Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/238

Rh After which Jean, exhausted with laughter, descended from the chair and lay down on his bed to read a letter from Lulu (not knowing a syllable of it). A little later he came rushing up to my bed in the most terrific state of excitement, the whites of his eyes gleaming, his teeth bared, his kinky hair fairly standing on end, and cried:

"You—me, me—you? Pas bon. You—you, me—me: bon. Me—me, you—you!" and went away capering and shouting with laughter, dancing with great grace and as great agility and with an imaginary partner the entire length of the room.

There was another game—a pure child's game—which Jean played. It was the name game. He amused himself for hours together by lying on his paillasse tilting his head back, rolling up his eyes, and crying in a high quavering voice—"JAW-neeeeee." After a repetition or two of his own name in English, he would demand sharply "Who is calling me? Mexique? Es-ce que tu m'appelle, Mexique?" and if Mexique happened to be asleep, Jean would rush over and cry in his ear, shaking him thoroughly—"Es-ce tu m'appelle, toi?" Or it might be Barbu, or Pete The Hollander, or B. or myself, of whom he sternly asked the question—which was always followed by quantities of laughter on Jean's part. He was never perfectly happy unless exercising his inexhaustible imagination....

Of all Jean's extraordinary selves, the moral one was at once the most rare and most unreasonable. In the matter of les femmes he could hardly have been accused by his bitterest enemy of being a Puritan. Yet the Puritan streak came out one day, in a discussion which lasted for several hours. Jean as in the case of France, spoke in dogma. His contention was very simple: "The woman who smokes is not a woman." He defended it hotly against the attacks of all the nations represented; in vain did Belgian and Hollander, Russian and Pole, Spaniard and Alsatian, charge and counter-charge—Jean remained unshaken. A woman could do anything but smoke—if she smoked she ceased automatically to be a woman and became something unspeakable. As Jean was at this time sitting alternately on B.'s bed and mine, and as the alternations