Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/187

176 ried or wore or had on leash spasmodically to them. I never ceased to be surprised by the scorn, contempt, disgust and frequently sheer ferocity manifested in the male and particularly in the female faces. All the ladies wore, of course, black; they were wholly unbeautiful of face or form, some of them actually repellant; not one should I, even under more favourable circumstances, have enjoyed meeting. The first time I caught water everybody in the town was returning from church, and a terrific sight it was. Vive la bourgeoisie, I said to myself, ducking the shafts of censure by the simple means of hiding my face behind the moving water barrel.

But one day—as I started to inform the reader—somebody and I were catching water, and, in fact, had caught our last load, and were returning with it down the street; when I, who was striding rapidly behind trying to lessen with both hands the impetus of the machine, suddenly tripped and almost fell with surprise—

On the curb of the little unbeautiful street a figure was sitting, a female figure dressed in utterly barbaric pinks and vermilions, having a dark shawl thrown about her shoulders; a positively Arabian face delimited by a bright coif of some tenuous stuff, slender golden hands holding with extraordinary delicacy what appeared to be a baby of not more than three months old; and beside her a black-haired child of perhaps three years and beside this child a girl of fourteen, dressed like the woman in crashing hues, with the most exquisite face I had ever known.

Nom de Dieu, I thought vaguely. Am I or am I not completely asleep? And the man in the shafts craned his neck in stupid amazement, and the planton twirled his moustache and assumed that intrepid look which only a planton (or a gendarme) perfectly knows how to assume in the presence of female beauty.

That night The Wanderer was absent from la soupe, having been called by Apollyon to the latter's office upon a matter of superior import. Everyone was abuzz with the news. The gypsy's wife and three children, one a baby at the breast, were