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I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on
top of me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to
him. He turned quickly to come to reinforce the two who were
mastering Basil. The latter's head was already sinking lower and
lower, like a leaking ship, as his enemies pressed him down. 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.
Suddenly that broad back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying
on one leg; Basil, somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows' huge
fists and those of the footman were battering Basil's sunken head
like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant's ankle out of his
sudden and savage grip. While his own head was forced slowly down
in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor was being
forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face.
Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook
together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the
floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like
battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he
sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and
another in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he
knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang
at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between
them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let go and
turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and,
to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other
footman, bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling
out of the room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him,
seeing that the battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride the
pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.
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