Book: The Enormous Room

E >> Edward Estlin Cummings >> The Enormous Room




"You're looking pretty well today, Count Bragard," B. said amiably.

"I do well enough," the Count answered. "It is a frightful strain--you of
course realise that--for anyone who has been accustomed to the decencies,
let alone the luxuries, of life. This filth"--he pronounced the word with
indescribable bitterness--"this herding of men like cattle--they treat us
no better than pigs here. The fellows drop their dung in the very room
where they sleep. What is one to expect of a place like this? _Ce n'est
pas une existence_"--his French was glib and faultless.

"I was telling my friend that you knew Cézanne," said B. "Being an artist
he was naturally much interested."

Count Bragard stopped in astonishment, and withdrew his hands slowly from
the tails of his coat. "Is it possible!" he exclaimed, in great
agitation. "What an astonishing coincidence! I am myself a painter. You
perhaps noticed this badge"--he indicated a button attached to his left
lapel, and I bent and read the words: On War Service. "I always wear it,"
he said with a smile of faultless sorrow, and resumed his walk. "They
don't know what it means here, but I wear it all the same. I was a
special representative for The London Sphere at the front in this war. I
did the trenches and all that sort of thing. They paid me well; I got
fifteen pounds a week. And why not? I am an R.A. My specialty was horses.
I painted the finest horses in England, among them the King's own entry
in the last Derby. Do you know London?" We said no. "If you are ever in
London, go to the" (I forget the name) "Hotel--one of the best in town.
It has a beautiful large bar, exquisitely furnished in the very best
taste. Anyone will tell you where to find the ----. It has one of my
paintings over the bar: "Straight-jacket" (or some such name) "the
Marquis of ----'s horse, who won last time the race was run. I was in
America in 1910. You know Cornelius Vanderbilt perhaps? I painted some of
his horses. We were the best of friends, Vanderbilt and I. I got handsome
prices, you understand, three, five, six thousand pounds. When I left, he
gave me this card--I have it here somewhere--" he again stopped, sought
in his breastpocket a moment, and produced a visiting card. On one side I
read the name "Cornelius Vanderbilt"--on the other, in bold
handwriting--"to my very dear friend Count F.A. de Bragard" and a date.
"He hated to have me go."

I was walking in a dream.

"Have you your sketch-books and paints with you? What a pity. I am always
intending to send to England for mine, but you know--one can't paint in a
place like this. It is impossible--all this dirt and these filthy
people--it stinks! Ugh!"

I forced myself to say: "How did you happen to come here?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "How indeed, you may well ask! I cannot tell
you. It must have been some hideous mistake. As soon as I got here I
spoke to the Directeur and to the Surveillant. The Directeur said he knew
nothing about it; the Surveillant told me confidentially that it was a
mistake on the part of the French government; that I would be out
directly. He's not such a bad sort. So I am waiting; every day I expect
orders from the English government for my release. The whole thing is
preposterous. I wrote to the Embassy and told them so. As soon as I set
foot outside this place, I shall sue the French government for ten
thousand pounds for the loss of time it has occasioned me. Imagine it--I
had contracts with countless members of The Lords--and the war came. Then
I was sent to the front by The Sphere--and here I am, every day costing
me dear, rotting away in this horrible place. The time I have wasted here
has already cost me a fortune."

He paused directly in front of the door and spoke with solemnity: "A man
might as well be dead."

Scarcely had the words passed his lips when I almost jumped out of my
skin, for directly before us on the other side of the wall arose the very
noise which announced to Scrooge the approach of Marley's ghost--a dismal
clanking and rattling of chains. Had Marley's transparent figure walked
straight through the wall and up to the Dickensian character at my side,
I would have been less surprised than I was by what actually happened.

The doors opened with an uncanny bang and in the bang stood a fragile
minute queer figure, remotely suggesting an old man. The chief
characteristic of the apparition was a certain disagreeable nudity which
resulted from its complete lack of all the accepted appurtenances and
prerogatives of old age. Its little stooping body, helpless and brittle,
bore with extraordinary difficulty a head of absurd largeness, yet which
moved on the fleshless neck with a horrible agility. Dull eyes sat in the
clean-shaven wrinkles of a face neatly hopeless. At the knees a pair of
hands hung, infantile in their smallness. In the loose mouth a tiny
cigarette had perched and was solemnly smoking itself.

