Smiling Willie and the Tiger

by John Harris

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘Well built. Spoke like an American. They called him Dolly, I think.’

  Mace smiled and turned to Instant. ‘We’re close behind ’em, Instant,’ he said. He turned back to the proprietor. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘They went on into Winifred.’

  Mace dotted the information down on his starched cuff with his pencil and nodded to Instant. ‘Are your men ready, Instant?’ he asked.

  Instant clicked to attention, ‘Yessir. That is, except for Wooden.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Wooden?’

  ‘He says he’s got callouses on his…’ Instant searched for a word that was refined enough to be used in front of an officer. ‘–On ’is be’ind, sir. He says he joined up as an infantryman and thought he’d be walking.’

  ‘When he was, he always complained of bad feet,’ Mace snapped. ‘Now he’s mounted, he complains of callouses on his arse. Right’ – he made up his mind quickly – ‘we’ll use him as horse-holder whenever possible. Then he can use both his arse and his feet and I hope he enjoys it.’

  Two

  The champagne at Petticoat Poll’s might not have been the best there was, but with a lump of ice for a cooler, it slaked the thirst and Winifred was a good place to rest for a while.

  Set on the railway line from Chichester Junction at the joining of the loops that ran to Mimosa Grove and Heenop, Winifred was situated in the middle of the Little Reef, and Amerika, Standerton, Vandermerweshalt, Paradise, Ochs Drift, Dreifontein and a dozen other small villages and towns made up a busy well-populated area. Since the realisation had come that no fortunes were to be made from diamonds, the little towns were now mostly farming communities with only a few diggings remaining of what was once to have been a glorious future. But, like Chichester Junction, Winifred had taken on an importance that no one had realised. Its position had made it the commercial centre for the other small towns, and before anyone had noticed what was happening, it had sprouted a station and sidings, several stores, shops, agencies for cattle, corn and produce, a gas works, a cold storage company, a soda-water manufactory, four hotels, any number of bars, and three churches. Like the rest of the Little Reef it had escaped devastation in the fighting because it was off the route of the armies and because, with its mixed population, both sides had too many supporters there.

  Like most other towns in the area it had long been less a riotous mining camp than a sober neighbourhood with its share of righteous housewives. There was a general absence of gambling hells and sultry dance-dives and, though at the bottom there was always a sediment of miners and seedy cosmopolitans with cunning ideas about easy money, the bulk of the population belonged to the commercial and professional middle class devoted to church bazaars and amateur theatricals.

  However, since the conquering British, anxious to protect their diamond rights in Kimberley, had brought with them their special legislation against buying or even holding uncut stones, evasion of these laws was a flourishing industry in itself. There were already lawyers who were making an excellent living by advising clients how to make the most of their opportunities and still remain on the right side of the law, and there were many cases of new and unexpected careers that looked like leading to the glory of a knighthood and a private box at Epsom. These men had money and there were always a few who needed somewhere they could gamble quietly, visit lady friends who wouldn’t be acceptable to their wives, or exchange the illicit goods they had to sell, and Petticoat Poll’s was discreet and, except when the miners in the area got going on a Saturday night, reasonably quiet.

  The front rooms were very firmly residential and presented a respectable façade with a large bar, billiard hall, dusty lounge and dining room served by Cape Coloured and Indian waiters in linen pillbox hats. Only the candlelit private dining rooms and cabinets particuliers upstairs at the back were given up to what Poll referred to obliquely as ‘entertainment’.

  Poll herself, the former wife of a British trooper who had deserted from the Cape garrison, was astute enough to be aware that her career was balanced nicely on a knife-edge between her special type of custom and the disapproval of the Anglican, Catholic and Dopper Churches; and her assistants, the Brown Hen, Joey da Costa, Jericho Jessie and the Rose of Sharon, when they weren’t on duty wouldn’t have dreamed of greeting any of their customers by name.

