THE youth of Henry Street, James Street, and Charles and Augusta Mews had for a long time resented the visits of an insignificant-looking Hebrew to their neighbourhood. Their neighbourhood appeared to be to them a sort of fortress from which they must exclude the youthful males of Pimlico, King’s Road, Chelsea, the Seven Dials, or even the East End. Their high stomachs and their sense of honour called for this assertion of the spirit of place. Therefore in the appropriate darkness outside Mrs. Leroy’s shop they had set upon Mr. Fleight to the number of eighteen.
They had given him no particular explanation. They just hit him while they shouted. They struck him in the face with their fists; they hit him on the top of the head, such of them as happened to be in the army, with their belts. They kicked his shins and his back, and they did their best to kick his stomach. But the crowd of them was too great round him to let this effective manoeuvre come off. He said nothing and he did nothing. He crushed his head in between his shoulders and tried to bolt this way and that. He made no attempt at defence, which is the wise nature of his race where defence is hopeless. And when finally they threw him through the door of the Leroy’s shop they felt that the honour of their community had been avenged. They had informed him, while they hit him, all shouting at once, though in different phrases, that he was a flash Jew from the Dials; that they wouldn’t have him sparking their gals; that a blooming blank bloke like him hadn’t no call to walk their pavements, and they shouted through the shop door that if ever the blighter came to those parts again they would do him in good and strong. There was nothing personal about that cleansing of their neighbourhood; they none of them had any admiration for Miss Leroy, who appeared to them a mean-spirited sort of young female. They had, in short, just done their manly duties, acting like lynchers of the United States, the fomenters of pogroms in Russia, or like the Wehmgericht of mediaeval Germany, which acted in the dark when the public authorities did not perform their functions. And they knew that they had as worthily upheld the traditions of their neighbourhood as could have been done by Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Islington, or the vicinity of the Caledonian Market. It was an act of justice of which they boasted for many weeks afterwards in that neighbourhood.
Leaning back against the counter Mr. Fleight spat out two of the teeth that he had not swallowed and remarked to Mrs. Leroy with a rather hissing intonation:
“There, you’ve tasted the blessings of our civilisation from the highest to the lowest on the same day! You’ve witnessed a democratic assemblage; the pursuits of the idle rich and the real native pleasures of the Anglo-Saxon populace.”
Mrs. Leroy went into the kitchen and ran quickly out with a rolling-pin.
“Put some vinegar and brown paper on his eye!” she exclaimed and went into the court. She approached the remainder of the band of young men, brandishing her rolling-pin, but without wasting her breath on expressing her opinions. Gilda Leroy ran into the scullery to fill a basin with water, and the master of the house, arising, put his hands deep into his pockets and, filling the doorway with his large person, surveyed the proceedings of his wife in the court. She caught one weedy boy a good crack on the side of the jaw as he started to run. But the others, having dispersed to safe distances, since she was not a very active woman, informed her earnestly from the other side of the main street that they would do her in upon an early opportunity, and they accompanied her progress along the thoroughfare with yells and cat-calls, until, a policeman appearing meditatively at the end of the street, they dispersed in silence. Mrs. Leroy went round the corner to a meat stall, where she purchased on credit, after some discussion, a pound and a half of beef-steak. The untoward event exercised the strongest possible influence upon the career of Mr. Fleight. This arose from his immense personal vanity. For, to an absolute and unassuming modesty as to his intellect, his powers, or as to the position that he deserved in society, Mr. Fleight added a personal vanity that was nothing more nor less than morbid. This was a trait that was very little suspected in him, since most people regarded him as being so plain that they never referred to his personal appearance for fear of causing him pain.
But when he looked in the glass Mr. Fleight was accustomed to see what he regarded as the ideal, typical man of the Western Hemisphere. He saw features of extreme regularity, a chin not too broad for intelligence, a slightly olive skin that showed, subcutaneously, the healthy tint of good red blood. His dark moustache was very carefully ordered; his dark hair was very carefully parted and waved slightly over a broad, low forehead. And his eyes, which he regarded as his best features, were large, brown, mournful and introspective.
