shoulders. His legs were very thin and betrayed the coloured blood in
him; but he was twenty-six or twenty-seven at least and, like most
prize-fighters, he had lived a life of alternate hard training and mad
dissipation, so that, as Patsy phrased it, the real “pep” had gone out
of him. Still, he was an awkward customer and Patsy preached caution.
“Keep him out; keep him out,” was his advice in every round, and
towards the tenth round he began to get insistent. “Keep him out and
watch him. Mr. Harriman’s not coming round again is a bad sign, Dick!
Watch him and hit like hell. Watch him and do all you know.”
In the eleventh round Dick’s blows and his long reach and height began
to tell. Suddenly Zulu feinted and drew Dick’s left. As the Zulu rushed
in Dick stepped back and hit hard with the right, but the Zulu ducked
it and threw his arms round him.
“Break away! break away!” cried the referee, stepping forward to
the fighters. But before Dick could break away the Zulu had struck
up against him with his knee, and the whole room swam with lights,
floor and people all rocking in his agony. Zulu jumped in like a wild
cat, hitting again and again, and when lying on the floor Dick heard
the referee counting--seven--eight--nine. He tried to get up, but
couldn’t. The next moment Patsy had burst into the ring and carried him
out to the dressing-room.
A doctor came and they gave him brandy, which only seemed to intensify
the intolerable pain. He was fully conscious now and sick as a dog. He
heard the doctor say: “He’s young and there’s nothing burst; he’ll be
all right in a week. Was it a blow?”
“Zulu’s knee,” said Patsy, sobbing with rage. “I never warned the boy.
I thought he could keep him out.”
Dick never knew how he got to Mamaroneck; in fact he was ill for nearly
three weeks and it was a month before he came again to Heenan’s, and as
luck would have it the first man he met was Sid Harriman.
“You didn’t want the two thousand or the ten thousand dollars either,”
said Harriman, sneering, “but you took the knockout in the eleventh
round all the same. It doesn’t pay to be a d--d boob.”
All Dick’s anger at the sneering tone vanished. “I guess you’re
right, Mr. Harriman,” he said. “It doesn’t pay to be a boob.” But he
registered an oath to himself that the next time he met Zu Lenward he
would take it out of him.
But he didn’t know even then how being honest in life weights the dice
against you. He found it hard to get a match, and without Patsy it
might have been impossible.
He proposed to fight this man or that, but everyone turned him down.
At length he asked Patsy for the reason and Patsy gave it to him with a
certain reluctance.
“Put yourself in the other man’s place and think,” he said at length;
“that’s the way to understand it right.
“Why did Harriman offer you ten thousand dollars to lose that fight?
Because he had some big bet on--perhaps for one hundred thousand
dollars--that you would lose it, and perhaps another bet at long odds
that you’d be knocked out in the eleventh round.
“Now when you refused what had he to do? First, he had to tell Zu
Lenward to knock you out in the eleventh round; but he had to pay for
that. Zulu said ‘’twas only certain by a foul.’ ‘Then you must foul
him,’ said Harriman, and he’d have to pay much more for a foul. Besides
in case of a foul the referee must be squared, and that costs a mint of
money; then the foul may be seen by the onlookers and cause a scandal,
and therefore he bears you malice for making him pay out p’r’haps five
times as much as he had reckoned on paying. See!
“Well, thin it’s all over and you’re K.O. And later your name comes up
before the promoters and Harriman says: ‘Not that guy; he’s honest or
stupid or----’ And so you’re finding it hard to get in the swim agin,
but you’ll get in. I know how to do that. Harriman won’t let anger
button his pocket; lave it to me.”
The chance came sooner than Dick thought possible. Two or three months
later he fought with Walt Thompson and that gave him the right to fight
Lenward again for the championship. This time he made no mistake. He
had measured his man. In the first two or three rounds he hit him so
heavily that the result was not doubtful. A pitiless devil had entered
into Dick and he was transformed. He fought as he had never fought--not
to win, but to punish--and by the tenth round Lenward was incapable of
any tricks. He was beaten to standstill, and in the seventeenth round
was knocked clean off his feet and through the ropes. The cool savagery
pleased the onlookers, and Dick went out of the ring a fighting man
willing now to take his orders and put the dough in his jeans. He
realized that being straight led only to ruin.
