Lucky Jim

He began to lose all consciousness of the audience before him; the only member of it he cared about had left and was presumably not going to come back. Well, if this was going to be his last public appearance here, he'd see to it that people didn't forget it in a hurry. He'd do some good, however small, to some of those present, however few. No more imitations, they frightened him too much, but he could suggest by his intonation, very subtly of course, what he thought of his subject and the worth of the statements he was making.

Gradually, but not as gradually as it seemed to some parts of his brain, he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic, wounding bitterness.

Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish.

Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist. A growing mutter, half-amused, half-indignant, arose about him, but he closed his ears to it and read on. Almost unconsciously he began to adopt an unnameable foreign accent and to read faster and faster, bis head spinning. As if in a dream he heard Welch stirring, then whispering, then talking at his side. He began punctuating his discourse with smothered snorts of derision. He read on, spitting out the syllables like curses, leaving mispronunciations, omissions, spoonerisms uncorrected, turning over the pages of his script like a score-reader following a /presto /movement, raising his voice higher and higher. At last he found his final paragraph confronting him, stopped, and looked at his audience.

Below him, the local worthies were staring at him with frozen astonishment and protest. Of the Staff contingent, the senior members looked up with similar expressions, the junior wouldn't look up at all.

The only person in the main body of the Hall who was actually producing sounds was Gore-Urquhart, and the sounds he was producing were of loud skirling laughter. Shouts, whistles, and applause came from the gallery.

Dixon raised his hand for silence, but the noise continued. It was too much; he felt faint again, and put his hands over his ears. Through all the noise a louder noise became audible, something between a groan and a bellow. Half-way down the Hall Bill Atkinson, unable at that distance, or unwilling, to distinguish between the scratching and the covering of ears, collapsed full length in the aisle. The Principal rose to his feet, opening and shutting his mouth, but without any quietening effect.

He bent and began urgently whispering with the alderman at his side. The people near Atkinson started trying to lift him up, but in vain. Welch began calling Dixon's name. A stream of students entered and made towards the recumbent Atkinson. There were perhaps twenty or thirty of them.

Shouting directions and advice to one another, they picked him up and bore him through the doors. Dixon came round in front of the lectern and the uproar died away.' That'll do, Dixon,' the Principal said loudly, signalling to Welch, but too late.

'What, finally, is the practical application of all this?' Dixon said in his normal voice. He felt he was in the grip of some vertigo, hearing himself talking without consciously willing any words. 'Listen and I'll tell you. The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It's only the home-made pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd, the Esperanto …' He paused and swayed; the heat, the drink, the nervousness, the guilt at last joined forces in him. His head seemed to be swelling and growing lighter at the same time; his body felt as if it were being ground out into its constituent granules; his ears hummed and the sides, top, and bottom of his vision were becoming invaded by a smoky, greasy darkness. Chairs scraped at either side of him; a hand caught at his shoulder and made him stumble. With Welch's arm round his shoulders he sank to his knees, half-hearing the Principal's voice saying above a tumult: '… from finishing his lecture through sudden indisposition.

I'm sure you'll all…'

I've done it now, he managed to think. And without even telling them…

He drew air into his lungs; if he could push it out again he'd be all right, but he couldn't, and everything faded out in a great roar of wordless voices.

'THAT'S all it was,' Beesley said the next morning. 'Quite understandable. But it was that whisky he gave you that really finished you, wasn't it?'

'Yes, I suppose I should have been all right without that. I can't tell Welch that, though.'