Fowlers End (27 page)

You don’t know Mary like I do,
Said the naughty little bird on Mary’s hat...

they laughed again, but in the wrong places, the yobbos. I gave her a bonus, too....

Yet, with the business manifestly gone to the dogs, there were innumerable able-bodied men and women struggling to get into it. Thank God for this, for such is the spirit of man: he must give his lifeblood to the dying.

Once the agent Billy Bax (Sam Yudenow left the bookings to him) sent me a double-turn, Franky and Johnnie. The female half of this team turned up with the agent’s slip. She was a pretty young woman, not more than twenty-five years old, but already showing signs of want and wear. She asked me breathlessly, “You know who we are? Franky and Johnnie? Song and dance act? Franky’s my husband. We live off the Vauxhill Bridge Road. I walked all the way. Could you advance me ten shillings for his poor old bus fare, because he really does try so hard?”

“With pleasure, ma’am,” I said, and did so out of Uncle Hugh’s pocket. When her husband turned up, he was carrying a baby about eight months old. He was one of those blond, nervous, petulant, willowy men with an expression female novelists generally describe as “sensitive.”

“What do you propose to do with the
baby?” I asked.

Quick as a bird the woman said, “Oh, we’ll only be on ten minutes. Perhaps somebody could hold him for me. Only ten minutes, sir, only ten minutes.”

“What the devil is Billy Bax sending me?” I cried. “With Charing Cross Road crawling with talent out of work—”

“Ssh!
You’ll wake up Charley. Swear not to tell,” she said, in her breathless way. “Franky was getting so discouraged he said he would end it all. And Mr. Bax ... well, you know, he’s a very passionate man. So, you know? But it doesn’t mean anything really. There’s no way of getting a foothold, unless ...”

Thus, their baby was held, not by me but by a nursing mother who, as she said, “knew what it was.” She was right in the front, in the fivepennies. Giving the child one of her breasts to chew on, she settled down to enjoy herself while Franky and Johnnie—as if I hadn’t guessed—sang “Frankie and Johnny Were Lovers.”

I was glad to get rid of them, but at the same time I swore the blood feud against Billy Bax. I swore to myself that when I met him he should have the rough edge of my tongue and the back of my hand right in the middle of his horrid face, which I visualized as flabby, sodden like wet blotting paper, its grayness relieved by the blood in his eye and the strawberry color of his blubbery lips. He would be about fifty-five years old....

But one day there came into the vestibule a tall, slim man with a sly, ingratiating manner, dressed in a ten-guinea chalk-stripe suit not much the worse for wear and pointy tan shoes. His cuffs came down to his knuckles, and his collar was of the pattern popularized by the Prince of Wales, as he was then, before we stopped loving him. His hat was a homburg. You could have put the knot of his tie into a thimble. As for his face: it was an animated Rake’s Progress. Under and over prominent watery brown eyes I saw a concentricity of black bags. Hard as he might try, he couldn’t keep the muscles of
his face in equilibrium. Knowing when these muscles were getting out of control, but unable to keep
them in check, he occasionally let them go in a fireworks display of confidential winks and whimsical grimaces.

As my mother would have said, he didn’t look a bit well. There was something about his posture that made me feel uneasy—he was too animated from the waist up and too deliberate from the hips down. Also, he punctuated his sentences with prefabricated laughter.

“Here’s a list for Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday,” he said, with a hearty laugh. “Jacob and the Angel, Eccentric Dancers, ha-ha-ha! Two single turns—The Tramp Juggler and Gritto, The Man Who Eats Bricks, ha-ha-ha! Well, as it happens, Gritto broke a tooth in Brixton, ha-ha-ha, so in order not to let Sam Yudenow down, I decided at the last moment to dub. Got it? I’m Billy Bax, Song and Dance— what’s the odds so long as you’re happy?—that’s my line, ha-ha-ha! ... Look here, let’s have a pound on account, will you?”

I said, “Better ask Mr. Yudenow.”

Billy Bax the Agent said, “I don’t wanna do that. It’s bad for prestige. Oh, for Christ’s sake, look—ten per cent passes through my hands, and
I’m
taking the place of Gritto, ha-ha-ha! What’s the odds, so long as you’re happy? I been on the boards and better off ‘em. I been on the boards and now I’m on the floor, ha-ha-ha! The show must go on—ask Sam Yudenow—so I need a quid at this very moment to keep my office open. Funny—isn’t it?—ha-ha-ha!... Fix you up with a nice girl? I mean, free of charge? Ha-ha-ha!”

