“He is a bad fellow, a criminal, a traitor, an insult to civilization,”
Apollyon roared into my face.
“Yes?” I said again.
“You’d better be careful!” the Directeur shouted. “Do you know what’s
happened to your friend?”
“_Sais pas_,” I said.
“He’s gone to prison where he belongs!” Apollyon roared. “Do you
understand what that means?”
“Perhaps,” I answered, somewhat insolently I fear.
“You’re lucky not to be there with him! Do you understand?” Monsieur Le
Directeur thundered, “and next time pick your friends better, take more
care, I tell you, or you’ll go where he is—TO PRISON FOR THE REST OF
THE WAR!”
“With my friend I should be well content in prison!” I said evenly,
trying to keep looking through him and into the wall behind his black,
big, spidery body.
“In God’s Name, what a fool!” the Directeur bellowed furiously—and the
Surveillant remarked pacifyingly: “He loves his comrade too much,
that’s all.”—“But his comrade is a traitor and a villain!” objected the
Fiend, at the top of his harsh voice—“_Comprenez-vous; votre ami est UN
SALOP!_” he snarled at me.
He seems afraid that I don’t get his idea, I said to myself. “I
understand what you say,” I assured him.
“And you don’t believe it?” he screamed, showing his fangs and
otherwise looking like an exceedingly dangerous maniac.
“_Je ne le crois pas, Monsieur_.”
“O God’s name!” he shouted. “What a fool, _quel idiot_, what a beastly
fool!” And he did something through his froth-covered lips, something
remotely suggesting laughter.
Hereupon the Surveillant again intervened. I was mistaken. It was
lamentable. I could not be made to understand. Very true. But I had
been sent for—“Do you know, you have been decided to be a suspect?”
Monsieur le Surveillant turned to me, “and now you may choose where you
wish to be sent.” Apollyon was blowing and wheezing and muttering …
clenching his huge pinkish hands.
I addressed the Surveillant, ignoring Apollyon. “I should like, if I
may, to go to Oloron Sainte Marie.”
“What do you want to go there for?” the Directeur exploded
threateningly.
I explained that I was by profession an artist, and had always wanted
to view the Pyrenees. “The environment of Oloron would be most
stimulating to an artist—”
“Do you know it’s near Spain?” he snapped, looking straight at me.
I knew it was, and therefore replied with a carefully childish
ignorance: “Spain? Indeed! Very interesting.”
“You want to escape from France, that’s it?” the Directeur snarled.
“Oh, I hardly should say that!” the Surveillant interposed soothingly;
“he is an artist, and Oloron is a very pleasant place for an artist. A
very nice place, I hardly think his choice of Oloron a cause for
suspicion. I should think it a very natural desire on his part.”—His
superior subsided snarling.
After a few more questions I signed some papers which lay on the desk,
and was told by Apollyon to get out.
“When can I expect to leave?” I asked the Surveillant.
“Oh, it’s only a matter of days, of weeks perhaps,” he assured me
benignantly.
“You’ll leave when it’s proper for you to leave!” Apollyon burst out.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, indeed. Thank you very much,” I replied with a bow, and exited.
On the way to The Enormous Room the Black Holster said to me sharply:
“_Vous allez partir?_”
“_Oui._”
He gave me such a look as would have turned a mahogany piano leg into a
mound of smoking ashes, and slammed the key into the lock.
—Everyone gathered about me. “What news?”
“I have asked to go to Oloron as a suspect,” I answered.
“You should have taken my advice and asked to go to Cannes,” the fat
Alsatian reproached me. He had indeed spent a great while advising me;
but I trusted the little Machine-Fixer.
“_Parti?_” Jean le Nègre said with huge eyes, touching me gently.
“No, no. Later, perhaps; not now,” I assured him. And he patted my
shoulder and smiled, “_Bon!_” And we smoked a cigarette in honour of
the snow, of which Jean—in contrast to the majority of _les
hommes_—highly and unutterably approved. “_C’est jolie!_” he would say,
laughing wonderfully. And next morning he and I went on an exclusive
promenade, I in my _sabots_, Jean in a new pair of slippers which he
had received (after many requests) from the _bureau_. And we strode to
and fro in the muddy _cour_ admiring _la neige_, not speaking.
One day, after the snowfall, I received from Paris a complete set of
Shakespeare in the Everyman edition. I had forgotten completely that B.
and I—after trying and failing to get William Blake—had ordered and
paid for the better-known William; the ordering and communicating in
general being done with the collaboration of Monsieur Pet-airs. It was
a curious and interesting feeling which I experienced upon first
opening to “As You Like It” … the volumes had been carefully inspected,
I learned, by the _sécrétaire_, in order to eliminate the possibility
of their concealing something valuable or dangerous. And in this
connection let me add that the _sécrétaire_ or (if not he) his
superiors, were a good judge of what is valuable—if not what is
dangerous. I know this because, whereas my family several times sent me
socks in every case enclosing cigarettes, I received invariably the
former sans the latter. Perhaps it is not fair to suspect the officials
of La Ferté of this peculiarly mean theft; I should, possibly, doubt
the honesty of that very same French censor whose intercepting of B.’s
correspondence had motivated our removal from the Section Sanitaire.
Heaven knows I wish (like the Three Wise Men) to give justice where
justice is due.
Somehow or other, reading Shakespeare did not appeal to my disordered
mind. I tried Hamlet and Julius Caesar once or twice, and gave it up,
after telling a man who asked “Shah-kay-spare, who is Shah-kay-spare?”
that Mr. S. was the Homer of the English-speaking peoples—which remark,
to my surprise, appeared to convey a very definite idea to the
questioner and sent him away perfectly satisfied. Most of the timeless
time I spent promenading in the rain and sleet with Jean le Nègre, or
talking with Mexique, or exchanging big gifts of silence with The Zulu.
For Oloron—I did not believe in it, and I did not particularly care. If
I went away, good; if I stayed, so long as Jean and The Zulu and
Mexique were with me, good. “_M’en fous pas mal_,” pretty nearly summed
up my philosophy.
At least the Surveillant let me alone on the Soi-Même topic. After my
brief visit to Satan I wallowed in a perfect luxury of dirt. And no one
objected. On the contrary everyone (realizing that the enjoyment of
dirt may be made the basis of a fine art) beheld with something like
admiration my more and more uncouth appearance. Moreover, by being
dirtier than usual I was protesting in a (to me) very satisfactory way
against all that was neat and tidy and bigoted and solemn and founded
upon the anguish of my fine friends. And my fine friends, being my fine
friends, understood. Simultaneously with my arrival at the summit of
dirtiness—by the calendar, as I guess, December the twenty-first—came
the Black Holster into The Enormous Room and with an excited and angry
mien proclaimed loudly:
“_L’américain! Allez chez le Directeur. De suite._”