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

open at the neck, was swatting luxuriously and for all he was worth that round helpless face and that peaches-and-cream complexion. From where I stood, at a distance of six or eight yards, the impact of the Sheeney’s fist on The Young Pole’s jaw and cheeks was disconcertingly audible. The latter made not the slightest attempt to defend himself, let alone retaliate; he merely skidded about, roaring and clutching desperately out of harm’s way his long white scarf, of which (as I have mentioned) he was extremely proud. But for the sheer brutality of the scene it would have been highly ludicrous. The Sheeney was swinging like a windmill and hammering like a blacksmith. His ugly head lowered, the chin protruding, lips drawn back in a snarl, teeth sticking forth like a gorilla’s, he banged and smote that moon-shaped physiognomy as if his life depended upon utterly annihilating it. And annihilate it he doubtless would have, but for the prompt (not to say punctual) heroism of The June Bride⁠—who, lowering his huge gun, made a rush for the fight; stopped at a safe distance; and began squeaking at the very top and even summit of his faint girlish voice:

“Aux armes! Aux armes!”

which plaintive and intrepid utterance by virtue of its very fragility penetrated the building and released The Black Holster, who bounded through the gate, roaring a salutation as he bounded, and in a jiffy had cuffed the participants apart. “All right, whose fault is this?” he roared. And a number of highly reputable spectators, such as Judas and The Fighting Sheeney himself, said it was The Young Pole’s fault. “Allez! Au cabinot! De suite!” And off trickled the sobbing Young Pole, winding his great scarf comfortingly about him, to the dungeon.

Some few minutes later we encountered The Zulu speaking with Monsieur Auguste. Monsieur Auguste was very sorry. He admitted that The Young Pole had brought his punishment upon himself. But he was only a boy. The Zulu’s reaction to the affair was absolutely profound: he indicated les femmes with one eye, his trousers with another, and converted his utterly plastic personality into an amorous machine for several seconds, thereby vividly indicating the root of the difficulty. That the stupidity of his friend, The Young Pole, hurt The Zulu deeply I discovered by looking at him as he lay in bed the next morning, limply and sorrowfully prone; beside him the empty paillasse, which meant cabinot⁠ ⁠… his perfectly extraordinary face (a face perfectly at once fluent and angular, expressionless and sensitive) told me many things whereof even The Zulu might not speak, things which in order entirely to suffer he kept carefully and thoroughly ensconced behind his rigid and mobile eyes.

From the day that The Young Pole emerged from cabinot he was our friend. The blague had been at last knocked out of him, thanks to Un Mangeur de Blanc, as the little Machine-Fixer expressively called The Fighting Sheeney. Which mangeur, by the way (having been exonerated from all blame by the more enlightened spectators of the unequal battle) strode immediately and ferociously over to B. and me, a hideous grin crackling upon the coarse surface of his mug, and demanded⁠—hiking at the front of his trousers⁠—

“Bon, eh? Bien fait, eh?”

and a few days later asked us for money, even hinting that he would be pleased to become our special protector. I think, as a matter of fact, we “lent” him one-eighth of what he wanted (perhaps we lent him five cents) in order to avoid trouble and get rid of him. At any rate, he didn’t bother us particularly afterwards; and if a nickel could accomplish that a nickel should be proud of itself.

And always, through the falling greyness of the desolate Autumn, The Zulu was beside us, or wrapped around a tree in the cour, or melting in a post after tapping Mexique in a game of hide-and-seek, or suffering from toothache⁠—God, I wish I could see him expressing for us the wickedness of toothache⁠—or losing his shoes and finding them under Garibaldi’s bed (with a huge perpendicular wink which told tomes about Garibaldi’s fatal propensities for ownership), or marvelling silently at the power of les femmes apropos his young friend⁠—who, occasionally resuming his former bravado, would stand in the black evil rain with his white farm scarf twined about him, singing as of old:

“Je suis content
pour mettre dedans
suis pas pressé
pour tirer
ah-la-la-la⁠ ⁠…”

… And the Zulu came out of la commission with identically the expressionless expression which he had carried into it; and God knows what The Three Wise Men found out about him, but (whatever it was) they never found and never will find that Something whose discovery was worth to me more than all the round and powerless money of the world⁠—limbs’ tin grace, wooden wink, shoulderless, unhurried body, velocity of a grasshopper, soul up under his armpits, mysteriously falling over the ownness of two feet, floating fish of his slimness half a bird.⁠ ⁠…

Gentlemen, I am inexorably grateful for the gift of these ignorant and indivisible things.

X Surplice

Let us ascend the third Delectable Mountain, which is called Surplice.

I will admit, in the beginning, that I never knew Surplice. This for the simple reason that I am unwilling to know except as a last resource. And it is by contrast with Harree The Hollander, whom I knew, and Judas, whom I knew, that I shall be able to give you (perhaps) a little of Surplice, whom I did not know. For that matter, I think Monsieur Auguste was the only person who might possibly have known him; and I doubt whether Monsieur Auguste was capable of descending to such depths in the case of so fine a person as Surplice.

Take a sheer animal of a man. Take the incredible Hollander with