Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/102

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I felt unutterably lost. I approached the door. I even started to push it.

"Attends, Nom de Dieu." The planton gave me another shove, faced the door, knocked twice, and cried in accents of profound respect: "Monsieur le Gestionnaire"—after which he gazed at me with really supreme contempt, his neat pig-like face becoming almost circular.

I said to myself: This Gestionnaire, whoever he is, must be a very terrible person, a frightful person, a person utterly without mercy.

From within a heavy, stupid, pleasant voice lazily remarked:

"Entrez."

The planton threw the door open, stood stiffly on the threshold, and gave me the look which plantons give to eggs when plantons are a little hungry.

I crossed the threshold, trembling with (let us hope) anger.

Before me, seated at a table, was a very fat personage with a black skull cap perched upon its head. Its face was possessed of an enormous nose, on which pince-nez precariously roosted; otherwise the face was large, whiskered, very German and had three chins. Extraordinary creature. Its belly, as it sat, was slightly dented by the table-top, on which table-top rested several enormous tomes similar to those employed by the recording angel on the Day of Judgment, an inkstand or two, innumerable pens and pencils, and some positively fatal looking papers. The person was dressed in worthy and semi-dismal clothes amply cut to afford a promenade for the big stomach. The coat was of that extremely thin black material which occasionally is affected by clerks and dentists and more often by librarians. If ever I looked upon an honest German jowl, or even upon a caricature thereof, I looked upon one now. Such a round fat red pleasant beer-drinking face as reminded me only and immediately of huge meerschaum pipes, Deutsche Verein mottos, sudsy seidels of Wurtzburger, and Jacob Wirth's (once upon a time) brachwurst. Such pinlike pink merry eyes as made me think of Kris Kringle him-