“My dear fellow,” said Hatton, “I’ll give you exercise and to spare; that is to say, if you can box.”
“I’m not a champion,” I said; “but I’m fond of it. I shouldn’t mind taking up boxing again. There’s nothing like it for exercise.”
“Quite right, James,” he replied; “and exercise, as I often tell my boys, is essential.”
“What boys?” I asked.
“My club boys,” said Hatton. “They belong to the most dingy quarter of the whole of London—South Lambeth. They are not hooligans. They are not so interesting as that. They represent the class of youth that is a stratum or two above hooliganism. Frightful weeds. They lack the robust animalism of the class below them, and they lack the intelligence of the class above them. The fellows at my club are mostly hard-working mechanics and under-paid office boys. They have nothing approaching a sense of humour or the instinct of sport.”
“Not very encouraging,” I said.
“Nor picturesque,” said Hatton; “and that is why they’ve been so neglected. There is romance in an out-and-out hooligan. It interests people to reform him. But to the outsider my boys are dull. I don’t find them so. But then I know them. Boxing lessons are just what they want. In fact, I was telling Sidney Price, an insurance clerk who lives in Lambeth and helps me at the club, only yesterday how much I wished we could teach them to use the gloves.”
“I’ll take it on, then, Hatton, if you like,” I said. “It ought to keep me in form.”
I found that it did. I ceased to be aware of my liver. That winter I was able to work to good purpose, and the result was that I arrived. It dawned upon me at last that the “precarious” idea was played out. One could see too plainly the white sheet and phosphorus.
And I was happy. Happier, perhaps, than I had ever hoped to be. Happier, in a sense, than I can hope to be again. I had congenial work, and, what is more, I had congenial friends.