Rodney Stone by Arthur Conan Doyle (affordable ebook reader txt) 📗

Street, and one of the gamest men upon the list.”

“It’s my flesh that’s beat me, sir,” said he.  “It creeps over me amazin’ fast.  I should fight at thirteen-eight, and ’ere I am nearly seventeen.  It’s the business that does it, what with loflin’ about behind the bar all day, and bein’ afraid to refuse a wet for fear of offendin’ a customer.  It’s been the ruin of many a good fightin’-man before me.”

“You should take to my job,” said Harrison.  “I’m a smith by trade, and I’ve not put on half a stone in fifteen years.”

“Some take to one thing and some to another, but the most of us try to ’ave a bar-parlour of our own.  There’s Will Wood, that I beat in forty rounds in the thick of a snowstorm down Navestock way, ’e drives a ’ackney.  Young Firby, the ruffian, ’e’s a waiter now.  Dick ’Umphries sells coals—’e was always of a genelmanly disposition.  George Ingleston is a brewer’s drayman.  We all find our own cribs.  But there’s one thing you are saved by livin’ in the country, and that is ’avin’ the young Corinthians and bloods about town smackin’ you eternally in the face.”

This was the last inconvenience which I should have expected a famous prize-fighter to be subjected to, but several bull-faced fellows at the other side of the table nodded their concurrence.

“You’re right, Bill,” said one of them.  “There’s no one has had more trouble with them than I have.  In they come of an evenin’ into my bar, with the wine in their heads.  ‘Are you Tom Owen the bruiser?’ says one o’ them.  ‘At your service, sir,’ says I.  ‘Take that, then,’ says he, and it’s a clip on the nose, or a backhanded slap across the chops as likely as not.  Then they can brag all their lives that they had hit Tom Owen.”

“D’you draw their cork in return?” asked Harrison.

“I argey it out with them.  I say to them, ‘Now, gents, fightin’ is my profession, and I don’t fight for love any more than a doctor doctors for love, or a butcher gives away a loin chop.  Put up a small purse, master, and I’ll do you over and proud.  But don’t expect that you’re goin’ to come here and get glutted by a middle-weight champion for nothing.”

“That’s my way too, Tom,” said my burly neighbour.  “If they put down a guinea on the counter—which they do if they ’ave been drinkin’ very ’eavy—I give them what I think is about a guinea’s worth and take the money.”

“But if they don’t?”

“Why, then, it’s a common assault, d’ye see, against the body of ’is Majesty’s liege, William Warr, and I ’as ’em before the beak next mornin’, and it’s a week or twenty shillin’s.”

Meanwhile the supper was in full swing—one of those solid and uncompromising meals which prevailed in the days of your grandfathers, and which may explain to some of you why you never set eyes upon that relative.

Great rounds of beef, saddles of mutton, smoking tongues, veal and ham pies, turkeys and chickens, and geese, with every variety of vegetables, and a succession of fiery cherries and heavy ales were the main staple of the feast.  It was the same meal and the same cooking as their Norse or German ancestors might have sat down to fourteen centuries before, and, indeed, as I looked through the steam of the dishes at the lines of fierce and rugged faces, and the mighty shoulders which rounded themselves over the board, I could have imagined myself at one of those old-world carousals of which I had read, where the savage company gnawed the joints to the bone, and then, with murderous horseplay, hurled the remains at their prisoners.  Here and there the pale, aquiline features of a sporting Corinthian recalled rather the Norman type, but in the main these stolid, heavy-jowled faces, belonging to men whose whole life was a battle, were the nearest suggestion which we have had in modern times of those fierce pirates and rovers from whose loins we have sprung.

And yet, as I looked carefully from man to man in the line which faced me, I could see that the English, although they were ten to one, had not the game entirely to themselves, but that other races had shown that they could produce fighting-men worthy to rank with the best.

There were, it is true, no finer or braver men in the room than Jackson and Jem Belcher, the one with his magnificent figure, his small waist and Herculean shoulders; the other as graceful as an old Grecian statue, with a head whose beauty many a sculptor had wished to copy, and with those long, delicate lines in shoulder and loins and limbs, which gave him the litheness and activity of a panther.  Already, as I looked at him, it seemed to me that there was a shadow of tragedy upon his face, a forecast of the day then but a few months distant when a blow from a racquet ball darkened the sight of one eye for ever.  Had he stopped there, with his unbeaten career behind him, then indeed the evening of his life might have been as glorious as its dawn.  But his proud heart could not permit his title to be torn from him without a struggle.  If even now you can read how the gallant fellow, unable with his one eye to judge his distances, fought for thirty-five minutes against his young and formidable opponent, and how, in the bitterness of defeat, he was heard only to express his sorrow for a friend who had backed him with all he possessed, and if you are not touched by the story there must be something wanting in you which should go to the making of a man.

But if there were no men at the tables who could have held their own against Jackson or Jem Belcher, there were others of a different race and type who had qualities which made them dangerous bruisers.  A little way down the room I saw the black face and woolly head of Bill Richmond, in a purple-and-gold footman’s livery—destined to be the predecessor of Molineaux, Sutton, and all that line of black boxers who have shown that the muscular power and insensibility to pain which distinguish the African give him a peculiar advantage in the sports of the ring.  He could boast also of the higher honour of having been the first born American to win laurels in the British ring.  There also I saw the keen features of Dada Mendoza, the Jew, just retired from active work, and leaving behind him a reputation for elegance and perfect science which has, to this day, never been exceeded.  The worst fault that the critics could find with him was that there was a want of power in his blows—a remark which certainly could not have been made about his neighbour, whose long face, curved nose, and dark, flashing eyes proclaimed him as a member of the same ancient race.  This was the formidable Dutch Sam, who fought at nine stone six, and yet possessed such hitting powers, that his admirers, in after years, were willing to back him against the fourteen-stone Tom Cribb, if each were strapped a-straddle to a bench.  Half a dozen other sallow Hebrew faces showed how energetically the Jews of Houndsditch and Whitechapel had taken to the sport of the land of their adoption, and that in this, as in more serious fields of human effort, they could hold their own with the best.

