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Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962

"The Enormous Room"


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 crawled
sideways; he got on one knee; he made a dart forward--and was caught
cleanly by an uppercut, lifted through the air a yard, and spread-eagled
against the stove which collapsed with an unearthly crash yielding an
inky shower of soot upon the combatants and almost crowning The Hollander
simultaneously with three four-feet sections of pipe.


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