E. W. Hornung_A J Raffles 02 (19 page)

"But the door's shut," put in a boy.

"I'll have a look at it," said the crammer.

And the key no longer in the lock, and the insensible youth
within! The key would be missed, the door kicked in; nay, with
the man's eye still upon me, I thought I could smell the
chloroform,

I thought I could hear a moan, and prepared for either any
moment. And how he did stare! I have detested blue eyes ever
since, and blonde moustaches, and the whole stout easy-going type

that is not such a fool as it looks. I had brazened it out with
the boys, but the first grown man wa too many for me, and the
blood ran out of my heart as though there was no Raffles at my
back. Indeed, I had forgotten him. I had so longed to put this
thing through by myself! Even in my extremity it was almost a
disappointment to m when his dear, cool voice fell like a
delicious draught upon my ears. But its effect upon the others
is more interesting to recall. Until now the crammer had the
centre of the stage, but at this point Raffles usurped a place
which was always his at will. People would wait for what he had
to say, as these people waited now for the simplest and most
natural thing in the world.

"One moment!" he had begun.

"Well?" said the crammer, relieving me of his eyes at last.

"I don't want to lose any of the fun—"

"Nor must you," said the crammer, with emphasis.

"But we've left our bikes outside, and mine's a Beeston Humber,"
continued Raffles. "If you don't mind, we'll bring 'em in before
these fellows get away on them."

And out he went without a look to see the effect of his words, I
after him with a determined imitation of his self-control. But I
would have given something to turn round. I believe that for
one moment the shrewd instructor was taken in, but as I reached
the steps I heard him asking his pupils whether any of them had
seen any bicycles outside.

That moment, however, made the difference. We were in the
shrubbery, Raffles with his electric torch drawn and blazing,
when we heard the kicking at the pantry door, and in the drive
with our bicycles before man and boys poured pell-mell down the
steps.

We rushed our machines to the nearer gate, for both were shut,
and we got through and swung it home behind us in the nick of
time. Even I could mount before they could reopen the gate,
which Raffles held against them for half an instant with
unnecessary gallantry. But he would see me in front of him, and
so it fell to me to lead the way.

Now, I have said that it was a very misty night (hence the whole
thing), and also that these houses were on a hill. But they were
not nearly on the top of the hill, and I did what I firmly
believe that almost everybody would have done in my place.
Raffles, indeed, said he would have done it himself, but that was
his generosity, and he was the one man who would not. What I did
was to turn in the opposite direction to the other gate, where we
might so easily have been cut off, and to pedal for my
life—up-hill!

"My God!" I shouted when I found it out.

"Can you turn in your own length?" asked Raffles, following
loyally.

"Not certain."

"Then stick to it. You couldn't help it. But it's the devil of
a hill!"

"And here they come!"

"Let them," said Raffles, and brandished his electric torch, our
only light as yet.

A hill seems endless in the dark, for you cannot see the end, and
with the patter of bare feet gaining on us, I thought this one
could have no end at all. Of course the boys could charge up it
quicker than we could pedal, but I even heard the voice of their
stout instructor growing louder through the mist.

"Oh, to think I've let you in for this!" I groaned, my head over
the handle-bars, every ounce of my weight first on one foot and
then on the other. I glanced at Raffles, and in the white light
of his torch he was doing it all with his ankles, exactly as
though he had been riding in a Gymkhana.

"It's the most sporting chase I was ever in," said he.

"All my fault!"

"My dear Bunny, I wouldn't have missed it for the world!"

Nor would he forge ahead of me, though he could have done so in a
moment, he who from his boyhood had done everything of the kind
so much better than anybody else. No, he must ride a wheel's
length behind me, and now we could not only hear the boys
running, but breathing also. And then of a sudden I saw Raffles
on my right striking with his torch; a face flew out of the
darkness to meet the thick glass bulb with the glowing wire
enclosed; it was the face of the boy Olphert, with his enviable
moustache, but it vanished with the crash of glass, and the naked
wire thickened to the eye like a tuning-fork struck red-hot.

