Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/270

 Then the two men fought.

It seemed grotesque, at first, to the wearied and indifferently watching McKinnon. It made him think of a combat between two butchers, two gross butchers clad in white. There was something ludicrous in the two heavy and lurching and staggering bodies, lunging at each other, like Pleistocene beasts from the twilight of time, like primordial monsters in the bitter and brutal combat of bitter and brutal ages. The sweat oozed out on their skins. It diamonded their faces. Then the beads of moisture ran together, and gathered into slow runnels that smarted in their eyes and moistened their necks and dripped on their clothing, mottled more and more with splashes of red.

Then it became brutish. It became blind and ponderous, like a bull-fight. It impressed McKinnon as something wordlessly pathetic, it was so useless and unreasoning, so futile and foolish, in the face of all the vaster problems that confronted that lonely steamship and the lives she carried. It did not horrify him, for by this time he was beyond horror, as a swimmer is beyond thought of a passing rain-shower.

Then it became sickening. The impact of bone and flesh on flesh and bone seemed demeaning and dehumanising to the dazed and