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

took la commission more or less as a healthy bull calf takes nourishment: there was little doubt that they would refind la liberté in a short while, judging from the inability of the Three Wise Men to prove them even suspicious characters. The Zulu uttered a few inscrutable gestures made entirely of silence and said he would like us to celebrate the accomplishment of this ordeal by buying ourselves and himself a good fat cheese apiece⁠—his friend The Young Pole looked as if the ordeal had scared the life out of him temporarily; he was unable to say whether or no he and “mon ami” would leave us: la commission had adopted, in the case of these twain, an awe-inspiring taciturnity. Jean Le Nègre, who was one of the last to pass, had had a tremendously exciting time, due to the fact that le gouvernement français’s polished tools had failed to scratch his mystery either in French or English⁠—he came dancing and singing toward us; then, suddenly suppressing every vestige of emotion, solemnly extended for our approval a small scrap of paper on which was written:

Calais,

remarking: “Qu-est-ce que ça veut dire?”⁠—and when we read the word for him, “m’en vais à Calais, moi, travailler à Calais, très bon!”⁠—with a jump and a shout of laughter pocketing the scrap and beginning the Song of Songs:

“après la guerre finit.⁠ ⁠…”

A trio which had been hit and hard hit by the Three Wise Men were, or was, The Wanderer and the Machine-Fixer and Monsieur Auguste⁠—the former having been insulted in respect to Chocolat’s mother (who also occupied the witness-stand) and having retaliated, as nearly as we could discover, with a few remarks straight from the shoulder apropos Justice (O Wanderer, did you expect honour among the honourable?); the Machine-Fixer having been told to shut up in the midst of a passionate plea for mercy, or at least fair-play, if not in his own case in the case of the wife who was crazed by his absence; Monsieur Auguste having been asked (as he had been asked three months before by the honorable commissioners), Why did you not return to Russia with your wife and your child at the outbreak of the war?⁠—and having replied, with tears in his eyes and that gentle ferocity of which he was occasionally capable:

“Be-cause I didn’t have the means. I am not a mil-lion-aire, Sirs.”

The Baby-Snatcher, the Trick Raincoat, the Messenger Boy, the Fighting Sheeney and similar gentry passed the commission without the slightest apparent effect upon their disagreeable personalities.

It was not long after Bill the Hollander’s departure that we lost two Delectable Mountains in The Wanderer and Surplice. Remained The Zulu and Jean le Nègre.⁠ ⁠… B. and I spent most of our time when on promenade collecting rather beautifully hued leaves in la cour. These leaves we inserted in one of my notebooks, along with all the colours which we could find on cigarette boxes, chocolate wrappers, labels of various sorts and even postage stamps. (We got a very brilliant red from a certain piece of cloth.) Our efforts puzzled everyone (including the plantons) more than considerably; which was natural, considering that everyone did not know that by this exceedingly simple means we were effecting a study of colour itself, in relation to what is popularly called “abstract” and sometimes “non-representative” painting. Despite their natural puzzlement everyone (plantons excepted) was extraordinarily kind and brought us often valuable additions to our chromatic collection. Had I, at this moment and in the city of New York, the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider The Great American Public as the most aesthetically incapable organization ever created for the purpose of perpetuating defunct ideals and ideas. But of course The Great American Public has a handicap which my friends at La Ferté did not as a rule have⁠—education. Let no one sound his indignant yawp at this. I refer to the fact that, for an educated gent or lady, to create is first of all to destroy⁠—that there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art.

Ah well, the revolution⁠—I refer of course to the intelligent revolution⁠—is on the way; is perhaps nearer than some think, is possibly knocking at the front doors of The Great Mister Harold Bell Wright and The Great Little Miss Pollyanna. In the course of the next ten thousand years it may be possible to find Delectable Mountains without going to prison⁠—captivity, I mean, Monsieur le Surveillant⁠—it may be possible, I daresay, to encounter Delectable Mountains who are not in prison.⁠ ⁠…

The Autumn wore on.

Rain did, from time to time, not fall: from time to time a sort of unhealthy almost-light leaked from the large uncrisp corpse of the sky, returning for a moment to our view the ruined landscape. From time to time the eye, travelling carefully with a certain disagreeable suddenly fear no longer distances of air, coldish and sweet, stopped upon the incredible clearness of the desolate, without-motion, Autumn. Awkward and solemn clearness, making louder the unnecessary cries, the hoarse laughter of the invisible harlots in their muddy yard, pointing a cool actual finger at the silly and ferocious group of man-shaped beings huddled in the mud under four or five little trees, came strangely in my own mind pleasantly to suggest the ludicrous and hideous and beautiful antics of the insane. Frequently I would discover so perfect a command over myself as to reduce la promenade easily to a recently invented