“If you’ve forgotten all about it,” he said, “it’s rather a pity I paid.
But I always was honest. That’s one of my misfortunes. If I wasn’t----
That’s the fine you paid for me.”
Then I remembered. Sam got into trouble with the police a few weeks ago.
He and a dozen or so of his fellow-students broke loose and ran riot
through the streets of Dublin. All high-spirited boys do this sort of
thing occasionally, whether they are junior army officers, lawyers’
clerks, or university undergraduates. Trinity College boys, being Irish
and having a large city at their gates, riot more picturesquely than
anyone else. Sam had captured the flag which the Lord Mayor flies
outside his house, had pushed a horse upstairs into the office of a
respectable stockbroker, and had driven a motor-car, borrowed from an
unwilling owner, down a narrow and congested street at twenty-five or
thirty miles an hour. He was captured in the end by eight policemen, and
was very nearly sent to gaol with hard labour. I got him off by paying
a fine of one pound, together with £2 4s. 6d. for the damage done by the
horse to the stockbroker’s staircase and office furniture. The motorcar,
fortunately, had neither injured itself nor anyone else.
“I hope,” I said, pocketing the money, “that this will be a lesson to
you, Sam.”
“It won’t,” he said. “At least, not in the way you mean. It’ll encourage
me to go into another rag the very first time I get the chance. As a
matter of fact, being arrested was the luckiest thing ever happened to
me, though I didn’t think so at the time.”
“Well,” I said, “if you like paying up these large sums it’s your own
affair. I should have thought you could have got better value for your
money by spending it on something you wanted.”
“Money isn’t everything in the world,” said Sam. “There is such a thing
as having a good time, a rattling good time, even if you don’t make
money out of it and run a chance of being arrested. I daresay you’d like
to hear what I’ve been at.”
“If you’ve committed any kind of crime,” I said, “I’d rather you didn’t
tell me. It might be awkward for me afterwards when you are tried.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly a crime,” said Sam, “anyhow, it isn’t
anything wrong, though, of course, it may be slightly illegal. I’d
rather like to have your opinion about that.”
“Is it a long story? I’m rather busy to-day.”
“Not very long,” said Sam, “but I daresay it would sound better after
dinner. What would you say now to asking me to dine to-night at your
club? We could go up to that library place afterwards. There’s never
anybody there, and I could tell you the whole thing.”
Sam knows the ways of my club nearly as well as I do myself. There
is never anyone in the library in the evening. I gave the required
invitation.
We dined comfortably, and I got a good cigar for Sam afterwards. When
the waiter had left the room he plunged into his story.
“You remember the day I was hauled up before that old ass of a
magistrate. He jawed a lot and then fined me £3 4s. 6d., which you paid.
Jolly decent of you. I hadn’t a shilling in the world, being absolutely
stony broke at the time; so if you hadn’t paid--and lots of fellows
wouldn’t--I should have had to go to gaol.”
“Never mind about that,” I said. “You’ve paid me back.”
“Still, I’m grateful, especially as I should have missed the spree of
my life if I’d been locked up. As it was, thanks to you, I walked out of
the court without a stain on my character.”
“Well, hardly that. You were found guilty of riotous behaviour, you
know.”
“Anyhow, I walked out,” said Sam, “and that’s the main point.”
It was, of course, the point which mattered most; and, after all, the
stain on Sam’s character was not indelible. Lots of young fellows behave
riotously and turn out excellent men afterwards. I was an undergraduate
myself once, and there is a story about Sam’s father, now a dean, which
is still told occasionally. When he was an undergraduate a cow was found
tied up in the big examination hall.
Sam’s father, who was very far from being a dean then, had borrowed the
cow from a milkman.
“There were a lot of men waiting outside,” said Sam. “They wanted to
stand me a lunch in honour of my escape.”
“Your fellow-rioters, I suppose?”
“Well, most of them had been in the rag, and, of course, they were sorry
for me, being the only one actually caught. However, the lunch never
came off. There was a queer old fellow standing on the steps of the
court who got me by the arm as I came out. Said he wanted to speak to me
on important business, and would I lunch with him. I didn’t know what he
could possibly have to say to me, for I had never seen him before; but
he looked--it’s rather hard to describe how he looked. He wasn’t exactly
what you’d call a gentleman, in the way of clothes, I mean; but he
struck me as being a sportsman.”
