The Enormous Room

by e. e. cummings

  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 barbed-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 girls’ 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 pain sec or cabinot for any of either sex who were caught communicating with each other. Moreover the promenades des hommes et des femmes occurred at roughly speaking the same hour,so that an homme or femme who remained upstairs on the chance of getting a smile or a wave from his or her girl or lover lost the promenade thereby....

  Scene from the Enormous Room

  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 appareled 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 has 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 “Je vais vous voir tout à l’heure,mes amis”,and left us with an affectionate shake of the hand and a sidelong glance of jealousy and mistrust at B’s respectable friend.

  “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 realize 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 breast-pocket 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 : “Il vous faut prendre
des douches”—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 rapidly 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 promènent—a rectangle about 5o 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 a 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 recognized 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 Creil,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 : “Qu’est-ce que vous faites là? 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 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 Ree-shar,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 properly ends,were made by the familiar fil de fer barbelé.

  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 gymnastic;a minute wooden shed filled the right upper corner and served secondarily as a very partial shelter for les hommes and primarily as a stable for an extraordinary water-wagon,composed of a wooden barrel on two wheels with shafts which could 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 2 and 3—a huge iron cannon-ball and the six-foot 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 co
uld 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 défendu to exhibit any part of the female person at a window while the males were on promenade;to quell all rixes 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 balayeur 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.

  Scene from the cour

  Having acquainted me with 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,apologizing 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 racetrack. 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.