‘All I want is a chance at this socalled Braddock,’ said The Tiger Fitzpatrick, trembling with cold, drink, and advancing age under the rain.
‘Where do you live?’
He shrugged an embarrassed shoulder.
‘Where are you sleeping tonight?’
‘Well, lady, I haven’t made up my mind yet, if you see what I mean, lady.’
Asta gave him three half-crowns and her card, and said: ‘Look here, you, whatever you call yourself — take this and go and get yourself something to eat and a bed. You know where to get a bed?’
‘Yes, lady.’
‘Get a good night’s sleep, do you hear? Have a good breakfast. Get a shave. Is that clear? Wash your filthy hands. Do you understand? Then come along to this address, and I’ll give you a job. 9.30 to-morrow morning. I know you, you drunkards; the moment I turn my back, you’ll rush into the “Vhite Horse” and drink yourself silly.’
‘Oh no, I won’t, lady.’
‘I know you, you sots, better than you know yourselves. Go away!’
She left The Tiger in the dim lamplight, looking from the three half-crowns to the card she had given him.
Next morning at 9.15 he knocked at her door. Even Asta realized that she could not reasonably ask any of her friends to give such a man a job. Besides, he needed a strong influence. At any moment, he might run off the rails, get drunk, go crazy, try and rob people in the streets. Having thought the matter over for thirty or forty seconds, she took him into her own service.
The Tiger Fitzpatrick became her butler.
He fraternized with her housekeeper, Mrs Kipling, who had, in her day, danced suggestive dances and sung lewd songs in East End music-halls, but who now (as visitors said) was like something out of the Book of Revelation. She had been plump; now she was thin, but her flesh had shrunk faster than her skin, which hung in peculiar folds. Her hair had been red, but it had gone white and she had made it red again — fantastically red — carmine tinged with blue. Her health had gone with her youth: her stomach made noises. Every morning Mrs Kipling rouged herself, blowing out her lank cheeks and drawing under each cheek-bone a cyclamen-coloured disc. She lived, now, in invisible limelight. Everything that she did, said, and wore was intended to strike a target twenty feet away, and the perfume she used clung in the air for a long time. She was careless about the house, concealed dust under rugs, scratched what she was employed to polish, stole what she was expected to protect, and burnt everything she was asked to cook. From time to time she had what she called ‘attacks’ and then she would go weeping and groaning into her room — which was hung from ceiling to floor with theatrical photographs — and came out an hour later singing ‘Ta-ra-ra B OOM-de-ay’ under her breath, which smelt strongly of whisky. Mrs Kipling got on well with The Tiger Fitzpatrick. She spoke of her triumphs, and he spoke of his. The Tiger had, at least, got his name into the papers: she knew his press-cutting by heart. There was, indeed, something compelling about the wide-eyed gesticulatory enthusiasm of The Tiger Fitzpatrick, when he spoke of boxing and devoted himself to prophesying the results of the big fights.
It is a fact that in fifteen years he has never managed to forecast a winner. Yet he still has half-pitying, half- mocking friends in the profession who give him tickets. Shortly after he put on a black coat and a striped waistcoat in the service of Asta Thundersley, he was presented with two ringside seats for the Leppard—Coffin bout, and asked his employer if she would like to come. He was anxious, he said, to do her a good turn. No man in his right senses could possibly doubt that Coffin would win in four rounds — probably in the third. He, The Tiger, owed Asta much — would she give him a chance to repay her by putting her shirt on Coffin? She put L10 on Coffin and went with The Tiger Fitzpatrick to the Albert Hall, where she shouted down several thousand people, brandishing her big red fists in the air and stamping her feet until Coffin, having run away for two rounds, was knocked unconscious in the third and booed out of the ring. The Tiger explained, with violent blows at the ambient air, that Coffin had been robbed. Asta lost her ten pounds, but developed a taste for the Ring.
Since then she has been conspicuous in the crowd at every notable prize-fight. Sometimes The Tiger Fitzpatrick accompanies her, whispering dark secrets in a voice that can be heard four rows away. If she had laid her bets in direct opposition to his forecasts, she would never have lost. But she has faith in her butler. He has not been drunk more than thirty times in fifteen years — that is to say, not so drunk as to be incapable of walking. She feels that he is a demonstration of the power of militant humanitarianism, and would not lose him for all the money in the world. For ‘his part, The Tiger glumly worships the ground upon which Asta treads. Once, in the ‘Black Swan’, the body- servant of a gentleman who lived two doors away made Miss Thundersley the subject of a ribald remark, whereupon The Tiger, looming over him, said: ‘Put your hands up, you bastard, and fight like a man!’ — meanwhile throwing across what he believed to be a punch like a thunderbolt. The punch landed with deadly accuracy exactly where the other man’s chin would have been if he had still been there; but he had finished his drink and left a quarter of a minute ago. The Tiger Fitzpatrick no longer needs to hit anyone: a look at his face is enough. This perhaps is just as well.
Once in a while, he helps Asta in her garden. With a spade The Tiger is more trouble than he is worth; the essential pressure of the foot reminds him how Kornblum trod on his instep, once upon a time, in Birmingham, and this makes him so angry that he cuts everything to pieces. If he is given a hedge to trim, he does very well indeed for the first twenty minutes; but soon the snapping of the shears reminds him of the quick left-right with which Roland Gogarty knocked him cold in Sheffield. And so he fights the battle over again to the detriment of the defenceless hedge. It is dangerous to let him weed. As the hoe comes down there comes back to his memory a vivid recollection of how Pancho Quixote held him for one operative moment with a chin hooked over his shoulder while he butted with his head and hammered his kidneys with his right hand; then God help the geraniums!
Asta Thundersley, however, who is violent as a cow-buffalo, has a light hand with growing things. She loves children and vegetables. Holding out a handful of seeds like little knots of coarse brown string, she will say to The Tiger Fitzpatrick: ‘Look! Onions. Each of these is an onion, millions of onions. And what a nice thing an onion is! Layer on layer, what a miraculous thing an onion is!’
The Tiger usually replies: ‘With sausages.’
Once, picking up a windfall apple under one of the two sootintoxicated trees in her garden, Asta tore the fruit apart and said: ‘Six, seven, eight pips. … Isn’t it odd, Tiger? You can count the pips inside an apple, but not the apples inside a pip?’
‘Just spit them out,’ said The Tiger Fitzpatrick, ‘you get appendicitis through swallowing pips.’
Asta Thundersley called him a punch-drunk idiot and hurled the jagged halves of the apple at his head. Later,