Thus he was now in a condition that made him feel he couldn’t let anybody in the world see him. The Leroys had done so, but he experienced what was really an added passion to exhibit himself to no one else — to absolutely no one else. For, even after the Samaritan ministrations of Mrs. Leroy and her daughter, acting under the direction of Mr. Leroy, who had himself done a bit of fighting in his day, the state of Mr. Fleight’s face was such that the mere thought of it made him shudder. No dishonour could have been more than that and no tragedy greater.
Having resisted very little, he had suffered hardly at all in his nerves, and the shock which a more combative animal would have experienced had been spared him altogether, so that he remained perfectly coherent and neither shivered nor whimpered whilst painfully they sponged his cut face, his swollen lips and his lacerated gums. The result when he came to look in the small, square looking-glass that was presented to him by Miss Leroy was absolutely unendurable. The flesh round his eyes was so puffed up that he could hardly at all perceive the brown pupil. It was beginning to grow a dull purple. Off the bridge of his nose the skin had entirely peeled, and when he drew up his lips in a feigned smile there was a gap in his upper jaw like that of a child who is losing its first teeth. And his first remark, immediately after having seen himself, was:
“I shan’t possibly be able to make any more speeches at Byefleet.”
“Why not?” Mrs. Leroy asked. “I suppose you could get those black eyes painted.”
“Not he, mother,” Mr. Leroy said. “He won’t look fit to be seen for a good fortnight; but,” he added, in his capacity of a man who read the papers, “he could say he’d been bashed about by bruisers hired by the man that’s against him, and that would be worth a few votes to him.”
“No, it can’t be done,” Mr. Fleight said peremptorily. Along with his morbid vanity went a morbid fear that it should be known he considered himself handsome. And he stuttered and stammered slightly before he could think of any reason. “I should have to give information to the police. There’d have to be enquiries and things.”
“Well, it would look a little awkward if it was found out that you’d been here,” Mr. Leroy said.
“I don’t mean that at all,” the candidate for Byefleet answered rather haughtily. “I suppose I’m at liberty to go where I like. But I shouldn’t be able to help my candidature by pretending that it was hired bruisers that had done it. So the more secret I can keep it the better it’s going to be for me.” He added, rather wilily, “But I don’t see how I’m going to keep it secret.”
This touched at once the hospitable chord in Mr. Leroy’s heart.
“You can have a bed here for the night, I suppose.”
“I don’t see how he can,” Mrs. Leroy exclaimed sharply. “It isn’t as if this was an hotel. I’ve only got the two bedrooms.”
“Well,” Mr. Leroy said, “he can sleep in Gilda’s room and Gilda can go to Mrs. Kerridge’s like she does when her uncle George comes up for the Cup Tie.”
“Oh, yes!” Mr. Fleight exclaimed, eagerly, “that’s exactly what I want done — you’ll oblige me immensely by making an arrangement like that. In that way we can keep it absolutely dark.”
“As dark as your eyes will be to-morrow,” Mr. Leroy said jocularly.
“I don’t see,” Mrs. Leroy said sturdily, “why the young man can’t go to his own house and keep it dark there.”
“Because,” Mr. Fleight answered eagerly, “the house will be chock full of reporters to-morrow morning and I can’t trust my servants. You can’t trust any Englishman or Englishwoman.”
“You seem to be able to trust us, young man,” Mrs. Leroy said.
“Oh, you’re different!” Mr. Fleight answered. “I’d certainly trust you, but you’re not the sort of people I move among. You’re not representatives of English Society or their servants.”
“I’m sure,” Mrs. Leroy said indignantly, “when I was cook in Sir Pompey Munro’s service you could have trusted me with your life and untold gold as well.”
“I don’t deny it,” Mr. Fleight said; “but,” he added cunningly, “could you have trusted any of the housemaids or the other women servants?”
“No,” Mrs. Leroy conceded; “they was most of them hussies.”
“Then that really settles it,” Mr. Fleight said triumphantly, “for things aren’t even what they were. And if you couldn’t trust the household of a fine old family like Sir Pompey’s, how are the servants of a Jew millionaire like me to be trusted? It’s notorious that we Jews get the most insolent and untrustworthy servants in London, and yet we treat them better than anyone else in the world. And, I don’t like much to speak about it, but I’ll pay anything you like for the accommodation. Anything in reason or out of reason.” Miss Leroy, who had been trembling with excitement during all this conversation, broke in now — and she was suffering from extreme emotion:
“Oh, ma, how can you think of haggling with him like this? Hasn’t he, as you might say, shed his precious blood for us? Oughtn’t we to allow him to wipe his feet on our sheets and counterpanes if he was so disposed? Isn’t it all along of us that this disaster has fallen on him?”
