13. The Episode of the Rotating Professor

George Sharman lived in Great King Street, which is a cheap residential road near Oxford Station. The house which he inhabited (along with a daily slut who came to cook his meals and make a pretence of cleaning) stood a little apart from the rest of the row, and boasted something in the way of a garden; if some barren rhododendron bushes, a great deal of rank grass, several cabbages, and two exuberant but unproductive apple-trees can be dignified with that name. It was small, and constructed of grey stone with a white facing at the front; on the wooden porch, green paint flaked and blistered. Its name was ‘The Haven’. The slut, after a day occupied mainly with drinking stout and reading a novelette in the sitting-room, returned to her own house at eight o’clock. So when Fen, Wilkes, Sally, and Mr. Hoskins encountered Mr. Barnaby at the end of the road, Mr. Sharman was presumably its only occupant.

Mr. Barnaby was full of bizarre strategies. He was holding a large street-map under a lamp and studying it intently but without much evident comprehension.

“They’re all here, my dear Anthony,” he told Mr. Hoskins. “Quite fiery and aggressive with spirituous liquors. Positively every way of escape is guarded by some desperado of a Blue.”

“Of course, there’s every possibility that he’s gone already,” Fen said. “But I’m taking no chances. Wilkes, will you stay well in the background with Sally?” Wilkes, brandishing his umbrella, nodded, and Fen was so taken aback at this immediate acquiescence that he forgot for a moment what he was going to say. Then, pulling himself together: “Mr. Barnaby, you’ve got someone on the back gate?”

“Oh, but of course.”

“Good. Mr. Hoskins, stay here and help Mr. Barnaby. Richard, the front gate’s yours. I shall go in and interview the gentleman, if he’s there.”

“Too like the Somme,” Mr. Barnaby murmured. “The Eve of Battle, by Burne-Jones.”

They all went, feeling a little foolish, to take up their positions. Rain was falling again, and the reflections of the street lamps gained intensity and precision on the wet black road. No one was about. A sound of muffled altercation from some way away suggested that Mr. Barnaby’s recruits were dissatisfied with some feature of the campaign. Cadogan stood by a telegraph pole, and putting his ear to it, listened to the singing of the wires. Analysing his feelings, he found that he was less excited than curious. After all, they had everything on their side.

Fen walked briskly up the short asphalt path which led to the door. Seeing a notice requiring him to knock and ring, he knocked and rang. He waited; knocked again; rang again; and eventually, receiving no answer, walked out of sight round the side of the house, where he might be presumed to be entering burglariously by a window. The rain increased in volume, and Cadogan turned up his coat collar. Mr. Barnaby could be heard discoursing to Mr. Hoskins on some subject unconnected with the present business. Two, three minutes went by without incident. And then, abruptly, the reverberation of a shot came from the house—a violent detonation accompanied by a sharp gash of flame in one of the darkened rooms. Immediately Fen’s voice was heard shouting, but the words were indistinct, and Cadogan, his muscles tight and his heart pounding, hesitated where to go and what to do. Finally he stumbled over the wet muddy lawn in the direction in which Fen had gone; that left the front gate unguarded, but along the road, in either direction, there were guards. Rounding the corner of the house, he was aware out of the corner of his eye of a dark figure slipping through the bushes on the other side, and gave a shout of warning. Almost simultaneously Fen dropped from a nearby window, cursing in several languages, and waved him back to his post.

“He’s out,” he announced rather obviously. “And he’s got a gun. The other side.” They ran back again, dipping and stumbling in the darkness. Someone in the house next door flung open the window and said: “Anything the matter?” but they ignored him, and by the time he had got on a hat and coat and arrived outside, almost everyone was gone.

Cadogan was never able to sort out the exact details of the fiasco which followed. It is to be remembered that Mr. Barnaby’s army was not wholly sober; that in the darkness it was not easy to distinguish friend from foe, with the result that Mr. Barnaby was set upon until his distinctive wails revealed the mistake; and that everyone, under the erroneous impression that the quarry was in sight, deserted his post at the crucial moment and joined in a fruitless general beating to and fro. It was soon apparent that Sharman had made his way through a gap in the fence at the back of the garden into an alley beyond; and Fen, unbelievably enraged, sent two under­graduates back to the house in case they were mistaken, dispatched Mr. Barnaby (now plaintive with physical injury) and the rest in the direction of the station, and himself, with Cadogan, Mr. Hoskins, Sally, and Wilkes, set off along the only other possible escape route, the road which leads out to the suburb of Botley.