“I’ll give you your pound,” I said.

“And I’m much obliged, ha-ha-ha! As for the girls, remember there’s a depression on. In the old days many a good ride I had for a sandwich, ha-ha-ha! But now you can bottle anybody for a threat or a promise. Only see what I’m reduced to, ha-ha-ha.”

“Here’s a pound, and sign a chit,” I said. “And better make it good.”

So Billy Bax came on that Monday night as a substitute for Gritto, the Stone Crusher. His was an odiously allusive style.

The language, at its lowest, was not quite expressive enough for this debased man; he had to reinforce his double meanings with winks and leers. One of his songs was encored, the refrain of it being:

If you are a fat old hen
Then any old cock will do ...

After that he went into what he called an
“eccentric dance.”

When he came off I ran up to the dressing room, impelled by cold distaste, to tell him to moderate his act. There I saw him sitting on the edge of the bed, unnaturally rigid, ghastly in his make-up. As I came into the room he stood up stiffly, cried, “California, here I come!” and fell dead of heart failure. So perish all such.

This, I told Copper Baldwin, was heartache; but he upbraided me, saying, “Oh, be your bloody age! Your heart aches, does it? Then let it. What’s a heart for? Gawd strike me blind, didn’t anybody ever tell you that the heart is the most muscular organ in the body? Ever foot-slog forty miles a day? Then your knees ache and your hips ache— Gawd’s sake, that’s the way you get strong, you currant! You can believe me, cocko, it’s a weak heart that never ached. And you’re an unlicked pup as yet. You’ll get hardened, you’ll harden. Only it’s a painful process. Everybody’s got to carry ‘is o
wn pack until ‘e drops, and the longer you carry it the heavier it gets. I’m not telling you a word of a he. That is, of course, provided you don’t live like a bleeding pig—on your Darby-and-Joan, for yourself. And you ain’t a pig, are you, now? You’re not, you know; otherwise why bother with poor old Miss Noel?”

I said, “Oh, that’s neither here nor there—”

“Begging your pardon, son, it is both ‘ere and there. What’s she to you? It’s a case of divine compassion; and you mark my words, cocko, when it comes your turn Gawd will pity you.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said.

He replied, “It’s a manner of speaking. Always there is some-think close behind you.... Never mind Gawd. What’s He to Hecuba? What’s Noel to you?”

“The hell with Noel!” I cried.

“Leave ‘er alone, poor gel, and she’ll find ‘er own hell. Found it, matter of fact. But what made you wash ‘er, and dress ‘er, and soak ‘er in scent? Tell me that. And answer me this: what made you bring that gentleman, Sourbreast, up from town to gee the poor bitch up?”

“Sourbreast came here to pay
me
a visit,” I said. “Although, if you must know, Copper, I first took Miss Noel to Sourbreast’s place in Albany.”

And well I remembered that incident. I took her in, subdued and decent. She seemed to inhale the flat while she was looking at it. The Sickert over the fireplace brought tears to her eyes, and when she caressed the spines of the old books there was something in her gestures that put me in mind of an aged bachelor caressing the head of someone else’s newborn child. Then she saw the piano and asked, “May I try and play it?”

“Please do, my dear madam,” said Sourbreast, uncovering the keyboard and lifting the great lid.

Then Miss Noel played, much as she had played that day when we washed her and changed her clothes.

Sourbreast cried, “No, really! Upon my heart and soul, this is talent, God bless me! I’ll get you engagements, I’ll be damned if I don’t. Yes, upon my word of honor I’ll get hold of Miller and hire you the Wigmore Hall.” He was excited. “Leave it to me,” he said. “I positively guarantee
you fifty guineas. Seriously, this I categorically guarantee out of my own pocket! ... Oh, please, no thanks!—we’ll show a profit. But you’ll need some kind of dark evening dress, and your hair done, and a manicure, and all that. Shoes, et cetera; I am not well up in these matters, you know. Could I, perhaps, advance you twenty pounds?”

“I really don’t know what to say,” said Miss Noel, weeping. “Nobody ever believed ...”

But he took out of his wallet five five-pound notes (for he was of a generous nature) and thrust them into her hand. And he did, indeed, rent the Wigmore Hall, and poor Miss Noel was in her glory. She bought a long-sleeved black dress of some stuff they called “ring velvet” and had her hair trimmed and dyed dark brown, which, I suppose, was its original color. She had her nails attended to, also, and got herself a pair of black suede court shoes and a discreet little hat. I chipped in with a diamond clip from the HiLife Gem Company, which cost eleven shillings. Copper Baldwin came forward w
ith a most ladylike row of artificial pearls—not too big, not too little—the largest one in the center was about the size of a marble. Miss Noel had already taken to washing. Now she developed a new manner and kept talking about her engagement at the Wigmore Hall. She gave me supercilious looks, ignored Copper Baldwin completely, and laughed in Sam Yudenow’s face. There was no controlling her—she kept playing medleys and trying to perfect them.

