Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/259

248 a good fat cheese apiece—his friend The Young Pole looked as if the ordeal had scared the life out of him temporarily; he was unable to say whether or no he and "mon ami" would leave us: la commission had adopted, in the case of these twain, an awe-inspiring taciturnity. Jean Le Nègre, who was one of the last to pass, had had a tremendously exciting time, due to the fact that le gouvernement français's polished tools had failed to scratch his mystery either in French or English—he came dancing and singing toward us; then, suddenly suppressing every vestige of emotion, solemnly extended for our approval a small scrap of paper on which was written:

remarking: "Qu-est-ce que ça veut dire?"—and when we read the word for him, "m'en vais à Calais, moi, travailler à Calais, très bon!"—with a jump and a shout of laughter pocketing the scrap and beginning the Song of Songs:

"apres la guerre finit...."

A trio which had been hit and hard hit by the Three Wise Men were, or was, The Wanderer and the Machine-Fixer and Monsieur Auguste—the former having been insulted in respect to Chocolat's mother (who also occupied the witness-stand) and having retaliated, as nearly as we could discover, with a few remarks straight from the shoulder à propos Justice (O Wanderer, did you expect honour among the honourable?); the Machine-Fixer having been told to shut up in the midst of a passionate plea for mercy, or at least fair-play, if not in his own case in the case of the wife who was crazed by his absence; Monsieur Auguste having been asked (as he had been asked three months before by the honorable commissioners), Why did you not return to Russia with your wife and your child at the outbreak of the war?—and having replied, with tears in his eyes and that gentle ferocity of which he was occasionally capable:

"Be-cause I didn't have the means. I am not a mil-lion-aire, Sirs."

The Baby-Snatcher, the Trick Raincoat, the Messenger Boy,