Fowlers End (18 page)

Copper Baldwin said t
o me, “Get what I mean, Dan? You can’t win. Begin to get what I mean?”

7

LATER, I said to Copper Baldwin, “Look here, Copper; I get what you mean all right about Sam Yudenow. But I don’t see why I should be expected to share your hate for him. He makes me laugh, like Sairey Gamp, and Montague Tigg, and—”

“No literature, please,” said Copper Baldwin. “Like I began to tell you, I was born and bred and brought up among these characters that your friend Charles Dickens never saw except with a police inspector at each elbow. ‘You can’t tell me nothing about bringing up children,’ the old girl says to the welfare worker. I’ve ‘ad thirteen and buried ten.’ Lovely, eh? You like population, don’t you? As I gather from your attitude, Mr. Laverock, one of ‘em might write a sonnet, or something. Okay, let ‘em breed. But you feed ‘em—I won’t. According to you, that filthy old greasy midwife is ‘c
harming,’ just because ‘er front teeth ‘ave rotted away and she says, ‘Put the bottle on the mankle-shelf and let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.’Instead of ‘disposed.’ But I was dragged into the bloody world by Sairey Gamp, and me and my sister were the only two that lived, out of eight. Lovely, tell your mum!

“And by the same token, you and the rest of ‘em shove down your kids’ throats the charm of the Eatanswill election, in the
Pickwick Papers.
Charming. The voters was bribed and dragged to the polls blind-drunk. And the journalism was scurrilous. But that was good old English, so it was delightful, wasn’t it? Old Mr. Pickwick could get drunk as a tinker’s bitch on cold punch and chucked into the pound in a wheelbarrow. But that was character, wasn’t it? Whereas, Charles Dickens goes to America—‘e was disappointed, you know, in a Mississippi investment on which ‘e expected the Yanks to
pay twenty-five hundred per cent— and when they didn’t was disgusted because they run per
sonalities in a newspaper, drank cocktail before dinner, and rigged an Eatanswill election. ‘Umbug, bloody ‘umbug! And so are you.

“But you cry your eyes out because Edgar Allanbloody-Poe was dragged drunk to the polls in Baltimore.... Look—did you ever ‘ear of an empire getting great on Mr. Pickwick and the Cheeryble Brothers? I mean, the spirit of innocent benevolence? Your friend Charles Dickens’s city merchants? Did you, bloody hell! You make me tired. Old Pickwick, I’ll lay you nine to two, was selling Indian opium to China. So don’t give me this stuff about Sam Yudenow amusing you. It’s literature and lies, son—fiction. Just because Sam Yudenow is such a bloody out-and-outer, and you’ve read too many book
s, you see what you call a character. You’ll live and learn, son, believe me.”

I asked, “What’s the nature of a character, Copper?”

“Something dirty in a picturesque kind o’ way,” he said, after a moment’s pause. “A madman for ‘is own benefit. That’s a character. And always remember, son, there’s no such thing as a young character or a middle-classer that does a regular ‘ard day’s graft and pays off on the furniture. A character is a parasite. I don t say ‘e doesn’t put as much work into being what ‘e is as somebody else might put into doing what ‘e does. A character is a kind o’ clown. First ‘e makes you laugh, and in the process feels your pockets. Sam Yudenow’s one.”

I said, “I don’t mind if he feels
my
pockets so long as he makes me laugh.”

“Very likely,” said Copper Baldwin dryly. “Because, after all, what ‘ave you got o’ your own inside ‘em? ... ‘Ello, what’s this? Not that I blame ‘im, but there’s a geezer staring at us. Look of a gentleman—man with big boots. Know ‘im?”

The Pantheon was closed for the night, and the only light burning was a sickly one under a yellow-and-green
shade in the vestibule. The Film Renters On-the-Dot Delivery Service, which picked up old cans of film and delivered fresh ones the night before change day, was late as usual. As Sam Yudenow was eventually to tell me, On-the-Dot worked “on stvictly Amevican lines”—that is to say, the manager smoked a cigar. For a consideration, Onthe-Dot would deliver not only films but other perishables, from Aldgate Pump to Southend-on-Sea. For example: one October evening they tossed into my vestibule a box of fireworks and a case of butter. Sam Yudenow had his eye on the delivery boy, with a view to
making some kind of manager of him—that boy could throw an oblong steel trunk containing twenty cans of film sixteen feet, so that it landed on one of its corners with such force that it made a hole in the floor. And he was never out more than three inches.

