Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/67

56 Two days in a gendarmerie would be enough, I thought. We marched out.

Behind me the bedslippered rooster uhahingly shuffled. In front of me clumsily gamboled the huge imitation of myself. It descended the terribly worn stairs. It turned to the right and disappeared....

We were standing in a chapel.

The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute; it was beating, senseless and futile, with shrill fists upon a thick enormous moisture of gloom. To the left and right through lean oblongs of stained glass burst dirty burglars of moonlight. The clammy stupid distance uttered dimly an uncanny conflict—the mutterless tumbling of brutish shadows. A crowding ooze battled with my lungs. My nostrils fought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet unpleasant odour. Staring ahead, I gradually disinterred the pale carrion of the darkness—an altar, guarded with the ugliness of unlit candles, on which stood inexorably the efficient implements for eating God.

I was to be confessed, then, of my guilty conscience, before retiring? It boded well for the morrow.

... the measured accents of the fencer: "Prenez votre paillasse." I turned. He was bending over a formless mass in one corner of the room. The mass stretched halfway to the ceiling. It was made of mattress-shapes. I pulled at one—burlap, stuffed with prickly straw. I got it on my shoulder. "Alors." He lighted me to the door-way by which we had entered. (I was somewhat pleased to leave the place.)

Back, down a corridor, up more stairs; and we were confronted by a small scarred pair of doors from which hung two of the largest padlocks I had ever seen. Being unable to go further, I stopped: he produced a huge ring of keys. Fumbled with the locks. No sound of life: the keys rattled in the locks with surprising loudness; the latter, with an evil grace, yielded—the two little miserable doors swung open.

Into the square blackness I staggered with my paillasse. There was no way of judging the size of the dark room which