The next time he fought it was all arranged. Sid Harriman told him that
he was to be knocked out in the fourteenth round and in the fourteenth
round he gave his opponent an opening and got it on the jaw. He flopped
about on the floor like a fish till even Harriman was delighted. “Some
actor,” he cried. “By God! I thought for the moment you were knocked
out.”
Patsy, too, was delighted, for Dick’s bank account had jumped up
five thousand dollars, and there was more excitement about his next
appearance than there had ever been before.
The next two years were filled with alternate victories and defeats,
and it seemed curious to Dick, but it was the defeats that brought in
the money--twenty thousand and fifty thousand dollars at a time--and no
risk--even of a foul. The certainties gave the cash.
* * * * *
Gradually the place at Mamaroneck was improved and extended. One year
Dick bought ten acres of adjoining land and the next spring built a
walled-in bathing place and a little pier for the time he’d be able to
afford a steam launch, the desire of his life.
Towards the end of the third year he outgrew the weight, and though
for six months or so he could still sweat himself down to it by hard
exercise he preferred to give up the championship even while he was
too light to enter the light-weight class with any hope of conspicuous
success.
Bu he had no difficulty in getting a vaudeville engagement at a
thousand a week for boxing with Ed Jones a quarter of an hour each
night, and he soon found that the rest and absence of championship
contests improved his health and strength in the most astonishing
way. Of course he described the improvement to Patsy, and as usual
Patsy, who could hardly write and never cared to read, understood the
phenomenon and had reasoned it out for himself.
“Sure, it’s plain,” he said, “every athlete has to take a rest before
he comes to the trial; even a jumper or runner has to have a day’s rest
annyway before he tries to beat the record. That’s why I never let you
box for a couple of days before goin’ into the ring. And a tough fight
takes it out of a man more than annything else in the world.
“Take the great fight between Sharkey and Jeffries, the greatest fight
ever was fought; they both went into the ring perfectly trained, yet
Sharkey, who had two ribs broken, lost thirteen pounds in weight in the
fifty minutes the fight lasted and Jeffries lost eleven. Think of it!
eleven pounds lost in an hour by a man trained fine and hard. A fight’s
a dreadful punishin’ test, even if you win.
“A man,” he went on reflectively, “has only a certain amount of reserve
vitality; it’s like a balance in the bank; he should never exhaust it
or draw it down too low, for it’s that gives him strength. When you
increase the size of yer muscles you do it through using some of this
nerve-force, and you must rest in order to let it accumulate again.
Rest’s a great thing,” Patsy summed up, “and so’s exercise, and you
need both to be perfect. This vaudeville stunt for a year or so will be
the making of ye, if ye keep away from wimmin an’ booze.”
* * * * *
But the stream of Dick’s life was not fated to run as smoothly as
Patsy hoped. Men are the dupes of their desires. Dick had a pronounced
success on the stage; he was good-looking and lightly built, without
the bunchy biceps and knobs of muscle which most strong men display and
most women dislike. He boxed with a certain grace and his footwork in
especial was magically swift and catlike. His Celtic sensitive nature
made him a natural actor, and from his first appearance he got letters
from women and girls who wanted to know him.
Along in the first summer he and Jones were filling a week’s engagement
at Newark, N.J., when a rich woman, a Mrs. Faber, invited them to a
garden-party, and arranged that they should box for the amusement
of her guests. Both men took the invitation as a mere joke; but the
grounds were crowded with fashionably dressed young people, and the
performance was a huge success. After the boxing Mrs. Faber, struck by
Dick’s looks and quiet manners, introduced him to some of her guests,
and notably to a Miss Woolcombe, who set Dick’s blood in a turmoil.
The first glance from her dark eyes and Dick’s heart seemed to stop;
he had to gulp down the fever of emotion, and indeed Kate Woolcombe
was pretty enough to have seduced a less impressionable nature. In ten
minutes Dick found that she had a very keen sense of humour; a sort
of natural gaiety danced in her hazel eyes and lit up her whole face.
And her personality was as marked as her beauty. When he spoke of his
home at Mamaroneck and the joy he took in the waters of the Sound he
was delighted to learn that she lived there too, not a mile away, with
her father and mother. “May I call?” Dick risked; but the little lady
treated the question quite as a matter of course. “I think my mother
will be glad,” she said, “and my young brother will be overjoyed; in
fact the eldest, Harold, who is just seventeen, will make a hero of
you at once, I’m sure,” and she laughed charmingly.
