and forth would more or less sheepishly issue the delinquents.
And I think The Wanderer, with his wife and children whom he loved as never have I seen a man love anything in this world, was partly happy; walking in the sun when there was any, sleeping with his little boy in a great gulp of softness. And I remember him pulling his fine beard into two darknesses—huge-sleeved, pink-checked chemise—walking kindly like a bear—corduroy bigness of trousers, waistline always amorous of knees—finger-ends just catching tops of enormous pockets. When he feels, as I think, partly happy, he corrects our pronunciation of the ineffable Word—saying
“O, May-err-DE!”
and smiles. And once Jean Le Nègre said to him as he squatted in the cour with his little son beside him, his broad strong back as nearly always against one of the gruesome and minute pommiers—
“Barbu! j’vais couper ta barbe, barbu!” Whereat the father answered slowly and seriously.
“When you cut my beard you will have to cut off my head” regarding Jean le Nègre with unspeakably sensitive, tremendously deep, peculiarly soft eyes. “My beard is finer than that; you have made it too coarse,” he gently remarked one day, looking attentively at a piece of photographie which I had been caught in the act of perpetrating: whereat I bowed my head in silent shame.
“Demestre, Josef (femme, née Feliska)” I read another day in the Gestionnaire’s book of judgment. O Monsieur le Gestionnaire, I should not have liked to have seen those names in my book of sinners, in my album of filth and blood and incontinence, had I been you…. O little, very little, gouvernement français, and you, the great and comfortable messieurs of the world, tell me why you have put a gypsy who dresses like To-morrow among the squabbling pimps and thieves of yesterday….
He had been in New York one day.
One child died at sea.
“Les landes” he cried, towering over The Enormous Room suddenly one night in Autumn, “je les connais commes ma poche—Bordeaux? Je sais où que c’est. Madrid? Je sais où que c’est. Tolède? Seville? Naples? Je sais où que c’est. Je les connais comme ma poche.”