I saw no more of that. One of them had crept up on my side also;
as I looked, hearing him pant, he was grabbing at my left handle,
and I nearly sent Raffles into the hedge by the sharp turn I took
to the right. His wheel's length saved him. But my boy could
run, was overhauling me again, seemed certain of me this time,
when all at once the Sunbeam ran easily; every ounce of my weight
with either foot once more, and I was over the crest of the hill,
the gray road reeling out from under me as I felt for my brake.
I looked back at Raffles. He had put up his feet. I screwed my
head round still further, and there were the boys in their
pyjamas, their hands upon their knees, like so many
wicket-keepers, and a big man shaking his fist. There was a
lamp-post on the hill-top, and that was the last I saw.

We sailed down to the river, then on through Thames Ditton as far
as Esher Station, when we turned sharp to the right, and from the
dark stretch by Imber Court came to light in Molesey, and were
soon pedalling like gentlemen of leisure through Bushey Park, our
lights turned up, the broken torch put out and away. The big
gates had long been shut, but you can manoeuvre a bicycle through
the others. We had no further adventures on the way home, and
our coffee was still warm upon the hob.

"But I think it's an occasion for Sullivans," said Raffles, who
now kept them for such. "By all my gods, Bunny, it's been the
most sporting night we ever had in our lives! And do you know
which was the most sporting part of it?"

"That up-hill ride?"

"I wasn't thinking of it."

"Turning your torch into a truncheon?"

"My dear Bunny! A gallant lad—I hated hitting him."

"I know," I said. "The way you got us out of the house!"

"No, Bunny," said Raffles, blowing rings. "It came before that,
you sinner, and you know it!"

"You don't mean anything I did?" said I, self-consciously, for I
began to see that this was what he did mean. And now at latest
it will also be seen why this story has been told with undue and

inexcusable gusto; there is none other like it for me to tell; it
is my one ewe-lamb in all these annals. But Raffles had a ruder
name for it.

"It was the Apotheosis of the Bunny," said he, but in a tone I
never shall forget.

"I hardly knew what I was doing or saying," I said. "The whole
thing was a fluke."

"Then," said Raffles, "it was the kind of fluke I always trusted
you to make when runs were wanted."

And he held out his dear old hand.

"The worst of this war," said Raffles, "is the way it puts a
fellow off his work."

It was, of course, the winter before last, and we had done
nothing dreadful since the early autumn. Undoubtedly the war was
the cause. Not that we were among the earlier victims of the
fever. I took disgracefully little interest in the
Negotiations, while the Ultimatum appealed to Raffles as a
sporting flutter. Then we gave the whole thing till Christmas.
We still missed the cricket in the papers. But one russet
afternoon we were in Richmond, and a terrible type was shouting
himself hoarse with "'Eavy British lorsses—orful slorter o' the
Bo-wers! Orful slorter! Orful slorter! 'Eavy British
lorsses!" I thought the terrible type had invented it, but
Raffles gave him more than he asked, and then I held the bicycle
while he tried to pronounce Eland's Laagte. We were never again
without our sheaf of evening papers, and Raffles ordered three
morning ones, and I gave up mine in spite of its literary page.
We became strategists. We knew exactly what Buller was to do on
landing, and, still better, what the other Generals should have
done. Our map was the best that could be bought, with flags
that deserved a better fate than standing still. Raffles woke me
to hear "The Absent-Minded Beggar" on the morning it appeared;
he was one of the first substantial subscribers to the fund. By
this time our dear landlady was more excited than we. To our
enthusiasm for Thomas she added a personal bitterness against
the Wild Boars, as she persisted in calling them, each time as
though it were the first. I could linger over our landlady's
attitude in the whole matter. That was her only joke about it,
and the true humorist never smiled at it herself. But you had
only to say a syllable for a venerable gentleman, declared by her
to be at the bottom of it all, to hear what she could do to him
if she caught him. She could put him in a cage and go on tour
with him, and make him howl and dance for his food like a debased
bear before a fresh audience every day. Yet a more kind-hearted
woman I have neverknown. The war did not uplift our landlady as
it did her lodgers.

