Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/69

 "Vous ne voulez pas de café?"

The threatening question recited in a hoarse voice woke me like a shot. Sprawled half on and half off my paillasse, I looked suddenly up into a juvenile pimply face with a red tassel bobbing in its eyes. A boy in a Belgian uniform was stooping over me. In one hand a huge pail a third full of liquid slime. I said fiercely: "Au contraire, je veux bien." And collapsed on the mattress.

"Pas de quart, vous?" the face fired at me.

"Comprends pas," I replied, wondering what on earth the words meant.

"English?"

"American."

At this moment a tin cup appeared mysteriously out of the gloom and was rapidly filled from the pail, after which operation the tassel remarked: "Your friend here" and disappeared.

I decided I had gone completely crazy.

The cup had been deposited near me. Not daring to approach it, I boosted my aching corpse on one of its futile elbows and gazed blankly around. My eyes, wading laboriously through a dark atmosphere, a darkness gruesomely tactile, perceived only here and there lively patches of vibrating humanity. My ears recognised English, something which I took to be low-German and which was Belgian, Dutch, Polish, and what I guessed to be Russian.

Trembling with this chaos, my hand sought the cup. The cup was not warm; the contents, which I hastily gulped, were