Profane expletives flew from my lips; those of much holier men might have been no less unguardedly emphatic in the self-same circumstances.
“But who was it?”
“I could have told you all along if you hadn’t suspected me.”
“It wasn’t a suspicion, Raffles. It was never more than a dread, and I didn’t even dread it in my heart of hearts. Do tell me now.”
Raffles watched the red end of a ruined Sullivan make a fine trajectory as it flew to leeward between sea and stars.
“It was that poor unlucky little alien who was waiting for him the other morning in Jermyn Street, and again last night near his own garden gate. That’s where he got him in the end. But it wasn’t a shooting case at all, Bunny; that’s why I never heard anything. It was a case of stabbing in accordance with the best traditions of the Latin races.”
“God forgive both poor devils!” said I at last.
“And other two,” said Raffles, “who have rather more to be forgiven.”
CHAPTER XIX
Apologia
On one of the worst days of last year, to wit the first day of the Eton and Harrow match, I had turned into the Hamman, in Jermyn Street, as the best available asylum for wet boots that might no longer enter any club. Mine had been removed by a little pinchbeck oriental in the outer courts, and I wandered within unpleasantly conscious of a hole in one sock, to find myself by no means the only obvious refugee from the rain. The bath was in fact inconveniently crowded. But at length I found a divan to suit me in an upstairs alcove. I had the choice indeed of more than one; but in spite of my antecedents I am fastidious about my cooling companions in a Turkish bath, and it was by no accident that I hung my clothes opposite to a newer morning coat and a pair of trousers more decisively creased than my own.
But the coincidence in pickle was no less remarkable. In ensuing stages of physical devastation one had dim glimpses of a not unfamiliar, reddish countenance; but with the increment of years it has been my lot to contract short sight as well as incipient obesity, and in the hot rooms my glasses lose their grip upon my nose. So it was not until I lay swathed upon my divan that I recognised E.M. Garland in the fine fresh-faced owner of the nice clothes opposite mine. A tawny moustache rather spoilt him as Phoebus, and there was a hint of old gold about the shaven jaw and chin; but I never saw better looks of the unintellectual order; and the amber eye was as clear as ever, the great strong wicket-keeper’s hand unexpectedly hearty, when recognition dawned on Teddy in his turn.
He spoke of Raffles without hesitation or reserve, and of me and my Raffles writings as though there was nothing reprehensible in one or the other, displaying indeed a flattering knowledge of those pious memorials.
“But of course I take them with a grain of salt,” said Teddy Garland; “you don’t make me believe you were either of you such desperate dogs as all that. I can’t see you climbing ropes or squirming through scullery windows—even for the fun of the thing!” he added with somewhat tardy tact.
It is certainly rather hard to credit now. I felt that after all there was something to be said for being too fat at forty, and that Teddy Garland had said it excellently.
“Now,” he continued, “if only you would give us the row between Raffles and Dan Levy, I mean the whole battle royal that A.J. fought and won for me and my poor father, that would be something like! The world would see the sort of chap he really was.”
“I am afraid it would have to see the sort of chaps we all were just then,” said I, as I still think with exemplary delicacy; but Teddy lay silent and florid for some time. These athletes have their vanity. But this one rose superior to his.
“Manders,” said he, leaving his divan and coming and sitting on the edge of mine, “you have my free leave to give me and mine away to the four winds, if you will tell the truth about that duel, and what Raffles did for the lot of us!”
“Perhaps he did more than you ever knew.”
“Put it all in.”
“It was a longer duel than you think. He once called it a guerilla duel.”
“Then make a book of it.”
“But I’ve written my last word about the old boy.”
“Then by George I’ve a good mind to write it myself!”
This was an awful threat. Happily he lacked the materials, and so I told him. “I haven’t got them all myself,” I added, only to be politely but openly disbelieved. “I don’t know where you were,” said I, “all that first day of the match, when it rained.”
Garland was beginning to smile when the surprise of my statement got home and changed his face.
