o’clock.
But on this particular evening, he was not eating supper at six— or at seven o’clock either. By the time eight o’clock chimed, I’d been sitting for three hours in the corner of an unfamiliar public house. Having bolted from the theatre in high dudgeon, I had chosen the pub at random. It was dingy and dim, even by the standards of such houses, with a fire in a great stone fireplace that flickered upon the denizens and gave them rather the appearance of robbers in a cave. This impression was not completely fanciful either, for it turned out that this was a notable haunt of the sporting crowd. It was called the Horse and Dolphin, or more commonly the Nag and Fish. The walls and the mantel were festooned with sporting memorabilia, and pictures of horses and dogs.
I paid no attention to any of this. I sat in my corner, drinking my claret and brooding.
Perhaps my first few plays had indeed been lacking. One had for instance been a melodrama after the manner of Boucicault, about a virtuous young vicar who is falsely accused of a crime. I could accept that this was an apprentice piece, glittering here and there with flecks of gold, but admittedly the work of a Poet still finding his stride. But my new play—the play I sat clutching tonight—was different. John, Baptist; or, The Devil Distraught: a five-act drama that broke new ground in its treatment of the early life of the prophet—portraying him as a compelling but undisciplined youth, chafing in the shadow of a saintly brother, who was nearly undone by the erotic fascination he exerted upon women in general, and on one of them in particular, the duplicitous daughter of a Galilean pirate. But he redeemed himself, abjured the Devil, single-handedly cleared a path through the spiritual wilderness for the coming of the Lord, and finally triumphed in a last desperate battle against his Old Enemy, who came to him at the eleventh hour in the form of the beauteous Salome and sought to seduce him to his ruin. It was a work of truth and terrible beauty, despite the inability of Mr Edmund Cubitt to see this: Edmund Cubitt, purveyor of tartan ghouls to the illiterate, a man who tooth-picked his soul each morning in case stray bits of poetry had lodged there.
Except Edmund Cubitt was right, and as I reread the play I knew it. John, Baptist was a turgid sham, filled with wooden characters and leaden discourse, stinking of spilt poetry. And nothing I would ever write would be one whit better, because I had no talent. This was nothing but an illusion I had conjured, in my desperation to reinvent myself after that Cornish debacle. But it was time to face the truth about myself. Or at least to face a few selected glimmers of the truth, since this is really what we mean when we commit ourselves to self-knowledge, with all the tearful fervour that accompanies such moments. We won’t face the whole truth until we are dragged out shrieking upon Judgement Day itself, when each one of us will find himself loathsome—oh yes we will, my friend—beyond all hope of enduring.
LOOKING BACK ACROSS the years—scribbling these lines in my crabbed old hand here in Whitechapel, four decades later—I have to shake my head. What a preposterous youth I was! Hunkered in that public house, wallowing in self-pity, and scourging myself with self-hatred. Ecce homo, behold the man: the disgraced priest, fled to the metropolis and hiding under an alias like a rat in a bolt-hole—not that a rat has an alias, nor indeed a bolt-hole, but we’ll let that pass by—and now shaken to his very foundations by the discovery that his plays were drivel. Dear absurd self-aggrandizing idiot boy.
But at the time it seemed shattering. I was drunk enough—on claret and despair—to make a Gesture. Thus I bolted to my feet and shouldered to the stone fireplace, where a gingery man stood warming his hands. Ignoring him, I consigned John, Baptist to the flames, watching with savage satisfaction as my fondest hopes writhed and blackened and expired. With a bleak little snarl I turned away, but in doing so I lost my balance, and reached out to brace myself against the low table behind. That’s when I saw Him upon the wall. He was reaching out to me.
Prominent amongst the sporting pictures were images of pugilism: portraits of bare-knuckle fighters in sparring poses, and dramatic drawings of desperate battles. It was one of these that riveted me now.
It was a pen-and-ink engraving of two pugilists at close quarters, hemmed by a bellowing fight mob, surprisingly detailed and lifelike. The warriors wore breeches and clogs, and their bare torsos were improbably well-muscled, for the sketchers of prize-fights are notorious for seeing past the actual to the Ideal. The one on the left was hunched down, coiled to launch a blow at his opponent’s midriff. He was the shorter and stockier of the two, swarthy and black-haired and snarling with bad intent. His opponent arched over him in an elegant parabola. He was fair and perfectly formed and beautiful, this second pugilist, in the way that rugged men can have beauty. His left fist was held low, and with his right he was reaching over and past his hunched opponent, as if reaching out towards someone he had just seen in the crowd. His lips were slightly parted, and his eyes had just begun to widen, as if in surprise and welcome at whoever it was he had glimpsed.
But there was distress in his eyes as well. The artist had caught a moment late in the fight, for the ravages of terrible bare-fisted blows were evident on both men. When you looked more closely you saw that a ragged cut had been torn open on the fair man’s brow. Evidently the cut had been inflicted just an instant before, because it was clean and white; the blood had not yet begun to flow. Thus the distress—and yet it wasn’t distress, not quite. I gazed for fully half a minute before realizing what those eyes in fact contained. It was an enormous empathy—a great sorrowful complicity in the suffering of the world. This fighter recognized that his pain was commingled with your own—and he was looking straight at you. In his pain and sorrow, he was reaching out to you.
He was reaching out to me.
Evidently I’d exclaimed this out loud, because there was a chuckle at my elbow. “Reaching out to you? Naw, mate—he’s missing with his right, is what he’s doing.”
It was the gingery man who had been warming his hands. He regarded me with wry amusement.
“Missing him with the right, and dropping his left into the bargain, daft Irish bog-trotter, which was a terrible habit he had. And that’s what ended the fight, about an eye-blink later. The Gardener landed him a doubler to his liver—that being the Gardener on the left, there—Tom Oliver, the Battersea Gardener, famous for his sweet peas and nectarines. He followed that with a leveler to the conk, and that was that. Down goes our man like a toppling tree, and nothing I can do will bring him back again.”
“You?”
“I was his second, that afternoon. There I am, right there.”
He pointed to the picture—guiding me to a closer look with a hand on my side—and there he was indeed, just outside the rope by one of the ring posts. The man who stood beside me tonight was older—fifty years old, perhaps; his hair was thinning, and his whiskers were patchier than they once had been. But he was unmistakably the man in the sketch: frozen forever in an attitude of dawning horror, arching back and raising his hands as if to ward off the blows that were about to rain upon his champion, with all the wide-eyed woefulness of St John at the foot of the Cross.
“We did what we could, of course. Carried him to the corner, and blew brandy up his nose, and at the end of thirty seconds we carried him back to the line of scratch and prayed he’d stay upright when we let go. But down he went—flat down on his phiz in the mud—and that was that. Well, the Gardener’s friends hurried over, and I held up our man’s hand so the Gardener could shake it, for that’s what you do. You shake the man’s hand—partly for sportsmanship, but mainly in case you’ve killed him. The handshake can be cited in court to prove there was no hard feelings, y’see, and with luck the judge will reduce your sentence accordingly. All goes well, it’s six months for manslaughter—but if you’re not careful it can be worse. It’s a terrible thing when a man gets killed in the prize-ring—tragic beyond measure, for they’ll throw the seconds in jail as well. But nobody died that day, thank the Dear, though Daniel never fought again,
