Fowlers End (40 page)

“Am not prepared to say I can,”
said the heavy voice.

“But the working man, statistically, has his rights, you’ll grant?”

After a pause, the man with the heavy voice said, “Booger the working man, the idle sod! But statistics I grant you. Now then!”

“But what about correlation?”

“Oh ay, I dare say there’s something to be said for correlation. But booger labor. Let’s get this right, Mr. Cruikback. Listen to me. I’ve worked amoong bloody laborers and, if you will excuse the expression, to put it delicately, they are not fit to shovel shit. Don’t blame me, it’s the way they’re made. I’m sorry to say it joost happens they’re no bloody good.”

“But what about A.A.A.A.?” Cruikback asked.

“They’re joost as bad,” said the man with the heavy voice, “and mark my words, the time will come ...” His tone changed. “Yes, I’m nobbut a common old builder,” he said, while I could almost feel him nod. “Come on now, you’re a surveyor. Gi’ me. Anglo-American Automobile Associates, is it? A.A.A.A., is that it? I’m only a common old working man, so let’s have it, and I wouldn’t say no to a fifty-pound note.”

“Oh, I say, look here!”

“Look wheer?”

“You see, of course, my wife is going to have a miscarriage.”

“I’m only a common old builder. Yes, I’ll allow I can lay my hands on two or three hoondred thousand pound; but call that loock. I’m a working man. When my good lady had to have a miss, we used to do it with a bottle of gin, and parsley boiled in Epsom salts. When it begins to
work, pretend to trip, like, at head of stairs; this failing, sit on her hard—it might surprise you, with all your education, to know the strength of a buttock. Gi’the lass a sack o’ potatoes to lift, make her roon oop and down stairs, kick her in belly and feed her smutty wheat. Frighten the lady: go ‘boo’ in the middle of the night, and catch her around unexpected corners. Yes ay, mister, and when she faints carry her to bedroom, off wi’ t’ drawers, and an enema or douche of strong Epsom salts. Or parsley—starvation diet—then chuck lass downstairs again. Fall on her accide
ntal, like, with the elbow over the lower bone. That ought to work. If it doesn’t, I’ll gi’ ye an address; only the woman charges two guineas. If, however, you use a knitting needle, be sure to sterilize it first. Heat knitting needle red hot, but spit on it first to cool it—poor little boogers, they got their own troobles without knitting needle being red hot—or pass water on it. That’ll case-harden knitting needle and disinfect and cool at same time.... Is she a bleeder?”

“I don’t know what the bloody hell you are talking about,” said Cruikback, in an offended tone.

“Tha’ doesn’t? Eeh well, lad, let’s drop matter.... About Samshott Heath. Business is business. Let’s have t’ dope, and here’s a fifty-pound note for ‘ee.”

Then I got up, filled with a great anger and a sense of shocking destruction; also of maddening bewilderment. But anger was predominant. My awe of Cruikback went away like a mist in a high wind. I confronted him and said, “You bloody little crook!”

“Remember Snellgrove-in-the-Vale!” he cried.

“So I do—” and let him have it right between
the eyes.

Coming out of a brief unconsciousness, he said, “I’ll let you get away with it this time, Laverock,” and passed out again, bleeding as if I had cut his throat.

The builder from the north said to me, “To tell ‘ee the truth I never did like the look of that booger. Has he been trying it on? Wi’ me, I mean? Because if so, I’ll show him a bit o’ Lancasheer. Ay, will I!”

I said, “Pray do so without further delay,” and left the bar, dreaming of the “bit o’Lancasheer” Cruikback was bound to get. The Liverpool Kiss, as elaborated by Sam Yudenow, is merely the hors d’oeuvre to a “bit o’ Lancasheer”; and poor Cruikback had a theodolite with him. The man from the north would have got hold of that by all three legs. His feet being tired, he would undoubtedly use this scientific instrument as a bundle of rods—oak rods—and, having beaten the part you look through into splinters on Cruikback’s head, would do his best to break the sticks in a bundle on his bac
k. And I had not the slightest doubt that this man, who was built cubically, would give Cruikback something to remember him by, by way of the shins, the coccyx, the insteps, and the genitals. Perhaps, I thought happily, Cruikback will lose an eye or two?

I got out before the police came, and started to make my way to the station, in order to reach which I had to pass my mother’s house. I didn’t want to, because I knew that she would be looking out of one window or another, so I went to the other side of the street. And there my Uncle Hugh was waiting for me.

