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

ever I can create by some occult process of imagining a deed so perfectly cruel as the deed perpetrated in the case of Joseph Demestre, I shall consider myself a genius. Then let us admit that the Three Wise Men were geniuses. And let us, also and softly, admit that it takes a good and great government perfectly to negate mercy. And let us, bowing our minds smoothly and darkly, repeat with Monsieur le Curé⁠—“toujours l’enfer.⁠ ⁠…”

The Wanderer was almost insane when he heard the judgment of la commission. And hereupon I must pay my respects to Monsieur Pet-airs; whom I had ever liked, but whose spirit I had not, up to the night preceding The Wanderer’s departure, fully appreciated. Monsieur Pet-airs sat for hours at the card-table, his glasses continually fogging, censuring The Wanderer in tones of apparent annoyance for his frightful weeping (and now and then himself sniffing faintly with his big red nose); sat for hours pretending to take dictation from Joseph Demestre, in reality composing a great letter or series of great letters to the civil and I guess military authorities of Orne on the subject of the injustice done to the father of four children, one a baby at the breast, now about to be separated from all he held dear and good in this world. “I appeal” (Monsieur Pet-airs wrote in his boisterously careful, not to say elegant, script) “to your sense of mercy and of fair play and of honour. It is not merely an unjust thing which is being done, not merely an unreasonable thing, it is an unnatural thing.⁠ ⁠…” As he wrote I found it hard to believe that this was the aged and decrepit and fussing biped whom I had known, whom I had caricatured, with whom I had talked upon ponderous subjects (a comparison between the Belgian and French cities with respect to their location as favouring progress and prosperity, for example); who had with a certain comic shyness revealed to me a secret scheme for reclaiming inundated territories by means of an extraordinary pump “of my invention.” Yet this was he, this was Monsieur Pet-airs Lui-Même; and I enjoyed peculiarly making his complete acquaintance for the first and only time.

May the Heavens prosper him!

The next day The Wanderer appeared in the cour walking proudly in a shirt of solid vermilion.

He kissed his wife⁠—excuse me, Monsieur Malvy, I should say the mother of his children⁠—crying very bitterly and suddenly.

The plantons yelled for him to line up with the rest, who were waiting outside the gate, bag and baggage. He covered his great king’s eyes with his long golden hands and went.

With him disappeared unspeakable sunlight, and the dark keen bright strength of the earth.

IX Zoo-Loo

This is the name of the second Delectable Mountain.

Zulu is he called, partly because he looks like what I have never seen, partly because the sounds somehow relate to his personality and partly because they seemed to please him.

He is, of all the indescribables I have known, definitely the most completely or entirely indescribable. Then (quoth my reader) you will not attempt to describe him, I trust.⁠—Alas, in the medium which I am now using a certain amount or at least quality of description is disgustingly necessary. Were I free with a canvas and some colours⁠ ⁠… but I am not free. And so I will buck the impossible to the best of my ability. Which, after all, is one way of wasting your time.

He did not come and he did not go. He drifted.

His angular anatomy expended and collected itself with an effortless spontaneity which is the prerogative of fairies perhaps, or at any rate of those things in which we no longer believe. But he was more. There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort⁠—things which are always inside of us and, in fact, are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them⁠—are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb; an is. The Zulu, then, I must perforce call an is.

In this chapter I shall pretend briefly to describe certain aspects and attributes of an is. Which is we have called The Zulu, who Himself intrinsically and indubitably escapes analysis. Allons!

Let me first describe a Sunday morning when we lifted our heads to the fight of the stovepipes.

I was awakened by a roar, a human roar, a roar such as only a Hollander can make when a Hollander is honestly angry. As I rose from the domain of the subconscious, the idea that the roar belonged to Bill The Hollander became conviction. Bill The Hollander, alias America Lakes, slept next to The Young Pole (by whom I refer to that young stupid-looking farmer with that peaches-and-cream complexion and those black puttees who had formed the rear rank, with the aid of The Zulu Himself, upon the arrival of Babysnatcher, Bill, Box, Zulu, and Young Pole aforesaid). Now this same Young Pole was a case. Insufferably vain and self-confident was he. Monsieur Auguste palliated most of his conceited offensiveness on the ground that he was un garçon; we on the ground that he was obviously and unmistakably The Zulu’s friend. This Young Pole, I remember, had me design upon the wall over his paillasse (shortly after his arrival) a virile soldat clutching a somewhat dubious flag⁠—I made the latter from descriptions furnished by Monsieur Auguste and The Young Pole himself⁠—intended, I may add, to be the flag of Poland. Underneath which beautiful picture I was instructed to perpetrate the flourishing inscription

“Vive la Pologne”

which I did to the best of my limited ability and for Monsieur Auguste’s sake. No sooner was the photographie complete than The Young Pole,