“He wanted to create a diversion,” said Fen, “and, by God, he succeeded. Put not your trust in princes, etcetera… Keep an eye out on either side, everyone, and for God’s sake remember he’s armed…” He subsided into a sort of dull complaining, very distressing to listen to.

“Unless he’s quite mad he won’t have gone to the station,” Cadogan ventured.

“No,” said Fen, a little mollified. That’s why I sent the others there. They’re so tight they couldn’t corner a tortoise in a rabbit-hutch… Sally, I really think you ought to go back.”

“Me? No fear. Anyway, I’ve got Dr. Wilkes to look after me.”

“You see?” said Wilkes complacently.

“The vanity of the old,” said Fen. “I suppose you realize, Wilkes, that you ought to be ending your life in ripe contemptation, and not gadding about protecting young girls?”

“You unchivalrous hound,” said Wilkes, and this so abashed Fen that for a short while he was quite silent.

This road, unlike Great King Street, was a busy one, and at several points they had difficulty in forcing their way through the ambuscades of damp umbrellas. The brightly-lighted buses, their radiators steaming beneath the rain, lumbered by. The gutters gurgled and streamed with water. A policeman, caped and imperious, stood at a crossroads directing traffic, but of Mr. Sharman there was no visible sign.

“Oh, damn,” said Fen. We’re never going to find him, you know. He may have gone in anywhere. God rot Barnaby and his minions for making a mess of things.”

But Sally was taking matters into her own hands. She ran into the road, narrowly missing a taxi on the way, and approached the policeman.

“Hullo, Bob,” she said.

“Why, ’ullo, Sally,” he answered. “Gawd, what a night. You oughtn’t ter talk ter me when I’m on point duty, yer know.”

“I’m looking for a man, Bob.”

“When weren’t yer?” said Bob, winking. He beckoned a lorry across.

“Oh, funny, aren’t you?” said Sally. “No, really, Bob, this is serious. He must have come up here. Weedy, undersized chap, with rabbity teeth; very muffled up.”

“Ah, yes, I saw ’im, not more’n a minute ago. ’E was nearly crushed to a pudding, crossin’ against signals.”

“Where did he go?”

“Into the flicks,” said Bob, jerking his head in the appropriate direction. “’Ardly your type, though, I should ’ave thought.”

But Sally was by this time returning to the others, flushed and victorious. “He’s gone into the Colossal,” she told them.

“Good for you,” said Fen. “It’s nice to know there’s someone in this party besides me who’s got a little nous.” He glared malevolently at Wilkes. “Well, come on.”

The Colossal (which lay less than a hundred yards ahead of them) is one of the smallest and most disreputable cinemas ever contrived. It is also, from the mechanical aspect, primitive to the point of seeming the first successful experiment of the cinematograph’s inventor. The usherettes are listless and the commissionaire old, confused, and prone to organize small, unnecessary queues of patrons when any number of seats are available. Very ancient films are shown, liable to every ill that celluloid is heir to, from incessant crackling through to total dislocation, and matters are not improved by an operator who, apart from being constantly intoxicated, seems only imperfectly acquainted with the mechanics of his craft. The Colossal is also a great haunt of couples in an advanced condition of amorous delight, and is frequented by the rowdiest section of under­graduates for the sheer joy of seeing things go wrong.

Outside the doors Fen marshalled his forces. “There’s no point in all of us going in,” he said. “And someone ought to keep an eye on this exit and the one round the comer. I hope he hasn’t gone in and come out again already, but we’ll have to risk that. Richard, and you, Mr. Hoskins, will you stay outside?”

He went in, accompanied by Sally and Wilkes, to buy the tickets. The commissionaire tried to make them queue, but they brushed him aside. Fortunately, the Colossal has no gallery, so there was no chance of their looking for Sharman in the wrong quarter.

