Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/214

Rh of him, thanks to Un Mangeur de Blanc, as the little Machine-Fixer expressively called The Fighting Sheeney. Which mangeur, by the way (having been exonerated from all blame by the more enlightened spectators of the unequal battle) strode immediately and ferociously over to B. and me, a hideous grin crackling upon the coarse surface of his mug, and demanded—hiking at the front of his trousers—

"Bon, eh? Bien fait, eh?"

and a few days later asked us for money, even hinting that he would be pleased to become our special protector. I think, as a matter of fact, we "lent" him one-eighth of what he wanted (perhaps we lent him five cents) in order to avoid trouble and get rid of him. At any rate, he didn't bother us particularly afterwards; and if a nickel could accomplish that a nickel should be proud of itself.

And always, through the falling greyness of the desolate Autumn, The Zulu was beside us, or wrapped around a tree in the cour, or melting in a post after tapping Mexique in a game of hide-and-seek, or suffering from toothache—God, I wish I could see him expressing for us the wickedness of toothache—or losing his shoes and finding them under Garibaldi's bed (with a huge perpendicular wink which told tomes about Garibaldi's fatal propensities for ownership), or marvelling silently at the power of les femmes à propos his young friend—who, occasionally resuming his former bravado, would stand in the black evil rain with his white farm scarf twined about him, singing as of old:

... And the Zulu came out of la commission with identically the expressionless expression which he had carried into it; and God knows what The Three Wise Men found out about him, but (whatever it was) they never found and never will find that Something whose discovery was worth to me more