The Enormous Room · Chapter 8 (2/2)

And I think The Wanderer, with his wife and children whom he loved as never have I seen a man love anything in this world, was partly happy; walking in the sun when there was any, sleeping with his little boy in a great gulp of softness. And I remember him pulling his fine beard into two darknesses⁠—huge-sleeved, pink-checked chemise⁠—walking kindly like a bear⁠—corduroy bigness of trousers, waistline always amorous of knees⁠—finger-ends just catching tops of enormous pockets. When he feels, as I think, partly happy, he corrects our pronunciation of the ineffable Word⁠—saying

“O, May-err-de!”

and smiles. And once Jean Le Nègre said to him as he squatted in the cour with his little son beside him, his broad strong back as nearly always against one of the gruesome and minute pommiers⁠—

“Barbu! j’vais couper ta barbe, barbu!” Whereat the father answered slowly and seriously.

“When you cut my beard you will have to cut off my head” regarding Jean le Nègre with unspeakably sensitive, tremendously deep, peculiarly soft eyes. “My beard is finer than that; you have made it too coarse,” he gently remarked one day, looking attentively at a piece of photographie which I had been caught in the act of perpetrating: whereat I bowed my head in silent shame.

“Demestre, Josef (femme, née Feliska)” I read another day in the Gestionnaire’s book of judgment. O Monsieur le Gestionnaire, I should not have liked to have seen those names in my book of sinners, in my album of filth and blood and incontinence, had I been you.⁠ ⁠… O little, very little, gouvernement français, and you, the great and comfortable messieurs of the world, tell me why you have put a gypsy who dresses like Tomorrow among the squabbling pimps and thieves of yesterday.⁠ ⁠…

He had been in New York one day.

One child died at sea.

“Les landes” he cried, towering over The Enormous Room suddenly one night in Autumn, “je les connais commes ma poche⁠—Bordeaux? Je sais où que c’est. Madrid? Je sais où que c’est. Tolède? Seville? Naples? Je sais où que c’est. Je les connais comme ma poche.”

He could not read. “Tell me what it tells,” he said briefly and without annoyance, when once I offered him the journal. And I took pleasure in trying to do so.

One fine day, perhaps the finest day, I looked from a window of The Enormous Room and saw (in the same spot that Lena had enjoyed her half-hour promenade during confinement in the cabinet, as related) the wife of The Wanderer, “née Feliska,” giving his baby a bath in a pail, while The Wanderer sat in the sun smoking. About the pail an absorbed group of putains stood. Several plantons (abandoning for one instant their plantonic demeanour) leaned upon their guns and watched. Some even smiled a little. And the mother, holding the brownish, naked, crowing child tenderly, was swimming it quietly to and fro, to the delight of Celina in particular. To Celina it waved its arms greetingly. She stooped and spoke to it. The mother smiled. The Wanderer, looking from time to time at his wife, smoked and pondered by himself in the sunlight.

This baby was the delight of the putains at all times. They used to take turns carrying it when on promenade. The Wanderer’s wife, at such moments, regarded them with a gentle and jealous weariness.

There were two girls, as I said. One, the littlest girl I ever saw walk and act by herself, looked exactly like a gollywog. This was because of the huge mop of black hair. She was very pretty. She used to sit with her mother and move her toes quietly for her own private amusement. The older sister was as divine a creature as God in His skillful and infinite wisdom ever created. Her intensely sexual face greeted us nearly always as we descended pour la soupe. She would come up to B. and me slenderly and ask, with the brightest and darkest eyes in the world,

“Chocolat, M’sieu’?”

and we would present her with a big or small, as the case might be, morceau de chocolat. We even called her Chocolat. Her skin was nearly sheer gold; her fingers and feet delicately formed: her teeth wonderfully white; her hair incomparably black and abundant. Her lips would have seduced, I think, le gouvernement français itself. Or any saint.

Well.⁠ ⁠…

Le gouvernement français decided in its infinite but unskillful wisdom that The Wanderer, being an inexpressibly bad man (guilty of who knows what gentleness, strength and beauty) should suffer as much as he was capable of suffering. In other words, it decided (through its Three Wise Men, who formed the visiting Commission whereof I speak anon) that the wife, her baby, her two girls, and her little son should be separated from the husband by miles and by stone walls and by barbed wire and by Law. Or perhaps (there was a rumour to this effect) The Three Wise Men discovered that the father of these incredibly exquisite children was not her lawful husband. And of course, this being the case, the utterly and incomparably moral French Government saw its duty plainly; which duty was to inflict the ultimate anguish of separation upon the sinners concerned. I know The Wanderer came from la commission with tears of anger in his great eyes. I know that some days later he, along with that deadly and poisonous criminal Monsieur Auguste and that aged archtraitor Monsieur Pet-airs, and that incomparably wicked person Surplice, and a ragged gentle being who one day presented us with a broken spoon which he had found somewhere⁠—the gift being a purely spontaneous mark of approval and affection⁠—who for this reason was known as The Spoonman, had the vast and immeasurable honour of departing for Précigne pour la durée de la guerre. If ever I can create by some occult process of imagining a deed so perfectly cruel as the deed perpetrated in the case of Joseph Demestre, I shall consider myself a genius. Then let us admit that the Three Wise Men were geniuses. And let us, also and softly, admit that it takes a good and great government perfectly to negate mercy. And let us, bowing our minds smoothly and darkly, repeat with Monsieur le Curé⁠—“toujours l’enfer.⁠ ⁠…”

The Wanderer was almost insane when he heard the judgment of la commission. And hereupon I must pay my respects to Monsieur Pet-airs; whom I had ever liked, but whose spirit I had not, up to the night preceding The Wanderer’s departure, fully appreciated. Monsieur Pet-airs sat for hours at the card-table, his glasses continually fogging, censuring The Wanderer in tones of apparent annoyance for his frightful weeping (and now and then himself sniffing faintly with his big red nose); sat for hours pretending to take dictation from Joseph Demestre, in reality composing a great letter or series of great letters to the civil and I guess military authorities of Orne on the subject of the injustice done to the father of four children, one a baby at the breast, now about to be separated from all he held dear and good in this world. “I appeal” (Monsieur Pet-airs wrote in his boisterously careful, not to say elegant, script) “to your sense of mercy and of fair play and of honour. It is not merely an unjust thing which is being done, not merely an unreasonable thing, it is an unnatural thing.⁠ ⁠…” As he wrote I found it hard to believe that this was the aged and decrepit and fussing biped whom I had known, whom I had caricatured, with whom I had talked upon ponderous subjects (a comparison between the Belgian and French cities with respect to their location as favouring progress and prosperity, for example); who had with a certain comic shyness revealed to me a secret scheme for reclaiming inundated territories by means of an extraordinary pump “of my invention.” Yet this was he, this was Monsieur Pet-airs Lui-Même; and I enjoyed peculiarly making his complete acquaintance for the first and only time.

May the Heavens prosper him!

The next day The Wanderer appeared in the cour walking proudly in a shirt of solid vermilion.

He kissed his wife⁠—excuse me, Monsieur Malvy, I should say the mother of his children⁠—crying very bitterly and suddenly.

The plantons yelled for him to line up with the rest, who were waiting outside the gate, bag and baggage. He covered his great king’s eyes with his long golden hands and went.

With him disappeared unspeakable sunlight, and the dark keen bright strength of the earth.