Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/200

Rh muscled legs planted far apart, shook one fist after another at the recumbent Young Pole, thundering (curiously enough in English):

"Come on you Gottverdummer son-of-a-bitch of a Polak bastard and fight! Get up out o' there you Polak hoor and I'll kill you, you Gottverdummer bastard you! I stood enough o' your Gottverdummer nonsense you Gottverdummer" etc.

As Bill The Hollander's thunder crescendoed steadily, cramming the utmost corners of The Enormous Room with Gottverdummers which echoingly telescoped one another, producing a dim huge shaggy mass of vocal anger, The Young Pole began to laugh less and less; began to plead and excuse and palliate and demonstrate—and all the while the triangular tower in its naked legs and its palpitating chemise brandished its vast fists nearer and nearer, its ghastly yellow lips hurling cumulative volumes of rhythmic profanity, its blue eyes snapping like fire-crackers, its enormous hairy chest heaving and tumbling like a monstrous hunk of sea-weed, its flat soiled feet curling and uncurling their ten sour mutilated toes.

The Zulu puffed gently as he lay.

Bill The Hollander's jaw, sticking into the direction of The Young Pole's helpless gestures, looked (with the pitiless scorching face behind it) like some square house carried in the fore of a white cyclone. The Zulu depressed his chin; his eyes (poking slowly from beneath the visor of the cap which he always wore, in bed or out of it) regarded the vomiting tower with an abstracted interest. He allowed one hand delicately to escape from the blanket and quietly to remove from his lips the gently burning cigarette.

"You won't eh? You bloody Polak coward!"

and with a speed in comparison to which lightning is snail-like the tower reached twice for the peaches-and-cream cheeks of the prone victim; who set up a tragic bellowing of his own, writhed upon his somewhat dislocated paillasse, raised his elbows shieldingly, and started to get to his feet by way of his trembling knees—to be promptly knocked flat. Such a howling as The Young Pole set up I have rarely heard: he