“Horsey?”
“Not the least. More like one’s idea of some kind of modern pirate,
though not exactly. He talked like an American. I went with him, of
course.”
“Of course,” I said, “anyone with an adventurous spirit would prefer
lunching with an unknown American buccaneer to sharing a commonplace
feast with a mob of boys. Did you happen to hear his name?”
“He said it was Hazlewood, but----”
“But it may not have been?”
“One of the other fellows called him Cassidy later on.”
“Oh,” I said, “there were other fellows?”
“There were afterwards,” said Sam, “not at first. He and I lunched
alone. He did me well. A bottle of champagne for the two of us and
offered me a second bottle. I refused that.”
“He came to business after the champagne, I suppose?”
“He more or less talked business the whole time, though at first I
didn’t know quite what he was at. He gassed a lot about my having
knocked down those two policemen. You remember that I knocked down two,
don’t you? I would have got a third only that they collared me from
behind. Well, Hazlewood, or Cassidy, or whatever his name was, had seen
the scrap, and seemed to think no end of a lot of me for the fight I put
up.”
“The magistrate took a serious view of it, too,” I said.
“There wasn’t much in it,” said Sam modestly. “As I told Hazlewood, any
fool can knock down a policeman. They’re so darned fat. He asked me if I
liked fighting policemen. I said I did.”
“Of course.”
Sam caught some note of sarcasm in my voice. He felt it necessary to
modify his statement.
“Well, not policemen in particular. I haven’t a special down on
policemen. I like a scrap with anyone. Then he said--Hazlewood, that
is--that he admired the way I drove that car down Grafton Street. He
said he liked a man who wasn’t afraid to take risks; which was rot.
There wasn’t any real risk.”
“The police swore that you went at thirty miles an hour,” I said. “And
that street is simply crowded in the middle of the day.”
“I don’t believe I was doing anything like thirty miles an hour,” said
Sam. “I should say twenty-seven at the outside. And there was no risk
because everybody cleared out of my way. I had the street practically to
myself. It was rather fun seeing all the other cars and carts and things
piled up upon the footpaths at either side and the people bolting
into the shops like rabbits. But there wasn’t any risk. However, old
Hazlewood evidently thought there was, and seemed frightfully pleased
about it. He said he had a car of his own, a sixty h.p. Daimler, and that
he’d like to see me drive it. I said I’d take him for a spin any time he
liked. I gave him a hint that we might start immediately after lunch and
run up to Belfast in time for dinner. With a car like that I could have
done it easy. However, he wasn’t on.”
“Do you think he really had the car?”
“Oh, he had her all right. I drove her afterwards. Great Scott, such a
drive! The next thing he said was that he believed I was a pretty good
man in a boat. I said I knew something about boats, though not much.”
Modesty is one of Sam’s virtues. He is, I believe, an excellent hand in
a small yacht, and does a good deal of racing.
“I asked him what put it into his head that I could sail a boat, and he
said O’Meara told him. O’Meara is a man I sail with occasionally, and I
thought it nice of him to mention my name to this old boy. I can hoist
a spinnaker all right and shift a jib, but I’m no good at navigation.
Always did hate sums and always will. I told him that, and he said he
could do the navigation himself. All he wanted was a good amateur crew
for a thirty-ton yawl with a motor auxiliary. He had four men, and he
asked me to make a fifth. I said I’d go like a shot. Strictly speaking,
I ought to have been attending lectures; but what good are lectures?”
“Very little,” I said. “In fact, hardly any.” “I wasn’t going to lose a
cruise for the sake of any amount of lectures,” said Sam, “particularly
with the chance of a tour on that sixty h.p. car thrown in.”
Sam paused at this point. It seemed to me that he wanted encouragement.
“You’d have been a fool if you had,” I said.
“Up to that time,” said Sam thoughtfully, “I hadn’t tumbled to what he
was at. I give you my word of honour I hadn’t the dimmest idea that he
was after anything in particular. I thought he was simply a good old
sport with lots of money, which he knew how to spend in sensible ways.”
“The criminal part of the business was mentioned later on, I suppose?”
“I don’t know that there’s anything criminal about it,” said Sam. “I’m
jolly well sure it wasn’t wrong, under the circumstances. But it may
have been criminal. That’s just what I want you to tell me.
“I’ll give you my opinion,” I said, “when I hear what it was.”
