The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings

Liberté.

Egalité.

Fraternité.

And I wondered that France should have a use for Monsieur Auguste, who had been arrested (because he was a Russian) when his fellow munition workers struck and whose wife wanted him in Paris because she was hungry and because their child was getting to look queer and white. Monsieur Auguste, that desperate ruffian exactly five feet tall who—when he could not keep from crying (one must think about one’s wife or even one’s child once or twice, I merely presume, if one loves them—“et ma femme est très gen-tille, elle est fran-çaise et très belle, très, très belle, vraiment; elle n’est pas comme moi, un pet-it homme laid, ma femme est grande et belle, elle sait bien lire et é-crire, vraiment; et notre fils … vous dev-ez voir notre pet-it fils….”)—used to start up and cry out, taking B. by one arm and me by the other,

“Allons, mes amis! Chan-tons ‘Quackquackquack.’”

Whereupon we would join in the following song, which Monsieur Auguste had taught us with great care, and whose renditions gave him unspeakable delight:

“ Un canard, déployant ses ailes
(Quackquackquack)
Il disait à sa canarde fidèle
(Quackquackquack)
Il disait (Quackquackquack)
Il faisait (Quackquackquack)
Quand” (spelling mine)
“finirons nos desseins,
Quack.
Quack.
Quack.
Qua-
ck.”

I suppose I will always puzzle over the ecstasies of That Wonderful Duck. And how Monsieur Auguste, the merest gnome of a man, would bend backwards in absolute laughter at this song’s spirited conclusion upon a note so low as to wither us all.

Then, too, the Schoolmaster.

A little fragile old man. His trousers were terrifically too big for him. When he walked (in an insecure and frightened way) his trousers did the most preposterous wrinkles. If he leaned against a tree in the cour, with a very old and also fragile pipe in his pocket—the stem (which looked enormous in contrast to the owner) protruding therefrom—his three-sizes too big collar would leap out so as to make his wizened neck appear no thicker than the white necktie which flowed upon his two-sizes too big shirt. He always wore a coat which reached below his knees, which coat, with which knees, perhaps someone had once given him. It had huge shoulders which sprouted, like wings, on either side of his elbows when he sat in The Enormous Room quietly writing at a tiny three-legged table, a very big pen walking away with his weak bony hand. His too big cap had a little button on top which looked like the head of a nail; and suggested that this old doll had once lost its poor grey head and had been repaired by means of tacking its head upon its neck, where it should be and properly belonged. Of what hideous crime was this being suspected? By some mistake he had three moustaches, two of them being eyebrows. He used to teach school in Alsace-Lorraine, and his sister is there. In speaking to you his kind face is peacefully reduced to triangles. And his tie buttons on every morning with a Bang! And off he goes; led about by his celluloid collar, gently worried about himself, delicately worried about the world. At eating time he looks sidelong as he stuffs soup into stiff lips. There are two holes where cheeks might have been. Lessons hide in his wrinkles. Bells ding in the oldness of eyes. Did he, by any chance, tell the children that there are such monstrous things as peace and good will … a corrupter of youth, no doubt … he is altogether incapable of anger, wholly timid and tintinnabulous. And he had always wanted so much to know—if there were wild horses in America?