He
flung up one hand just as I thought him falling and hung on to a
huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards discovered, of
St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across the
room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome bodily
out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air,
so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over
like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness
broke, and he sank, his enemies closing over him.
Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as
best he could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling
over each other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their
falls, but Rupert certainly the more so. I was still successfully
held down. The floor was a sea of torn and trampled papers and
magazines, like an immense waste-paper basket. Burrows and his
companion were almost up to the knees in them, as in a drift of
dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a sheet
of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some
fantastic trouser frill.
Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad
back of Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend
of effort in it as if my friend still needed some holding down.
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