Someone tore their tickets in two, and having performed this simple but destructive act, relapsed into apathy as they pushed through the swing-doors into a warm, vibrating darkness. The screen was for the moment occupied by the image of a door, which was slowly opening to admit the muzzle of a revolver, and this was immediately followed by the spectacle of a white-haired man writing at a desk. Invisible violins played a whole-tone chord, tremolo, in a high register, while muted trombones grunted in a diseased but foreboding manner underneath. This music rose to a violent fortissimo and was terminated abruptly by an explosion, at which the white-haired man fell forward on to his desk, his pen dropping from a nerveless hand. (“Dead,” said Fen sepulchrally.) At this crisis of affairs, however, they were diverted from attending to what subsequently occurred by being ushered to their seats.

The cinema was not very full. Immediately in front of them was a solid block of under­graduates, but the rest of the seats were sparsely occupied. Near them, a young woman who was showing a surprising length of leg lay stickily clutched in the embraces of a young man, apparently insensible to the alarming events being enacted for her benefit. Someone was asleep in the row in front. Even with nothing more than the illumination from the screen and from the small yellow lights at the side to help them, it should not be insuperably difficult to locate Mr. Sharman.

“Pa was a nice guy,” said the film. “Who’d want to kill him?”

Fen got up and meandered down the gangway. An usherette, anxious to be helpful, approached and indicated to him the whereabouts of the gentlemen’s lavatory. He ignored her and continued peering about him.

“OK, boys,” said the film. “Take him to the morgue. Now, Mrs. Hargben, do you know of anyone who had reason to dislike your husband?”

Fen was getting in the way of the people at the side. One man got up and said: “’Ere, sit darn, matey.” “Sit down yourself,” said someone else behind him. Fen ignored them both and returned to Sally and Wilkes. “I shall have to try the other side,” he told them.

“Right. Now we’ll see the Clancy dame,” said the film. “It’s a nasty business, chief. I don’t like it.” Two detectives were wiped off the screen and the hero and heroine, glueily kissing, substituted. There followed without pause a rocky prospect across which a number of cowboys were galloping, firing dementedly at some person or persons in front of them.

“Wrong reel!” sang the undergraduates delightfully. “Osbert’s drunk again!”

At this the screen (perhaps in sympathy) suffered a severe attack of delirium tremens, and finally went completely black, leaving the cinema in almost total darkness.

“Damn,” said Fen.

The under­graduates were rising in a body, forcibly expressing their intention of putting Osbert’s head in a bucket. Some of them actually rushed out at the back. The manager, a short, pudgy man in evening dress, appeared in front of the screen, bathed in an ill-chosen red spotlight which made him look like a vampire newly engorged with blood, and pleaded without much optimism for patience.

“A slight technical hitch,” he panted at them. “It will be remedied immediately. Keep your seats, ladies and gentlemen. Keep your seats, please.” But no one took the least notice of him. From the operator’s box came a sound of scuffling and yells.

“Keep your seats,” the manager repeated in futile desperation.

Fen, Wilkes, and Sally were all on their feet “We’re going to lose him in this mess,” said Fen. “Come on, we’d better get outside. If he saw us come in, he’s pretty certain to take this opportunity.” They pushed their way out. As they went, the film was suddenly superimposed on top of the manager, giving him a curiously spectral appearance.

“Listen, honey,” it said. “If they ask where you were last night, don’t say anything. It’s a frame, see?”

But outside the main doors there was nothing but the girl in the pay-box, the large and melancholy form of Mr. Hoskins, and the commissionaire, fingering his medals for want of better occupation.

“What’s happening?” asked Mr. Hoskins. “I heard an awful uproar.” He brushed the rain-water from his hair, which was now soaking.

“He hasn”t come out here?”

“No.”

At this moment there was a sound of running footsteps, and Cadogan, dripping and in despair, pelted round the corner. “He’s out,” he shouted. “He’s got away.”

Fen groaned “Oh, my dear paws,” he said “Why didnt you stop him?”

“He had a gun,” Cadogan replied. “And if you think I’m going to rush at a gun like something out of a film, you’re quite mistaken.”

Fen groaned again. “Which way did he go?”

“Down that side road. He stole a bicycle.”

Without hesitation Fen ran to an untenanted blue Hillman which stood by the kerb, got in, and started it. “Come on,” he beckoned them. “La propriété, c’est vol, and I’m damned if I’m going to lose him again for want of a vehicle.” Somehow or other, they all piled in, and the car started. The owner, who was drinking pale ale in a nearby public-house, was for quite a long time totally unaware that it had gone.

