Book: The Enormous Room

E >> Edward Estlin Cummings >> The Enormous Room




"_Vous êtes, uh-ah, l'Am-é-ri-cain?_"

"_Je suis Américain_," I admitted.

"_Eh-bi-en uh-ah uh-ah_--We were expecting you." He surveyed me with
great interest.

Behind this seedy and restless personage I noted his absolute likeness,
adorning one of the walls. The rooster was faithfully depicted à la
Rembrandt at half-length in the stirring guise of a fencer, foil in hand,
and wearing enormous gloves. The execution of this masterpiece left
something to be desired; but the whole betokened a certain spirit and
verve, on the part of the sitter, which I found difficulty in attributing
to the being before me.

"_Vous êtes uh-ah KEW-MANGZ?_"

"What?" I said, completely baffled by this extraordinary dissyllable.

"_Comprenez vous fran-çais?_"

"_Un peu._"

"_Bon. Alors, vous vous ap-pel-lez KEW MANGZ, m'est-ce pas? Edouard
KEW-MANGZ?_"

"Oh," I said, relieved, "yes." It was really amazing, the way he writhed
around the G.

"_Comment ça se prononce en anglais?_"

I told him.

He replied benevolently, somewhat troubled "uh-ah uh-ah uh-ah--why are
you here, KEW-MANGZ?"

At this question I was for one moment angrier than I had ever before been
in all my life. Then I realized the absurdity of the situation, and
laughed.--"_Sais pas_."

The questionnaire continued:

"You were in the Red Cross?"--"Surely, in the Norton Harjes
Ambulance, Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un."--"You had a friend
there?"--"Naturally."--"_Il a écrit, votre ami, des bêtises, n'est ce
pas?_"--"So they told me. _N'en sais rien._"--"What sort of person was
your friend?"--"He was a magnificent person, always _très gentil_ with
me."--(With a queer pucker the fencer remarked) "Your friend got you into
a lot of trouble, though."--(To which I replied with a broad grin)
"_N'importe_, we are _camarades_."

A stream of puzzled uh-ahs followed this reply. The fencer, or rooster or
whatever he might be, finally, picking up the lamp and the lock, said:
"_Alors, viens avec moi, KEW-MANGZ._" I started to pick up the _sac_, but
he told me it would be kept in the office (we being in the office). I
said I had checked a large _sac_ and my fur overcoat at Briouse, and he
assured me they would be sent on by train. He now dismissed the
_gendarmes_, who had been listening curiously to the examination. As I
was conducted from the bureau I asked him point-blank: "How long am I to
stay here?"--to which he answered "_Oh, peutêtre un jour, deux jours, je
ne sais pas._"

Two days in a _gendarmerie_ would be enough, I thought. We marched out.

Behind me the bedslippered rooster uhahingly shuffled. In front of me
clumsily gamboled the huge imitation of myself. It descended the terribly
worn stairs. It turned to the right and disappeared....

We were standing in a chapel.

The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute; it
was beating, senseless and futile, with shrill fists upon a thick
enormous moisture of gloom. To the left and right through lean oblongs of
stained glass burst dirty burglars of moonlight. The clammy stupid
distance uttered dimly an uncanny conflict--the mutterless tumbling of
brutish shadows. A crowding ooze battled with my lungs. My nostrils
fought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet
unpleasant odour. Staring ahead, I gradually disinterred the pale carrion
of the darkness--an altar, guarded with the ugliness of unlit candles, on
which stood inexorably the efficient implements for eating God.

I was to be confessed, then, of my guilty conscience, before retiring? It
boded well for the morrow.

... the measured accents of the fencer: "_Prenez votre paillasse._" I
turned. He was bending over a formless mass in one corner of the room.
The mass stretched halfway to the ceiling. It was made of
mattress-shapes. I pulled at one--burlap, stuffed with prickly straw. I
got it on my shoulder. "_Alors._" He lighted me to the door-way by which
we had entered. (I was somewhat pleased to leave the place.)

