The man tossed the harmonica on the table with a scornful look (a menacingly scornful look) at the object of universal execration; and turned his back. Surplice, trembling from the summit of his filthy and beautiful head to the naked soles of his filthy and beautiful feet, covered the harmonica delicately and surely with one shaking paw; seated himself with a surprisingly deliberate and graceful gesture; closed his eyes, upon whose lashes there were big filthy tears … and played….
… and suddenly:
He put the harmonica softly upon the table. He rose. He went quickly to his paillasse. He neither moved nor spoke nor responded to the calls for more music, to the cries of “Bis!”—“Bien joué!”—“Allez!”—“Va-z-y!” He was crying, quietly and carefully, to himself … quietly and carefully crying, not wishing to annoy anyone … hoping that people could not see that Their Fool had temporarily failed in his part.
The following day he was up as usual before anyone else, hunting for chewed cigarette ends on the spitty slippery floor of The Enormous Room; ready for insult, ready for ridicule, for buffets, for curses.
Alors—
One evening, some days after everyone who was fit for la commission had enjoyed the privilege of examination by that inexorable and delightful body—one evening very late, in fact, just before lumières éteintes, a strange planton arrived in The Enormous Room and hurriedly read a list of five names, adding:
“partir demain de bonne heure”
and shut the door behind him. Surplice was, as usual, very interested, enormously interested. So were we: for the names respectively belonged to Monsieur Auguste, Monsieur Pet-airs, The Wanderer, Surplice and The Spoonman. These men had been judged. These men were going to Précigne. These men would be prisonniers pour la durée de la guerre.
I have already told how Monsieur Pet-airs sat with the frantically weeping Wanderer writing letters, and sniffing with his big red nose, and saying from time to time: “Be a man, Demestre, don’t cry, crying does no good.”—Monsieur Auguste was broken-hearted. We did our best to cheer him; we gave him a sort of Last Supper at our bedside, we heated some red wine in the tin cup and he drank with us. We presented him with certain tokens of our love and friendship, including—I remember—a huge cheese … and then, before us, trembling with excitement, stood Surplice—
We asked him to sit down. The onlookers (there were always onlookers at every function, however personal, which involved Food or Drink) scowled and laughed. Le con, Surplice, chaude pisse—how could he sit with men and gentlemen? Surplice sat down gracefully and lightly on one of our beds, taking extreme care not to strain the somewhat capricious mechanism thereof; sat very proudly; erect; modest but unfearful. We offered him a cup of wine. A kind of huge convulsion gripped, for an instant, fiercely his entire face: then he said in a whisper of sheer and unspeakable wonderment, leaning a little toward us without in any way suggesting that the question might have an affirmative answer,