They turned into the narrow street which ran down by the cinema. The off wheels, slithering through a choked gutter, threw up a wave of water against the red-brick wall, plastered with advertisements, and in the headlights the rain glittered like silver needles. In a short time the road broadened, and they caught sight of Sharman, pedalling like a maniac, and every now and then staring back over his shoulder. As they drew nearer, the lights caught for a moment the white of his eyes and the rodent mouth. They came level, and Fen shouted:

“Listen, Sharman: if you don’t stop, I’m going to drive you into the pavement.”

As he did so, Sharman abruptly sheered off and vanished. It was so like magic that for the moment they did not realize that he had turned into a narrow, muddy path on the left. Fen pulled up and backed the car in the hasty and unnerving manner peculiar to all his driving (“‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,’” Cadogan quoted appositely), but the entrance was too narrow for them to penetrate. They got out, abandoned the car, and ran, splishing into puddles and drenched to the skin, towards a glow of light, a smell of petrol, and the harsh sound of music. But only Sally realized that Sharman was in a cul-de-sac. At the end of it was the Botley Fair, and there was no escape route except by the way they had come.

Passing a steam engine which laboured and fumed in the streaming rain, they found Sharman’s bicycle on the ground near the entrance of the first huge striped marquee. Fen left Cadogan and Mr. Hoskins on the watch outside, and with Wilkes and Sally pushed through the entrance. At the first moment the blare of lights and music dazzled and stunned them. Few people were present—the weather was not good for business. On their right was a shooting-range, at which a brilliantined youth was exhibiting his prowess to a girl, in front, octagonal stalls devoted to the rolling of pennies down on to numbered boards, sparsely patronized; on the left, darts booths, skittles, a cheiromancer. At the far end a massive roundabout was gathering speed, with only two people on it. Dodgem cars aimlessly circled, the contacts at the summit of their poles crackling and flashing against wire netting, the loud-speakers, fantastically over-amplified, roaring forth dance music.

“Baybee,” a gargantuan voice sang. “Don’t ever say may-bee, baybee.” The machinery of the roundabout ground and battered with increasing speed, with the heavy, explosive force of a train passing over a subway. It bore a notice: “There is no limit to the speed of this machine.” In one place the roof was leaking, flooding down on to the dry, trodden mud. A group of young girls, with bare, thin, white legs, berets, cheap wool coats, and scarlet lips, stood lifelessly watching the cars, or the prizes—dolls, toby-jugs, canaries and goldfish, cigarette packets—piled high like the gimcrack splendours of a proletarian heaven. The air was hot, smelling of steam and oil and canvas, and impregnated with incessant noise.

Like a scene from a Graham Greene novel, Cadogan thought as he peered in: somewhere there must be somebody saying a “Hail Mary”…

But they had none of them the time either to assimilate these details, or to indulge in much literary reminiscence. From behind one of the booths, Sharman ducked and ran: ran to the tethered canvas at the far end, clawing for an exit. There was none. He turned with a kind of animal snarl as Fen, pushing Sally forcibly out of the line of fire, went forward, Then in sheer panic he ran to the rapidly moving roundabout, and disregarding the shouts of the attendant, who was leaning against a pole on the wooden platform surrounding it, caught at one of the rails as it was flying past and, with a jerk which must nearly have torn his arms from their sockets, levered himself on. With hardly a moment’s hesitation Fen followed him. Somewhere a woman screamed, and the attendant, now thoroughly alarmed, tried to hold him off, and failed. Fen, too, fell, stumbled, fought his way on to that circulating switchback, and clung with aching hands to a wooden motor-cycle, with a plush-seat, while he tried to gain equilibrium against the centrifugal and backward pull. Sharman, a short way ahead of him, was braced and feeling for his gun.

“Bloody fools,” said the attendant to Cadogan, who had just arrived with Mr. Hoskins to join Sally and Wilkes. “Do they want ter kill themselves?”

The lights of the roundabout dimmed suddenly as it reached its normal maximum speed. Islanded in calm, the operator at the centre regarded it with indifference, waiting the few revolutions during which strained muscles would hold out before slowing again.

“You’ve got to stop that thing,” Cadogan said sharply. “The first man who got on is a murderer. He’s armed and dangerous. Stop it, for God’s sake.”