Back, down a corridor, up more stairs; and we were confronted by a small
scarred pair of doors from which hung two of the largest padlocks I had
ever seen. Being unable to go further, I stopped: he produced a huge ring
of keys. Fumbled with the locks. No sound of life: the keys rattled in
the locks with surprising loudness; the latter, with an evil grace,
yielded--the two little miserable doors swung open.

Into the square blackness I staggered with my _paillasse_. There was no
way of judging the size of the dark room which uttered no sound. In front
of me was a pillar. "Put it down by that post, and sleep there for
tonight, in the morning _nous allons voir_" directed the fencer. "You
won't need a blanket," he added; and the doors clanged, the light and
fencer disappeared.

I needed no second invitation to sleep. Fully dressed, I fell on my
_paillasse_ with a weariness which I have never felt before or since. But
I did not close my eyes: for all about me there rose a sea of most
extraordinary sound... the hitherto empty and minute room became suddenly
enormous: weird cries, oaths, laughter, pulling it sideways and backward,
extending it to inconceivable depth and width, telescoping it to
frightful nearness. From all directions, by at least thirty voices in
eleven languages (I counted as I lay Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Turkish,
Arabian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, German, French--and English) at
distances varying from seventy feet to a few inches, for twenty minutes I
was ferociously bombarded. Nor was my perplexity purely aural. About five
minutes after lying down, I saw (by a hitherto unnoticed speck of light
which burned near the doors which I had entered) two extraordinary
looking figures--one a well-set man with a big, black beard, the other a
consumptive with a bald head and sickly moustache, both clad only in
their knee-length chemises, hairy legs naked, feet bare--wander down the
room and urinate profusely in the corner nearest me. This act
accomplished, the figures wandered back, greeted with a volley of
ejaculatory abuse from the invisible co-occupants of my new
sleeping-apartment; and disappeared in darkness.

I remarked to myself that the _gendarmes_ of this _gendarmerie_ were
peculiarly up in languages, and fell asleep.




IV

LE NOUVEAU

_"Vous ne voulez pas de café?"_

The threatening question recited in a hoarse voice woke me like a shot.
Sprawled half on and half off my _paillasse_, I looked suddenly up into a
juvenile pimply face with a red tassel bobbing in its eyes. A boy in a
Belgian uniform was stooping over me. In one hand a huge pail a third
full of liquid slime. I said fiercely: "_Au contraire, je veux bien._"
And collapsed on the mattress.

"_Pas de quart, vous?_" the face fired at me.

"_Comprends pas_," I replied, wondering what on earth the words meant.

"English?"

"American."

At this moment a tin cup appeared mysteriously out of the gloom and was
rapidly filled from the pail, after which operation the tassel remarked:
"Your friend here" and disappeared.


I decided I had gone completely crazy.

The cup had been deposited near me. Not daring to approach it, I boosted
my aching corpse on one of its futile elbows and gazed blankly around. My
eyes, wading laboriously through a dark atmosphere, a darkness gruesomely
tactile, perceived only here and there lively patches of vibrating
humanity. My ears recognised English, something which I took to be
low-German and which was Belgian, Dutch, Polish, and what I guessed to be
Russian.

Trembling with this chaos, my hand sought the cup. The cup was not warm;
the contents, which I hastily gulped, were not even tepid. The taste was
dull, almost bitter, clinging, thick, nauseating. I felt a renewed
interest in living as soon as the deathful swallow descended to my
abdomen, very much as a suicide who changes his mind after the fatal
dose. I decided that it would be useless to vomit. I sat up. I looked
around.

The darkness was rapidly going out of the sluggish stinking air. I was
sitting on my mattress at one end of a sort of room, filled with pillars;
ecclesiastical in feeling. I already perceived it to be of enormous
length. My mattress resembled an island: all around it on the floor at
distances varying from a quarter of an inch to ten feet (which
constituted the limit of distinct vision) reposed startling identities.
There was blood in some of them. Others consisted of a rind of blueish
matter sustaining a core of yellowish froth. From behind me a chunk of
hurtling spittle joined its fellows. I decided to stand up.

