H----’s last words to me were: “Now look here, Charles, don’t go playing
the fool down there. I know the East End is nowadays supposed to be as
respectable as Kensington and that the cinema has got it beat hollow for
pools of blood, but believe me a chap is still liable to be punctured in
the ribs by a clever boy like Julian Raphael. So be a good fellow and go
back to your nice old Navy and write a book saying which of your brother
Admirals didn’t win Jutland just to show you’re an Admiral as well.”
H---- was right. I was a fool, certainly. But God drops the folly into
the world as well as the wisdom, and surely it’s part of our job to pick
up bits of it. Besides, I’ve never been one for dinner-parties or the
artless prattle of young ladies, and so, thought I, could a man spend
his leave more profitably than in landing a snake like Julian Raphael?
I took myself off down to the East End with my oldest tweeds, a
toothbrush and a growth on my chin. George Tarlyon came with me. He had
scented a row that night, and not the devil himself can keep George from
putting both his feet into the inside of a row. Besides, he wanted to
have a look at Miss Manana Cohen, saying he was a connoisseur of Cohens
and liked nothing so much as to watch them turning into Curzons or
Colquhouns. I wasn’t sorry, for you can’t have a better man in a row
than George Tarlyon, and with his damfool remarks he’d make a miser
forget he was at the Ritz. We took two rooms in Canning Town E., and
very nice rooms they were, over a ham and beef shop, and walked from pub
to pub watching each other’s beards grow and listening for Julian
Raphael. At least, I listened and George talked.
You would naturally have thought that the likely place to find that
smart young man would be round about what journalists call the
“exclusive hotels and night-clubs of the West End.” Not a bit of it. We
soon heard something of Julian Raphael’s ways from one tough or another.
Tarlyon’s idea of getting information delicately about a man was to
threaten to fight anyone who wouldn’t give it to him, and we soon
collected quite a bit that way.
Mr. Raphael was a Socialist, it appeared--remember, I’d guessed he was
clever?--and hated the rich. He hated the rich so bitterly that, though
he had a pretty fat bank-account of his own, he still clung to his old
quarters in the East End. But no one knew, or cared to give, the address
of his “old quarters,” which were probably various. Tarlyon threatened
to fight any number of toughs who didn’t “know” Mr. Raphael’s address,
but they preferred to fight, and in the end George got tired.
Oh, yes, Julian Raphael was certainly watched by the police, but he was
generally somewhere else while the police were watching him. And Miss
Manana Cohen was certainly his young lady-love, and she loved him and
lived with him but he wouldn’t marry her because of another principle he
had, that it was wrong for a man of independent spirit to have a wife of
his own. Nice boy, Mr. Julian Raphael. But it appeared that he loved
Miss Manana very decidedly and discouraged competition. It also appeared
that before he had taken to the downward path he had been a juggler with
knives on the music-halls. Knives again. Tarlyon thought that a pretty
good joke at the time, but he didn’t enjoy it nearly so much later on.
We had been pottering about down there several days and George was just
beginning to think of a nice shave and a bath when we hit on our first
clue. The clue was walking up a grimy side-street by the East India
Docks.
“Oh, pretty!” says George. And she certainly was. She hadn’t seen us.
She was in a hurry.
“We follow,” I said.
“Naturally,” says George. “A nice girl like that! What do you take me
for, a Y. M. C. A.?”
We followed. She walked fast, did Miss Manana. And it was queer, how she
lit up that grimy God-forsaken street. The way she was walking, you
might have taken her for a young gentlewoman “doing” the East End in a
hurry. Tall, lithe, quietly dressed--Julian Raphael’s property! And he’d
made her scream with pain.
“Now what?” snapped George.
She had been about twenty yards ahead of us. Street darkish, deserted,
lined with warehouses, and all closed because it was a Saturday
afternoon. Suddenly, no Manana Cohen. We slipped after her quick as you
like. She had dived down a narrow passage between the warehouses. We
were just in time to see the tail of her skirt whisking through a door
in the wall a few yards up--and just in time to cut in after her.
“Oh!” she gasped. We must have looked a couple of cut-throats. And it
was dark in there. I was panting--nothing like a sailor’s life for
keeping you thoroughly out of training, unless it’s a soldier’s. But
George was all there, being a good dancer.
“Miss Cohen, I believe?” he asks. All in whispers. She just stared at
us. George didn’t want to scare her any more than I did. He was gay, in
that mood of his when he seems to be laughing more at himself than at
anyone else. But she just stared at us. She was tall, as women go, but
we simply towered over the poor child. Then she recognised me and went
as red as a carnation. I couldn’t think why. Tarlyon said comfortingly:
“There, there!”
Then she panted all in a jumble: “I’m sorry I was rude to you the other
night. Really I am. Please go away now, please!”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” I whispered. “We want----”
George, with his foot, gently shut the door behind us. We were in the
passage of the house or whatever it was. It was pitch-dark. I lit
another match.