The attendant stared at him. “Wot the hell—”

“That’s perfectly true,” said Wilkes with sudden authority. “Sally, go and phone the police, and then get on to the others at the station and tell them to come here.” Sally, white and silent, nodded and ran off. People were coming towards them, wondering what the trouble was.

“Gawd,” said the attendant, suddenly convinced. And he shouted to the man at the centre: “’Ere, Bert, stop ’er! Quick!”

The words were carried away in a violent gust of wind and the iron pounding of the roundabout. The man at the centre shook his head interrogatively. Sharman had got the pistol out of his pocket. He took aim and fired. The man at the controls gaped stupidly for a fleeting second, and dropped out of sight.

“The bastard!” said the attendant with sudden savagery. The bastard’s shot ’im.”

The keepers of the other booths and side-shows were approaching now. And the roundabout was still gaining speed: it shook the whole marquee with its dull tremendous reverberation Incongruously, the music blared on: “Honey-love, honey-dove, I’m cryin’ for the moon…” Faces were suddenly pinched, frightened. From one of the other two people on the roundabout came a piercing scream of real terror.

“Lie down!” the attendant bawled. “Lie down against the rail. My Gawd!” he added in a lower voice, “if anyone comes orf while she’s goin’ at that lick they won’t live to talk abaht it.”

The speed was still increasing. In the cavern of semi-darkness faces, forms, were only dimly seen, plucked out of sight and thrown back again as if by a giant’s hand. In the marquee, everything else had stopped, every stall was deserted. On the fringes of the group below the furious circling wind could be felt.

“We can’t stop ’er,” the attendant muttered. “We can’t stop ’er now. Not till the steam gives out.”

“What the hell do you mean?” said Cadogan, suddenly terrified.

“The engine an’ all’s in the middle. There’s no way yer can get to it. If you tried to get on ’er at this speed you’d break yer bloody neck.”

“How long will it keep up?”

The attendant shrugged. “’Alf an hour,” he answeied grimly. “If it doesn’t bring the ’ole bloody marquee down first.”

“Oh, God,” said Cadogan, and felt very sick. “can’t we get one of the rifles and shoot him off?

“You try shootin’ at that thing and you’ll ’it anything but ’im.”

The roundabout was going faster.

“I’ve got it,” Cadogan exclaimed suddenly. “If we sawed away the skirting-board there, couldn’t we get to the centre underneath it?”

The man stared. “You might,” he answered. “But there’s a bloody lot of machinery there, and as likely as not you’d get yer ‘ead torn orf, even crawlin’.”

“We’ve got to try it,” Cadogan said, “if only for the sake of those other two people. They’re in a blind panic, and it’s ten to one they’ll go at any moment.”

The attendant hesitated only a moment “I’m with yer,” he said. “Phil, get my tools.”

Have you ever, indifferent reader, clung to the edge of a roundabout which is moving at high speed? If your feet are braced, you can lean over inwards at an angle of sixty degrees and still not lose your balance: it’s only then, in fact, that you are balanced at all. Sit upright, and you will want all your strength to avoid being pulled off, like a pin placed on the outside of a revolving turn-table. It is not, in any event, the place to tackle a desperate man, though it is true that the same disadvantages apply to both sides.

There is another thing, and that is that the senses begin to be affected. After a while, only the agonizing outward pull on your body tells you that you are going round. Everything else, vision included, gives you the illusion that you are going up—up a dark, precipitous, endless slope, which becomes the steeper as the speed increases. In the end you imagine a non-existent gravitational pull downwards and find yourself fighting against it. It is a curious sensation, this rushing upwards through a dark tunnel of wind with the faces of the onlookers a slanting, recurrent blur—exhilarating at first, then tiring, and at last, with the sinews strained beyond endurance, wholly unbearable, a nightmare of struggle and misery.

Fen’s arms were aching from the first wrench, but at first the sensation was not unenjoyable. It occurred to him belatedly that there was little point in this melodramatic, final pursuit: some quite irrational impulse had urged him to it, just as the desire to escape for a little longer had driven Sharman to this futile temporary refuge. Now he was here he must make the best of it. He remembered with a pang of annoyance that his gun was still lying on the desk in his room, where he had left it; and was subsequently comforted by the reflection that even if Sharman fired at him he was almost certain to miss. Nearer the centre of the roundabout one would have more freedom of movement, but one would also constitute a far easier target. Taking it all in all, he decided to stay where he was; decided, moreover, to do nothing about Sharman until the roundabout stopped, when it would be time enough.

