Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/164

Rh landing quietly beside them; and exclaimed rapidly and briefly through his nose.

"Mang."

He said it almost petulantly, or as a child says "Tag! You're it."

The onlookers recoiled, completely surprised. Whereat the frightened youth in black puttees sidled over and explained with a pathetic, at once ingratiating and patronising, accent.

"He is not nasty. He's a good fellow. He's my friend. He wants to say that it's his, that box. He doesn't speak French."

"It's the Gottverdummer Polak's box," said the Triangular Man exploding in Dutch. "They're a pair of Polakers; and this man" (with a twist of his pale-blue eyes in the direction of the Bewhiskered One) "and I had to carry it all the Gottverdummer way to this Gottverdummer place."

All this time the incognizable nouveau was smoking slowly and calmly, and looking at nothing at all with his black buttonlike eyes. Upon his face no faintest suggestion of expression could be discovered by the hungry minds which focussed unanimously upon its almost stern contours. The deep furrows in the cardboardlike cheeks (furrows which resembled slightly the gills of some extraordinary fish, some unbreathing fish) moved not an atom. The moustache drooped in something like mechanical tranquillity. The lips closed occasionally with a gesture at once abstracted and sensitive upon the lightly and carefully held cigarette; whose curling smoke accentuated the poise of the head, at once alert and uninterested.

Monsieur Auguste broke in, speaking, as I thought, Russian—and in an instant he and the youth in puttees and the Unknowable's cigarette and the box and the Unknowable had disappeared through the crowd in the direction of Monsieur Auguste's paillasse, which was also the direction of the paillasse belonging to the Cordonnier as he was sometimes called