“But what is it, what do you want?” the girl moaned.
“We just want to have a word with your young man,” said George, the
idiot, in his ordinary voice.
“Oh!” she caught her breath. That gave the show away all right. Julian
Raphael was at home, whatever home was. Then the match went out. And the
lights went on, snap! Julian Raphael stood at the end of the passage,
pointing a revolver.
George said: “Don’t be an ass!”
“Come here!” says Mr. Raphael to the girl.
“No, you don’t!” said George, hauling her to him by the arm.
Julian Raphael smiled in that way he had. “If you don’t let her go at
once,” he says, “I shoot.”
“You what!” I said.
Tarlyon laughed. You can hear him. He said: “Now don’t be a fool all
your life but stand at attention when you speak to my friend here,
because he’s a knight. And put that comic gun away else I’ll come and
hit you.”
I couldn’t help laughing. The young Jew looked so surprised. He’d never
before been talked to just in that way and it bothered him, he was used
to doing the laughing and being taken seriously. But I had laughed too
soon. There was a whizz by my ear, a thud on the door behind me, and a
knife an inch deep in the panel. The surprise had given Manana a chance
to slip away. She was by Mr. Raphael now at the end of the passage.
There wasn’t light enough to make out what was behind them, a stairway
up or a stairway down. Down, I guessed, into the bowels of the earth.
Julian Raphael was smiling. I’ll say it was well thrown, that knife.
Tarlyon was livid. “By God,” he whispered, “threw a knife at us! We
_are_ having a nice weekend!”
I held him back. What was the use? A little child could have led us at
knife-throwing. Julian Raphael said, with that infernal sneer of his:
“Gentlemen, I merely wanted to show you what to expect if you were to
advance another step. I wouldn’t kill you--not yet. One of you, yes.
But it would cause comment, the disappearance of two fools. However, I
might slice bits off your ears. Further, this is my house. Are you not
intruding? Gentlemen, you may go.”
And, you know, we did. What the deuce else was there to do? If Tarlyon
with his infernal chuckling hadn’t roused the man out of his lair we
might have taken him by surprise and learnt something of the whereabouts
of that counterfeiting business. But as it was, “go” was us while the
going was good. And the way Tarlyon swore when we were outside made me
glad it was a Saturday afternoon and the warehouses were closed, else he
might have corrupted the poor workmen.
“What do we do now?” he asked at last. “Lump it?”
“Well, at any rate, we know his address now.”
“Address be blowed! That’s not an address, Charles, but an exit. I’ll
bet our smart friend doesn’t press his trousers in that hole--and, by
Heaven, there you are!”
He made me jump. I hadn’t, didn’t, see anything. I thought it was
another knife.
“Never mind,” snapped George. “Too late now. Come on, man, come on!”
He made me walk on. After reaching daylight from that passage between
the warehouses we had turned to the left, walked on a hundred yards or
so by the front of the warehouses, then to the left again. This, running
parallel to the passage, was a row of quite respectable-looking houses
all stuck together, as quite respectable-looking houses should do in
these times. There are streets and streets of them down there, and I’m
told white women sometimes marry Chinamen just for the pleasure of
living in them. But, as someone has said, white women will do anything.
We had come to the end of a block when Tarlyon set up that howl and then
shut me up.
“What the deuce!” I said again.
George said, walking on: “Jewboy has made one mistake. Naughty Jewboy.
Now have a look at that house we passed. Don’t stare as though you were
an American tailor looking at the Prince of Wales. Casually. The corner
one.”
I turned and looked, casually. It was a house like another, and I said
so. George asked me how far I thought it was from the passage in which I
had nearly fielded Raphael’s knife with my ear. I said it must be a good
way. Two hundred yards at least. There was a whole block of warehouses
and a row of houses in between.
“Quite,” said George. We walked on. “Then how did Mr. Raphael get there
so quick? Not by the road. I just saw a piece of his delightful face
round the curtain of one of the windows. His one mistake, to have let me
see him. There must be an underground passage about two hundred yards
long between his warehouse address and his residence. You’ll bet the
police have never spotted it yet, and I only spotted it because he was
so eager to see us well away. I don’t think he likes us, Charles. But
I’d be pleased to know who is supposed to be living in that house. And
I’d take a bet that there’s a nice counterfeiting _matinée_ going on
this very moment somewhere between that house and that warehouse
passage. Now you say something.”
“The point is, George, do you think he saw you spot him?”
Tarlyon smiled. “There’s always a catch. Trust the God of the Jews to
lay a snag for poor Gentiles. But I don’t know. He mayn’t have seen I
got him. But we will have to act as if he had. Get him quick, else he’ll
be in the air. What’s the time now? Nearly eight. We’ll get back to
civilisation, try and catch H---- at his home address, come down here
to-night and surround the place. Fun. Hurray!”