At this moment, at the far end of the room, I seemed to see an
extraordinary vulture-like silhouette leap up from nowhere. It rushed a
little way in my direction crying hoarsely "_Corvée d'eau!_"--stopped,
bent down at what I perceived to be a _paillasse_ like mine, jerked what
was presumably the occupant by the feet, shook him, turned to the next,
and so on up to six. As there seemed to be innumerable _paillasses_, laid
side by side at intervals of perhaps a foot with their heads to the wall
on three sides of me, I was wondering why the vulture had stopped at six.
On each mattress a crude imitation of humanity, wrapped ear-high in its
blanket, lay and drank from a cup like mine and spat long and high into
the room. The ponderous reek of sleepy bodies undulated toward me from
three directions. I had lost sight of the vulture in a kind of insane
confusion which arose from the further end of the room. It was as if he
had touched off six high explosives. Occasional pauses in the minutely
crazy din were accurately punctuated by exploding bowels; to the great
amusement of innumerable somebodies, whose precise whereabouts the gloom
carefully guarded.

I felt that I was the focus of a group of indistinct recumbents who were
talking about me to one another in many incomprehensible tongues. I
noticed beside every pillar (including the one beside which I had
innocently thrown down my mattress the night before) a good sized pail,
overflowing with urine, and surrounded by a large irregular puddle. My
mattress was within an inch of the nearest puddle. What I took to be a
man, an amazing distance off, got out of bed and succeeded in locating
the pail nearest to him after several attempts. Ten invisible recumbents
yelled at him in six languages.

All at once a handsome figure rose from the gloom at my elbow. I smiled
stupidly into his clear hardish eyes. And he remarked pleasantly:

"Your friend's here, Johnny, and wants to see you."

A bulge of pleasure swooped along my body, chasing aches and numbness, my
muscles danced, nerves tingled in perpetual holiday.

B. was lying on his camp-cot, wrapped like an Eskimo in a blanket which
hid all but his nose and eyes.

"Hello, Cummings," he said smiling. "There's a man here who is a friend
of Vanderbilt and knew Cézanne."

I gazed somewhat critically at B. There was nothing particularly insane
about him, unless it was his enthusiastic excitement, which might almost
be attributed to my jack-in-the-box manner of arriving. He said: "There
are people here who speak English, Russian, Arabian. There are the finest
people here! Did you go to Gré? I fought rats all night there. Huge ones.
They tried to eat me. And from Gré to Paris? I had three gendarmes all
the way to keep me from escaping, and they all fell asleep."

I began to be afraid that I was asleep myself. "Please be frank," I
begged. "Strictly _entre nous_: am I dreaming, or is this a bug-house?"

B. laughed, and said: "I thought so when I arrived two days ago. When I
came in sight of the place a lot of girls waved from the window and
yelled at me. I no sooner got inside than a queer looking duck whom I
took to be a nut came rushing up to me and cried: 'Too late for
soup!'--This is Campe de Triage de la Ferté Macé, Orne, France, and all
these fine people were arrested as spies. Only two or three of them can
speak a word of French, and that's _soupe!_"

I said, "My God, I thought Marseilles was somewhere on the Mediterranean
Ocean, and that this was a _gendarmerie_."

"But this is M-a-c-é. It's a little mean town, where everybody snickers
and sneers at you if they see you're a prisoner. They did at me."

"Do you mean to say we're _espions_ too?"

"Of course!" B. said enthusiastically. "Thank God! And in to stay. Every
time I think of the _section sanitaire_, and A. and his thugs, and the
whole rotten red-taped Croix Rouge, I have to laugh. Cummings, I tell you
this is the finest place on earth!"

