Asta began to chuckle. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said to Gonger, ‘he’ll be back.’
‘Why don’t you let people alone?’ asked Gonger. ‘They don’t interfere with you. What do you want to interfere with them for?’
‘I don’t like pansies.’
‘I mean to say,’ said Gonger, that intrepid man, ‘you don’t own the place, do you now?’
‘No, thank God. If I owned your stinking place, I’d have to be nice to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. But since I don’t own the place, I can say what I damn well like — and so I shall, young fellow, and if you don’t believe me, just try and stop me, that’s all. Just you try.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of trying, Miss,’ said Gonger.
‘I should think not. It would take a better man than you or a dozen like you. Give me another drink. And when I ask for a Tom Collins, I don’t ask for a Tom Collins so that you can get away with a short measure of gin. I ask for a Tom Collins because I want a Tom Collins, and that means to say that it’s got to have the right amount of gin in it. Is that clear?’
‘You don’t think,’ said Gonger, ‘that I’d be crazy enough to try and get away with giving you short measure, do you?’
‘And don’t think that I am the sort of fool who falls for that line of talk, young fellow. Before I fall for that stuff, I’ll fall for the three-card trick. Hurry up, I haven’t got all day.’
Then Gonger would mix her a Tom Collins, brazenly giving her, short measure again. And she would drink it saying: ‘That’s better.’
There was something sympathetic about the Battleaxe, as she was called. Many people liked her in spite of her savage tongue and belligerent manner; Like the carcass of Samson’s lion, this muscular busybody was capable of giving out sweetness. Furthermore, she was what is known as a Character, and all the world loves a Character. It was difficult to be dull in her company. She kept you on your toes: she was almost certain to say or do something unpredictable. There was a time when, to the ill-concealed, ineffable joy of Gonger, Asta Thundersley was pursued by an enigmatic young man, whose sole topic of conversation was the fact that he had never had a Mother, not a real Mother, not a proper Mother — not a Mother who was a comrade, not a Mother who was a Mother, not a Mother who guided him; just an ordinary Mother like everybody else’s Mother — not a Mother he could look up to. The ideal Mother, he maintained, was Miss Thundersley — a Mother who drank Tom Collins, smoked all day long, and could tell a good smutty story.
Asta listened to all this for several days, with a hideous contortion of the face which was her idea of a motherly smile. At last, on a Saturday morning when the bar was crowded, she produced from her handbag a small towel which she folded into a triangle like a baby’s diaper, and approached the young man waving this object in one hand and a safety-pin in the other, shouting:
‘You want me to be a mother to you, you silly little man? Right! Let’s start, from the beginning! I’m going to change your nappy!’
No one doubted for a moment that if the young man had stayed, something scandalous would have happened; but he fled, and never set foot in the bar again.
In this manner she antagonized certain people. It was quite clear that she was a little crazy; one of those strong-minded lunatics dangerously compounded of love and anger; contemptuous of the opinions of mankind.
10
She liked to startle people. If she had been born poor, she would no doubt have tried to have her way with the world by walking up and down Whitehall between sandwich boards, or chalking on walls. But she was rich, and a member of an influential family. She had access to great people who could not refuse to see her: they had known her mother, her father, or one of her uncles.
Some women might have been held back by reticence. Not Asta Thundersley, that uproarious extrovert. For herself she would ask nothing. But for a kicked pup she would drag the Home Secretary himself out of his bath. She overdid things; never knew when to stop. Once, for instance, she interested herself in the case of a woman who, having old-fashioned ideas of child management, beat and starved her stepdaughter. The child, who was six years old, ruined the experiment by dying of ill-treatment: she had always been a difficult child. The stepmother was sentenced to six months in prison. Asta was outraged at the lightness of this sentence and for five years, no matter what anyone said, she managed to introduce ‘six months for torturing a child to death’ into every conversation. If, say, you were talking about the parcel-post, she got away from parcels to the subject of string; from string to rope; from rope to murder, and so to a peroration: ‘Kill your wife’s lover as a gentleman should, and you’ll swing for it. Torture babies to death and you only get six months in quod!’ With her, every issue became a monomania, something fiercely personal.