When they said “Good-bye,” and she gave him her hand, he had to look at
it in surprise, it was so tiny.
Dick went back to his hotel walking on air; the vision of the mutinous
lips and laughing eyes went with him everywhere; in bed, when he tried
to sleep, they were photographed on his brain in colour, lifelike. At
first it was the sheer bodily beauty of her that enthralled him, the
little round lissom figure, the lovely face; but soon this vision grew
less distinct, while the impression of her whole personality seemed to
grow deeper.
As soon as Dick got back to New York he called at the Woolcombes, and
found they lived in a big colonial house bowered amidst gardens and
overlooking a wide reach and the shore of Long Island. Mrs. Woolcombe
was kind to him, with a shade of restraint, and the banker father
condescending at first, but the two boys, Harold and Fred, soon broke
the ice by their enthusiastic interest in “the great game” and hero
worship of the champion whose feats they had read about.
Then a new life began for Dick. Miss Kate read a great deal and spoke
French fairly and had more than a bowing acquaintance with French
literature.
She was learning Spanish, Dick found out, and this pleased him as
putting her too with him in the class of learners. His naïve admiration
of her wisdom and knowledge made her laugh outright, but at the same
time flattered her deliciously, and the acquaintance ripened rapidly,
thanks mainly to the two boys.
Dick gave Harold boxing lessons, and soon his sister heard nothing but
“Dick does this” and “Patsy says that” till the two households became
intimate. Mrs. Donovan was unaffectedly proud when Mrs. Woolcombe came
to see her, but had the natural tact and good manners of the Celtic
race, and the better-taught woman recognised at once her native good
sense and amiability.
The year before Dick had realised his dream and had bought a
high-powered launch, and Fred soon learned to drive it as well as the
owner, and so the four made continual excursions. It was a book and a
moonlit night that finally brought Dick and Kate together.
They had gone for a long trip in the launch, had taken food with them
and were returning rather late. Kate had lent Dick _Slippy McGee_, and
Dick wanted to know whether the heroine had realised that Slippy was in
love with her first. Did she hold aloof from him because he had been a
burglar? “No,” Kate thought, “that had nothing to do with it.”
“You know,” said Dick simply, “that’s why I’m afraid to tell you how I
love you, for fear you’d think a prize-fighter too common to care for.”
She sat there beside him in silence, as if thinking, and he went on
with love’s instinctive cunning: “It’s for all my life. Oh, Kate, I’d
be content to wait on you hand and foot and serve you all my days if
you’d just let me,” and he stole his arm round her waist. “I know I’m
not good enough for you; I knew that when you just said ‘Good-bye’ to
me at Mrs. Faber’s and gave me your little hand. Sure, look how small
it is beside mine,” he continued, taking it in his own brown paw; then
lifting it he kissed it again and again and looked up. Kate’s face was
very earnest and her eyes flooded with emotion. “I love you, darling,”
he went on, and somehow their lips met.
Dick never forgot that kiss. It was more than a kiss; it was a
consecration. “I’m not good enough,” he went on. “I wish I were better.
I’ll try,” he ended simply.
“We’ll both try,” the girl said. “You mustn’t run yourself down....
You’re good enough for me, Dick,” she added, “for I love you.”
They sat hand in hand in a sacred silence and next day agreed to say
nothing about their love for a little while, as if such a secret could
be kept.
But the course of passionate love never yet ran smooth; smoothness is
not in the nature of a torrent, and Kate’s awakening came very soon.
The rest and the long trips in the motor-launch had made Dick put on
flesh, and one day Patsy weighed him and was horrified to find that
he was beyond the light-weight limit. He measured him too, and found
that he had grown nearly an inch and was now five feet ten and a half
inches, with an arm-stretch of nearly seventy-six inches. At once he
set Dick to work: long walks and runs every morning; potatoes and bread
and all sweets were cut out of the diet, and instead of a lounging day
steady exercise increasing in severity, especially exercise on the mat.
“You are strong enough for annything,” said Patsy, “but now I want to
get thim belly muscles as hard as iron--strong enough to protect that
plexus of yours. Sure you put your big shoulder in front of yur chin
fine; nobody will get you on the chin; but you are inclined to lave
yourself open about the body, and a punch on the spleen would make you
go groggy.”