A vision of the Chef de la section Sanitaire Ving-et-Un passed through my
mind. The doughy face. Imitation-English-officer swagger. Large calves,
squeaking puttees. The daily lecture: "I doughno what's th'matter with
you fellers. You look like nice boys. Well-edjucated. But you're so dirty
in your habits. You boys are always kickin' because I don't put you on a
car together. I'm ashamed to do it, that's why. I doughtwanta give this
section a black eye. We gotta show these lousy Frenchmen what Americans
are. We gotta show we're superior to 'em. Those bastards doughno what a
bath means. And you fellers are always hangin' 'round, talkin' with them
dirty frog-eaters that does the cookin' and the dirty work 'round here.
How d'you boys expect me to give you a chance? I'd like to put you
fellers on a car, I wanta see you boys happy. But I don't dare to, that's
why. If you want me to send you out, you gotta shave and look neat, and
_keep away from them dirty Frenchmen_. We Americans are over here to
learn them lousy bastards something."

I laughed for sheer joy.

A terrific tumult interrupted my mirth. "_Par ici!_"--"Get out of the way
you damn Polak!"--"M'sieu, M'sieu!"--"Over here!"--"_Mais
non!_"--"_Gott-ver-dummer!_" I turned in terror to see my _paillasse_ in
the clutches of four men who were apparently rending it in as many
directions.

One was a clean-shaven youngish man with lively eyes, alert and muscular,
whom I identified as the man who had called me "Johnny." He had hold of a
corner of the mattress and was pulling against the possessor of the
opposite corner: an incoherent personage enveloped in a buffoonery of
amazing rags and patches, with a shabby head on which excited wisps of
dirty hair stood upright in excitement, and the tall, ludicrous,
extraordinary, almost noble figure of a dancing bear. A third corner of
the _paillasse_ was rudely grasped by a six-foot combination of yellow
hair, red hooligan face, and sky-blue trousers; assisted by the
undersized tasseled mucker in Belgian uniform, with a pimply rogue's mug
and unlimited impertinence of diction, who had awakened me by demanding
if I wanted coffee. Albeit completely dazed by the uncouth vocal fracas,
I realised in some manner that these hostile forces were contending, not
for the possession of the mattress, but merely for the privilege of
presenting the mattress to myself.

Before I could offer any advice on this delicate topic, a childish voice
cried emphatically beside my ear: "Put the mattress here! What are you
trying to do? There's no use destroy-ing a mat-tress!"--at the same
moment the mattress rushed with cobalt strides in my direction, propelled
by the successful efforts of the Belgian uniform and the hooligan visage,
the clean-shaven man and the incoherent bear still desperately clutching
their respective corners; and upon its arrival was seized with surprising
strength by the owner of the child's voice--a fluffy little gnome-shaped
man with a sensitive face which had suffered much--and indignantly
deposited beside B.'s bed in a space mysteriously cleared for its
reception. The gnome immediately kneeled upon it and fell to carefully
smoothing certain creases caused by the recent conflict, exclaiming
slowly syllable by syllable: "Mon Dieu. Now, that's better, you mustn't
do things like that." The clean-shaven man regarded him loftily with
folded arms, while the tassel and the trousers victoriously inquired if I
had a cigarette?--and upon receiving one apiece (also the gnome, and the
clean-shaven man, who accepted his with some dignity) sat down without
much ado on B.'s bed--which groaned ominously in protest--and hungrily
fired questions at me. The bear meanwhile, looking as if nothing had
happened, adjusted his ruffled costume with a satisfied air and (calmly
gazing into the distance) began with singularly delicate fingers to stuff
a stunted and ancient pipe with what appeared to be a mixture of wood and
manure.

I was still answering questions, when a gnarled voice suddenly
threatened, over our head: "Broom? You. Everybody. Clean. _Surveillant_
says. Not me, no?"--I started, expecting to see a parrot.

It was the silhouette.

