Fowlers End (42 page)

Copper Baldwin removed from the pockets of his overalls that hammer-tomahawk-jemmy and went away to hide it, saying in his axiomatic way, “Carry one o’ these, and who knows who might take it orf of you? Now
you
wouldn’t use a chopper on O’Toole, but O’Toole would use a chopper on you.... Mrs. Edwards, get out the jar!”

Trembling from head to foot, Mrs. Edwards fumbled for and found one of those screw-top jars in which fruit is preserved. She poured into it the contents of the till, silver first, screwed the lid down tight, and gave it to Copper Baldwin, who said, “As Sam Smallpox would say, ‘Drop it in the laventry system.’ I could show ‘im a trick worth two of that. But believe me, Dan—while a few of ‘em keep us occupied, the others go for the cashbox.... Mrs. Edwards, Mr. Laverock says lock up and go ‘ome. Where’s that bloody little skiver, Johnny Headlong? Just when you want these little bastards,
they are never around!”

But at this moment Johnny Headlong crept in from behind with the air of a Red Indian about him, war-painted with excitement, and said in a breathless whisper, “Mr. Laverock—O’Toole’s mob is gathering. I counted fourteen, drunk as lords. Pute ‘as got an iron bar, the Bull Squires ‘as ‘is kicking boots on, the Brick Foster—’e’s got knuckledusters. The rest ‘ave all got something, like razors and fings. But O’Toole, ‘e’s relying on ‘is mitts and ‘is boots.” The boy was frantic with excitement. “They been on the beer, guv, so belly-punch. When they leans forward to spew, use your ‘ands. Don’
t worry, I’ll stand by you. ‘Ave a cigar.” And he offered me one of those miniature cheroots that used to sell at six for tenpence.

I said, “Before you go back to the projection room, young Headlong, tell me one thing: where’s this mob now?”

He replied, “Like I told you, guv’nor, beering up in the Load o’Mischief.”

“Scram,” said I. Then, to Copper Baldwin, “Tactically speaking, Copper, I think our best bet is to carry the battle into the enemy’s camp. He hits twice who hits first. After all, there’s only fourteen or so of them to our two. I’ll bet you anything you like that if I take O’Toole and you take another simultaneously, they’ll cut and run. Let’s try it and see?”

“What, in a confined space?”

“Certainly,” I said. “All the better. Look at Horatius, look at Thermopylae—”

“Look at the Load o’ Mischief, with three back entrances. Who defends the rear? And where’s your lines o’ communication? Don’t give me no bloody Greeks— Spartans, I beg your pardon—because this is Fowlers End. Besides which, you got a crowded house here, and those bastards mean mischief. That sod O’Toole, ‘e’s looking for a bull-and-a-cow to end all rows, a proper bundle.... Oh, blimey, if only I ‘ad five picked men from my squad ...”

“I say, attack!” I said.

“And I say, defend!” said Copper Baldwin. “Again—but if I ‘ad my way I’d turn the lights up, play ‘God Save the King,’ and give everybody a complimentary ticket for another show. Shut the gaff for tonight.”

“If
you had your way,” I said. “If you had your way, you would submit to tyranny, would you?”

“Within reason.” We were becoming heated.

“You will admit that this mob violen
ce is bad?” I asked.

“Well, I mean to say, the French Revolution was better than Louis the Sixteenth, and all that. Besides, they’ll wreck the joint, that mob. And poor old Sam—”

“Hold hard, Copper, since when was he ‘poor old

Sam’?”

“You can’t ‘elp—” he began, and then stopped himself. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, this is Wills’s ‘ouse now! Ain’t
it funny?” he added, with a sort of wistfulness. “It feels like nothing will ever be the same again. I fell in hate with that man.”

I said to him, “Look here, Copper, I’ll have no discussion. If I lock the panic bolts, and somebody yells ‘Fire!’ where are we? If I play ‘God Save the King,’and empty the house, where are we? I’ll fight them, by God I will, and you’ll stand by!” I was really worked up into a state of exaltation now. “And if you think I’m afraid of your Darby O’Kelly O’Toole, so help me God I’ll step across the road and haul him out with these two hands!”

Copper Baldwin sighed and said, “Don’t waste your time, cocko. ‘Ere they come.”

Indeed, O’Toole and his friends were advancing upon us in a mob. I had barely time to say, angrily, “This is what comes of talking tactics,” when they were at the foot of the steps. With ineffable dignity, I said, “Hello, O’Toole. Glad you brought your friends. Only I’m sorry to say we are full up. Come again another evening, won’t you?” Thereupon, Darby O’Kelly O’Toole laughed, and when he laughed he became indescribably sinister.

