I was once hit in the eye by a fragment of half-sodden turf thrown up by the explosion of a shell, and had time to think myself a dead man before I realised what had happened. On one occasion, his Excellency Ibrahim Pasha threatened to hang me out of hand; and I believed he meant to do it. I have been in many awkward corners in my time; but my inward forces were never more thoroughly routed than by that episode of the lost wig on the stage of the Globe Theatre.
XII
I suppose the confession I am about to make will stamp me in the minds of a great many people as an irredeemable barbarian. I care little for that, however, and I am staunch in the opinions which I have held all my lifetime. Perhaps my voice may find an echo here and there.
I am a lover of the noble art of self-defence, and to my way of thinking few greater blunders have been made by those who legislate for our well-being than was fallen into by the moral people who abolished the Prize-Ring. It should be admitted at once that the Ring was full of abuses at the time at which an end was made of it; but it was not beyond mending, and a marked deterioration has been noticeable in the character of our people since the sport of the Ring ceased to be a source of popular amusement. British fair play was a proverb amongst the roughest. The rules of the game were recognised even in a street fight, and the man who broke them was likely to be roughly handled.
It matters little that the sense of honour was crude and rough. It was there, and all bullies and blackguards were compelled to abide by it So long as it was the fashion to fight with fists, the use of the knife, the bludgeon, and the brickbat was far rarer than it is now. The most ignorant crowd could be trusted to police a brace of combatants. There is no harm in a stand-up fight with the weapons of nature. Men will fight, and we English people had the least harmful way of fighting of all the peoples of the world. No man was ever good for much with his hands who was not chaste and temperate in life. Excellence in this pursuit was the growth of all the more masculine virtues.
I have the kindliest memories of some of the old heroes. The very first man who helped me on with a pair of boxing-gloves was the mighty 'Slasher'—the Tipton Slasher, William Perry, who in the days of my nonage kept the Champion of England public-house in my native parish of West Bromwich, in South Staffordshire. He it was who trained my youthful hands to guard my youthful head; and I have a foolish stupid pride and pleasure in the memory of that fact The Worcester and Birmingham Canal divides the parishes of Smethwick and West Bromwich, and the Slasher's house was the last on the right-hand side—a shabby, seedy place enough, smoke-encrusted on the outside and mean within, but a temple of splendour all the same to the young imagination. The Champion of England dwelt there—the unconquered, the undisputed chieftain of the fighting clan. He reigned there for years, none daring to make him afraid.
I have been soundly flogged time and time again for visiting him. I have been put on bread and water and held in solitary confinement for the same misdemeanour, but the man had a glamour for me and drew me with the attraction of a magnet. I can see him now, almost as plainly as if he stood before me. He was a Hercules of a man, with enormous shoulders, and his rough honest mid-England features had a sort of surly welcome in their look. But for an odd deformity he would have had the stature of a giant; but he was hideously knock-kneed, and his shamble when he walked was awkward to the limits of the grotesque. You have only to invert the letter V to have an image of the Slasher's legs from foot to knee. His feet were strangers to each other; but his knees were inseparable friends, and hugged each other in a perpetual intimacy. In fighting he used to await his man, propped up in this inverted V fashion, and somehow he gained so solid a footing in that strange and clumsy attitude that he never, in all his experience of the Ring, received a knock-down blow until he encountered Tom Sayers in that last melancholy fight which cost him the championship, and the snug little property in the Champion of England public-house, and his friends and his reputation, and all he had in the world.
I earned one of the soundest thrashings I ever got in my life by playing truant from school in order to follow the Slasher to a wretched little race meeting, held at a place called The Roughs, on the side of the Birmingham Road, in the parish of Hands-worth. My hero was there in glory, followed about by an innumerable tag-rag and bobtail, and I am afraid that on two occasions at least he was tempted to swagger and 'show off,' as children say. He shambled up to one of the 'try your strength' machines: the figure of a circus clown, with a buffer to punch at in the neighbourhood of his midriff, and a dial on his chest to indicate the weight of the blow administered. The Slasher tossed a penny to the proprietor of the machine and waved him on one side; but the man stood in front of the contrivance and besought him pathetically not to strike.
'Not you, Mr. Perry, 'he said humbly; 'oh, not you, Mr. Perry.'