“Gun-running,” said Sam.
Gun-running has for some time been a popular sport in Ireland, and I
find it very difficult to say whether it is against the law or not. The
Government goes in for trying to stop it, which looks as if a gun-runner
might be prosecuted when caught. On the other hand, the Government never
prosecutes gun-runners, even those who openly boast of their exploits,
and that looks as if it were quite a legal amusement. I promised Sam
that I would consider the point, and I asked him to tell me exactly what
he did.
“Well,” he said, “when I heard it was gunrunning I simply jumped at the
chance. Any fellow would. I said I’d start right away, if he liked. As a
matter of fact, we didn’t start for nearly a fortnight. The boat turned
out to be the _Pegeen_. You know the _Pegeen_, don’t you?”
I did not. I am not a sailor, and except that I cannot help seeing
paragraphs about _Shamrock IV_. in the daily papers I do not think I
know the name of a single yacht.
“Well,” said Sam, “she’s O’Meara’s boat I’ve sailed in her sometimes in
cruiser races. She’s slow and never does any good, but she’s a fine sea
boat. My idea was that Hazlewood had hired her, and I didn’t find out
till after we had started that O’Meara was on board. That surprised me
a bit, for O’Meara goes in for being rather an extreme kind of
Nationalist--not the sort of fellow you’d expect to be running guns for
Carson and the Ulster Volunteers. However, I was jolly glad to see him.
He crawled out of the cabin when we were a couple of miles out of the
harbour, and by that time I’d have been glad to see anyone who knew one
end of the boat from the other. Old Hazlewood was all right; but the
other three men were simply rotters, the sort of fellows who’d be just
as likely as not to take a pull on a topsail halyard when told to slack
away the lee runner. I was just making up my mind to work the boat
single-handed when O’Meara turned up. There was a middling fresh breeze
from the west, and we were going south on a reach. I didn’t get much
chance of a talk with O’Meara because he was in one watch and I in the
other--had to be, of course, on account of being the only two who knew
anything about working the boat. I did notice, though, that when he
spoke to Hazlewood he called him Cassidy. However, that was no business
of mine. We sailed pretty nearly due south that day and the next, and
the next after that. Then we hove to.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Ask me another,” said Sam. “I told you I couldn’t navigate. I hadn’t an
idea within a hundred miles where we were. What’s more, I didn’t care.
I was having a splendid time, and had succeeded in knocking some sort of
sense into the other fellow in my watch. Hazlewood steered, and barring
that he was sea-sick for eight hours, my man turned out to be a decent
sort, and fairly intelligent. He said his name was Temple, but Hazlewood
called him O’Reilly as often as not.”
“You seem to have gone in for a nice variety of names,” I said. “What
did you call yourself?”
“I stuck to my own name, of course. I wasn’t doing anything to be
ashamed of. If we’d been caught and the thing had turned out to be
a crime--I don’t know whether it was or not, but if it was, I
suppose------”
“I suppose I should have paid your fine,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks, awfully. I rather expected you would
whenever I thought about that part of it, but I very seldom did.”
“What happened when you lay to?”
“Nothing at first. We bumped about a bit for five or six hours, and
Temple got frightfully sick again. I never saw a man sicker. Hazlewood
kept on muddling about with charts, and doing sums on sheets of paper,
and consulting with O’Meara. I suppose they wanted to make sure that
they’d got to the right place. At last, just about sunset, a small
steamer turned up. She hung about all night, and next day we started
early, about four o’clock, and got the guns out of her, or some of them.
We couldn’t take the whole cargo, of course, in a 30-ton yacht I don’t
know how many more guns she had. Perhaps she hadn’t any more. Only our
little lot Anyhow, I was jolly glad when the job was over. There was
a bit of a roll--nothing much, you know, but quite enough to make it
pretty awkward. Temple got over his sea-sickness, which was a comfort.
I suppose the excitement cured him. The way we worked was this--but I
daresay you wouldn’t understand, even if I told you.”
“Is it very technical? I mean, must you use many sea words?”
“Must,” said Sam. “We were at sea, you know.”
“Well,” I said, “perhaps you’d better leave that part out. Tell me what
you did with the guns when you’d got them.”
“Right. It was there the fun really came in. Not that I’m complaining
about the other part. It was sport all right, but the funny part, the
part you’ll like, came later. What _about_ another cigar?”