Suddenly the figure darted at me with a spiderlike entirety.

I felt myself lost.

A voice said mechanically from the vicinity of my feet: "_II vous faut
prendre la douche_"--I stared stupidly. The spectre was poised before me;
its averted eyes contemplated the window. "Take your bath," it added as
an afterthought, in English--"Come with me." It turned suddenly. It
hurried to the doorway. I followed. Its rapid deadly doll-like hands shut
and skillfully locked the doors in a twinkling. "Come," its voice said.

It hurried before me down two dirty flights of narrow mutilated stairs.
It turned left, and passed through an open door.

I found myself in the wet sunless air of morning.

To the right it hurried, following the wall of the building. I pursued it
mechanically. At the corner, which I had seen from the window upstairs,
the barbed-wire fence eight feet in height began. The thing paused,
produced a key and unlocked a gate. The first three or four feet of wire
swung inward. He entered. I after him.

In a flash the gate was locked behind me, and I was following along a
wall at right angles to the first. I strode after the thing. A moment
before I had been walking in a free world: now I was again a prisoner.
The sky was still over me, the clammy morning caressed me; but walls of
wire and stone told me that my instant of freedom had departed. I was in
fact traversing a lane no wider than the gate; on my left, barbed-wire
separated me from the famous _cour_ in which _les femmes se promenent_--a
rectangle about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone wall at the
further end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire;--on my right, grey
sameness of stone, the _ennui_ of the regular and the perpendicular, the
ponderous ferocity of silence....

I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of the
fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with a
female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent
explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and
encountered a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding Face:
four livid, shaggy disks focussing hungrily; four pair of uncouth eyes
rapidly smouldering; eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous
titter. Suddenly above and behind these terrors rose a single horror of
beauty--a crisp vital head, a young ivory, actual face, a night of firm,
alive, icy hair, a white, large, frightful smile.

... The thing was crying two or three paces in front of me: "Come!" The
heads had vanished as by magic.

I dived forward; followed through a little door in the wall into a room
about fifteen feet square, occupied by a small stove, a pile of wood, and
a ladder. He plunged through another even smaller door, into a bleak
rectangular place, where I was confronted on the left by a large tin bath
and on the right by ten wooden tubs, each about a yard in diameter, set
in a row against the wall. "Undress" commanded the spectre. I did so. "Go
into the first one." I climbed into the tub. "You shall pull the string,"
the spectre said, hurriedly throwing his cigarette into a corner. I
stared upward, and discovered a string dangling from a kind of reservoir
over my head: I pulled: and was saluted by a stabbing crash of icy water.
I leaped from the tub. "Here is your napkin. Make dry yourself"--he
handed me a piece of cloth a little bigger than a handkerchief. "Hurree."
I donned my clothes, wet and shivering and altogether miserable. "Good.
Come now!" I followed him, through the room with the stove, into the
barbed-wire lane. A hoarse shout rose from the yard--which was filled
with women, girls, children, and a baby or two. I thought I recognised
one of the four terrors who had saluted me from the window, in a girl of
18 with a soiled slobby body huddling beneath its dingy dress; her bony
shoulders stifled in a shawl upon which excremental hair limply spouted;
a huge empty mouth; and a red nose, sticking between the bluish cheeks
that shook with spasms of coughing. Just inside the wire a figure
reminiscent of Gré, gun on shoulder, revolver on hip, moved monotonously.

The apparition hurried me through the gate, and along the wall into the
building, where instead of mounting the stairs he pointed down a long,
gloomy corridor with a square of light at the end of it, saying rapidly,
"Go to the promenade"--and vanished.

