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

epub:type="z3998:given-name">B. wrote his own address and name in the inside of the belt, explained in French to The Young Pole that any time The Zulu wanted to reach him all he had to do was to consult the belt; The Young Pole translated; The Zulu nodded; The Norwegian smiled appreciatively; The Zulu received the belt with a gesture to which words cannot do the faintest justice⁠—

A planton was standing in The Enormous Room, a planton roaring and cursing and crying, “Hurry, those who are going to go.”⁠—B. shook hands with Jean and Mexique and the Machine-Fixer and the Young Skipper, and Bathhouse John (to whom he had given his ambulance tunic, and who was crazy-proud in consequence) and the Norwegian and the Washing Machine Man and The Hat and many of les hommes whom we scarcely knew.⁠—The Black Holster was roaring:

“Allez, nom de Dieu, l’américain!”

I went down the room with B. and Pete, and shook hands with both at the door. The other partis, alias The Trick Raincoat and The Fighting Sheeney, were already on the way downstairs. The Black Holster cursed us and me in particular and slammed the door angrily in my face⁠—

Through the little peephole I caught a glimpse of them, entering the street. I went to my bed and lay down quietly in my great pelisse. The clamour and filth of the room brightened and became distant and faded. I heard the voice of the jolly Alsatian saying:

“Courage, mon ami, your comrade is not dead; you will see him later,” and after that, nothing. In front of and on and within my eyes lived suddenly a violent and gentle and dark silence.

The Three Wise Men had done their work. But wisdom cannot rest.⁠ ⁠…

Probably at that very moment they were holding their court in another La Ferté committing to incomparable anguish some few merely perfectly wretched criminals: little and tall, tremulous and brave⁠—all of them white and speechless, all of them with tight bluish lips and large whispering eyes, all of them with fingers weary and mutilated and extraordinarily old⁠ ⁠… desperate fingers; closing, to feel the final lukewarm fragment of life glide neatly and softly into forgetfulness.

XIII I Say Goodbye to La Misère

To convince the reader that this history is mere fiction (and rather vulgarly violent fiction at that) nothing perhaps is needed save that ancient standby of sob-story writers and thrill-artists alike⁠—the Happy Ending. As a matter of fact, it makes not the smallest difference to me whether anyone who has thus far participated in my travels does or does not believe that they and I are (as that mysterious animal, “the public” would say) “real.” I do, however, very strenuously object to the assumption, on the part of anyone, that the heading of this, my final, chapter stands for anything in the nature of happiness. In the course of recalling (in God knows a rather clumsy and perfectly inadequate way) what happened to me between the latter part of August, 1917, and the first of January, 1918, I have proved to my own satisfaction (if not to anyone else’s) that I was happier in La Ferté Macé, with The Delectable Mountains about me, than the very keenest words can pretend to express. I daresay it all comes down to a definition of happiness. And a definition of happiness I most certainly do not intend to attempt; but I can and will say this: to leave La Misère with the knowledge, and worse than that the feeling, that some of the finest people in the world are doomed to remain prisoners thereof for no one knows how long⁠—are doomed to continue, possibly for years and tens of years and all the years which terribly are between them and their deaths, the grey and indivisible Nonexistence which without apology you are quitting for Reality⁠—cannot by any stretch of the imagination be conceived as constituting a Happy Ending to a great and personal adventure. That I write this chapter at all is due, purely and simply, to the, I daresay, unjustified hope on my part that⁠—by recording certain events⁠—it may hurl a little additional light into a very tremendous darkness.⁠ ⁠…

At the outset let me state that what occurred subsequent to the departure for Précigne of B. and Pete and The Sheeneys and Rockyfeller is shrouded in a rather ridiculous indistinctness; due, I have to admit, to the depression which this departure inflicted upon my altogether too human nature. The judgment of the Three Wise Men had⁠—to use a peculiarly vigorous (not to say vital) expression of my own day and time⁠—knocked me for a loop. I spent the days intervening between the separation from “votre camarade” and my somewhat supernatural departure for freedom in attempting to partially straighten myself. When finally I made my exit, the part of me popularly referred to as “mind” was still in a slightly bent if not twisted condition. Not until some weeks of American diet had revolutionized my exterior did my interior completely resume the contours of normality. I am particularly neither ashamed nor proud of this (one might nearly say) mental catastrophe. No more ashamed or proud, in fact, than of the infection of three fingers which I carried to America as a little token of La Ferté’s goodwill. In the latter case I certainly have no right to boast, even should I find myself so inclined; for B. took with him to Précigne a case of what his father, upon B.’s arrival in The Home of The Brave, diagnosed as scurvy⁠—which scurvy made my mutilations look like thirty cents or even less. One of my vividest memories of La Ferté consists in a succession of crackling noises associated with the disrobing of my friend. I recall that we appealed to Monsieur Ree-chard together, B. in behalf of his scurvy and I in behalf