Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

“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 violence 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 muscles, 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 double 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 saturating 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 bitterness 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 your 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, bollock, or gouge; come one, come all, single or collective, in the name of democracy!”

  Since nobody stepped up for the moment (I think they rather liked this form of address) I elbowed my way through and, in about half a dozen strides, got across the street to the telephone booth near the Load of Mischief, where they were pulling the old wall down. More tactics: I couldn’t have them panicking my full hall, so I was heading them off—this brilliant stroke occurred to me, it is true, several days after it happened, but it wasn’t bad, really.

  The phone booth was one of those old-fashioned ones made of wood on three sides, but with a plate-glass door. This was before the days of dials: you had to lift the receiver, wait for the operator to answer, give your number, insert two pennies, and twist a knob. In case of emergency, you were supposed to say “Fire!” or “Police!” as the case might be, and simply wait.

  After what seemed to be an hour, a voice asked, “What number, please?”

  “Emergency—police station,” I said.

  “Please insert two pennies.”

  “Damn it, I want the police!”

  “I have yet to see the situation that is improved by the use of filthy language,” said the voice.

  “Quick, get me the bloody police!”

  “Kindly modify your shitty language and insert two pennies, please.” I was fumbling in my pockets. There were florins, half crowns, little silver threepenny bits, halfpennies, and a pound note—but no pennies.

  I shouted, “Look, I haven’t got any pennies. This is an emergency. This is a matter of life and death. For Christ’s sake—I’ll fold up a pound note and put it in the slot, only get me the police!”

  The voice said severely, “All right, young man, just for taking the Lord’s name in vain and using bad language, you can fold up your pound note and stick it up your arse.” There was no time to argue the point, because I heard an ominous scraping noise outside.

  Darby O’Kelly O’Toole, assisted by the Brick Foster, had lifted a sort of pudding stone, a great lump of old brick and mortar weighing about a hundred and fifty pounds, and together they were poising it in their four horny hands to throw it at me through the plate-glass door. It stood to reason there was nothing for it but to open the door—it opened outward—and fight my way back to the Pantheon. The door of the booth being hinged on the right, I pushed it with my left hand while I lunged with the other. I felt an electric shock; and everything went black, and at the same time I heard a rending noise.

  They have killed me, I thought....

  But then I felt a dragging weight on my right arm. I had forgotten to replace the receiver before hitting O’Toole. All the power of my body must have been behind that punch, because the instrument and pay box, the screws of which must have been rotted already by the stinking winds of Fowlers End, had come out of the wall.

  As for what that chipped telephone receiver did to the Irishman’s eye, thank God for the darkness that fell, or I might not have had stomach for the rest of the fight. As it way, he fell senseless, letting go that mass of brick and mortar, which fell on the instep of Foster; and he howled to the sky like a coyote.

  Behind this pair stood Pute and half a dozen others. I still had the mechanical part of the telephone box in my hand, gripping it by the receiver. My heart beat high. I swung it like a medieval morgenstern, bellowing at the top of my voice, and knocked one of the louts into the rubble.

  Twirling this interesting weapon around and around, I fell upon the demoralized rear of O’Toole’s force, utterly defeating them. The last man I hit, as I remember, was a weasel-faced man in a beret named Jonathan Bible; and he may think himself lucky that I did not land fair and square, or he would not be alive to boast of it.

  There was a ricochet off his miserable shoulders and onto the back of his head; whereupon the cord parted and the box went through Godbolt’s window in a shower of pennies. The noise of these coins falling on the pavement—not the sound of broken glass, for Fowlers End was used to that—conjured up a host of ectoplasmic creatures, materializati
ons of twilight. They rushed into the jagged breach, looking for loot. Who they were and where they came from I do not know; and nobody knows where they went with whatever they could lay their hands on, because only one was later arrested in the swamp, clutching to his bosom an old-fashioned wire-and-canvas dressmaker’s dummy clothed in a coarse chemise. He was a half-wit whose name nobody knew: he didn’t know it himself.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Godbolt, who kept saucepans and kettles of water boiling on the stove, emptied them out of the first-floor window on the heads of the mob, while her husband, brandishing a pair of scissors, exhorted them to repent before it was too late. It was something like The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Most of the boiling water fell upon the helmet of a policeman, Inspector Dench, who had arrived just then at the instance of the General Post Office to see who had been mucking about with the telephones; and he assured me later that there is nothing more agonizing to wear than a policeman’s helmet soaked in boiling water. He roared like a lion and tore his helmet off.

  Then, I suppose, he remembered the years that immediately followed the end of World War I, when dogs had to be muzzled on account of an outbreak of rabies. Policemen were instructed, if they saw a foaming dog with its tail between its legs, to take off their helmets, thrust them out for the dog to bite, and then, having warned the dog, use their batons.

  He took off his helmet with a loud cry, thrust it into the face of one of the looters—who, it transpired, was a pregnant servant girl looking for diapers—and hit her on the shoulder with his truncheon. Later, before he was relegated to duty in some even more deserted place, he swore by the Almighty God that there was froth on her lips and she had a tail.

  I got back to the Pantheon twirling nothing but the telephone receiver on the end of a bit of flex; and there was Sam Yudenow, embattled. He was fighting like a fishmonger, and for what he shouted I must refer you to one of those “Dictionaries of Unconventional Language.”

  “... Take away my sodding living?” he cried. “So what’ll become of my wife and children, loafers? Go make the salt-o’-the-earth fat on the dole, the scum! Don’t be working-classes, shit-pots—find a job! Come on, you poxy pigs, come on!...”