  Poll’s was an establishment known all along the Little Reef as a place where you could take your ease or make a little money, or even acquire a little knowledge of the world on the luxurious divans upstairs that were especially designed to suggest ideas even to the most innocent. There were dwarf palms rusting into thin whiskers along the stoep and pots of bougainvillaeas and proteas from the Cape on the verandahs to give a splash of colour. At night the front was lit with roaring gas lamps that brought in every insect for miles around. It had class and decorum, and a bell was always rung in the morning to encourage the guests to return to their own rooms.

  While it wasn’t a place to live, because it was the expensive haunt of speculators with money to burn, it was certainly a place to enjoy yourself and Fish was already installed with the Brown Hen behind the proteas at the back of the first floor verandah.

  ‘My pa was called Adolphus, too,’ he was explaining. ‘Only I’m Adolphus C.’

  ‘What’s the C stand for?’ the Brown Hen enquired.

  ‘Nothin’.’ Fish gestured. ‘My pa said, “A feller’s got to have a middle letter”, but they couldn’t think of nothing just then so they just called me Adolphus C, intending to fix something behind that there C later on. Only they never got around to it.’ He clinked glasses with the Brown Hen. ‘I got a ranch,’ he went on. ‘You know that? In Texas. Everybody in the States got ranches.’

  ‘Really?’

  Fish nodded. He was well content. They had bought new suits at the store, and his battered homburg and checked shirt, exchanged for a neat grey three-piece and a straw boater, were now buried under an anthill on the veldt.

  The shapes of the buildings down Nieuwoudt Street fused in the darkness with the stunted bushes. The starlight was glinting on the iron roofs and the flat brick façades of the new buildings, giving the dusty road an icy look. Road-menders’ equipment was lying about because the town council, considering that Winifred, on the main highway north, was a place of growing importance, were busy laying down the first hard-surfaced road in the district. When it was finished it would be possible to step from a horse outside Poll’s in the winter rains without sinking up to the ankles in red mud.

  ‘Where’s you friends got to?’ the Brown Hen enquired.

  Fish waved his hand airily. ‘Inside,’ he said.

  ‘Doing a bit of business?’

  ‘Nope. More personal than that.’

  The Brown Hen didn’t enquire any further – her particular line was wifely mousiness – and, as it happened, what Willie and the Tiger were up to was much more delicate than the tawdry business of speculation or swindle.

  Willie had decided it was time the Tiger grew up. He had sold the ancient shot-gun he’d carried to a Boer farmer for ten pounds as a new kind of hammerless weapon and with the money had already set up a lucrative little sideline in army tinned milk, ham, eggs and bacon, camp pie, apple pudding, fruit and stew for Poll’s dining room which he picked up at Balmerinostad from a Dutch storekeeper operating in Sinai. Poll asked no questions and Willie was happy. Fish was happy, too, and it seemed a shame that the Tiger should be left out in the cold. He had, therefore, pushed a couple of gins into him and was at that moment shoving him up the stairs that led to Poll’s famous cabinets particuliers.

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ the Tiger was saying uncertainly.

  ‘Soon get used to it,’ Willie said. ‘All fixed. Arranged it with Poll. Name of Rose of Sharon.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Down there.’

  ‘Who with?’

  Willie put his finger to his lips. ‘Mus
tn’t say. Sign of a gent.’

  Unfortunately, more concerned with his own assignation than the Tiger’s, he hadn’t paid enough attention to Poll’s directions and he turned right instead of left and the girl the Tiger saw sitting on the end of the bed wore, instead of the usual bright satin, a cotton underslip and a lace-edged wrapper and she was combing her hair by the light of a couple of candles.

  The room looked homely – not at all the type the Tiger associated with ladies of easy virtue. Prominent among its decorations were a tintype photograph of a man and woman staring starkly from a backdrop of Greek columns and woodland ferns, a cheap china house decorated with the words ‘A present from Brighton’, and a cushion cover edged with Union Jacks and centred by the face of Lord Roberts with his white moustache and little tufty beard.

  The girl had risen as he had closed the door behind him and she was staring at him now, startled and angry. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded in what the Tiger thought was an unnecessarily brusque manner.

