Come now!” I followed him, through the room with the stove, into the barbed-wire lane. A hoarse shout rose from the yard⁠—which was filled with women, girls, children, and a baby or two. I thought I recognised one of the four terrors who had saluted me from the window, in a girl of 18 with a soiled slobby body huddling beneath its dingy dress; her bony shoulders stifled in a shawl upon which excremental hair limply spouted; a huge empty mouth; and a red nose, sticking between the bluish cheeks that shook with spasms of coughing. Just inside the wire a figure reminiscent of Gré, gun on shoulder, revolver on hip, moved monotonously.

The apparition hurried me through the gate, and along the wall into the building, where instead of mounting the stairs he pointed down a long, gloomy corridor with a square of light at the end of it, saying rapidly, “Go to the promenade”⁠—and vanished.

With the laughter of the Five still ringing in my ears, and no very clear conception of the meaning of existence, I stumbled down the corridor; bumping squarely into a beefy figure with a bull’s neck and the familiar revolver who demanded furiously: “What are you doing there? Nom de Dieu!”⁠—“Pardon. Les douches,” I answered, quelled by the collision.⁠—He demanded in wrathy French “Who took you to the douches?”⁠—For a moment I was at a complete loss⁠—then Fritz’s remark about the new baigneur flashed through my mind: “Ree-shar” I answered calmly.⁠—The bull snorted satisfactorily. “Get into the cour and hurry up about it” he ordered.⁠—“C’est par là?” I inquired politely.⁠—He stared at me contemptuously without answering; so I took it upon myself to use the nearest door, hoping that he would have the decency not to shoot me. I had no sooner crossed the threshold when I found myself once more in the welcome air; and not ten paces away I espied B. peacefully lounging, with some thirty others, within a cour about one quarter the size of the women’s. I marched up to a little dingy gate in the barbed-wire fence, and was hunting for the latch (as no padlock was in evidence) when a scared voice cried loudly “Qu’est ce que vous faites là!” and I found myself stupidly looking into a rifle. B., Fritz, Harree, Pompom, Monsieur Auguste, The Bear, and the last but not least Count de Bragard immediately informed the trembling planton that I was a Nouveau who had just returned from the douches to which I had been escorted by Monsieur Reeshar, and that I should be admitted to the cour by all means. The cautious watcher of the skies was not, however, to be fooled by any such fol-de-rol and stood his ground. Fortunately at this point the beefy planton yelled from the doorway “Let him in,” and I was accordingly let in, to the gratification of my friends, and against the better judgment of the guardian of the cour, who muttered something about having more than enough to do already.

I had not been mistaken as to the size of the men’s yard: it was certainly not more than twenty yards deep and fifteen wide. By the distinctness with which the shouts of les femmes reached my ears I perceived that the two cours adjoined. They were separated by a stone wall ten feet in height, which I had already remarked (while en route to les douches) as forming one end of the cour des femmes. The men’s cour had another stone wall slightly higher than the first, and which ran parallel to it; the two remaining sides, which were property ends, were made by the familiar barbed-wire.

The furniture of the cour was simple: in the middle of