Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 12

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Bill Richmond had, in fact, exactly as keen an eye for the qualities which go to make up a champion as Sailor Mason, once of Bristol, now of New York. He had as keen an eye for the main chance, too. But he had a motive for taking up Tom Molyneux, for working himself to the bone training him and managing him, which Sailor Mason lacked. He, too, was a black man, like Tom Molyneux. The swells frequented his inn, and liked him, but it did not occur to them to disguise their contempt for him. Now and again it was all he could do to prevent himself rushing in upon them and mowing them down, with their lily faces and corseted hips. If Black Tom Molyneux became champion over the white man, how grand it would be, thought Black Bill Richmond. His eyes rolled hungrily in his skull. Moreover, he had himself been beaten by Tom Cribb. He had a great respect for the fellow, who was no sniggering swell, like these. But it would be a pleasant thing to get his own back on the tips of Tom Molyneux’s clenched knuckles.

So the two black men set to work. The champion of England refused to have anything to do, at first, with the thick-lipped heathen. The heathen was forced to content himself, therefore, with lesser men. But so terrific were his victories, so clearly did he out-top all other contenders for the championship, that it was impossible for Tom Cribb to ignore the challenge Molyneux now issued.

The battle was joined in December 1810, and was as titan an affair as any in the history of prize-fighting. The white man and the black fought like creatures out of some shaggy saga. The black man won; the white man received the verdict.

The black man won in the twenty-eighth round as decisively as any fighter ever won any fight. Tom Cribb lay at his feet like a hunk of ribs a butcher lifts from a hook and deposits on a counter. For all the frantic pushings and thumpings and water-squirtings of his seconds, Tom Cribb lay there, quite unconscious, the full half-minute. The referee called to him once, again, a third time. He lay on like a dead man.

“We’ve won! We’ve won!” cried Black Bill Richmond, Tom Molyneux’s second. He seized Tom’s bleeding fist and lifted it to his mouth and kissed it. “We’ve won, Tom! We’ve won!”

But louder than Bill Richmond roared the furious crowd. What? A foreigner, a black man, is to become champion of England—to beat our Tom Cribb, and become champion of England? It was the sort of noise that, in epochs and regions only a little more turbulent, precedes the tarring and feathering of negroes, the hanging of them from trees, the burning of their still plunging bodies.

But Tom Molyneux was as unaware of the fists shaken at him, and the teeth that glared at him, as if he were way back in Virginia, stripped to the waist and striding between the cotton-bushes. Excepting that here, in England, it was unconscionably cold. It was December. The sweat of his exertions flowed in thick streams and congealed as it flowed. He heard himself sneezing. It was the only sound he heard above the triumphal thudding of the pulses in his ears.

“Dere yo’ are, Joe!” they sang. “Yo’ always said so. An’ it’s true. Ah’ve beat him, Joe, an’ ah’m champion of the world now, an’ ah’m comin’ back to yo’ an’ we’ll have such a good time together, Joe! My, what a good time we’ll have!

“But you don’ think I’ve forgotten, do ye? Ah’m goin’ straight off to find her. Ah’m goin’ straight to Winfold in Somerset, an ah’ll whisper in her ear: ‘Are you Mary Jane Spender? What yo’ cryin’ for? Now you come straight along wi’ me, missy; you needn’t cry any more now. You pack up all your dainty little things an’ come straight along wi’ me!’ ”

But what is all this excitement about, here, in the ring here, this icy December morning? These are Tom Cribb’s seconds, aren’t they, screaming and swearing and tugging at poor Bill Richmond, as if they’re going to tear the flesh from his bones?

“You’ve won, have you? You’ve won? You dirty thieving nigger! You lump of carrion, you! You’ve won, have you? Do you think we didn’t see you slip those bullets into your stinking blackamoor’s fists? What do you take us for, you lousy black cur, eh?”

They went on like that for a half-minute, a minute. Tom Cribb was beginning to come round, to heave and mutter.

“You can see for yourself I haven’t!” pleaded Bill Richmond. “Come here, Tom! Come here! Show them you haven’t got any bullets in your fists! Show the gentlemen!”

But the gentlemen spent another good minute abusing Bill Richmond, and another good minute seeing for themselves that Tom Molyneux had not, as a matter of fact, any bullets hidden in his fists. And by that time Tom Cribb was standing in the ring, his right knee forward, his fists up before his face. He looked quite a lot better for the child-like sleep he had had.

“Time!” cried the referee. Tom Molyneux sneezed again. The black man and the white man went back to the fight again. The white man won.