“Now, I don’t see why you should say that,” Mr. Fleight said amiably, though his voice whistled still in the vacant gap in his teeth.
“Why?” Miss Leroy exclaimed, and her excitement overcame her bashfulness. “It was because those hooligans thought you were keeping company with — coming after me.”
Mr. Fleight began to smile, but he checked the impulse when he remembered the gap in his jaw.
“That’s very ridiculous!” he said; “though it does lend some reason to the fellows if they made that mistake. I thought myself it was just Anglo-Saxon lightness of heart and the opportunity of bashing somebody when they were eighteen to one.”
“If you want to stop here, young man, until your black eyes are cured,” Mrs. Leroy said, “you’ll have to pay what Gilda’s Uncle George pays — ten shillings a week for board and lodging and find your own washing — or eight and sixpence if you help me with the packing cases and things I have to tip the carters for. And I’d much rather it was the eight and six, for I can’t abide having a lazy man sitting about and smoking in all the rooms all day long.”
Mr. Fleight was about to say that he was ready to come in on the eight and sixpenny basis, since a certain amount of exercise would be necessary for him during his seclusion, when Miss Leroy took the opportunity to go into a fit of perfectly real hysterics. She had to be taken over to Mrs. Kerridge’s by her mother and put to bed; and this seriously incommoded Mr. Fleight. Indeed, his next couple of hours or so were exceedingly agitated and presented to him the aspect of a series of dexterous but troublesome conjuring tricks. He wanted to send messages by the telegraph and the telephone, and he had intended to employ upon this work Gilda Leroy, who was young, intelligent and fairly acquainted with modern habits. Mr. Leroy was an absolute antique. He had never sent a telegram in his life, and though he had several times tried to use the telephone at the waterworks, that instrument had so exceedingly bewildered him that he swore he would never again dare to go near one of the things. Nevertheless, with Mr. Leroy as his henchman, Mr. Fleight set out.
He sent Mr. Leroy for a taxi-cab, which — the costermongers and their stalls having gone home for the night — was brought up to the very door of the shop, though the cabman grumbled exceedingly at the narrowness of the entrance. In the meantime he wrote a letter to his dentist, the great Mr. R. P. Wetherell, of New York. Then, with his hat crushed down over his eyes, Mr. Rothweil crept into the cab accompanied by Mr. Leroy. The cab very much upset the nerves of the turncock, who had never been in one of these vehicles before, and who dreaded an instantaneous and calamitous death.
Mr. Fleight covered his face with his handkerchief whilst he was walking across the West Strand Post Office, and he hid himself as far as he could in one of the compartments for writing telegrams, whilst the telegram itself, along with the money to pay for it, he handed over his shoulder to Mr. Leroy. The turncock, however, was trembling so remarkably in the fingers that he was unable to affix the postage stamps, and this caused the clerks some annoyance. They said that two men in advanced stages of intoxication had no right to hinder the work of the Public Services. Mr. Fleight made a quick jump to one of the telephone boxes; it was, however, occupied by Mr. Debenham, by misfortune, and although Mr. Fleight covered his face as quickly as possible with his handkerchief, he was afraid Mr. Debenham must almost certainly have observed the state of his features. He entered the next telephone box in spite of the objections by the clerk at the counter that he had not given his number and he had not paid for his call in advance. From the interior of the box Mr. Fleight gave Mr. Leroy more money and the number of the garage at which his chauffeur had put up. Mr. Leroy dropped the money all over the Post Office and forgot the number, which Mr. Fleight had to look up all over again. These proceedings irritated the clerk at the counter still more; he came through into the part of the office that was designed for the public, approached the telephone box, and addressed the back of Mr. Fleight:
“Look here,” he exclaimed, “you’ve no right to come here drunk! If you don’t go away I shall call the police.”
“I’m not drunk,” Mr. Fleight muttered. “You give me 12077 Victoria.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort,” the clerk said sulkily. “Out you go!”
