Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/256

Rh before the commission until to-morrow," the Wooden Hand said. "Go get your dinner in the kitchen."

I descended.

Afrique was all curiosity—what did they say? what did I say?—as he placed before me a huge, a perfectly huge, an inexcusably huge plate of something more than lukewarm grease.... B. and I ate at a very little table in la cuisine, excitedly comparing notes as we swallowed the red-hot stuff.... "Du pain; prenez, mes amis," Afrique said. "Mangez comme vous voulez" the Cook quoth benignantly, with a glance at us over his placid shoulder.... Eat we most surely did. We could have eaten the French Government.

The morning of the following day we went on promenade once more. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant to promenade in the cour while somebody else was suffering in the Room of Sorrow. It was, in fact, rather thrilling.

The afternoon of this day we were all up in The Enormous Room when la commission suddenly entered with Apollyon strutting and lisping behind it, explaining, and poo-poohing, and graciously waving his thick wicked arms.

Everyone in The Enormous Room leaped to his feet, removing as he did so his hat—with the exception of les deux américains, who kept theirs on, and The Zulu, who couldn't find his hat and had been trying for some time to stalk it to its lair. La commission reacted interestingly to the Enormous Room: the captain of gendarmes looked soggily around and saw nothing with a good deal of contempt; the scented soap squinted up his face and said, "Faugh!" or whatever a French bourgeois avocat says in the presence of a bad smell (la commission was standing by the door and consequently close to the cabinet).

And the red-head man, as I recollect, was contemplating the floor by the door, where six pails of urine solemnly stood, three of them having overflowed slightly from time to time upon the reeking planks. . . And The Directeur was told that les hommes should have a tin trough to urinate into, for