“Do you mean to say A.J. never told you?” he cried, still incredulously.
“No; he wouldn’t give you away.”
“Not even to you—his pal?”
“No. I was naturally curious on the point. But he refused to tell me.”
“What a chap!” murmured Teddy, with a tender enthusiasm that made me love him. “What a friend for a fellow! Well, Manders, if you don’t write all this I certainly shall. So I may as well tell you where I was.”
“I must say it would interest me to know.”
My companion resumed his smile where he had left it off. “I wonder if you would ever guess?” he speculated, looking down into my face.
“I don’t suppose I should.”
“No more do I; not in a month of Sundays; for I spent that day on the very sofa I was on a minute ago!”
I looked at the striped divan opposite. I looked at Teddy Garland sitting on mine. His smile was a little wry with the remnant of his bygone shame; he hurried on before I could find a word.
“You remember that drug I had? Somnol I think it was. That was a risky game to play with any head but one’s own; still A. J. was right in thinking I should have been worse without any sleep at all. I should,” said Teddy, “but I should have rolled up at Lord’s! The beastly stuff put me asleep all right, but it didn’t keep me asleep long enough! I was awake before four, heard you both talking in the next room, remembered everything in a flash! But for that flash I should have dropped off again in a minute; but if you remember all I had to remember, Manders, you won’t wonder that I lay madly awake all the rest of the night. My head was rotten with sleep, but my heart was in such hell as I couldn’t describe to you if I tried.”
“I’ve been there,” said I, briefly.
“Well, then, you can imagine my frightful thoughts. Suicide was one; but to get out of that came first, to get away without looking either of you in the face in broad daylight. So I shammed sleep when Raffles looked in, and when you both went out I dressed in five minutes and slunk out too. I had no idea where I was going. I don’t remember what brought me down into this street. It may have been my debt to Dan Levy. All I remember is finding myself opposite this place, my head splitting, and the sudden idea that a bath might freshen me up and couldn’t make me worse. I remembered A.J. telling me he had once taken six wickets after one. So in I came. I had my bath, and some tea and toast in the hot-rooms; we were all to have a late breakfast together, if you recollect. I felt I should be in plenty of time for that and Lord’s—if only I hadn’t boiled all the cricket out of me. So I came up here and lay down there. But what I hadn’t boiled out was that beastly drug. It got back on me like a boomerang. I closed my eyes for a minute—and it was well on in the afternoon when I awoke!”
Here Teddy interrupted himself to order whiskies and soda of a metropolitan Bashi-Bazouk who happened to pass along the gallery; and to go stumbling over to his pockets, in his swaddling towels, for cigarettes and matches. And the rest of his discourse was less coherent.
“Then I did feel it was a toss-up between my razor and a charge of shot! I had no idea it was raining; if you look up at that coloured skylight, you can’t say if it’s raining now. There’s another sort of hatchway on top of it. Then you hear that fountain tinkling all the time; you don’t hear any rain, do you?—It was after three, but I lay till nearly four simply cursing my lu
ck; there was no hurry then. At last I wondered what the papers had to say about me—who was playing in my place, who’d won the toss and all the rest of it. So I had the nerve to send out for one, and what should I see? ‘No play at Lord’s’—and sudden illness of my poor old father! You know the rest, Manders, because in less than twenty minutes after that we met.”
“And I remember thinking how fit you looked,” said I. “It was the bath, of course, and the sleep on top of it. But I wonder they let you sleep so long.”
“How could they know what I’d been up to?” said Teddy. “I mightn’t have had any sleep for a week; it was their business to let me be. But to think of the rain coming on and saving me—for even Raffles couldn’t have done it without the rain. That was the great slice of luck—while I was lying right there! And that’s why I like to lie there still—for luck rather than remembrance!”
The drinks came; we smoked and sipped. I regretted to find that Teddy was no longer faithful to the only old cigarette. But his loyalty to Raffles won my heart as he had never won it in his youth.
