I
“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 never
known. 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.”
Our landlady first wept on hearing our determination, and then longed
to have the pulling of certain whiskers (with the tongs, and they
should be red-hot); but from that day, and for as many as were left to
us, the good soul made more of us than ever. Not that she was at all
surprised; dear brave gentlemen who could look for burglars on their
bicycles at dead of night, it was only what you might expect of them,
bless their lion hearts. I wanted to wink at Raffles, but he would not
catch my eye. He was a ginger-headed Raffles by the end of January, and
it was extraordinary what a difference it made. His most elaborate
disguises had not been more effectual than this simple expedient, and,
with khaki to complete the subdual of his individuality, he had every
hope of escaping recognition in the field. The man he dreaded was the
officer he had known in old days; there were ever so many of him at the
Front; and it was to minimize this risk that we went out second-class
at the beginning of February.
It was a weeping day, a day in a shroud, cold as clay, yet for that
very reason an ideal day upon which to leave England for the sunny
Front. Yet my heart was heavy as I looked my last at her; it was heavy
as the raw, thick air, until Raffles came and leant upon the rail at my
side.
“I know what you are thinking, and you’ve got to stop,” said he. “It’s
on the knees of the gods, Bunny, whether we do or we don’t, and
thinking won’t make us see over their shoulders.”