But presently it ceased to have that precise effect upon us. Bad
was being made worse and worse; and then came more than
Englishmen could endure in that black week across which the names
of three African villages are written forever in letters of
blood. "All three pegs," groaned Raffles on the last morning of
the week; "neck-and-crop, neck-and-crop!" It was his first word
of cricket since the beginning of the war.

We were both depressed. Old school-fellows had fallen, and I
know Raffles envied them; he spoke so wistfully of such an end.
To cheer him up I proposed to break into one of the many more or
less royal residences in our neighborhood; a tough crib was what
he needed; but I will not trouble you with what he said to me.
There was less crime in England that winter than for years past;
there was none at all in Raffles. And yet there were those who
could denounce the war!

So we went on for a few of those dark days, Raffles very glum
and grim, till one fine morning the Yeomanry idea put new heart
into us all. It struck me at once as the glorious scheme it was
to prove, but it did not hit me where it hit others. I was not
a fox-hunter, and the gentlemen of England would scarcely have
owned me as one of them. The case of Raffles was in that respect
still more hopeless (he who had even played for them at Lord's),
and he seemed to feel it. He would not speak to me all the
morning; in the afternoon he went for a walk alone. It was
another man who came home, flourishing a small bottle packed in
white paper.

"Bunny," said he, "I never did lift my elbow; it's the one vice I
never had. It has taken me all these years to find my tipple,
Bunny; but here it is, my panacea, my elixir, my magic philtre!"

I thought he had been at it on the road, and asked him the name
of the stuff.

"Look and see, Bunny."

And if it wasn't a bottle of ladies' hair-dye, warranted to
change any shade into the once fashionable yellow within a given
number of applications!

"What on earth," said I, "are you going to do with this?"

"Dye for my country," he cried, swelling. "Dulce et decorum est,
Bunny, my boy!"

"Do you mean that you are going to the front?"

"If I can without coming to it."

I looked at him as he stood in the firelight, straight as a dart,
spare but wiry, alert, laughing, flushed from his wintry walk;
and as I looked, all the years that I had known him, and more
besides, slipped from him in my eyes. I saw him captain of the
eleven at school. I saw him running with the muddy ball on days
like this, running round the other fifteen as a sheep-dog round a
flock of sheep. He had his cap on still, and but for the gray
hairs underneath—but here I lost him in a sudden mist. It was
not sorrow at his going, for I did not mean to let him go alone.
It was enthusiasm, admiration, affection, and also, I believe, a
sudden regret that he had not always appealed to that part of my
nature to which he was appealing now. It was a little thrill of
penitence. Enough of it.

"I think it great of you," I said, and at first that was all.

How he laughed at me. He had had his innings; there was no
better way of getting out. He had scored off an African
millionaire, the Players, a Queensland Legislator, the Camorra,
the late Lord Ernest Belville, and again and again off Scotland
Yard. What more could one man do in one lifetime? And at the
worst it was the death to die: no bed, no doctor, no
temperature—and Raffles stopped himself.

"No pinioning, no white cap," he added, "if you like that
better."

"I don't like any of it," I cried, cordially; "you've simply got
to come back."

"To what?" he asked, a strange look on him.

And I wondered—for one instant—whether my little thrill had
gone through him. He was not a man of little thrills.

Then for a minute I was in misery. Of course I wanted to go
too—he shook my hand without a word—but how could I? They
would never have me, a branded jailbird, in the Imperial
Yeomanry! Raffles burst out laughing; he had been looking very
hard at me for about three seconds.

"You rabbit," he cried, "even to think of it! We might as well
offer ourselves to the Metropolitan Police Force. No, Bunny, we
go out to the Cape on our own, and that's where we enlist. One
of these regiments of irregular horse is the thing for us; you
spent part of your pretty penny on horse-flesh, I believe, and
you remember how I rode in the bush! We're the very men for
them, Bunny, and they won't ask to see our birthmarks out there.
I don't think even my hoary locks would put them off, but it
would be too conspicuous in the ranks."