Mr. Fleight looked passionately round over his shoulder, and the effect upon the clerk was appalling, since it showed what a terrible state his face must be in. The clerk jumped fully three feet backwards and exclaimed:
“Look here, if you’re suffering from a mortal disease you’ve no right to use the telephone box! It’s forbidden by the Act.”
“You damned ass!” Mr. Fleight said with a bitter fury; “what do you think I’ve got? Cancer? Leprosy? This is the efficiency of the confounded British Public Service! In any Christian country you’d expect they’d try to help a man who’d been smashed up in an accident to get on to his doctor, instead of letting any jackanapes put all the possible hindrances he could think of in a man’s way. I might be bleeding to death internally whilst you’re playing the fool here.”
“Oh, come now!” the clerk said in an aggrieved and shocked voice, “why didn’t you say what was the matter at the start? I’ll do all I can to help you. Perhaps you’d like a glass of water.”
“I don’t want anything,” Mr Fleight said, “but for you to give me the number I want, and to get this letter through to Mr. Wetherell, the dentist, as quickly as you possibly can by express. It’s no good your telling me that it would be quicker to telephone to him because it wouldn’t. He’s at his private house, where he isn’t on the telephone.”
“He shall have it in twenty minutes, Mr. Toms,” the clerk said.
“Mr. who?” Mr. Fleight asked.
“Do you suppose,” the clerk answered, “that I don’t know you for Cannoneer Toms, the champion bantam weight of the world, just come from fighting Charlie Thompson of Chicago? Why, you’re the best known man in the United Kingdom to anyone that’s any feeling for sport at all. You think I’m only a Post Office clerk, but I’ve got a soul above my station like the rest of the world.”
Mr. Fleight had an odd sensation, as if he were going that night into a rest cure or into prison for a fortnight. He was afraid of anybody’s seeing his face. But this Post Office clerk having seen it, the plunge seemed to be over as far as the clerk was concerned, and Mr. Fleight remarked:
“I haven’t the least objection to listening to your disquisition upon yourself if you’ll get that letter sent off first, and put me on to the number that I’ve asked you to give me three times.”
“I’ll get the letter to its destination in under a quarter of an hour,” the clerk said zealously. He disappeared, and immediately afterwards, from the ear piece of the telephone, Mr. Fleight heard the vague metallic noises indicating that he was being put into communication with the garage where his car was waiting. The garage informed him that his chauffeur was getting a bit of supper.
“Well, tell him to come to me,” Mr. Fleight said. “I’ll hold the line till he does.”
The garage appeared slightly to demur at this proposal. It seemed to them almost a sacrilege, and certainly an impertinence, tor interrupt a chauffeur at his meal. And Mr. Fleight’s chauffeur was very eminent in his profession. Mr. Fleight never quite rightly understood why his chauffeur was so eminent. But probably it was only because, being Mr. Fleight’s chauffeur, he had such enormous sums at his disposal for tyres, petrol and sundries, that there was no member of the trade that was not ready to bow into the dust before him, and no other chauffeur who was not ready, enviously, to treat him as a prince. The voice from the garage remarked anxiously:
“Oh, but he’s at his supper. Supper, you know.”
“But, hang it all!” Mr. Fleight exclaimed, “I’m his employer.”
The voice did not seem to be in any particular way impressed. It remarked with a sort of reluctance:
“Oh, of course, if you’re his employer...”
It ceased, apparently in order to consult someone, and then announced:
“If you really think it’s necessary we’ll send a boy to his restaurant.”
“It’s absolutely quite necessary,” Mr. Fleight remarked, with a cynicism that, probably, did not travel along the wires. “I know, of course, that he won’t like to be disturbed, but I’ll apologise properly when he does come.”
“Then I suppose,” the voice said, still rather reluctantly, “it will be all right. Hold the line.”
With the ear piece to his ear, Mr. Fleight turned once more to face the Post Office clerk, who at once burst into a flood of talk.
Of course, when Mr. Fleight first came into the office he had thought he and his trainer were two ordinary “drunks.” But now he knew who they were he was ready — as long as it was becoming — to do anything to oblige him. And let him tell Mr. Toms that if he were the Prime Minister himself, and he came into there — as he did quite frequently when he was going to take a train from Charing Cross — he wouldn’t put himself out one jot to do more than was demanded of his official position. Not one jot. “But when it’s a question of you...” the clerk concluded.