So we stood back while the man in big boots who looked like a gentleman came clumping into the vestibule, muddy to the knees with the hopeless, useless, clayey mire of the neighborhood. There were splotches of this same mud all over him and a great smear of it on his lip, where he had wiped his nose with his finger, which he managed to wear like a guardee mustache. On him, it had a calculated, cosmetic appearance. Yes, indeed, there was no mistaking this newcomer for anything but a gentleman. It was not that his breeches had been cut to fit, or his boots made to measure—he wa
s dressed in old army surplus stuff. It was, simply, that nobody but a born gentleman could have turned up in this strange place, mediocre in every line and filthy from head to foot, with such an air of owning it.

God knows how they have—not what it takes but what it lacks—to do it! By rights, I am supposed to be something of a gentleman myself (or so my poor mother used to insist) but I could never file myself blunt and blatant enough to fit the wards of the lock that opens the door to the
gentry. It has always struck me that there is something swinishly unfair about the aristocratic attitude.

Now the humblest workman has it. Turnabout is fair play, I dare say; but still I don’t like it. Top or bottom, it implies a
droit de seigneur,
to which I will not submit.

This man with big boots bellowed, “I say, look here, my car’s broken down—and where the hell
am
I?”

I looked at him closely—which means to say that the tip of my nose was less than a foot distant from the tip of his—and saw a face such as is generally described as “attractive.” It was shaped somewhat like a dancing-master’s fiddle: broad at the temples, curving in at the cheeks, and swelling out a little at the jaws. There were even two symmetrical creased dimples something like I holes in the belly of this kit-face, which had the appearance of having been stained to a weather-beaten look. Only, where the finger board should have been, hung a most atrocious tie with which
I was miserably familiar—the tie of the Old Valetudinarians, which may be worn only by those who were at school at Snellgrove-in-the-Vale. This tie cannot be mistaken for any other: the background is flowerpot red, and it has diagonal stripes of emerald green, buff, black, sky blue, orange, and gray.

I recognized the man at once then—he had been a prefect when I was in the fifth form at Snellgrove—and quite a figure he cut, as I remembered. He used to lash about with an ash plant, wore his hat at a distinctive angle, and had the right to put his left hand in his trousers pocket. I used to admire him tremendously; he was a leader in games, surreptitiously gambled for money, and was the son of a magnate. It was he who introduced to the seniors the practice of parting the hair neither at one side nor in the middle, but two inches off dead-center. He used to have six pairs of
flannel trousers and a staring way of looking that took the heart out of younger boys. It all came back to me in a rush.
His father was involved in the building of medium-priced houses somewhere south of the Midlands, but something went wrong and he took to drink—breakfasted off brandy, fell into a log fire, and died of burns. His mother turned up for the last sports, and nobody had ever seen a more truly bred gentlewoman. It was the first time I had ever seen a woman with pale blue hair. I heard my mother telling my father that she used to be a
vendeuse
in
haute couture—“a
shopgirl.” Then our hero swaggered off with his flannels and his dimples, and it was generally supposed that he could have done no less than
make a fortune.

I said, “I beg your pardon, but isn’t your name Cruikback?”

“Yes, it is,” he said, in his old frank way. “And upon my word, aren’t you young Laverock? What the devil are
you
doing in this hole?”

“Well, what are
you?”
I asked.

Who was it that wrote of “the pathos of distance”? There is a profundity in this abstruse expression—which means nothing more than that distance lends enchantment. (How the poor poets must wrack their brains to design new dresses for old cliches!) If I had been called upon, ten minutes earlier, to describe Jack Cruikback, I would have called back into memory a man about seven feet tall, muscled like a water buffalo, and altogether enviable—cool, ruthless, indomitable, good at mathematics—a giant, a gentleman, and a scholar. But now I saw before me someone miraculously shrunk to
a miserable five feet ten—he couldn’t have grown much since that last cricket match—a good two inches shorter than I, and slender rather than lean. The f holes in his face were more pronounced, and so was the bridge of his nose. He still parted his black hair the same way, though; but the big, slightly curved cuif on the right-hand side of his head somehow conveyed the impression of an ebonite chin rest. Much as I hate the overdone metaphor, he had an air of
having overstrung himself; and for the first time I noticed that he had prominent little ears, like pegs. But his fingers were still long and sinewy, with prominent veins, such as we used to regard as proof of manhood, and he wore the same carnelian signet ring that he had flaunted at school: the seal engraved with half-obliterated heads of stags and lions and bears and pigs-in-triplicate, with bars and bends and crowns galore. It was whispered, when I was in the Fifth Form, that he was a lineal descendant of Richard Crookback, otherwise known as King Richard III, and therefore en
titled to the throne of England. Only, Cruikback’s illustrious ancestor, he said, was ousted by the murderous machinations of a certain Harry Tidder—offspring of a flighty French floosie named Katherine and a penniless Welsh squire, who had the nerve to call himself Tudor.... And so, he would say, his father had come down to being a mere builder.