Dick realised the truth of this, and as usual went in for the new
exercises with enthusiasm, Patsy assuring him that the stomach muscles
were the strongest in the body and that he could make them like a wall
of steel if he chose.
In three months, when Dick had brought himself down to the requisite
weight, Patsy went into Heenan’s every day and soon made up a fight
between him and the light-weight champion, Benny Rossiter.
Benny was the best man that Dick so far had ever met. A New England
boy, brought up on a farm, he had gone to Princeton and there fallen
in love with the game, perhaps because of his extraordinary excellence
in it. Almost as soon as he began to box he seemed to know everything
by instinct. Patsy and Dick went one afternoon to see him box, and
Dick was impressed by his speed and strength. He was very dark; some
said his mother was a Jewess. While only five feet seven or eight in
height he was more strongly built than Dick, and carried, they said,
a terrible punch in his right hand. But what Dick especially admired
about him was the natural way he ducked and slipped, even in practice
boxing; it was uncanny the way he could get down and avoid blows.
“That man is better than me,” said Dick, as they went away.
“Better’n nothin’,” replied Patsy; “he’s naturally quick and he has
learned the game like them amatoors, but you have learned it bit by bit
and paid for your knowledge again and again. I tell you he will live
with you only about ten rounds, perhaps twelve, and then he’ll go to
pieces.”
The announcement of the fight made a great sensation. There was
nothing much doing in 1919 and the papers seized on the two men
as representative Americans; would-be literary men wrote them up
incessantly, and the reporters told everything about their daily lives
and practice that they could get hold of.
Benny, the college boy, was of course the favourite in better circles,
so Dick was not surprised when Harriman came round to watch him
exercising one day and afterwards said to him:
“This thing must be staged in Madison Square Garden, and there ought to
be a big wad in it. If I give you ten per cent. of what I make clear
will that suit you?”
Dick looked at Patsy. “Sure,” said Patsy; “sure, Mr. Harriman. Dick
will fight according to instructions.”
A day or two afterwards he learned that he was to be knocked out in the
eighth round.
He regretted this for one reason in especial. Both the Woolcombe boys
were crazy to see him fight and had begun to bet on his winning, and
one day Kate said to him shyly: “I would like to see you in the real
ring, though I am afraid it will be very brutal.”
“Oh, you mustn’t come this time,” Dick blurted out.
“Why not?” she asked.
“You know,” he said, putting his arms round her and drawing her to him,
“I told you long ago I was not good enough for you”; and then love’s
humility being strong upon him, with the need for confession and the
urge to tell the loved one the very worst about himself, he went on:
“I’m going to lose this fight. Benny Rossiter is very good”; and seeing
her look of amazement, added, “and I’m a little out of practice--and--I
shall probably make a lot of money by losing.”
“What do you mean?” asked the girl, with parted lips and wide-open
eyes. “What do you mean, Dicky?”
“Just that,” he said bitterly. “He is champion, and it pays a fighting
man to lose some fights. I’ll get another chance later and then maybe
you can come to see it. If I lose then it will be because I am not
good enough to win.”
They were entering her house when he began speaking and she gave him
no chance to talk further to her that day, and the next day he got a
letter from her in which she said that she could not believe what he
had told her; could not believe that he was going to let himself be
beaten in order to win money unfairly--“because that was what you said,
Dick: no one but yourself would make me believe it of you.”
He had feared just this and now the catastrophe was overwhelming. He
wrote begging for an interview, and when she kept away a couple of days
without answering him he confided in Patsy and sent him to her. Patsy
shook his head when he knew what was expected of him.
“All wimmin is crazy,” was Patsy’s verdict; “they’re all looney. Does
she expect a prize-fighter to be an angel; why doesn’t she feel for
your wings? Does she think a boy like you could have one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in the bank and a place like this in four years
by fighting on the square? Why, it ain’t sense! Let her go and ask her
banker father how he made his fortune; sure, she’ll find that he has
done things that would make Beelzebub blush, if he tells the truth, but
he’s too cunning.”
But Dick prayed him to do his best as mediator and sent him off, and
the result of Patsy’s intercession was that the day after he got
another little note from Kate: “Have you told your mother? Does she
approve?”
So Dick had to tell his mother the same day. When he told her that he
was going to lose the fight and that it was by losing that he had made
all his money, she looked at him horror-stricken, almost like Kate,
and cried out: “Oh, wirra, wirra, to think of that and you a son of a
p’lisman.”