A vulture-like figure stood before me, a demoralised broom clenched in
one claw or fist: it had lean legs cased in shabby trousers, muscular
shoulders covered with a rough shirt open at the neck, knotted arms, and
a coarse insane face crammed beneath the visor of a cap. The face
consisted of a rapid nose, droopy moustache, ferocious watery small eyes,
a pugnacious chin, and sunken cheeks hideously smiling. There was
something in the ensemble at once brutal and ridiculous, vigorous and
pathetic.

Again I had not time to speak; for the hooligan in azure trousers hurled
his butt at the bear's feet, exclaiming: "There's another for you,
Polak!"--jumped from the bed, seized the broom, and poured upon the
vulture a torrent of _Gott-ver-dummers_, to which the latter replied
copiously and in kind. Then the red face bent within a few inches of my
own, and for the first time I saw that it had recently been young--"I say
I do your sweep for you" it translated pleasantly. I thanked it; and the
vulture, exclaiming: "Good. Good. Not me. _Surveillant._ Harree does it
for everybody. Hee, hee"--rushed off, followed by Harree and the tassel.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched the tall, ludicrous, extraordinary,
almost proud figure of the bear stoop with quiet dignity, the musical
fingers close with a singular delicacy upon the moist indescribable
eighth-of-an-inch of tobacco.

I did not know that this was a Delectable Mountain....

The clean-shaven man (who appeared to have been completely won over by
his smoke), and the fluffy gnome, who had completed the arrangement of my
_paillasse_, now entered into conversation with myself and B.; the
clean-shaven one seating himself in Harree's stead, the gnome declining
(on the grounds that the bed was already sufficiently loaded) to occupy
the place left vacant by the tassel's exit, and leaning against the drab,
sweating, poisonous wall. He managed, however, to call our attention to
the shelf at B.'s head which he himself had constructed, and promised me
a similar luxury _toute de suite_. He was a Russian, and had a wife and
_gosse_ in Paris. "My name is Monsieur Au-guste, at your service"--and
his gentle pale eyes sparkled. The clean-shaven talked distinct and
absolutely perfect English. His name was Fritz. He was a Norwegian, a
stoker on a ship. "You mustn't mind that feller that wanted you to sweep.
He's crazy. They call him John the Baigneur. He used to be the bathman.
Now he's _Maître de Chambre_. They wanted me to take it--I said, 'F----
it, I don't want it.' Let him have it. That's no kind of a job, everyone
complaining and on top of you morning till night. 'Let them that wants
the job take it' I said. That crazy Dutchman's been here for two years.
They told him to get out and he wouldn't, he was too fond of the booze"
(I jumped at the slang) "and the girls. They took it away from John and
give it to that little Ree-shar feller, that doctor. That was a swell job
he had, _baigneur_, too. All the bloody liquor you can drink and a girl
every time you want one. He ain't never had a girl in his life, that
Ree-shar feller." His laughter was hard, clear, cynical. "That Pompom,
the little Belgian feller was just here, he's a great one for the girls.
He and Harree. Always getting _cabinot_. I got it twice myself since I
been here."

All this time the enormous room was filling gradually with dirty light.
In the further end six figures were brooming furiously, yelling to each
other in the dust like demons. A seventh, Harree, was loping to and fro
splashing water from a pail and enveloping everything and everybody in a
ponderous and blasphemous fog of _Gott-ver-dummers_. Along three sides
(with the exception, that is, of the nearer end, which boasted the sole
door) were laid, with their lengths at right angles to the wall, at
intervals of three or four feet, something like forty _paillasses_. On
each, with half a dozen exceptions (where the occupants had not yet
finished their coffee or were on duty for the _corvée_) lay the headless
body of a man smothered in its blanket, only the boots showing.

The demons were working towards our end of the room. Harree had got his
broom and was assisting. Nearer and nearer they came; converging, they
united their separate heaps of filth in a loudly stinking single mound at
the door. Brooms were stacked against the wall in the corner. The men
strolled back to their mattresses.

