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But he felt considerably relieved after he had uttered them. He fell to reading accounts of the big prize-fight which was to take place in San Francisco that evening. He revelled in the descriptions of "upper cuts" and "left hooks," and learned incidentally that the affair was to be quite one-sided. A local amateur was to box a champion.
Well, that would be the special train, come through from the other coast; the prize-fight special, and the last section, at that. There was no man up the tracks with a red flag to guard against a pile-up. And they also looked bored; they must have been standing there quite a while. And hot. So, you see, his plight was not so bad!
Hadn't we heard of the great Prize-fight?" We had not. "Not the great fight coming off between Jem Clark and the Dustman?" We were unfamiliar even with the heroes' names. She found this hard very hard to believe. Why, Portsmouth was full of it, word having come down from London the date was to-morrow, and that Fareham, or one of the villages near Fareham, the field of battle.
Indeed there are many controversies far more immoral, as to the manner in which they are conducted, than a brutal prize-fight. There is, however, a pleasure of its own in conflict; and I have always experienced a certain indescribable, though I believe not at all unusual exaltation, even in struggling with a well-set, thoroughly roused storm of wind and snow or rain.
In those early days of the century prize-fights were very common in England. The noble art of self-defence was patronized by the greatest in the land. Society loved a prize-fight, and always went to see it, as Society went to any other fashionable function. Magistrates went, and even clerical members of that august body.
They looked upon their little commonwealth as upon their own private estate and homestead, as they had a right to do, and would no more allow the Devil's religion of unreason to be preached therein, than we should permit a prize-fight in our gardens.
"We might get up a Wild West Show here, or a prize-fight, for you. Do you know, Mr. Ponsonby, I think it will take full another century for women to really civilize men." "How so?" "Get the cruelty and love of brutal sports out of them." "Then you'd cease to like us. Nothing is so insipid, I fancy, to a woman as a man made in her own image." "Well, what have you against Newport?" "Against it?
They are of no country and no time. They are what you call goddesses. Men fall down at their feet. They play with men and run them through their pretty fingers like sand. Cleopatra was such a woman they say; and so was Circe. She turned men into swine. Ha! ha! It is true no? It all came about because Maria Valenzuela said: "You English people are what shall I say? savage no? You prize-fight.
'Shall we open it at once? enquired the artist, who had grown decidedly cheerful under the combined effects of company and gin; and without waiting for a reply, he began to strip as if for a prize-fight, tossed his clerical collar in the wastepaper basket, hung his clerical coat upon a nail, and with a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, struck the first blow of the evening.
"Well, then, the sooner we settle this business the better," continued Charlie. "Where shall it come off?" "Prize-fightin's agin the law," suggested an old pauper, who seemed to fear they were about to set to in the kitchen. "So it is, old man," said Charlie, "and I would be the last to engage in such a thing, but this is not a prize-fight, for there's no prize.
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