The Enormous Room E. E. Cummings (snow like ashes TXT) 📖

Which again brings us to the Skipper, whose elaborate couch has already been mentioned⁠—he was a Hollander and one of the strongest, most gentle and altogether most pleasant of men, who used to sit on the water-wagon under the shed in the cour and smoke his pipe quietly of an afternoon. His stocky even tightly-knit person, in its heavy-trousers and jersey sweater, culminated in a bronzed face which was at once as kind and firm a piece of supernatural work as I think I ever knew. His voice was agreeably modulated. He was utterly without affectation. He had three sons. One evening a number of gendarmes came to his house and told him that he was arrested, “so my three sons and I threw them all out of the window into the canal.”

I can still see the opening smile, squared kindness of cheeks, eyes like cool keys⁠—his heart always with the Sea.

The little Machine-Fixer (le petit bonhomme avec le bras cassé as he styled himself, referring to his little paralysed left arm) was so perfectly different that I must let you see him next. He was slightly taller than Garibaldi, about of a size with Monsieur Auguste. He and Monsieur Auguste together were a fine sight, a sight which made me feel that I came of a race of giants. I am afraid it was more or less as giants that B. and I pitied the Machine-Fixer⁠—still this was not really our fault, since the Machine-Fixer came to us with his troubles much as a very minute and helpless child comes to a very large and omnipotent one. And God knows we did not only pity him, we liked him⁠—and if we could in some often ridiculous manner assist the Machine-Fixer I think we nearly always did. The assistance to which I refer was wholly spiritual; since the minute Machine-Fixer’s colossal self-pride eliminated any possibility of material assistance. What we did, about every other night, was to entertain him (as we entertained our other friends) chez nous; that is to say, he would come up late every evening or every other evening, after his day’s toil⁠—for he worked as co-sweeper with Garibaldi and he was a tremendous worker; never have I seen a man who took his work so seriously and made so much of it⁠—to sit, with great care and very respectfully, upon one or the other of our beds at the upper end of The Enormous Room, and smoke a black small pipe, talking excitedly and strenuously and fiercely about La Misère and himself and ourselves, often crying a little but very bitterly, and from time to time striking matches with a short angry gesture on the sole of his big, almost square boot. His little, abrupt, conscientious, relentless, difficult self lived always in a single dimension⁠—the somewhat beautiful dimension of Sorrow. He was a Belgian, and one of two Belgians in whom I have ever felt the least or slightest interest; for the Machine-Fixer might have been a Polak or an Idol or an Esquimo so far as his nationality affected his soul. By and large, that was the trouble⁠—the Machine-Fixer had a soul. Put the bracelets on an ordinary man, tell him he’s a bad egg, treat him rough, shove him into the jug or its equivalent (you see I have regard always for M. le Surveillant’s delicate but no doubt necessary distinction between La Ferté and Prison), and he will become one of three animals⁠—a rabbit, that is to say timid; a mole, that is to say stupid; or a hyena, that is to say Harree the Hollander. But if, by some fatal, some incomparably fatal accident, this man has a soul⁠—ah, then we have and truly have most horribly what is called in La Ferté Macé by those who have known it: La Misère. Monsieur Auguste’s valiant attempts at cheerfulness and the natural buoyancy of his gentle disposition in a slight degree protected him from La Misère. The Machine-Fixer was lost. By nature he was tremendously sensible, he was the very apotheosis of l’ame sensible in fact. His sensibilité made him shoulder not only the inexcusable injustice which he had suffered but the incomparable and overwhelming total injustice which everyone had suffered and was suffering en masse day and night in The Enormous Room. His woes, had they not sprung from perfectly real causes, might have suggested a persecution complex. As it happened there was no possible method of relieving them⁠—they could be relieved in only one way: by Liberty. Not simply by his personal liberty, but by the liberation of every single fellow-captive as well. His extraordinarily personal anguish could not be selfishly appeased by a merely partial righting, in his own case, of the Wrong⁠—the ineffable and terrific and to be perfectly avenged Wrong⁠—done to those who ate and slept and wept and played cards within that abominable and unyielding Symbol which enclosed the immutable vileness of our common life. It was necessary, for its appeasement, that a shaft of bright lightning suddenly and entirely should wither the human and material structures which stood always between our filthy and pitiful selves and the unspeakable cleanness of Liberty.

B. recalls that the little Machine-Fixer said or hinted that he had been either a socialist or an anarchist when he was young. So that is doubtless why we had the privilege of his society. After all, it is highly improbable that this poor socialist suffered more at the hands of the great and good French government than did many a Conscientious Objector at the hands of the great and good American government; or⁠—since all great governments are per se good and vice versa⁠—than did many a man in general who was cursed with a talent for thinking during the warlike moments recently passed; during, that is to say, an epoch when