Even in the old days, when Catchy had such a shape that she could earn her living as an artist’s model, Asta Thundersley was regarded as a species of maniac — an over-energetic woman who ought to have been born a man; in which case she might have become a Cabinet Minister, and then she would have gagged herself with party politics and the consciousness of her own importance.
She picked up cronies and made friends in the unlikeliest corners, for she had a child-like craving for the indigestible sharp pickles and belly-aching green apples of society. There was, for example, an old ruined heavyweight boxer, who called himself The Tiger Fitzpatrick, whom she found one evening when she was rescuing fallen women (or something of the sort) near the East India Dock Road. The Tiger Fitzpatrick, drunk but still thirsty, came out of a dark turning, grabbed her wrist and said: ‘Listen, you!’
Without changing her expression, Asta Thundersley kicked him scientifically on the shin. Her legs might have belonged to a billiard table, and her kick was something to be remembered. As The Tiger let go and hopped back with a yelp of pain and incredulity, she beat him over the head with a massive umbrella, and said: ‘Take your hands off me, you dirty bully, you beery ape! Now what is it?’
The Tiger Fitzpatrick, somewhat sobered, muttered: ‘I’m broke to the wide.’
‘Serve you right! You smell as if you deserve to be, you drunken sot. How dare you lay your hands on me? I’ve half a mind to give you the hiding of your life.’
The Tiger cringed and said: ‘I couldn’t fight a lady, Lady.’
‘Oh no, not you! I know you. Don’t tell me. You couldn’t fight a lady, oh dear no! But you can try your hulking great brute strength on a lady, can’t you? You can bully a lady, can’t you? — or you think you can, don’t you? What do you want money for? Beer? Eh?’
‘Yes, lady,’ said The Tiger Fitzpatrick, with humility.
She looked at this shattered Hercules as he stood, hanging his head in the feeble light of a bracketed street-lamp in the rain, and observed that his head was like a head of moist clay half hammered back to utter blankness — all but the ears, which resembled old boxing-gloves. Yet there was something pathetic in the twitching and flickering of it. She thought of God’s breath breathed into the wet red earth in Eden. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a job?’ she asked.
He answered: ‘They won’t give me no job.’
‘Because you don’t deserve one, I suppose? Because they know you’ll get drunk and make a beast of yourself, like you are now — is that it?’
‘Lady,’ he said with dignity, ‘don’t you know who I am? I’m The Tiger Fitzpatrick.’ He paused, waiting for an exclamation.
‘Who’s he?’
‘I was nearly in the running for a fight with Johnny MacTurk. Lady, where have you been all your life? Didn’t anybody ever tell you anything? Didn’t you ever hear about how I went seventeen rounds with Tully Burnett? And there you are, talking like an educated lady! Four more fights and I’d of had a chance at Bob Fitzsirnmons. But I was robbed of the verdict when I fought Ernie Tombs. God Almighty,’ said The Tiger, with pain in his voice, ‘you must have heard what Tombs did to me? I’d got him going in the sixth. I could have knocked him out stone cold in the eighth and he knew it — I knew it. I said I’d let him go up to the tenth, but in the seventh — see? — I’m jabbing to the body with my left hand — and he knows, he knows, he knows what’s coming! And the next time I let him have it with the left, Tombs sees it coming and jumps clear off the canvas and takes the punch right in the groin. Honest to God, it wouldn’t have hurt a new-born baby; but Tombs rolls on the canvas, rolls and rolls and grabs himself down here and shouts — ‘foul, foul, foul’, like a dying man … and there it is. See? Some feller wrote a bit about it in the Liverpool Echo look, I got it here.’