Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/277

Rh has shaken hands with a little creature with a wizened arm, a little creature in whose eyes tears for some reason are; with a placid youth (Mexique?) who smiles and says shakily:

"Good-bye, Johnny; I no for-get you,"

with a crazy old fellow who somehow or other has got inside B.'s tunic and is gesticulating and crying out and laughing; with a frank-eyed boy who claps me on the back and says:

"Good-bye and good luck t'you"

(is he The Young Skipper, by any chance?); with a lot of hungry wretched beautiful people—I have given my bed to The Zulu, by Jove! and The Zulu is even now standing guard over it, and his friend The Young Pole has given me the address of "mon ami," and there are tears in The Young Pole's eyes, and I seem to be amazingly tall and altogether tearless—and this is the nice Norwegian, who got drunk at Bordeaux and stole three (or four was it?) cans of sardines ... and now I feel before me someone who also has tears in his eyes, someone who is in fact crying, someone whom I feel to be very strong and young as he hugs me quietly in his firm, alert arms, kissing me on both cheeks and on the lips....

"Goo-bye, boy!"

—O good-bye, good-bye, I am going away, Jean; have a good time, laugh wonderfully when la neige comes....

And I am standing somewhere with arms lifted up. "Si vous avez une lettre, sais-tu, il faut dire. For if I find a letter on you it will go hard with the man that gave it to you to take out." Black. The Black Holster even. Does not examine my baggage. Wonder why? "Allez!" Jean's letter to his gonzesse in Paris still safe in my little pocket under my belt. Ha, ha, by God, that's a good one on you, you Black Holster, you Very Black Holster. That's a good one. Glad I said good-bye to the cook. Why didn't I give Monsieur Auguste's little friend, the cordonnier, more than six francs for mending my shoes? He looked so injured. I am a fool, and I am going into the street, and I am going by myself with no planton into the little street of the little city of La Ferté Macé which