Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/39

28 door. Turnkey-creature extending a piece of chocolate with extreme and surly caution. I say "Merci" and seize chocolate. Klang shuts the door.

I am lying on my back, the twilight does mistily bluish miracles through the slit over the whang-klang. I can just see leaves, meaning tree.

Then from the left and way off, faintly, broke a smooth whistle, cool like a peeled willow-branch, and I found myself listening to an air from Petroushka, Petroushka, which we saw in Paris at the Châtelet, mon ami et moi....

The voice stopped in the middle—and I finished the air. This code continued for a half-hour.

It was dark.

I had laid a piece of my piece of chocolate on the window-sill. As I lay on my back a little silhouette came along the sill and ate that piece of a piece, taking something like four minutes to do so. He then looked at me, I then smiled at him, and we parted, each happier than before.

My cellule was cool, and I fell asleep easily.

(Thinking of Paris.)

... Awakened by a conversation whose vibrations I clearly felt through the left wall:

Turnkey-creature: "What?"

A moldly moldering molish voice, suggesting putrifying tracts and orifices, answers with a cob-webbish patience so far beyond despair as to be indescribable: "La soupe."

"Well, the soup, I just gave it to you, Monsieur Savy."

"Must have a little something else. My money is chez le directeur. Please take my money which is chez le directeur and give me anything else."

"All right, the next time I come to see you to-day I'll bring you a salad, a nice salad, Monsieur."

"Thank you, Monsieur," the voice moldered.

Klang!!—and says the turnkey-creature to somebody else; while turning the lock of Monsieur Savy's door; taking pains to raise his voice so that Monsieur Savy will not miss a single word through the slit over Monsieur Savy's whang-klang: