and a few days later asked us for money, even hinting that he would be pleased to become our special protector. I think, as a matter of fact, we “lent” him one-eighth of what he wanted (perhaps we lent him five cents) in order to avoid trouble and get rid of him. At any rate, he didn’t bother us particularly afterwards; and if a nickel could accomplish that a nickel should be proud of itself.
And always, through the falling greyness of the desolate Autumn, The Zulu was beside us, or wrapped around a tree in the cour, or melting in a post after tapping Mexique in a game of hide-and-seek, or suffering from toothache—God, I wish I could see him expressing for us the wickedness of toothache—or losing his shoes and finding them under Garibaldi’s bed (with a huge perpendicular wink which told tomes about Garibaldi’s fatal propensities for ownership), or marvelling silently at the power of les femmes à propos his young friend—who, occasionally resuming his former bravado, would stand in the black evil rain with his white farm scarf twined about him, singing as of old:
“Je suis content pour mettre dedans suis pas pressé pour tirer ah-la-la-la …”
… And the Zulu came out of la commission with identically the expressionless expression which he had carried into it; and God knows what The Three Wise Men found out about him, but (whatever it was) they never found and never will find that Something whose discovery was worth to me more than all the round and powerless money of the world—limbs’ tin grace, wooden wink, shoulderless, unhurried body, velocity of a grasshopper, soul up under his arm-pits, mysteriously falling over the ownness of two feet, floating fish of his slimness half a bird….
Gentlemen, I am inexorably grateful for the gift of these ignorant and indivisible things.
X.
SURPLICE
Let us ascend the third Delectable Mountain, which is called Surplice.
I will admit, in the beginning, that I never knew Surplice. This for the simple reason that I am unwilling to know except as a last resource. And it is by contrast with Harree The Hollander, whom I knew, and Judas, whom I knew, that I shall be able to give you (perhaps) a little of Surplice, whom I did not know. For that matter, I think Monsieur Auguste was the only person who might possibly have known him; and I doubt whether Monsieur Auguste was capable of descending to such depths in the case of so fine a person as Surplice.
Take a sheer animal of a man. Take the incredible Hollander with cobalt-blue breeches, shock of orange hair pasted over forehead, pink long face, twenty-six years old, had been in all the countries of all the world: “Australia girl fine girl—Japanese girl cleanest girl of the world—Spanish girl all right—English girl no good, no face—everywhere these things: Norway sailors German girls Sweedisher matches Holland candles” … had been to Philadelphia; worked on a yacht for a millionaire; knew and had worked in the Krupp factories; was on two boats torpedoed and one which struck a mine when in sight of shore through the “looking-glass”: “Holland almost no soldier—India” (the Dutch Indies) “nice place, always warm there, I was in cavalry; if you kill a man or steal one hundred franc or anything, in prison twenty-four hours; every week black girl sleep with you because government want white children, black girl fine girl, always doing something, your fingernails or clean your ears or make wind because it’s hot…. No one can beat German people; if Kaiser tell man to kill his father and mother he do it quick!”—the tall, strong, coarse, vital youth who remarked:
“I sleep with black girl who smoke a pipe in the night.”