It was my neighbour Warr who very good-humouredly pointed out to me all these celebrities, the echoes of whose fame had been wafted down even to our little Sussex village.

“There’s Andrew Gamble, the Irish champion,” said he.  “It was ’e that beat Noah James, the Guardsman, and was afterwards nearly killed by Jem Belcher, in the ’ollow of Wimbledon Common by Abbershaw’s gibbet.  The two that are next ’im are Irish also, Jack O’Donnell and Bill Ryan.  When you get a good Irishman you can’t better ’em, but they’re dreadful ’asty.  That little cove with the leery face is Caleb Baldwin the Coster, ’im that they call the Pride of Westminster.  ’E’s but five foot seven, and nine stone five, but ’e’s got the ’eart of a giant.  ’E’s never been beat, and there ain’t a man within a stone of ’im that could beat ’im, except only Dutch Sam.  There’s George Maddox, too, another o’ the same breed, and as good a man as ever pulled his coat off.  The genelmanly man that eats with a fork, ’im what looks like a Corinthian, only that the bridge of ’is nose ain’t quite as it ought to be, that’s Dick ’Umphries, the same that was cock of the middle-weights until Mendoza cut his comb for ’im.  You see the other with the grey ’ead and the scars on his face?”

“Why, it’s old Tom Faulkner the cricketer!” cried Harrison, following the line of Bill Warr’s stubby forefinger.  “He’s the fastest bowler in the Midlands, and at his best there weren’t many boxers in England that could stand up against him.”

“You’re right there, Jack ’Arrison.  ’E was one of the three who came up to fight when the best men of Birmingham challenged the best men of London.  ’E’s an evergreen, is Tom.  Why, he was turned five-and-fifty when he challenged and beat, after fifty minutes of it, Jack Thornhill, who was tough enough to take it out of many a youngster.  It’s better to give odds in weight than in years.”

“Youth will be served,” said a crooning voice from the other side of the table.  “Ay, masters, youth will be served.”

The man who had spoken was the most extraordinary of all the many curious figures in the room.  He was very, very old, so old that he was past all comparison, and no one by looking at his mummy skin and fish-like eyes could give a guess at his years.  A few scanty grey hairs still hung about his yellow scalp.  As to his features, they were scarcely human in their disfigurement, for the deep wrinkles and pouchings of extreme age had been added to a face which had always been grotesquely ugly, and had been crushed and smashed in addition by many a blow.  I had noticed this creature at the beginning of the meal, leaning his chest against the edge of the table as if its support was a welcome one, and feebly picking at the food which was placed before him.  Gradually, however, as his neighbours plied him with drink, his shoulders grew squarer, his back stiffened, his eyes brightened, and he looked about him, with an air of surprise at first, as if he had no clear recollection of how he came there, and afterwards with an expression of deepening interest, as he listened, with his ear scooped up in his hand, to the conversation around him.

“That’s old Buckhorse,” whispered Champion Harrison.  “He was just the same as that when I joined the ring twenty years ago.  Time was when he was the terror of London.”

“’E was so,” said Bill Warr.  “’E would fight like a stag, and ’e was that ’ard that ’e would let any swell knock ’im down for ’alf-a-crown.  ’E ’ad no face to spoil, d’ye see, for ’e was always the ugliest man in England.  But ’e’s been on the shelf now for near sixty years, and it cost ’im many a beatin’ before ’e could understand that ’is strength was slippin’ away from ’im.”

“Youth will be served, masters,” droned the old man, shaking his head miserably.

“Fill up ’is glass,” said Warr.  “’Ere, Tom, give old Buckhorse a sup o’ liptrap.  Warm his ’eart for ’im.”

The old man poured a glass of neat gin down his shrivelled throat, and the effect upon him was extraordinary.  A light glimmered in each of his dull eyes, a tinge of colour came into his wax-like cheeks, and, opening his toothless mouth, he suddenly emitted a peculiar, bell-like, and most musical cry.  A hoarse roar of laughter from all the company answered it, and flushed faces craned over each other to catch a glimpse of the veteran.

“There’s Buckhorse!” they cried.  “Buckhorse is comin’ round again.”

“You can laugh if you vill, masters,” he cried, in his Lewkner Lane dialect, holding up his two thin, vein-covered hands.  “It von’t be long that you’ll be able to see my crooks vich ’ave been on Figg’s conk, and on Jack Broughton’s, and on ’Arry Gray’s, and many another good fightin’ man that was millin’ for a livin’ before your fathers could eat pap.”

The company laughed again, and encouraged the old man by half-derisive and half-affectionate cries.

“Let ’em ’ave it, Buckhorse!  Give it ’em straight!  Tell us how the millin’ coves did it in your time.”

The old gladiator looked round him in great contempt.

“Vy, from vot I see,” he cried, in his high, broken treble, “there’s some on you that ain’t fit to flick a fly from a joint o’ meat.  You’d make werry good ladies’ maids, the most of you, but you took the wrong turnin’ ven