“Give us away to your heart’s content,” said he; “but give the dear old devil his due at last.”
“But who exactly do you mean by ‘us’?”
“My father not so much, perhaps, because he’s dead and gone; but self and wife as much as ever you like.”
“Are you sure Mrs. Garland won’t mind?”
“Mind! It was for her he did it all; didn’t you know that?”
I didn’t know Teddy knew it, and I began to think him a finer fellow than I had supposed.
“Am I to say all I know about that too?” I asked.
“Rather! Camilla and I will both be delighted—so long as you change our names—for we both loved him!” said Teddy Garland.
I wonder if they both forgive me for taking him entirely at his word?
STINGAREE
Stingaree is an odd book. It’s been called an “Australian Raffles”—which it is, sort of, if you squint. We are including it here as an associational item.
It was filmed in 1934 by RKO Radio Pictures as a musical. It starred Irene Dunne as Hilda and Richard Dix as Stingaree.
A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS
I
“La parlate d’amor,
O cari fior,Recate i miei sospiri,
Narrate i miei matiri,
Ditele o cari fior—”
Miss Bouverie ceased on the high note, as abruptly as string that snaps beneath the bow, and revolved with the music-stool, to catch but her echoes in the empty room. None had entered behind her back; there was neither sound nor shadow in the deep veranda through the open door. But for the startled girl at the open piano, Mrs. Clarkson’s sanctum was precisely as Mrs. Clarkson had left it an hour before; her own photograph, in as many modes, beamed from the usual number of ornamental frames; there was nothing whatever to confirm a wild suspicion of the living lady’s untimely return. And yet either guilty consciences, or an ear as sensitive as it was true, had heard an unmistakable step outside.
Hilda Bouverie lived to look magnificent when she sang, her fine frame drawn up to its last inch, her throat a pillar of pale coral, her mouth the perfect round, her teeth a noble relic of barbarism; but sweeter she never was than in these days, or at this moment of them, as she sat with lips just parted and teeth just showing, in a simple summer frock of her own unaided making. Her eyes, of the one deep Tasmanian blue, were still open very wide, but no longer with the same apprehension; for a step there was, but a step that jingled; nor did they recognize the silhouette in top-boots which at length stood bowing on the threshold.
“Please finish it!” prayed a voice that Miss Bouverie liked in her turn; but it was too much at ease for one entirely strange to her, and she rose with little embarrassment and no hesitation at all.
“Indeed, no! I thought I had the station to myself.”
“So you had—I have not seen a soul.”
Miss Bouverie instantly perceived that honors were due from her.
“I am so sorry! You’ve come to see Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson?” she cried. “Mrs. Clarkson has just left for Melbourne with her maid, and Mr. Clarkson has gone mustering with all his men. But the Indian cook is about somewhere. I’ll find him, and he shall make some tea.”
The visitor planted himself with much gallantry in the doorway; he was a man still young, with a single eye-glass and a martial mustache, which combined to give distinction to a somewhat swarthy countenance. At the moment he had also an engaging smile.
“I didn’t come to see either Mr. or Mrs. Clarkson,” said he; “in fact, I never heard their name before. I was passing the station, and I simply came to see who it was who could sing like that—to believe my own ears!”
Miss Bouverie was thrilled. The stranger spoke with an authority that she divined, a sincerity which she instinctively took on trust. Her breath came quickly; she was a little nervous now.
“If you won’t sing to my face,” he went on, “I must go back to where I hung up my horse, and pray that you will at least send me on my way rejoicing. You will do that in any case. I didn’t know there was such a voice in these parts. You sing a good deal, of course?”
“I haven’t sung for months.”
He was now in the room; there was no longer any necessity to bar the doorway, and the light coming through fell full on his amazement. The girl stood before him with a calm face, more wistful than ironic, yet with hints of humor in the dark blue eyes. Her companion put up the eye-glass which he had dropped at her reply.
