With the last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way.When he arose from the table, he was oppressed by the feeling that he was distinctly hungry.Yet he alone had eaten.The two children in the other room had been sent early to bed in order that in sleep they might forget they had gone supperless.His wife had touched nothing, and had sat silently and watched him with solicitous eyes.She was a thin, worn woman of the working-class, though signs of an earlier prettiness were not wanting in her face.The flour for the gravy she had borrowed from the neighbour across the hall The last two ha'pennies had gone to buy the bread.
He sat down by the window on a rickety chair that protested under his weight, and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped into the side pocket of his coat.The absence of any tobacco made him aware of his action, and, with a scowl for his forgetfulness, he put the pipe away.
His movements were slow, almost hulking, as though he were burdened by the heavy weight of his muscles.He was a solid-bodied, stolid-looking man, and his appearance did not suffer from being overprepossessing.His rough clothes were old and slouchy.The uppers of his shoes were too weak to carry the heavy re-soling that was itself of no recent date.And his cotton shirt, a cheap, two shilling affair, showed a frayed collar and ineradicable paint stains.
But it was Tom King's face that advertised him unmistakably for what he was.It was the face of a typical prize-fighter; of one who had put in long years of service in the squared ring and, by that means, developed and emphasized all the marks of the fighting beast.It was distinctly a lowering countenance, and, that no feature of it might escape notice, it was clean-shaven.The lips were shapeless and constituted a mouth harsh to excess, that was like a gash in his face.The jaw was aggressive, brutal, heavy.The eyes, slow of movement and heavy-lidded, were almost expressionless under the shaggy, indrawn brows.Sheer animal that he was, the eyes were the most animal-like feature about him.They were sleepy, lion-like--the eyes of a fighting animal.The forehead slanted quickly back to the hair, which, clipped close, showed every bump of a villainous-looking head.A nose twice broken and moulded variously by countless blows, and a cauliflower ear, permanently swollen and distorted to twice its size, completed his adornment, while the beard, fresh-shaven as it was, sprouted in the skin and gave the face a blue-black stain.
Altogether, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or lonely place.And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done anything criminal.Outside of brawls, common to his walk in life, he had harmed no one.Nor had he ever been known to pick a quarrel.He was a professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was reserved for his professional appearances.Outside the ring he was slow-going, easy-natured, and, in his younger days, when money was flush, too open-handed for his own good.He bore no grudges and had few enemies.Fighting was a business with him.In the ring he struck to hurt, struck to maim, struck to destroy; but there was no animus in it.It was a plain business proposition.Audiences assembled and paid for the spectacle of men knocking each other out.The winner took the big end of the purse.When Tom King faced the Woolloomoolloo Gouger, twenty years before, he knew that the Gouger's jaw was only four months healed after having been broken in a Newcastle bout.And he had played for that jaw and broken it again in the ninth round, not because he bore the Gouger any ill-will, but because that was the surest way to put the Gouger out and win the big end of the purse.
Nor had the Gouger borne him any ill-will for it.It was the game, and both knew the game and played it.
Tom King had never been a talker, and he sat by the window, morosely silent, staring at his hands.The veins stood out on the backs of the hands, large and swollen; and the knuckles, smashed and battered and malformed, testified to the use to which they had been put.He had never heard that a man's life was the life of his arteries, but well he knew the meaning of those big upstanding veins.His heart had pumped too much blood through them at top pressure.They no longer did the work.He had stretched the elasticity out of them, and with their distension had passed his endurance.He tired easily now.No longer could he do a fast twenty rounds, hammer and tongs, fight, fight, fight, from gong to gong, with fierce rally on top of fierce rally, beaten to the ropes and in turn beating his opponent to the ropes, and rallying fiercest and fastest of all in that last, twentieth round, with the house on its feet and yelling, himself rushing, striking, ducking, raining showers of blows upon showers of blows and receiving showers of blows in return, and all the time the heart faithfully pumping the surging blood through the adequate veins.The veins, swollen at the time, had always shrunk down again, though each time, imperceptibly at first, not quite--remaining just a trifle larger than before.He stared at them and at his battered knuckles, and, for the moment, caught a vision of the youthful excellence of those hands before the first knuckle had been smashed on the head of Benny Jones, otherwise known as the Welsh Terror.
The impression of his hunger came back on him.
"Blimey, but couldn't I go a piece of steak!" he muttered aloud, clenching his huge fists and spitting out a smothered oath.
"I tried both Burke's an' Sawley's," his wife said half apologetically.
"An' they wouldn't?" he demanded.
"Not a ha'penny.Burke said--" She faltered.
"G'wan! Wot'd he say?"