With the laughter of the Five still ringing in my ears, and no very clear
conception of the meaning of existence, I stumbled down the corridor;
bumping squarely into a beefy figure with a bull's neck and the familiar
revolver who demanded furiously: "What are you doing there? _Nom de
Dieu!_"--"_Pardon. Les douches_," I answered, quelled by the
collision.--He demanded in wrathy French "Who took you to the
douches?"--For a moment I was at a complete loss--then Fritz's remark
about the new _baigneur_ flashed through my mind: "Ree-shar" I answered
calmly.--The bull snorted satisfactorily. "Get into the _cour_ and hurry
up about it" he ordered.--"_C'est par là?_" I inquired politely.--He
stared at me contemptuously without answering; so I took it upon myself
to use the nearest door, hoping that he would have the decency not to
shoot me. I had no sooner crossed the threshold when I found myself once
more in the welcome air; and not ten paces away I espied B. peacefully
lounging, with some thirty others, within a _cour_ about one quarter the
size of the women's. I marched up to a little dingy gate in the
barbed-wire fence, and was hunting for the latch (as no padlock was in
evidence) when a scared voice cried loudly "_Qu'est ce que vous faites
là!_" and I found myself stupidly looking into a rifle. B., Fritz,
Harree, Pompom, Monsieur Auguste, The Bear, and the last but not least
Count de Bragard immediately informed the trembling _planton_ that I was
a _Nouveau_ who had just returned from the _douches_ to which I had been
escorted by Monsieur Reeshar, and that I should be admitted to the _cour_
by all means. The cautious watcher of the skies was not, however, to be
fooled by any such fol-de-rol and stood his ground. Fortunately at this
point the beefy _planton_ yelled from the doorway "Let him in," and I was
accordingly let in, to the gratification of my friends, and against the
better judgment of the guardian of the _cour_, who muttered something
about having more than enough to do already.

I had not been mistaken as to the size of the men's yard: it was
certainly not more than twenty yards deep and fifteen wide. By the
distinctness with which the shouts of _les femmes_ reached my ears I
perceived that the two _cours_ adjoined. They were separated by a stone
wall ten feet in height, which I had already remarked (while _en route_
to _les douches_) as forming one end of the _cour des femmes_. The men's
_cour_ had another stone wall slightly higher than the first, and which
ran parallel to it; the two remaining sides, which were property ends,
were made by the familiar barbed-wire.

The furniture of the _cour_ was simple: in the middle of the further end,
a wooden sentry-box was placed just inside the wire; a curious
contrivance, which I discovered to be a sister to the booth upstairs,
graced the wall on the left which separated the two _cours_, while
further up on this wall a horizontal iron bar projected from the stone at
a height of seven feet and was supported at its other end by a wooden
post, the idea apparently being to give the prisoners a little taste of
gymnastics; a minute wooden shed filled the right upper corner and served
secondarily as a very partial shelter for the men and primarily as a
stable for an extraordinary water-wagon, composed of a wooden barrel on
two wheels with shafts which would not possibly accommodate anything
larger than a diminutive donkey (but in which I myself was to walk not
infrequently, as it proved); parallel to the second stone wall, but at a
safe distance from it, stretched a couple of iron girders serving as a
barbarously cold seat for any unfortunate who could not remain on his
feet the entire time; on the ground close by the shed lay amusement
devices numbers two and three--a huge iron cannon-ball and the six-foot
iron axle of a departed wagon--for testing the strength of the prisoners
and beguiling any time which might lie heavily on their hands after they
had regaled themselves with the horizontal bar; and finally, a dozen
mangy apple-trees, fighting for their very lives in the angry soil,
proclaimed to all the world that the _cour_ itself was in reality a
_verger_.

"Les pommiers sont pleins de pommes;
Allons au verger, Simone...."

A description of the _cour_ would be incomplete without an enumeration of
the manifold duties of the _planton_ in charge, which were as follows: to
prevent the men from using the horizontal bar, except for chinning, since
if you swung yourself upon it you could look over the wall into the
women's _cour_; to see that no one threw anything over the wall into said
_cour_; to dodge the cannon-ball which had a mysterious habit of taking
advantage of the slope of the ground and bounding along at a prodigious
rate of speed straight for the sentry-box; to watch closely anyone who
inhabited the _cabinet d'aisance_, lest he should make use of it to vault
over the wall; to see that no one stood on the girders, for a similar
reason; to keep watch over anyone who entered the shed; to see that
everyone urinated properly against the wall in the general vicinity of
the cabinet; to protect the apple-trees into which well-aimed pieces of
wood and stone were continually flying and dislodging the sacred fruit;
to mind that no one entered or exited by the gate in the upper fence
without authority; to report any signs, words, tokens, or other
immoralities exchanged by prisoners with girls sitting in the windows of
the women's wing (it was from one of these windows that I had recently
received my salutation), also names of said girls, it being forbidden to
exhibit any part of the female person at a window while the males were on
promenade; to quell all fights and especially to prevent people from
using the wagon axle as a weapon of defense or offense; and last, to keep
an eye on the sweeper when he and his wheelbarrow made use of a secondary
gate situated in the fence at the further end, not far from the
sentry-box, to dump themselves.

