Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/170

Rh with black eyes and a great smile and woolly paws—which noise, conceived and executed by The Lobster, sent The Enormous Room into an absolute and incurable hysteria.

The Fighting Sheeney was at a standstill. He knew not how to turn. At last he decided to join with the insurgents, and wailed brutally and dismally. That was the last straw: Rockyfeller, who could no longer (even by shouting to Judas) make himself heard, gave up conversation and gazed angrily about him; angrily yet fearfully, as if he expected some of these numerous bears, lions, tigers and baboons to leap upon him from the darkness. His livid super-disagreeable face trembled with the flickering cadence of the candle. His lean lips clenched with mortification and wrath. "Vous êtes chef de chambre," he said fiercely to Judas—"why don't you make the men stop this? C'est enmerdant." "Ah," replied Judas smoothly and insinuatingly—"They are only men, and boors at that; you can't expect them to have any manners." A tremendous group of Something Elses greeted this remark together with cries, insults, groans and linguistic trumpetings. I got up and walked the length of the room to the cabinet (situated as always by this time of night in a pool which was in certain places six inches deep, from which pool my sabots somewhat protected me) and returned, making as loud a clattering as I was able. Suddenly the voice of Monsieur Auguste leaped through the din in an

"Alors! c'est as-sez."

The next thing we knew he had reached the window just below the cabinet (the only window, by the way, not nailed up with good long wire nails for the sake of warmth) and was shouting in a wild, high, gentle, angry voice to the sentinel below:

"Plan-ton! It is impos-si-ble to sleep!"

A great cry: "Yes! I am coming!" floated up—every single noise dropped—Rockyfeller shot out his hand for the candle, seized it in terror, blew it out as if blowing it out were the last thing he would do in this life—and The Enormous Room hung silent; enormously dark, enormously expectant....