Dick felt inclined to smile, but it was on the wrong side of his mouth.
There was something pathetic in Mrs. Donovan’s hero-worship of her
policeman husband as a defender of justice and a champion of right.
The next three or four days were filled for Dick with suffering of a
new sort. In many Celts there is a vein of absolute pessimism, and as
Dick did not see how to conquer this difficulty the natural melancholy
of his nature awoke and he simply tried to make up his mind that he had
lost everything, that life was like that; it would give you this, that
and the other, and then snatch the cup of happiness from your lips and
spill the golden liquid in the dust.
“It was to be,” he said to himself with Celtic fatalism. “I suppose it
had to be.”
But now Patsy got after him. He was falling off in his speed and
strength, and as a ring-general Patsy would not permit that. In his
misery Dick at last told Harold all about it, and although he did not
know he thereby played a winning card, for Harold, boylike, saw very
little in it and went to his father, and when his father heard that
Dick would probably win one hundred thousand dollars, and not be hurt
by losing, he said before his daughter that he hoped a man would not
fool enough to throw away such a chance of a fortune. His daughter
turned on him, but her mother immediately sided with the father, and
Kate began to feel outlawed in her righteousness. In her heart she was
glad to acknowledge that perhaps she had been too severe, and off she
went with her brother to meet Dick.
The reconciliation was a renewal of love. In her desire to atone she
showed her lover all the warmth in her nature. She threw her arms round
his neck and said: “I won’t dispute any more. I think life horrid.
But one thing I am determined on. I want you to leave off fighting
altogether. Surely after this big lot of money we’ll have enough and
you can get a vaudeville engagement as you had at first.”
Dick was jubilant. “I will lose this fight,” he said, “but within three
months the fight for the championship will be staged again, and if I
win it I’ll fight no more. I’ve had enough of it. I’d like to travel in
France and Ireland and perhaps learn something and be more worthy of
you.”
And for the first time he ventured to touch her breasts and show his
passion. To his delight she responded and kissed him with hot lips. And
when he put his arms round her and held her to him closely she was all
yielding softness, and his desire for her grew to madness.
* * * * *
The fight at Madison Square Garden attracted an enormous crowd. The
place was crammed from floor to ceiling at unheard-of prices and the
betting was insane.
Dick measured his man as well as he could without trying to beat him,
and in about the eight or ninth round came to the conclusion that he
could beat him. Nevertheless he took the right and left on the jaw in
the twelfth round and went down for the count.
The audience went crazy with delight. The best people in New York were
there, had all bet on the college boy, and the college boy had won. It
had been a clean fight and their joy knew no bounds, and the Irish who
followed Dick to a man took their beating philosophically. “It always
needs a batin’,” they said, “to wake our man up. Sure, Donovan will
come again, and the next time we’ll get our money back and more.”
And that turned out to be very near the truth. Another fight for the
championship was staged in Newark, N.J., and once again the papers
boosted the fight just as if they had been paid for the advertisement,
when they got nothing by it except enthusiastic readers.
Before the training even began Dick had a long talk with Harriman.
“We’ll begin,” said that gentleman, “by handing you these for the last
fight,” and he gave Dick four cheques for twenty-five thousand dollars
each; “that’s about eleven per cent. of what I made.”
Dick thanked him.
“And now,” Harriman went on, “I want you to do me a favour. Can you
beat him?”
Dick nodded his head.
“Are you sure? I can only get odds of about five or six to four against
you. Dare I risk eight hundred thousand dollars on it? Will you bring
me my money home? If you do I’ll quit promoting and retire to my place
in the Adirondacks.”
“One can never be as sure of winning as of losing,” Dick replied, “but
I am satisfied I can beat him and I intend to.”
A few days afterwards the announcement came out that an agreement had
been signed; the prize would be one hundred thousand dollars, sixty
thousand dollars to go to the victor and forty thousand dollars to the
loser. Nine out of ten newspaper readers in New York believed that
Rossiter would be the victor and that Dick would again be beaten.
This time the whole Woolcombe family came to the fight. Harold and Fred
had interested the father and mother, and even Kate was carried off her
feet by the excitement.
The fight was very like one of the old Roman gladiatorial contests.
Harriman and his friends had built up a great amphitheatre that would
hold nearly sixty thousand persons.