He had a wide mouth, gaps in his teeth, and a protuberant jaw. His eyes, which were of a strangely pale color, seemed to expand and bulge, while the immense tendons of his short, thick neck were like vibrant strings played upon by the talons of his predatory passions. Laughter in O’Toole produced a chain reaction (as we were later to call it) that seemed to run all over him. I don’t know the anatomical terms, but between the lobes of his ears and his eyebrows he threw up a new set of arteries, and between the angle of his jaw and the place where his collar might have been, along corded musc
les, appeared something like pale blue worms.

At the same time he conveyed the impression of swelling.

His clothes became too tight for him, his veins got too small for all that his Irish heart was pumping through them; he had more breath in his powerful body than it could conveniently hold and had to let it out in something between a snarl and a glottal stop. While he did this he eased his shoulders, squared his elbows, sniffed, spat, and beckoned. Then Pute stood at his left hand and the Bull Squires at his right, and the Brick Foster brought up in his immediate rear. Behind him were grouped, haphazard, the rest of O’Toole’s gang.

(I wish it to be put on record that I believe my first suggestion to Copper Baldwin would have worked; but I was compelled to face the fact that while I was the better strategist, O’Toole was the tactician. There is not the slightest doubt that if, in the time we took to discuss the matter, Baldwin and I had rushed across the street and laid out the ringleaders, nothing would have come of this attack. It is one of the little “ifs” of history; and I am convinced that I am not far wrong in my conjecture that O’Toole would have adjusted his tactics to mine and come back again in dou
ble force and twice as angry when I was least expecting him.)

Anyway, there he was, backed by as appalling a group of desperate thugs as I have ever seen in my life—and I have seen quite a few. He came into the vestibule smiling and deliberate. Copper Baldwin spat on the palms of his hands and flexed his knuckles while he made a curious shrugging circular movement with his neck and shoulders, and—there is no other word for it—pawed the floor with the balls of his feet. His eyes were more than half closed, and I could see his melancholy nostrils twitching, if you can call a slow expansion and contraction a twitch. For the sake of his wind he was saturati
ng his lungs with what passed in Fowlers End for air.

As for myself, I remember that a strange tingling chill came over me, and into my mouth crept a taste of bit
terness and of blood. To Copper Baldwin, who was beginning to shuffle and dance, I said, “Oh, cut it out, and stand shoulder to shoulder!”—what time I stood like a monolith. Brilliant in theory but inexperienced in action, I couldn’t find it in my heart to make the first move. And, savage Liverpool Irish as he was, there seemed to be some psychic plug stopping up O’Toole’s temper. Yet he had to loose it; the others were waiting for his first move. Call it a constipation of the temper.

For, contrary to general belief, the Irish are not a fierce fighting people but a cringing and obsequious people—essentially a nation of tradesmen and politicians. They are no more fighters than they are poets, as they claim to be. I suppose that the most formidable of Irish fighters was Daniel O’Connell, who did it under protection in the House of Commons, and the most notable of their poets and singers was Thomas Moore, who made his reputation in London drawing rooms with such stuff as “Oh, Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” ... In battle with an Irishman, watch you
r shoulder blades. The only really dangerous Irish are, by origin, Anglo-Saxon, Scot, Spanish, and French—and the very Mayor of Dublin, as I write, turns out to be a Jew. And look at De Valera; he had scarcely an Irish corpuscle in his veins. For the rest, the Irish who know how to fight are Scandinavians.

But they have a tradition of wildness they feel they must live up to, although their national weapon is not the shillelagh but the Blarney stone. They cannot even box until they have been at least two generations in America. Before they fight, it is necessary for them to stamp and champ themselves into that state of maniac desperation which they call “getting their Irish up.” They can be pacified, I believe, when sober with a little of their own line of talk. Only, when they are sober they seldom want to fight. The Irish are all
right: all they lack is another fifty thousand years of evolution to erase the mark of the beast.

I said to the leader of this mob, “Why, I think you must be Mr.
Darby O’Kelly
O’Toole.” For the sake of atmosphere, I added, “Why, surely now—well, then, Mr. O’Toole, you must be related to the O’Kellys who have a right to call themselves ‘kings’ in Ireland, and to the famous ‘Darby Kelly’ they made the song about.”

“What of it?”

“Why, then, I should be happy to shake you by the hand and offer you a little something to drink. I am proud to meet the descendants of the O’Kellys and the O’Tooles. Now where is it the O’Tooles come from?” I asked, talking smooth and fast. “Will it be County Clare?”

He was nonplused, but I could sense a certain softening in his attitude. It was that incorrigible boy Johnny Headlong who provided O’Toole with a catharsis for the constipation of his temper by coming between us and, poking him in the face with one of his execrable six-for-tenpence cheroots, shouted in the manner of the early Mickey Rooney,” ‘Ave a cigar, cock!” O’Toole started out of a dream of peace and knocked the boy out of the way with a backhand blow that might have stunned a donkey.

