Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/279

268 says the gentleman. "Ah!" says the conductor, "tease ease eye-ee thoorde claz tea-keat. You air een tea say-coend claz. You weel go ean-too tea thoorde claz weal you yes pleace at once?" So I got stung after all. Third is more amusing certainly, though god-damn hot with these sardines, including myself of course. O yes of course. Poilus en permission. Very old some. Others mere kids. Once saw a planton who never saw a razor. Yet he was ''reformé. C'est la guerre.'' Several of us get off and stretch at a little tank-town-station. Engine thumping up front somewhere in the darkness. Wait. They get their bidons filled. Wish I had a bidon, a ''dis-donc bidon n'est-ce pas. Faut pas t'en faire'', who sang or said that?

PEE-p....

We're off.

I am almost asleep. Or myself. What's the matter here? Sardines writhing about, cut it out, no room for that sort of thing. Jolt.

"Paris."

Morning. Morning in Paris. I found my bed full of fleas this morning, and I couldn't catch the fleas, though I tried hard because I was ashamed that anyone should find fleas in my bed which is at the Hotel des Saints Pères whither I went in a fiacre and the driver didn't know where it was. Wonderful. This is the American embassy. I must look funny in my pélisse. Thank God for the breakfast I ate somewhere ... good-looking girl, Parisienne, at the switch-board upstairs. "Go right in, sir." A-I English by God. So this is the person to whom Edward E. Cummings is immediately to report.

"Is this Mr. Cummings?"

"Yes." Rather a young man, very young in fact. Jove I must look queer.

"Sit down! We've been looking all over creation for you."

"Yes?"

"Have some cigarettes?"

"Yes."

By God he gives me a sac of Bull. Extravagant they are at the American Embassy. Can I roll one? I can. I do.