Having acquainted me with the various _défendus_ which limited the
activities of a man on promenade, my friends proceeded to enliven the
otherwise somewhat tedious morning by shattering one after another all
rules and regulations. Fritz, having chinned himself fifteen times,
suddenly appeared astride of the bar, evoking a reprimand; Pompom bowled
the _planton_ with the cannon-ball, apologising in profuse and vile
French; Harree the Hollander tossed the wagon-axle lightly half the
length of the _cour_, missing The Bear by an inch; The Bear bided his
time and cleverly hurled a large stick into one of the holy trees,
bringing to the ground a withered apple for which at least twenty people
fought for several minutes; and so on. The most open gestures were
indulged in for the benefit of several girls who had braved the official
wrath and were enjoying the morning at their windows. The girders were
used as a race-track. The beams supporting the shed-roof were shinned.
The water-wagon was dislocated from its proper position. The cabinet and
urinal were misused. The gate was continually admitting and emitting
persons who said they were thirsty, and must get a drink at a tub of
water which stood around the corner. A letter was surreptitiously thrown
over the wall into the _cour des femmes_.

The _planton_ who suffered all these indignities was a solemn youth with
wise eyes situated very far apart in a mealy expressionless elipse of
face, to the lower end of which clung a piece of down, exactly like a
feather sticking to an egg. The rest of him was fairly normal with the
exception of his hands, which were not mates; the left being considerably
larger, and made of wood.

I was at first somewhat startled by this eccentricity; but soon learned
that with the exception of two or three, who formed the _Surveillant's_
permanent staff and of whom the beefy one was a shining example, all the
_plantons_ were supposed to be unhealthy; they were indeed the disabled
whom _le gouvernement français_ sent from time to time to La Ferté and
similar institutions for a little outing, and as soon as they had
recovered their health under these salubrious influences they were
shipped back to do their bit for world-safety, democracy, freedom, etc.,
in the trenches. I also learned that, of all the ways of attaining
_cabinot_, by far the simplest was to apply to a _planton_, particularly
to a permanent _planton_, say the beefy one (who was reputed to be
peculiarly touchy on this point) the term _embusqué_. This method never
failed. To its efficacy many of the men and more of the girls (by whom
the _plantons_, owing to their habit of taking advantage of the weaker
sex at every opportunity, were even more despised) attested by not
infrequent spasms of consumptive coughing, which could be plainly heard
from the further end of one _cour_ to the other.

In a little over two hours I learned an astonishing lot about La Ferté
itself: it was a co-educational receiving station whither were sent from
various parts of France (a) males suspected of espionage and (b) females
of a well-known type found in the zone of the armies. It was pointed out
to me that the task of finding such members of the human race was _pas
difficile:_ in the case of the men, any foreigner would do provided his
country was neutral (e.g. Holland); as for the girls, inasmuch as the
armies of the Allies were continually retreating, the _zone des armées_
(particularly in the case of Belgium) was always including new cities,
whose _petites femmes_ became automatically subject to arrest. It was not
to be supposed that all the women of La Ferté were _putains_: there were
a large number of respectable women, the wives of prisoners, who met
their husbands at specified times on the floor below the men's quarters,
whither man and woman were duly and separately conducted by _plantons_.
In this case no charges had been preferred against the women; they were
voluntary prisoners, who had preferred to freedom this living in
proximity to their husbands. Many of them had children; some babies. In
addition there were certain _femmes honnettes_ whose nationality, as in
the case of the men, had cost them their liberty; Marguerite the
washerwoman, for example, was a German.

La Ferté Macé was not properly speaking a prison, but a Porte or
Detention Camp: that is to say, persons sent to it were held for a
Commission, composed of an official, a lawyer, and a captain of
_gendarmes_, which inspected the Camp and passed upon each case in turn
for the purpose of determining the guiltiness of the suspected party. If
the latter were found guilty by the Commission, he or she was sent off to
a regular prison camp for the duration of the war; if not guilty, he or
she was (in theory) set free. The Commission came to La Ferté once every
three months. It should be added that there were prisoners who had passed
the Commission, two, three, four, and even five times, without any
appreciable result; there were _prisonierès_ who had remained in La Ferté
a year, and even eighteen months.