Copper Baldwin said, “Leave the kid alone, Liverpool!”

“And phwat was that ye called me?” asked O’Toole.

Then the fight started.

I know that when you fight a Liverpool Irishman on the rampage it is best, tactically, to keep your distance, just as you would in the case of a capstan running wild with whirling bars. But consider my predicament: being shortsighted it was essential for me to in-fight. When I boxed at Snellgrove-in-the-Vale I developed what the sportswriters call a “style”: I had to see what I was hitting, so I got in close, disturbed my opponent with my right arm, and then
brought my left over in a swishing arc. If it landed, there was the end of him; if it did not, there was the end of me. It was all in fun, then; I had no face to spoil, only it was regarded as somewhat
outre,
because we had been instructed in that old English style with the “long left” which has made the American boxer the master of the world since it is so easy to counter.

I could not walk into the windmill of an O’Toole, so I tried my luck from a longer range than I was accustomed to—and hit Pute, who, as I learned later, had been creeping up behind me.

When I saw him fall and heard his iron bar clanging on the stones of the vestibule behind him, the Spirit of the Lord came upon me. Observing that O’Toole was winding himself up for a roundhouse punch calculated to go through an oak plank, I stepped in and did the same again. I landed—I had aimed at the point of his jaw but hit just under his ear.

I was going to follow with a right uppercut, but he was down, and I grazed the chin of the man immediately behind him, who, because he wore glasses, was nicknamed “Goggles.” He at once shouted,” ‘Norn ‘it me wiv me glasses orn—it’s a criminal f—ing offense!”

This unmanly protest from a fellow who was carrying eighteen inches of gas pipe so annoyed me that I snatched off his glasses, dashed them to the floor, and punched him on the nose, crying, “Take that, you little wretch!” I believe I remember adding, “You cannot get more out of this life than you put into it.”

Copper Baldwin, meanwhile, was engaged with the Bull Squires, and I knew now why Jolly Jumbo’s crowd nicknamed him “The Little Ghost” when he fought, bless his heart, for Old Maunder’s rent. It was next door but one to impossible to hit him. He was wily as the Peddler Palmer with his box of tricks and tricky as Jimmy Wilde, whom
they call “The Ghost with the Hammer in His Hand.” Copper Baldwin’s blows landed, not hard but frequently.

“Keep close, Copper, for Christ’s sake, keep close!” I cried, as the Brick Foster advanced with his knuckledusters, and I felt my left arm go numb as one blow caught the point of the shoulder.

Copper Baldwin had picked up Pute’s iron bar, with which—always cautious—he was striking, quick as a snake, not at heads but at chins and collarbones; while I, thanking God that I could still feel my left hand, was doing my best with my right and praying for the police. For Darby O’Kelly O’Toole was getting up, and his face was terrible to see. If ever Irish was up, his was.

But young Headlong came down breathless, shouting, “Phone out of order!” and, with a shrill snarl of rage, threw himself upon O’Toole and (there’s Fowlers End for you) bit him in the bridge of the nose and held on like a Staffordshire bull terrier. O’Toole bellowed with anger and pain but could not shake him off.

“Git to the phone box by the pub,” said Copper Baldwin, “Call ‘Emergency’ and git the ‘bogeys.’ Me an’ the kid’ll ‘old them—on your way back, take the bastards from the rear. You got the weight to bust through, Dan. Remember Gideon!”

I said, “Oh, bugger Gideon. Hadn’t I better nip out the back way?”

“Where’s your tactics? Don’t you know a panic bolt can only be shut from the inside? You ain’t opening
my
rear to any f—ing assault.”

“Tactically speaking—” I began, when a juvenile delinquent struck me on the head with a bicycle chain. Half stunned, I said, “Oh, no, I mean to say, look here!”

Then there came into my mind something I had read somewhere—something to do with Davy Crockett or Abraham Lincoln, or both—and I kicked O’Toole in the
belly and gave Pute my heel in the face for luck, confronted the mob and made a noise like a wolf, howling,
“Wahooo!
My name is Mister Laverock, but they call me Poison! I chew nails and spit rust! Yow-eee! I’m meaner than a rattlesnake and chaw the living buffalo! I hold the spotted painter by the tail and stare out the lynx! Yip-eee! Step right up and lay right down—you unutterable cads— because I’ve got claws like a silver-tip bear! I can run backwards faster than a deer can run forwards, and when I’m mad I’m a one-man wave of destruction! Step right up, gentlemen; bite, bollo
ck, or gouge; come one, come all, single or collective, in the name of democracy!”