Copper Baldwin and I throbbed with anticipation. We had clubbed together to hire a car to take her to Wigmore Street at six o’clock one Thursday evening. She had been closeted with Sam Yudenow, who had said, “I want to say a few words congratulations. A few words congratulations I want to say. You see? Stick by Sam Yudenow and he’ll put a gold spoon right in your kisser. And you’ll be buried in a silver casket miv trimmings!”

He came down wearing an expression of innocence and despair, saying, “Go on, fetch ‘er. What do you want I should do, what? Carry her on my bended knees or something? I’m sorry to say the lady is, uxcuse me, pissed.”

And so she was, with her forehead on the edge of the desk and her lap full of vomit. Near by stood a bottle and two glasses.

Doubling his fists, Copper Baldwin said to Sam Yudenow, “Now this time, you bastard, you
are
going to get it!”

“A moment, please, Copper—all I ask of life is you shouldn’t do what you’ll be sorry for later. Go into the ladies’, put your head in the laventory, pull the plug, and cool off. Believe me, it’s a godsend.... Lavenberg, don’t look me no daggers. The poor girl can’t ‘elp it. Don’t laugh; pity, rather. It’s a dragedy.”

I said, “How come a bottle of Johnny Walker?”

Sam Yudenow said, “Doctor’s orders. Catarrh. But above all, I will not have my office polluted miv a sahr smell. Better put ‘er down on the piano and work it off.”

“What about the Wigmore Hall?” I asked helplessly, for Miss Noel was quite unconscious.

Sam Yudenow said easily, “Believe me, pianists are two a penny, as sure as I stand here. Wipe ‘er down and spvay her with perfumed disinfectant. More I couldn’t do for my own mother, God forbid!”

I said, “After this, Yudenow, I’m going to fix you.”

He said absently, “Yes, I want you should do that. Good boy. Get on the job.”

So Miss Noel went back to her tuneless piano, weeping as if her heart would break; and Copper Baldwin said to me, in a matter-of-fact voice, “In confidence, cocko, I’ve just made up my mind to murder Sam Yudenow.”

And he expounded the cruelest plans for the liquidation of Yudenow that I ever heard of. Being a handy man
with his mitts, said Copper Baldwin, he could rig up a gadget. Now if Sam Yudenow happened to be a bathing man, (a) he could drown him in a bathtub or (b) so arrange it that when he turned on the showerbath it would come out at boiling point. He had a working knowledge of electricity, he told me. “You know the bastard’s got a weak bladder. A copper electrode in the carsey wired up to the generator— nothing conducts electricity like water. Stream o’ pee is as good as a cable. Shape Sam’s heart is in, one convulsion o’ the bladder ought to bust ‘im like a balloon—somebody done it to m
e once when I was working on the railways where we ‘ad iron urinals. Yes sir, I went four feet into the air. I must ‘ave ‘ad a strong heart, because they wired me up to a live rail.... Somebody told me there was a poison you could make out of three ingredients anybody can buy for sixpence at any ironmonger’s shop. Undetectable. You wouldn’t ‘appen by any chance to know the names of these ingredients, would you? If ‘e was a drinking man I’d get ‘im tight, I would, and give ‘im a lovely great bubble of air in one of ‘is fat old arteries. I’ll bet you that would fix ‘im. What’s your opinion, Dan?”

I said, “Detectable—” entering into the spirit of the thing—“what about putting opium into his tea and then pouring molten lead down his throat through a funnel?”

“I could cut up a bit of water pipe. But wouldn’t solder do?”

“I imagine so,” I said, “only lead is heavier and holds the heat longer. I know a jujitsu blow—two, in fact— that are dead-sure killers, both with the edge of the hand. One is under the nose on the upper lip: you strike upwards. The other is on the bridge of the nose between the eyes, in which case you strike downwards. There is also, I believe, a jab of the thumb under the ear. I can’t say I’ve practiced these things, but a Japanese told me so. His father made him strike a wet sandbag with the outer edges of his hands ten
thousand times every day, so that they developed hard callouses sharp as glass. I do not think I have the time.”