Monsieur Auguste, whose French had not been able to keep pace with
Fritz's English, saw his chance, and proposed "now that the Room is all
clean, let us go take a little walk, the three of us." Fritz understood
perfectly, and rose, remarking as he fingered his immaculate chin "Well,
I guess I'll take a shave before the bloody _planton_ comes"--and
Monsieur Auguste, B., and I started down the room.

It was in shape oblong, about 80 feet by 40, unmistakably ecclesiastical
in feeling; two rows of wooden pillars, spaced at intervals of fifteen
feet, rose to a vaulted ceiling 25 or 30 feet above the floor. As you
stood with your back to the door, and faced down the room, you had in the
near right-hand corner (where the brooms stood) six pails of urine. On
the right-hand long wall, a little beyond the angle of this corner, a few
boards, tacked together in any fashion to make a two-sided screen four
feet in height, marked the position of a _cabinet d'aisance_, composed of
a small coverless tin pail identical with the other six, and a board of
the usual design which could be placed on the pail or not as desired. The
wooden floor in the neighborhood of the booth and pails was of a dark
colour, obviously owing to the continual overflow of their contents.

The right-hand long wall contained something like ten large windows, of
which the first was commanded by the somewhat primitive cabinet. There
were no other windows in the remaining walls; or they had been carefully
rendered useless. In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had contrived a
couple of peep-holes--one in the door-end and one in the left-hand long
wall; the former commanding the gate by which I had entered, the latter a
portion of the street by which I had reached the gate. The blocking of
all windows on three sides had an obvious significance: _les hommes_ were
not supposed to see anything which went on in the world without; _les
hommes_ might, however, look their fill on a little washing-shed, on a
corner of what seemed to be another wing of the building, and on a bleak
lifeless abject landscape of scrubby woods beyond--which constituted the
view from the ten windows on the right. The authorities had miscalculated
a little in one respect: a merest fraction of the barb-wire pen which
began at the corner of the above-mentioned building was visible from
these windows, which windows (I was told) were consequently thronged by
fighting men at the time of the girl's promenade. A _planton_, I was also
told, made it his business, by keeping _les femmes_ out of this corner of
their _cour_ at the point of the bayonet to deprive them of the sight of
their admirers. In addition, it was dry bread or _cabinot_ for any of
either sex who were caught communicating with each other. Moreover the
promenades of the men and the women occurred at roughly speaking the same
hour, so that a man or woman who remained upstairs on the chance of
getting a smile or a wave from his or her girl or lover lost the
promenade thereby....

We had in succession gazed from the windows, crossed the end of the room,
and started down the other side, Monsieur Auguste marching between
us--when suddenly B. exclaimed in English "Good morning! How are you
today?" And I looked across Monsieur Auguste, anticipating another Harree
or at least a Fritz. What was my surprise to see a spare majestic figure
of manifest refinement, immaculately apparelled in a crisp albeit
collarless shirt, carefully mended trousers in which the remains of a
crease still lingered, a threadbare but perfectly fitting swallow-tail
coat, and newly varnished (if somewhat ancient) shoes. Indeed for the
first time since my arrival at La Ferté I was confronted by a perfect
type: the apotheosis of injured nobility, the humiliated victim of
perfectly unfortunate circumstances, the utterly respectable gentleman
who had seen better days. There was about him, moreover, something
irretrievably English, nay even pathetically Victorian--it was as if a
page of Dickens was shaking my friend's hand. "Count Bragard, I want you
to meet my friend Cummings"--he saluted me in modulated and courteous
accents of indisputable culture, gracefully extending his pale hand. "I
have heard a great deal about you from B., and wanted very much to meet
you. It is a pleasure to find a friend of my friend B., someone congenial
and intelligent in contrast to these swine"--he indicated the room with a
gesture of complete contempt. "I see you were strolling. Let us take a
turn." Monsieur Auguste said tactfully, "I'll see you soon, friends," and
left us with an affectionate shake of the hand and a sidelong glance of
jealousy and mistrust at B.'s respectable friend.

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