Yet these resolutions all went by the board when Sharman fired his first shot. That wanton useless act roused in Fen something which was neither heroism, nor sentimentality, nor righteous indignation, nor even instinctive revulsion; and having stated the negative side, it is difficult to put into words what, actually, it was, since it is not a common emotion in mankind, and since it lies at the basis of Fen’s personality. I suppose that as near as anything would be to say that it was a kind of passionless sense of justice and of proportion, a deeply rooted objection to waste. In any case, if left him with the sudden desire to act; and, singing quietly and untunefully to himself the finale of the Enigma Variations, he crouched down beside one of the wooden motor-cycles, the centrifugal drive flattening him against it, and began to push his way forward.

Sharman, gun in hand, turned, saw him, and waited, holding his fire until it could be effective. His red-rimmed eyes were bright with lunacy, and he was shouting something that was lost in the rush of air. The two men, rising and falling on the hinged and undulating boards, were to all intents and purposes alone in their sloping tunnel of black wind. Outside things became even more inconsiderable and irrelevant with the increase of speed.

Fen went on. It was slow, nerve-racking progress, particularly at the gaps between the rows of motor-cycles. A hand or foot would slip, and the nails would clutch and tear agonizingly in the effort to regain hold. Sweat poured off him, and the bucketing din pounded in his ears. He had no idea of what he was going to do; if he attempted to throw anything it would scarcely leave his hand—and, anyway, he had nothing to throw. However he continued to move towards Sharman, and the two men, had they known it, were about six feet apart at the moment when Cadogan and the attendant were pushing their way under the roundabout towards the controls in the middle. At this point, as a matter of historical fact, Fen’s enterprise gave out; he could think of nothing to do: to hurl himself at Sharman was not only a physical impossibility, but would almost certainly result in immediate extinction. And so, being of an old-fashioned turn of mind, he invoked the gods.

They answered. It may be that they remembered him as an ardent supporter (against all the world) of the deus ex machina in drama, or it may be that they merely considered that the events of the evening had gone on long enough. What in fact happened was that Sharman momentarily lost his foothold, and, in struggling to regain it, dropped the gun. There was an instant of paralysing realization, and then Fen was on him.

In the nature of things, the struggle could not be a long one. And it was a matter of seconds before both men, locked together, were reeling back towards a gap in the railings, with Fen outermost. He knew what he had to do, and did it. As they reached the gap, he tore both arms from Sharman. The left, flung out to catch the railing, bore excruciatingly for a moment the weight of both their bodies; and then the right, swinging like an axe, struck Sharman sideways and backwards off the edge. The air took the man like a leaf. The white-faced crowd below saw him flung against a supporting pole with sickening violence, saw him hurled down the steps to lie still on the ground at their feet. Almost at the same instant Cadogan and the attendant, after an heroic but unharmed passage, reached the controls. The roundabout lost speed. When it stopped, willing hands helped Fen and the two others, who were frightened but not hurt, on to terra firma again. They were sweaty, dizzy, and begrimed. The man at the controls was unconscious, but in no danger; the bullet had broken his arm.

Wilkes rose from Sharman’s tattered and bleeding body.

“He’s not dead,” he said. “There are a lot of things broken, but he’ll live.”

“To be hanged,” said Fen in a shaky voice. “Which,” he added more cheerfully, “will be one Janeite the less, anyway.”

This must be the last recorded comment of the day. Almost as Fen spoke, Mr. Scott and Mr. Beavis drove up in Lily Christine III; they were followed by the Chief Constable and his minions; they were followed by the owner of the blue Hillman; he was followed by the police whom Sally had telephoned; they were followed by the owner of the bicycle which Sharman had taken; he was followed by Mr. Barnaby and his army, much inspired by the resources of the station bar, and they were followed by the Junior Proctor, the University Marshal, and two bulldogs, who had been advised by the railway authorities that trouble was afoot, and who looked as severe, authoritative, and ineffectual as ever.

It was quite a reunion.