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 Negre 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 Negre 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, nee_ 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.
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