At this (how vividly it all came back!) a nervous man in the Sixth Form suddenly went into a species of hysterics and said, “That’s nothing. My name is Cohen, and I don’t mind telling you that if a Cohen had had a crooked back he jolly well wouldn’t have been allowed to serve at the altar!” Cruikback said loftily, “You haven’t got the common savvy to understand, execrable Jew!” They fought it out with fists. By some system of bobbing and weaving, ducking and feinting, crouching and jabbing, Cohen bloodied our hero’s nose and knocked him down. Cruikback explained, later, that in the
first place he had been brought up to fight with the long straight left like a gentleman, and that in the second place his foot had slipped on the dry, polished grass in Lower Meadow, where the fight came off. And we all believed him—he was wonderfully plausible, in his didactic way—he had as many “of courses” as a society columnist. It was Cohen who slunk away, while Cruikback flaunted his reddened handkerchief like a pennant; and
when, having had his bleeding stanched by a key put down his back, he offered his long, aristocratic hand and said with all the condescension in the world, “Now then, Cohen, you’ve had your lesson. Take your medicine like a soldier, and let bygones be bygones,” and poor Cohen shook that hand, we all cheered although Cohen was unmarked.

But still I felt young and worshipful in his presence, foolishly tongue-tied, so that Copper Baldwin answered for me: “Mr. Laverock is the boss ‘ere, mister.”

Cruikback gave him a long, cold, blue-gray stare; slightly bloodshot, astounded, incredulous. Then, completely ignoring Copper Baldwin, he said to me, “What? Who, me? What am
I
doing here? Doing where, old thing? Don’t even know where I am!—” this, with a gush of confidence, free and easy, man-to-man—“What an enormous great fellow you’ve grown into! Lord, but it all seems about five hundred years ago, though, doesn’t it? In point of actual fact, Laverock, where is this? ... Fowlers End, you say? Oh, God! Now I
am
in for it! I live near St. John’s Wood, and my blasted car has gone squiffy, a
nd I don’t seem to see anything like a garage round here.... Lord, Laverock, what a long time it’s been! Remember the time I thrashed that Jew-boy down in Long Meadow? But you were in the Lower Fifth then—”

“Where’s this car o’yourn?” asked Copper Baldwin.

“If you can call it a car,” said Cruikback to me. “I left it a mile or so down the road, between here and Ullage.”

“What on earth were you doing there?” I asked.

“Oh,” said Cruikback, “I’m a surveyor n
ow, you know.”

“And what the ‘ell is there to survey round Ullage?” asked Copper Baldwin.

Cruikback did not look at him—he winced at him— and said, “Oh things go on, you know. They expand, Laverock, you know. I suppose you know that the working
classes have bred beyond all statistical correlation? Or don’t you? You always were a literary kind of bloke. Well—but I’m not here to tell tales out of school. Had the surprise of my life when I saw you here.”

“Statistical correlation to what?” asked Copper Baldwin.

“You’ll
understand what I mean, Laverock,” said Cruikback. “Statistics of overcrowding, and all the evils that go with it—such as incest, you know—are correlated with overpopulation in a given area. London wasn’t built to house ten million, you know....” When Cruikback started to talk like this, he had what they call a “silver tongue”—he could make something new and warm and personal out of the deadliest truism, or make a remark about the weather sound like a new advance in meteorology. Our doddering old headmaster, a Doctor of Divinity, had more than once voiced a hope that Cruikback m
ight go into the Church, or Parliament—he imparted such a warmth, such a resonance, such an air of newness to the twaddling platitude. “... You
must
know, Laverock, old thing, that no city was originally built to house ten million? Let alone your heavy industry? And here, don’t you see, is where your statistical correlation comes in—I mean, of course, the statistical correlation between your expanding city population,
plus
your expanding heavy industry,
plus,
of course, rising land values in your outlying suburbs. Well, that’s what I’m out here for, of course.”

“Depending on that city’s economic value,” said Copper Baldwin.

“That’s right!” cried Cruikback, as if Copper Baldwin had let fall a veritable trip hammer of ratiocination, hitting some knotty problem in just the right spot and breaking it open; his eyes sparkled as if they were reflecting newly bared veins of pure bright thought. “Perfectly right.
These things work, of course, in a ratio.... I beg your pardon, I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name?” “Baldwin.”