All at once a handsome figure rose from the gloom at my elbow. I smiled stupidly into his clear hardish eyes. And he remarked pleasantly:
“Your friend’s here, Johnny, and wants to see you.”
A bulge of pleasure swooped along my body, chasing aches and numbness, my muscles danced, nerves tingled in perpetual holiday.
B. was lying on his camp-cot, wrapped like an Eskimo in a blanket which hid all but his nose and eyes.
“Hello, Cummings,” he said smiling. “There’s a man here who is a friend of Vanderbilt and knew Cézanne.”
I gazed somewhat critically at B. There was nothing particularly insane about him, unless it was his enthusiastic excitement, which might almost be attributed to my jack-in-the-box manner of arriving. He said: “There are people here who speak English, Russian, Arabian. There are the finest people here! Did you go to Gré? I fought rats all night there. Huge ones. They tried to eat me. And from Gré to Paris? I had three gendarmes all the way to keep me from escaping, and they all fell asleep.”
I began to be afraid that I was asleep myself. “Please be frank,” I begged. “Strictly entre nous: am I dreaming, or is this a bug-house?”
B. laughed, and said: “I thought so when I arrived two days ago. When I came in sight of the place a lot of girls waved from the window and yelled at me. I no sooner got inside than a queer looking duck whom I took to be a nut came rushing up to me and cried: ‘Too late for soup!’—This is Campe de Triage de la Ferté Macé, Orne, France, and all these fine people were arrested as spies. Only two or three of them can speak a word of French, and that’s soupe!”
I said, “My God, I thought Marseilles was somewhere on the Mediterranean Ocean, and that this was a gendarmerie.”
“But this is M-a-c-é. It’s a little mean town, where everybody snickers and sneers at you if they see you’re a prisoner. They did at me.”