“Well, I’m sure it’s extremely obliging of you?” Mr. Fleight said.
“Not a bit,” the clerk answered. It was just an act of acknowledgment of genuine merit.
“Now, where did you get all these opinions?” Mr. Fleight asked.
“Where do I get them?” the clerk exclaimed, as if any fool ought to have known. “Why, out of the newspapers, out of John Richard Green’s f Short History of England’; out of Maine’s ‘Spirit of Constitutional Law.’” And let him ask Mr. Toms what did he suppose it was the business of all the education they had to have to pass their examinations for the Post Office, if it wasn’t for them to hold views and opinions, and know how to express them. And what was the object of it all? Look at Mr. Toms. If Mr. Toms would excuse his saying so — a few decades ago he would have been an ignoble, degraded, vicious creature. A common prize-fighter without an h. to his head...
Mr. Fleight was distracted by a voice exclaiming “Hullo!” on the telephone. But that came to nothing, and he asked desultorily of the clerk: “Then what do you propose as a remedy?” In a dim way he was interested in the clerk as he was interested in the people at the garage. He had never had quite such a conversation and, faintly, he had the feeling, that grew much more strong afterwards, that he was speaking, not to one or two, but to millions — that, in fact, he was interviewing triumphant Democracy.
“Remedy?” the clerk exclaimed. “I don’t know that I want a remedy: it’s what I want to see: it’s civilisation. It’s the high degree of efficiency we’ve arrived at.” And all around us there was life and movement going on. That was what Parliament ought to recognise. There was change. Our intellects were working all the time. We weren’t static. Every day we perceive new aspects. Why, look at the Reverend Pennyfather Blowater, the democratic vicar. What would have been his attitude towards prize-fighting ten years ago? The Clerk didn’t mind telling Mr. Toms he was talking to him about it the other day and Mr. Blowater said to him, “Jumnor, what is the whole country interested in? What takes the mind of everybody — all the world over? What has fascinated the attention of Maeterlinck, the great poet? Or supposing that you wanted to start a paper that you wanted to make money by, what would it have to be about? Boxing!”
“Now,” said the Reverend Blowater, “it’s no good shutting our eyes to things that are a great public manifestation. This is one of the aspirations of the democracy, and the aspirations of the democracy are always right. The trouble of the age is that it’s too much of a machine age; it’s too grey, too unromantic. Now what do we see in a professional prize-fighter? Heroism, romance, the democracy asserting itself. What is needed for the career of such a man? Sobriety, temperance, determination, physical fitness, dash — all democratic virtues. Consider the career of such a man.”
“Consider your own career,” the clerk dropped his quotation of the Reverend Blowater and addressed Mr. Fleight. “Consider your own career. At eighteen, you beat Pony Matheson in Islington; next year you knocked out Bob Chapman in three rounds at Aberystwith; then you beat Cob Bradshaw in Melbourne; then you laid out G. L. Levin at Chicago, and now you’ve finished it all by polishing off Tony Morris in the Agricultural Hall this evening. And what I should like to say to our representatives in Parliament is this....”
The post office clerk paused to draw a deep breath before commencing his peroration, but the voice of Chapman, the chauffeur, drew Mr. Fleight’s attention to the telephone, and, whilst Mr. Fleight was telling the chauffeur to fetch some clothes in a bag and leave them at Victoria cloak-room so that Mr. Fleight could send for them in the morning, he was vaguely aware that a superior was upbraiding Mr. Jumnor, the clerk, for wasting time that should have been spent in filling up forms called “A.”
Thus the voice of triumphant Democracy died away, and, holding his handkerchief to his face, Mr. Fleight seized the opportunity of bolting into the taxi-cab. Mr. Leroy bundled sheepishly in after him when he had directed the cabman to take them back to Augusta Mews.
“Now, what was all that talk about?” Mr. Leroy asked.
“Oh,” Mr. Fleight answered, “that’s only a symptom of the times. That’s the young generation knocking at the door, that is.”
“More like falling out of the window,” Mr. Leroy said. “You’d have thought he’d had a bad shaking. Do you suppose there are many more like him?”
“Oh, we’re breeding them by the million,” Mr. Fleight answered. “I wonder whether that dentist will have arrived.”