man, wearing neat, cheap, nameless clothing, and with a brown-paper parcel on the rack above him; and a young dark Irishman, his tough face fierce with drink and truculence, his eyes glittering with red points of fire, his tongue snarling curses, threats, and invitations to the fight that rasped and cut with naked menace through the smoke-blue air.
The young Jews slouched with laughter, filled the car with noisy clamour, sparred glibly, swiftly, with quick, eager, and praise-asking repartee, with knowing smirk and cynic jest, with acrid cynic wit that did not hit the mark. The little blondined prostitute listened to the hypnotic, slit-eyed, thick-lipped seductions of the young Italian with a small coy-bawdy smirk upon her painted face: she did not know what he meant, she had no idea what he was talking about, and with coy-bawdy smirk she rose, edged past his slow withdrawn knees and minced down the corridor towards the little cupboard at the end that housed the women’s toilet, while with lidded sly eyes and thick, slow-chewing and slow-smiling lips his calculating glance pursued her. The lady entered, closed the door upon a stale reek, and was gone some time. When she emerged she arranged her clothing daintily, smoothed out her rumpled dress across her hips and came mincing down the corridor again with faint coy-bawdy smirk, and was greeted again by her gallant suitor, who welcomed her in the same manner, with lidded eyes, thick, pallid and slow-chewing lips and slow withdrawn knees. The two deaf-mutes surveyed the scene with loathing: one was large and heavy, with the powerful shoulders of the cripple, a brutal face, a wide and cruel mouth; the other small and dark and ferret-faced—but both surveyed the scene with loathing. They looked at each and all the passengers and they dismissed each in turn upon their fingers. As they did so their faces writhed in vicious snarls, in sneering smiles, in convulsions of disgust and hatred; they looked upon the objects of their hate and jerked cruel thumbs towards earth in gestures eloquent of annihilation and destructive sudden death, and they drew swift fingers meaningly across their gullets with the deadly move of men who slit a throat—and all was as he had known it would be.
The working man with the strong and common face, the cheap, neat clothes, sat quietly, and looked quietly out of the window, with seamed face and quiet worn eyes, and the young Irishman sweltered in strong drink and murder; the taste of blood was thick in him, his little eyes glittered with red points of fire, and ever as the train rushed on he
