The Enormous Room · Chapter 3 (3/3)

I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew⁠—the moon’s picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon’s sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonlight.⁠—Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of colour. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.

We turned a corner, then another. My guides conferred concerning the location of something, I couldn’t make out what. Then the older nodded in the direction of a long dull dirty mass not a hundred yards away, which (as near as I could see) served either as a church or a tomb. Toward this we turned. All too soon I made out its entirely dismal exterior. Grey long stone walls, surrounded on the street side by a fence of ample proportions and uniformly dull colour. Now I perceived that we made toward a gate, singularly narrow and forbidding, in the grey long wall. No living soul appeared to inhabit this desolation.

The older rang at the gate. A gendarme with a revolver answered his ring; and presently he was admitted, leaving the younger and myself to wait. And now I began to realize that this was the gendarmerie of the town, into which for safekeeping I was presently to be inducted for the night. My heart sank, I confess, at the thought of sleeping in the company of that species of humanity which I had come to detest beyond anything in hell or on earth. Meanwhile the doorman had returned with the older, and I was bidden roughly enough to pick up my baggage and march. I followed my guides down a corridor, up a staircase, and into a dark, small room where a candle was burning. Dazzled by the light and dizzied by the fatigue of my ten or twelve mile stroll, I let my baggage go; and leaned against a convenient wall, trying to determine who was now my tormentor.

Facing me at a table stood a man of about my own height, and, as I should judge, about forty years old. His face was seedy sallow and long. He had bushy semicircular eyebrows which drooped so much as to reduce his eyes to mere blinking slits. His cheeks were so furrowed that they leaned inward. He had no nose, properly speaking, but a large beak of preposterous widthlessness, which gave his whole face the expression of falling gravely downstairs, and quite obliterated the unimportant chin. His mouth was made of two long uncertain lips which twitched nervously. His cropped black hair was rumpled; his blouse, from which hung a croix de guerre, unbuttoned; and his unputteed shanks culminated in bed-slippers. In physique he reminded me a little of Ichabod Crane. His neck was exactly like a hen’s: I felt sure that when he drank he must tilt his head back as hens do in order that the liquid may run down their throats. But his method of keeping himself upright, together with certain spasmodic contractions of his fingers and the nervous “uh-ah, uh-ah” which punctuated his insecure phrases like uncertain commas, combined to offer the suggestion of a rooster; a rather moth-eaten rooster, which took itself tremendously seriously and was showing off to an imaginary group of admiring hens situated somewhere in the background of his consciousness.

“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, n’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, peut-être 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 doorway 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.