Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/42

Rh Escorted to bureau, where I am turned over to a very fat gendarme.

"This is the American." The v-f-g eyed me, and I read my sins in his porklike orbs. "Hurry, we have to walk," he ventured sullenly and commandingly.

Himself stooped puffingly to pick up the segregated sack. And I placed my bed, bed-roll, blankets and ample pélisse under one arm, my 150-odd pound duffle-bag under the other; then I paused. Then I said, "Where's my cane?"

The v-f-g hereat had a sort of fit, which perfectly became him.

I repeated gently: "When I came to the bureau I had a cane."

"I don't give a damn about your cane," burbled my new captor frothily, his pink evil eyes swelling with wrath.

"I'm staying," I replied calmly, and sat down on a curb, in the midst of my ponderous trinkets.

A crowd of gendarmes gathered. One didn't take a cane with one to prison (I was glad to know where I was bound, and thanked this communicative gentleman); or criminals weren't allowed canes; or where exactly did I think I was, in the Tuileries? asks a rube movie-cop personage.

"Very well, gentlemen," I said. "You will allow me to tell you something." (I was beet-colored.) "In America that sort of thing isn't done."

This haughty inaccuracy produced an astonishing effect, namely, the prestidigitatorial vanishment of the v-f-g. The v-f-g's numerous confrères looked scared and twirled their whiskers.

I sat on the curb and began to fill a paper with something which I found in my pockets, certainly not tobacco.

Splutter-splutter-fizz-Poop—the v-f-g is back, with my oak-branch in his raised hand, slithering opprobria and mostly crying: "Is that huge piece of wood what you call a cane? It is, is it? What? How? What the—," so on.

I beamed upon him and thanked him, and explained that a