“I pity you. You must find existence dreadfully dull. As soon as you do, everything becomes a thousand times life-size. Phallic symbols five hundred feet high,” he lifted his hand. “A row of grinning teeth you could run the hundred yards on.” He grinned at her through his beard. “Wounds big enough to let a coach-and-six drive into their purulent recesses. Every slightest act eternally significant. It’s only when you believe in God, and especially in hell, that you can really begin enjoying life. For instance, when in a few moments you surrender yourself to the importunities of my bloody beard, how prodigiously much more you’d enjoy it if you could believe you were committing the sin against the Holy Ghost—if you kept thinking calmly and dispassionately all the time the affair was going on: All this is not only a horrible sin, it is also ugly, grotesque, a mere defæcation, a——”
Rosie held up her hand. “You’re really horrible,” she said. Coleman smiled at her. Still, she did not go.
“He who is not with me is against me,” said Coleman. “If you can’t make up your mind to be with, it’s surely better to be positively against than merely negatively indifferent.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Rosie feebly.
“When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the pen-knife into my arm.”
“Well, do you enjoy it?” asked Rosie.
“Piercingly,” he answered. “It is at once sordid to the last and lowest degree and infinitely and eternally significant.”
Coleman was silent and Rosie too said nothing. Futilely she wished it had been Toto instead of this horrible, dangerous Cossack. Mr. Mercaptan ought to have warned her. But then, of course, he supposed that she already knew the creature. She looked up at him and found his bright eyes fixed upon her; he was silently laughing.
“Don’t you want to know who I am?” she asked. “And how I got here?”
Coleman blandly shook his head. “Not in the very least,” he said.