‘Come into the drawing-room, sweetheart,’ said Diana; and there, with the door shut behind them, she went on, ‘The tender came with orders for Jack to rejoin his ship immediately. It would have broken his heart to miss this committee meeting and lose the common.’
‘But he will never forgive us for lying.’
‘No, dear,’ said Diana. ‘Now the first thing we must do is to send a message telling him not to come home but to go straight on to Wooton and take his chaise from there.’
‘There is no one to send,’ said Sophie. ‘None of the maids could possibly be sent, with that rough crowd. There is a whole tribe of gypsies; and both the Aubrey Arms and the Goat have been wheeling barrels of beer out there since early dawn.’
‘I will go,’ said Clarissa. ‘I do not stand out as much as either of you would do, and when I get to the edge of the crowd I can call one of our people to go and ask the Doctor to come.
I shall put on ankle-boots and an old tippet.’
The others looked at her for a moment. ‘Do please take Grim,’ said Sophie at last, anxious and ashamed.
‘Yes: but he must wear his choke-collar,’ said Diana who had seen the stable mastiff discourage a stranger. ‘I shall put it on to him while you get ready.’ She spoke with a fairly easy conscience: in this house and this village Clarissa was seen as a dependant; her presence at the Dripping Pan would be far less remarked; her scheme was better than any other, and though Diana was not proud of herself she honoured Clarissa for it.
‘You will not be afraid of all those rough men?’ asked Sophie, when Clarissa came down.
‘No. As far as I have seen, apart from mere brute strength
they are no more formidable than we are. Less so, indeed, since most have that dog-does-not-bite-bitch rule deeply engrained, while nothing of that kind applies to us.’
Mere brute strength was Stephen’s first impression of the prize-fight. The referee, a knowing publican from Bridport and a former pugilist, called the men to the middle of the roped-off square: they were both stripped to close-fitting knee-length linen drawers and to pumps, and they stood on either side of him, Bonden still tanned from his seafaring and slightly taller than the other, his pigtail turned tight about his head (the bandage had been disallowed, as too much like a protection), Evans broader, heavier, his flesh corpse-pale except where it was covered by a great mat of black hair. Neither had had much time to train, but both were in reasonable shape – big, powerful men. The referee named them to cheers from either side, and having spoken the ritual words in a hoarse shout he dismissed each to his corner, scratched a mark on the green level turf, retired beyond the ropes and called, ‘Now start the mill, gents; and may the best man win.’ Amid the cheers and counter-cheers of all those assembled – most of the men and boys from at least seven villages and their surrounding farms – the two men came up to the scratch.
There was no motion towards shaking hands. They eyed one another intently for a moment, with a few slight feints of head and stance, and at exactly the same moment exchanged a series of heavy blows to head and body, most warded off on either side, and then closed, each trying the other’s weight and strength.
‘This is more like wrestling than anything else,’ said Stephen: he, Jack, Dundas and Philip were sitting on the rising slope behind Bonden’s corner. ‘See, that ill-looking hairy fellow has seized Bonden’s arm.’
‘He is trying for a cross-buttock,’ said Jack.
He was indeed – a deadly throw – but unsuccessfully, for with a sudden twist and heave Bonden flung Evans forward, flat on his face.
‘Drop on him. Fall heavy. Kick him in the balls,’ bellowed the Woolcombe House supporters on either side of Jack and far up the hill behind him; but Bonden only nodded and smiled, and walked back to his corner, where he sat on his bottle-holder’s knee – Tom Farley, a former shipmate, who had come with Captain Dundas – while his second, Preserved Killick, sponged the blood from his face: an unimportant glancing blow that had nevertheless opened his eyebrow. He was breathing rather quick, but he looked cheerful and composed and when the umpire called time he sprang up as lively as his friends could wish, met Evans at the scratch and instantly struck him over his guard, left and right to forehead and ear, blows that were borne with apparent indifference though they staggered him and drew a surprising flow of blood. Once again Evans closed and once again there was a long obscure struggle for mastery until Bonden, breaking away at last, leapt back and then sprang forward, leading with his left at full stretch – a punch that would have ended the match had it gone home. But surprisingly fast for so heavy a man, Evans shifted six inches to the left and Bonden, slipping on the green grass, came down, to hoots of derision from the far side of the Dripping Pan, where the keeper’s friends and Captain Griffiths’ more subservient tenants sat with the hereditary opponents of Woolcombe, the men who lived in the villages of Holt, Woolcombe Major and Steeple Munstead.
It was not until the third and above all the fourth and fifth round that Stephen began to see that much more than mere brute strength was involved, very much more. Both men had been hit and hurt; their blood was up; each had taken the other’s measure; and although Bonden moved quicker and had more science, Evans’s blows, above all his body blows, were heavier by far. At one point they stood toe to toe in the middle of the ring, hammering one another with extraordinary rapidity and force, but he perceived that almost all the blows he could follow were diverted by the guard: indeed, in spite of the apparent confusion of arms and fists the whole was not unlike a fencing-match with its almost instant anticipation of attack, recoil, parry and lightning counter-strokes.
He sat there, watching them circle, manoeuvre, come in with a storm of blows, close and strive locked together, or break apart for a fresh attack: he watched them under the clear light of a high, veiled sky, fighting there to the roar of the opposing sides – they might have been in the arena of a small provincial Roman town – and he too was as tense as any as he urged his old friend and shipmate to go in and win, shouting for him in a voice he could barely hear for the huge din on either side.
Two long rounds close on ten minutes each, and the next, all ended in a knock-down blow, the first two in Bonden’s favour; but neither was a genuine stunner, though Evans’s bottle-holder had to help him back to his corner after the second. The third came after a confused mêlée in which Evans closed, tripping Bonden and throwing him backwards, most deliberately falling on him and, amid a great howl of reprobation, planting his knees where they would do most harm. To the shrieks and yells of Foul the two umpires looked at one another and at the referee, who agreed with one of them that the match should go on, though he shook his head as he said so. Killick and Fancy brought Bonden back to his corner, revived him as well as they could, and when time was called he came up to the scratch quite briskly.
By this point both men were much marked: Evans’s face and ears were mostly blood and his left eye was nearly closed; but Bonden, though showing less, had been severely punished during the in-fighting and from his attitude and breathing Stephen thought that two or three ribs might be sprung. Their lack of training told on them too and as though by tacit agreement they closed early in the next round, not so much hitting as trying for the cross-buttock and the decisive throw: or at least for a certain respite and breathing-space
* they had been fighting for forty minutes now (Stephen, watching them gasp in their corners between rounds, was astonished that they could have lasted so long), and in their untrained state both were nearly exhausted, while Bonden’s knuckles were split to the bone.
During this slow, laborious, grunting dance the blood from his open forehead blurred Bonden’s sight and he let himself be manoeuvred to the far side, almost on the ropes of a neutral corner, where Evans’s bulk hid him from the umpires and the referees. Here he felt a sudden change in the tension of the clasping arms, a different grunt, and the wicked knee came furious up between his legs. He shot back before it reached its mark, leaving Evans with dangling hands, and hit him two terrible blows, somewhat short since he was on the ropes, but full in the unguarded face. He felt the teeth go, heard an animal shriek of pain and rage and he was heaved back against the ropes by a great hairy sweating weight. In the brutish grapple his head was thrust under the top rope; the lashing of his hair parted and as he forced his way back into the ring to end the fight Evans seized his