  ‘Well…’ He swallowed. After what Willie had said the question seemed superfluous.

  The girl came nearer and he noticed her eyes were bright with anger and showed none of the languorous sleepiness he always associated with the profession. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the Tiger.’

  ‘The who, for God’s sake?’ The girl’s frown vanished and her eyes widened. The Tiger saw at once that they were brown and fringed with dark lashes like spiked stars and that she had a set of kiss-me-quick curls.

  ‘It’s a nickname,’ he explained meekly. ‘Sarcastic. My name’s really Lavender. Horace Clarence Lavender.’

  ‘We had one,’ the girl said. ‘But the wheel came off.’

  The Tiger gave a sheepish smile. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  The girl stared. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you, I’m sure, but it’s Pansy. Pansy Whistlecraft.’

  ‘That’s a pretty name.’ Not even a besotted lover could have called Pansy Whistlecraft a pretty name, but the Tiger was never behind the door when it came to politeness. When you weren’t very big and were inclined to nervousness, it paid, and it seemed to be paying now because she hadn’t yet thrown him out or hit him with the sherry bottle he could see on the dressing table.

  He swallowed again. ‘They said it was all right,’ he pointed out.

  ‘What was all right?’

  ‘Willie said it was fixed.’

  ‘Oh!’ The girl gazed at him, suspicion beginning to dawn. ‘What was?’

  The Tiger swallowed again and took his courage in both hands. ‘They said you’d see me right.’

  The girl frowned. ‘Well, I won’t,’ she said haughtily. ‘I’m not one of Poll’s girls, so there! Somebody’s having you on.’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘Poll’s my aunt. My ma’s just got married again to a sergeant in a remount depot at Cape Town and I couldn’t stand him so I left. Poll said I could come up here for a bit. I’m going to get a job in Jo’burg now the war’s ended.’

  ‘What as?’

  ‘I dunno.’ The girl seemed less hostile now and even willing to talk. ‘Plenty of good jobs going up there, I expect. Poll said I could stay here if I liked. Do the housekeeping for her till I moved on. I don’t think I fancy it. I imagine it can get a bit rowdy at times in these places.’

  ‘I expect it can,’ the Tiger agreed.

  He smiled and blinked rapidly with relief. ‘I’m glad you’re not one of them,’ he went on earnestly, though not without sudden misgivings because, with the two gins Willie had bought him under his belt, he found himself eyeing the deep cleft at the top of her slip and the big brass bedstead with the long lace spread with an interest he had never expected. It made him think of unmentionable things people sometimes did together and suddenly he found his heart hammering and felt a strange glandular stir. His breathing became a little constricted and for the first time in his life he felt as virile as a bull. She had said she wasn’t one of Poll’s girls, but he wondered if, pushed, she might be. She was shapely and warm-looking and provoked a devastating chemistry in him so that all sorts of unexpected thoughts began to pass through his head. He started abruptly as she spoke.

  ‘What are you doing in South Africa?’ she demanded, staring at him. He seemed a most unlikely customer for any of Poll’s girls and she decided he was a salesman who’d turned up, probably about the champagne stocks. ‘Come to make your fortune like the rest?’

  The Tiger nodded and moved closer. ‘Yes.’

  ‘My pa came to make his fortune. He left me and Ma in Port Elizabeth while he nipped up to Johannesburg to see which way the wind was blowing. We never saw him again.’

  She sounded as though she didn’t trust men, and the Tiger decided that with his own background of wild hope and indifferent speculation he would have to tread warily. Then he remembered the bags buried under the jacarandas at Chichester Junction and decided that with a bit of luck he’d probably already made a fortune.

  ‘I’m going to set up a newspaper,’ he announced. It was a fantasy that occupied a lot of his thoughts.

  ‘You are?’ The girl’s eyes widened. ‘You’ll need money for that.’

  ‘I can get it.’ The Tiger tried to look modest. ‘I was on a newspaper in England.’

  ‘Why did you come out here then?’

  ‘Well,’ the Tiger said, ‘it’s a long story.’

