Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/272

Rh pick your friends better, take more care, I tell you, or you'll go where he is—TO PRISON FOR THE REST OF THE WAR!"

"With my friend I should be well content in prison!" I said evenly, trying to keep looking through him and into the wall behind his black, big, spidery body.

"In God's Name, what a fool!" the Directeur bellowed furiously—and the Surveillant remarked pacifyingly: "He loves his comrade too much, that's all."—"But his comrade is a traitor and a villain!" objected the Fiend, at the top of his harsh voice--"Comprenez-vous; votre ami est UN SALOP!" he snarled at me.

He seems afraid that I don't get his idea, I said to myself. "I understand what you say," I assured him.

"And you don't believe it?" he screamed, showing his fangs and otherwise looking like an exceedingly dangerous maniac.

"Je ne le crois fas, Monsieur."

"O God's name!" he shouted. "What a fool, quel idiot, what a beastly fool!" And he did something through his froth-covered lips, something remotely suggesting laughter.

Hereupon the Surveillant again intervened. I was mistaken. It was lamentable. I could not be made to understand. Very true. But I had been sent for—"Do you know, you have been decided to be a suspect?" Monsieur le Surveillant turned to me, "and now you may choose where you wish to be sent." Apollyon was blowing and wheezing and muttering ... clenching his huge pinkish hands.

I addressed the Surveillant, ignoring Apollyon. "I should like, if I may, to go to Oloron Sainte Marie."

"What do you want to go there for?" the Directeur exploded threateningly.

I explained that I was by profession an artist, and had always wanted to view the Pyrenees. "The environment of Oloron would be most stimulating to an artist—"

"Do you know it's near Spain?" he snapped, looking straight at me.