"That made him furious. He came at me like a wild beast, with his mouth
open and his armed fist flourished aloft as if he would annihilate me. I
tried to deal with him by the methods of Mr. Slimy Cohen, but it was
useless. He was no boxer and he had a knuckle-duster. Consequently we
grabbed one another like a pair of monkeys and sought to inflict
unorthodox injuries. He struggled and writhed and growled and kicked and
even tried to bite; while I kept, as far as I could, control of his
wrists and waited my opportunity. It was a most undignified affair. We
staggered to and fro, clawing at one another; we gyrated round the room
in a wild, unseemly waltz; we knocked over the chairs, we bumped
against the table, we banged each other's heads against the walls; and
all the time, as my adversary growled and showed his teeth like a savage
dog, I was sensible of a strange feeling of physical enjoyment such as
one might experience in some strenuous game. I seemed to have acquired a
new and unfamiliar personality.

"But the knuckle-duster was a complication; for it was his right hand
that I had to watch; and yet I could not afford to free for an instant
his left, armed as it was with that shabbiest of weapons. Hence I hung
on to his wrists while he struggled to wrench them free, and we pulled
one another backwards and forwards and round and round in the most
absurd and amateurish manner, each trying to trip the other up and
failing at every attempt. At last, in the course of our gyrations, we
bumped through the open door into the passage leading to the museum; and
here we came down together with a crash that shook the house.

"As ill luck would have it, I was underneath; but, in spite of the shock
of the fall, I still managed to keep hold of his wrists, though I had
some trouble to prevent him from biting my hands and face. So our