“May I ask what you are doing in these wilds?”
“Certainly. I am Mrs. Clarkson’s companion.”
“And you sing, for the first time in months, the minute her back is turned: has the lady no soul for music?”
“You had better ask the lady.”
And her visible humor reached the corners of Miss Bouverie’s mouth.
“She sings herself, perhaps?”
“And I am here to play her accompaniments!”
The eye-glass focussed the great, smiling girl.
“Can she sing?”
“She has a voice.”
“But have you never let her hear yours?”
“Once. I had not been here long enough to know better. And I made my usual mistake.”
“What is that?”
“I thought I had the station to myself.”
The questioner bowed to his rebuke. “Well?” he persisted none the less.
“I was told exactly what my voice was like, and fit for.”
The gentleman turned on his heel, as though her appreciation of the humor of her position were an annoyance to him. His movement brought him face to face with a photographic galaxy of ladies in varying styles of evening dress, with an equal variety in coiffures, but a certain family likeness running through the series.
“Are any of these Mrs. Clarkson?”
“All of them.”
He muttered something in his mustache. “And what’s this?” he asked of a sudden.
The young man (for as such Miss Bouverie was beginning to regard him) was standing under the flaming bill of a grand concert to be given in the township of Yallarook for the benefit of local charities.
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Clarkson’s concert,” he was informed. “She has been getting it up, and that’s why she’s had to go to Melbourne—about her dress, you know.”
He smiled sardonically through mustache and monocle.
“Her charity begins near home!”
“It need not necessarily end there.”
“Yet she sings five times herself.”
“True—without the encores.”
“And you don’t sing at all.”
“But I accompany.”
“A bitter irony! But, I say, what’s this? ‘Under the distinguished patronage of Sir Julian Crum, Mus. Doc., D.C.L.’ Who may he be?”
“Director of the Royal College of Music, in the old country,” the girl answered with a sigh.
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br /> “Royal College of Music? That’s something new, since my time,” said the visitor, sighing also. “But what’s a man like that doing out here?”
“He has a brother a squatter, the next station but one. Sir Julian’s spending the English winter with him on account of his health.”
“So you’ve seen something of him?”
“I wish we had.”
“But Mrs. Clarkson has?”
“No—not yet.”
“I see!” and an enlightened gleam shot through the eye-glass. “So this is her way of getting to know a poor overworked wreck who came out to patch his lungs in peace and quiet! And she’s going to sing him one of his own songs; she’s gone to Melbourne to dress the part; and you’re not going to sing anything at all!”
Miss Bouverie refrained alike from comment and confirmation; but her silence was the less creditable in that her companion was now communing chiefly with himself. She felt, indeed, that she had already been guilty of a certain disloyalty to one to whom she owed some manner of allegiance; but that was the extent of Miss Bouverie’s indiscretion in her own eyes. It caused her no qualms to entertain an anonymous gentleman whom she had never seen before. A colder course had commended itself to the young lady fresh from London; but to a Colonial girl, on a station where special provision was made for the entertaining of strange travellers, the situation was simply conventional. It might have been less onerous with host or hostess on the spot; but then the visitor would not have heard her sing, and he seemed to know what singing was.
Miss Bouverie watched him as he leant over the piano, looking through the songs which she had dared once more to bring forth from her room. She might well have taken a romantic interest in the dark and dapper man, with the military eye-glass and mustache, the spruce duck jacket and the spurred top-boots. It was her first meeting with such a type in the back-blocks of New South Wales. The gallant ease, the natural gayety, the charming manners that charmed no less for a clear trace of mannerism, were a peculiar refreshment after society racier of Riverina soil. Yet it was none of these things which attracted this woman to this man; for the susceptible girl was dead in her for the time being; but the desperate artist was alive again after many weeks, was panting for fresh life, was catching at a straw. He had heard her sing. It had brought him galloping off the track. He praised her voice; and he knew—he knew what singing was.
The Raffles Megapack Page 70