Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/31

20 till I thought it would have tumbled off. Even the mustache seemed amused. Monsieur le Ministre de la Sureté de Noyon bit his lip. "Never mind writing that down," he directed the lawyer. Then, returning to the charge:

"You had a great deal of trouble with Lieutenant A.?"

I laughed outright at this complimentary nomenclature. "Yes, we certainly did."

He asked: "Why?" —so I sketched "Lieutenant" A. in vivid terms, making use of certain choice expressions with which one of the "dirty Frenchmen" attached to the section, a Parisien, master of argot, had furnished me. My phraseology surprised my examiners, one of whom (I think the moustache) observed sarcastically that I had made good use of my time in Paris.

Monsieur le Ministre asked: Was it true (a) that B. and I were always together and (b) preferred the company of the attached Frenchmen to that of our fellow-Americans?—to which I answered in the affirmative. Why? he wanted to know. So I explained that we felt that the more French we knew and the better we knew the French the better for us; expatiating a bit on the necessity for a complete mutual understanding of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races if victory was to be won.

Again the rosette nodded with approbation.

Monsieur le Ministre may have felt that he was losing his case, for he played his trump card immediately: "You are aware that your friend has written to friends in America and to his family very bad letters." "I am not," I said.

In a flash I understood the motivation of Monsieur's visit to Vingt-et-Un: the French censor had intercepted some of B.'s letters, and had notified Mr. A. and Mr. A.'s translator, both of whom had thankfully testified to the bad character of B. and (wishing very naturally to get rid of both of us at once) had further averred that we were always together and that consequently I might properly be regarded as a suspicious character. Whereupon they had received instructions to hold us at the section until Noyon could arrive and take charge—