Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/218

Rh language and thinks they mean to be Polish. That they are trying hard to be and never can be Polish.

Everyone else roars at him, Judas refers to him before his face as a dirty pig, Monsieur Peters cries angrily: "Il ne faut pas cracher par terre" eliciting a humble not to stay abject apology; the Belgians spit on him; the Hollanders chaff him and bulldoze him now and then, crying "Syph'lis"—at which he corrects them with offended majesty

"pas syph'lis, Surplice" causing shouts of laughter from everyone—of nobody can he say My Friend, of no one has he ever or will he ever say My Enemy.

When there is labour to do he works like a dog ... the day we had nettoyage de chambre, for instance, and Surplice and The Hat did most of the work; and B. and I were caught by the planton trying to stroll out into the cour ... every morning he takes the pail of solid excrement down, without anyone's suggesting that he take it; takes it as if it were his, empties it in the sewer just beyond the cour des femmes or pours a little (just a little) very delicately on the garden where Monsieur le Directeur is growing a flower for his daughter—he has, in fact, an unobstreperous affinity for excrement; he lives in it; he is shaggy and spotted and blotched with it; he sleeps in it; he puts it in his pipe and says it is delicious....

And he is intensely religious, religious with a terrible and exceedingly beautiful and absurd intensity ... every Friday he will be found sitting on a little kind of stool by his paillasse reading his prayer-book upside down; turning with enormous delicacy the thin difficult leaves, smiling to himself as he sees and does not read. Surplice is actually religious, and so are Garibaldi and I think The Woodchuck (a little dark sad man who spits blood with regularity); by which I mean they go to la messe for la messe, whereas everyone else goes pour voir les femmes. And I don't know for certain why The Woodchuck goes, but I think it's because he feels entirely sure he