The authorities at La Ferté consisted of the _Directeur_, or general
overlord, the _Surveillant_, who had the _plantons_ (orderlies) under him
and was responsible to the _Directeur_ for the administration of the
camp, and the _Gestionnaire_ (who kept the accounts). As assistant, the
_Surveillant_ had a mail clerk who acted as translator on occasion. Twice
a week the camp was visited by a regular French army doctor (_médecin
major_) who was supposed to prescribe in severe cases and to give the
women venereal inspection at regular intervals. The daily routine of
attending to minor ailments and injuries was in the hands of Monsieur
Ree-shar (Richard), who knew probably less about medicine than any man
living and was an ordinary prisoner like all of us, but whose impeccable
conduct merited cosy quarters. A sweeper was appointed from time to time
by the _Surveillant_, acting for the _Directeur_, from the inhabitants of
La Ferté; as was also a cook's assistant. The regular cook was a fixture,
and a Boche like the other fixtures, Marguerite and Richard. This fact
might seem curious were it not that the manner, appearance and actions of
the _Directeur_ himself proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was all
which the term Boche could possibly imply.

"He's a son-of-a-bitch," B. said heartily. "They took me up to him when I
came two days ago. As soon as he saw me he bellowed: '_Imbécile et
inchrétien!_'; then he called me a great lot of other things, including
Shame of my country, Traitor to the sacred cause of Liberty, Contemptible
coward and Vile sneaking spy. When he got all through I said 'I don't
understand French.' You should have seen him then."

Separation of the sexes was enforced, not, it is true, with success, but
with a commendable ferocity. The punishments for both men and girls were
dry bread and _cabinot_.

"What on earth is _cabinot?_" I demanded.

There were various _cabinots_: each sex had its regular _cabinot_, and
there were certain extra ones. B. knew all about them from Harree and
Pompom, who spent nearly all their time in the _cabinot_. They were rooms
about nine feet square and six feet high. There was no light and no
floor, and the ground (three were on the ground floor) was always wet and
often a good many inches under water. The occupant on entering was
searched for tobacco, deprived of his or her mattress and blanket, and
invited to sleep on the ground on some planks. One didn't need to write a
letter to a member of the opposite sex to get _cabinot_, or even to call
a _planton embusqué_--there was a woman, a foreigner, who, instead of
sending a letter to her embassy through the bureau (where all letters
were read by the mail clerk to make sure that they said nothing
disagreeable about the authorities or conditions of La Ferté) tried to
smuggle it outside, and got twenty-eight days of _cabinot_. She had
previously written three times, handing the letters to the _Surveillant_,
as per regulations, and had received no reply. Fritz, who had no idea why
he was arrested and was crazy to get in touch with his embassy, had
likewise written several letters, taking the utmost care to state the
facts only and always handing them in; but he had never received a word
in return. The obvious inference was that letters from a foreigner to his
embassy were duly accepted by the _Surveillant_ (Warden), but rarely, if
ever, left La Ferté.

B. and I were conversing merrily àpropos the God-sent miracle of our
escape from Vingt-et-Un, when a benign-faced personage of about fifty
with sparse greyish hair and a Benjamin Franklin expression appeared on
the other side of the fence, from the direction of the door through which
I had passed after bumping the beefy bull. "_Planton_" it cried heavily
to the wooden-handed one, "Two men to go get water." Harree and Pompom
were already at the gate with the archaic water-wagon, the former pushing
from behind and the latter in the shafts. The guardian of the _cour_
walked up and opened the gate for them, after ascertaining that another
_planton_ was waiting at the corner of the building to escort them on
their mission. A little way from the _cour_, the stone wall (which formed
one of its boundaries and which ran parallel to the other stone wall
dividing the two _cours_) met the prison building; and here was a huge
double door, twice padlocked, through which the waterseekers passed on to
the street. There was a sort of hydrant up the street a few hundred
yards, I was told. The cook (Benjamin F., that is) required from three to
six wagonfuls of water twice a day, and in reward for the labour involved
in its capture was in the habit of giving a cup of coffee to the captors.
I resolved that I would seek water at the earliest opportunity.

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