to be drowning in them. And the first visible and physical, although perhaps not the basic, causes of these sensations of horror and disgust came from the mountainous figures of the two policemen, and the feel of their huge soft-solid bodies as they jammed against him. For, if they had quelled his rebellion at the outset by smashing him over the head with their clubs, he might have felt a moment’s fear before the club crashed on his skull, but he would not have felt horror and disgust.
But the sight, the feel, the smell, the look of these huge soft-solid bodies of mountainous flesh, and the revolting clumsiness of their movements, made the thing horrible. As they rushed towards Eugene and tried to thrust him back into the cell, he grabbed hold of the bars on either side of the door, and began to howl at them and curse them foully, and to butt at them with his head. When this happened the policemen braced themselves together like turn-squat Buddhas, holding on to the bars with their huge muttony hands, that had no leanness in them, and butted back at Eugene with their huge soft-solid stomachs.
They stood, half-squatly, side by side, their muttony hands gripped around the bars, their great red faces moist and panting, their huge buttocks somehow obscenely womanish in their fat breadth, as they butted back clumsily at him with their soft ponderous bellies—all of this, and the revolting contact of their flesh against his own, filled him with such an infinite loathing of horror and disgust that he went mad.
He started to come out of the cell. When he did, the two big police men came running forward with a lumbering clumsiness and tried to push him back in. One of the men raised his ponderous fist and shouted: “Git back in thar now or I’ll hit ye.” A huge muttony fist smashed squarely on his nose and mouth: he butted, cursed, amid a pin-wheel aura of exploding rockets: the fist smashed hard again below one eye: the boy screamed like a wounded animal and cursing horribly all the time began to use his head as a battering ram, butting again and again at the fat red faces.
Meanwhile the other one, grunting and puffing, and with his tongue between his teeth, began to thump, tug and wrench at the fingers of one hand, trying to loosen them from the bar, and saying to his fellow:
“You git his other hand, Jim, an’try to make him turn a-loose.”
During all this time that Eugene had been cursing and butting at these men, he had also been shouting: “You God-damned red-faced South Car’lina bastards, you’re not going to lock me up in here with a nigger—no, you ain’t!”—and now he felt something rough and woolly scraping underneath his