  It was, too.

  He’d been a copy boy on a Kent ‘evening’ and had worried a great deal about his future.

  ‘But then,’ he explained, ‘I had this idea, see. There was another evening paper where I worked, and its offices were just across the street from ours and it appeared half an hour before we did. I started waiting on the corner for the first bundle to appear from the press. I put our lot on to a lot of good stories that way.’

  One evening, however, they were waiting for him.

  ‘It was full of this murder,’ the Tiger explained. ‘Three victims and the place swimming in blood. There were even the names of the victims. I showed it to the chief reporter and he sent me off fast as a jackass in the Derby to have a look while he rewrote it. Our story was much better than theirs.’

  He noticed the girl was studying him with interest now.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Well’ – the Tiger drew a deep breath – ‘the boy I bought the paper from just waited for me to disappear and then nipped back like lightning and handed in his bundle. They’d caught on and it was printed specially for us, y’see. It hadn’t happened.’

  The girl stared, then she gave a hoot of laughter. ‘You were properly done brown, weren’t you?’ she said.

  The Tiger nodded, also smiling. For the first time it seemed funny. His waistcoat was unfastened now and as he sat down on the bed next to her Pansy edged away a little. Her smile remained sympathetic, however. ‘That was proper hard luck,’ she said. ‘Were they cross?’

  ‘I didn’t wait to see,’ the Tiger said simply, moving fractionally along the bed after her.

  Pansy smiled. ‘I’m ever so glad,’ she said, moving along the bed once more

  ‘So’m I,’ the Tiger smiled. ‘Wouldn’t have been here, else, would I?’

  Pansy gazed at the Tiger’s mild purple-blue eyes. Although he looked about seventeen and wet behind the ears, he also looked eminently respectable – if a little hot-eyed at the moment – in his new blazer and hard straw hat with its striped band, and the pale grey pin-striped trousers and brown boots. His shirt was clean and he looked as though he bathed occasionally, which was a change from a lot of the men she saw in Winifred. He also hadn’t made a grab at her – which was another change, though she suspected he was about to – and he wasn’t a miner, a diamond buyer, or a speculator, which was a third. Newspapermen were few and far between in South Africa and it gave him an aura of intellectuality which appealed to the snob in her.

  The Tiger eyed her. After the gin
s he felt as bold as brass and quite ready to try his hand as a Casanova. He had no talent as a parlour hero, however, because that took some skill at lying and further skill at remembering what lies he’d told, but he had an urge to kiss her breathless and – to his surprise – to do other things, too, that had started to occur to him. Willie had put ideas into his head he hadn’t known existed.

  As he looked at her, Pansy moved further along the bed – faster than before – and the Tiger edged after her, doing a brisk sideways shuffle like a crab. The most important thing in his life at that moment was to get his hands on her.

  Pansy seemed to guess what he was after and was laughing a loud nervous laugh every time he said anything.

  ‘Always fancied setting myself up again as a newspaperman,’ the Tiger observed.

  ‘I’ll bet you did.’

  ‘Always fancied running something like The Diamond Fields Advertiser.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’

  He had his arm round her now, his fingers near the edge of the lace-fringed wrapper. ‘You’re not afraid of me, are you?’ he asked, a leer on his face like an elderly lecher’s.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, how about me giving you a kiss, then?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was breathless.

  ‘I’ll behave myself, you see if I don’t.’

  She wasn’t so sure and looked round for some means of distracting him. He had her crowded up against the pillows now and she was fighting a rearguard action. She had a brainwave.

  ‘Would you like some sherry wine?’ she asked.

  Three

  Fish was just beginning to succumb to the timid housewifely tactics of the Brown Hen when he noticed a tall figure with thin legs and a bad case of acne approaching down the street.

  The stranger was in civilian clothes with a dashing Wish-I-May-Die sombrero, a well-cut jacket, breeches and a stiff stand-up collar that sawed at his ears. He was stamped all over as a soldier and an officer, and Fish noticed that with him there was a policeman and that the policeman carried a gun.