“Skulker!” he cried. “What the hell are you cringing about this locality, sponging off—”

“Hold hard, Uncle Hugh,” I said, “where do you get that ‘skulk’, that ‘cringe’? I don’t like it. Take it ba
ck, or— ”

“Or what, you unmitigated cad?”

I said, “In consideration of the respect with which I regard you, the fact that I believe you to be a nice man; in consideration, I say, of the fact that my mother has a high
regard for you, and so had my father; in consideration of all these things, let us, as the poet says, kiss and part.”

This seemed to exacerbate his irritation, this “kiss and part.” The very idea of kissing me was sickening to him; the parting part, suddenly, he did not mind a bit, although he used to like me. He said to me, “Now look here, Daniel. You were a born idiot. That I don’t mind. With those bookshops of yours, you made an unmentionable fool of yourself. Well, we are all allowed one mistake. In your show business career, you have been behaving like such an ape that I could tear out the little hair I have left. Write that off as youthful enthusiasm. You went into bucket-shopkeeping—it’s in the
London Gazette—but
this, considering your ignorance, I can find an excuse for, if not condone. I always knew... Never mind. I repeat, I never knew that you would turn out to be what you have turned out to be. Thank God your father’s dead!”

I cried, “You leave my old man out of this!”

“The sweetest girl that ever walked!” he said.

I asked,
“Who
ever walked? What sweetest girl? What’s up?”

He said, “Anything but a thief. I promised—”

“To hell with your promises!” I told him. “What the devil do you mean by ‘thief?”

He continued, “And under pressure of circumstances, even this I can overlook. But, you dirty dog, what the devil do you mean by seducing one of the noblest works of God? What do you mean by it, eh?”

I said, “I have seduced no work of God. To whom, or to what, do you refer?”

“Miss Whistler,” said he. “Do you deny it?”

“Categorically, I do.”

Uncle Hugh shouted, “You swine, you seduced that girl! You took advantage of her!”

“She took advantage of me,” I said.

He replied, “You dissipated pig, how dare you speak like that about the lady I am going to marry, you lecherous beast!” and struck me in the face.

He should have placed the blow lower; as it was, I was merely startled, and asked, in the terms of a then-popular song, “How long has this been going on?”

He already regretted having struck me and said, “I’m sorry, Dan, my boy—we’re only young once. Being young, we are foolish—we don’t know what we have got— we don’t know what we ought to be thankful for. It’s a question of appreciating your values. Shake hands with me, my boy, and forgive my having beaten you just now. I didn’t really mean it, only my back was up.

My first impulse was to tell him that he could not knock the skin off a rice pudding, or fight his way out of a paper bag—a wet paper bag—only, to satisfy his vanity, I said, “I don’t think you broke bone. Adeep bruise is all. You have a terrible punch, though, but I rode with it. That’s why I’m not in an ambulance now.”

He said, “Ah, my boy, you ought to feel my right!”

“I’m not so stupid,” I said. “But may I ask what all this is in aid of? What’s June Whistler to you?”

“I’ll tell you frankly, Dan. Man was not meant to live alone. Reciprocity, I say, in life as in business. She needs somebody to look after her. So do I. She’s a young lady you can take anywhere. My friends are mad about her. Good yeoman stock, too. She was indiscreet with you, perhaps? ... Well, I know what it is to be a young dog on the rampage. I didn’t mean it when I called you a cad—I’m sure you aren’t, really. Only be a good fellow; try not to see June again, will you? She told me, for your information, that she didn’t care if she ever saw you again as long as she lived. We are g
oing to be man and wife.... God knows what your poor mother will say.... I have an option on a little property near Chobham in Surrey. I think I’ll build there. June wants
a terraced garden and dogs. I know a man whose setter has littered. I’ll get her a pair of pups. And she has a sound head for business and a wonderful eye for clothes. Makes ‘em all herself. Appreciates good wine. The only girl in the world. Don’t laugh,” said he, giggling, “but she said that I was the only boy. Come to think of it, my boy, I was very much in the wrong to wallop hell out of you like I did just now; because actually I stole her away from you. I couldn’t help it. How are you fixed?” Out came his wallet. “Have a fifty?” “Got one.”

“Have a cigar—quadruple Partagas—take the lot, keep the case! Come up the road and have a brandy?”

I said, “I don’t like the look of that pub. There seems to be an ambulance outside.”

“Well, better not, perhaps. Now I’
ve got to see your mother.

But never think of me as anything but your old friend. Unwittingly, perhaps, you changed my life.”

In spite of a peculiar melancholy that had come over me, I slapped him on the back and cried, “God give you joy! Be happy, old friend!” and went my way into the rain.

There never was a more appalling desolation than Fowlers End when I got back there in the early evening. The twilight was never more sulphurous, the inhabitants never more depraved. But Copper Baldwin was waiting for me in a state of almost uncontrollable excitement. “‘Ave a bit o’ gin,” he said. “I got news for you. Come on in.”

It being Sunday, the Pantheon was closed and empty, and the generator was still. A cat, driven to it by the rain, had found its way in, presumably through the office window, and was curled up on one of the eightpenny seats, cleaning its face of traces of a recent drink of milk. Copper Baldwin and the cat had been treating themselves to a little refreshment, only he did not smell of milk. Also, for the first
time, I saw him in his best clothes, and he was wearing a hat.

He offered me the bottle: it was not gin but slivovitz. “And where the devil did you get this?” I asked.

“I give an Estonian stoker five bob for it.”

I asked, “And where did you meet an Estonian stoker?”

“Bound the docks, cocko, round the docks. And I brought you a present. It cost me a ten-pun’note, but cheap at the price.” And he took out of his pocket a greasy envelope and said, “Papers, Mr. Laverock—first-class seaman’s papers. I got mine. So we can sail as soon as the
Avocado
does, in three days. She’s sailing in ballast, boy, for bananas—all the way to Guatemala, son—and what do you think o’ that?”

I looked at the papers, which were thick with the grime of years and about as dog-eared as papers can get. “But these,” I cried, “are made out in the name of Frank Mudd and signed with a cross! God damn it to hell, Copper—what do you take me for?
Mudd!
No, I mean to say, for Christ’s sake, there’s a limit to everything! A man can take so much! Mudd!”

“That was the name of the geezer I bought ‘em orf. And that’s your name for the time being, son. What’s in a name? I tell you, it’s all fixed. Captain John Williams will take you on nominally—purely nominally, mind—as a member o’ the crew for a twenty-pound note. That pays your passage. I’m ‘chips,’ which means to say carpenter. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And mark my words, an X is a bloody sight easier to forge than a signature. You can take that from me. I got a bit o’ capital now, and for certain private reasons I think I’d better be moving. Oh, and incidentally, so ‘
ad you. Because O’Toole is out and raising a mob. Out on good behavior, and this I don’t like, because my knowledge o’ mankind tells me that if a
sod like O’Toole behaves ‘imself before ‘is time is up, ‘e’s brooding. ‘E’s itching to get at somebody. That means us. And there are other factors. I ‘ave reason to believe the ‘busies’are trying to frame me; this I don’t like. So what if you call yourself Mudd? Asea voyage is what we need after the stink o’ Fowlers End. Read your John Masefield! There we go, and the porpoises playing, with Cuba—”

“You told me all about Cuba before,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. But I pocketed the papers, thinking of the “dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea” and of the landfall of Guatemala, where the Rio Dolce rolls sluggishly into the gray Caribbean under a burning sky, smelling mysteriously of the inland jungle ... while the washerwomen in spotless white shout from the shore, and in the evening by the weird light of naphtha flares the loaders pass green stems of bananas, shouting,
“Fruta, fruta, fruta!”

... So
let my name he Frank Mudd,
I thought.

Nevertheless, having had what I assumed to be my revenge upon Sam Yudenow, I felt guilty. I wondered how I could look him in the face. All of a sudden I discovered in him a number of desirable traits: what these were I cannot remember; let us say that I found in myself a lot that was undesirable.

Pig breeds pig and crook begets crook. It is better to be swindled than to swindle. My sense of guilt was excruciating. But what was I to do? I had already involved, as I thought, innocent parties. Was I to demand the return of their profits? I mentioned my state of mind to Copper Baldwin, who, laughing heartily, said that I was the private parts of a female. And when I asked, “What about Sam Yudenow?” he called down such appalling curses on the head of that exhibitor that even I blenched. The Great Curse in the Book of Deuteronomy is chicken feed compared with what Copper Baldwin wished on
Sam Yudenow. It was horrible to listen to him.... He had drifted back to South
America, and to that thin fish with backward-set spines which, attracted by human urine, rushes into the urethra and cannot be dislodged except by means of a jackknife, when Sam Yudenow came in.