“Look at that! Ralph, just look at that!”
Ten yards or so ahead of us loomed the back of a giant. He was striding
on with huge steps, a black cloak was flung about him, and he wore no
hat. Maybe it was the cloak, swaying this way and that, and one end
flapping over a shoulder, that made the man seem taller than he really
was--but it was a colossal back.
“It’s reminiscent,” Tarlyon murmured. “I can’t help a feeling about that
back--it’s reminiscent.”
“It’s reminiscent,” I whispered, “of a back I once lent money to. One
hundred pounds it was....”
We quickened our pace. The huge figure passed under the light of a lamp,
and the light fell on his bare head, and his hair flamed up like fire.
The huge figure, the arrogant walk, the flaming ginger hair....
“Red Antony!” I murmured.
“And we thought he was dead!” muttered Tarlyon--as though Red Antony
could have died without the noise of his death-rattle confounding the
thunder of the guns that killed many better men! Could a man who lived
so noisily die as other men? And yet, because the lean years of peace
had passed without sight or sign of him, we had believed the rumour that
had had it that Sir Antony Poole had risen to be sergeant in a Canadian
storm battalion and had then died; which had seemed natural in a kind of
way, for the worst German shot couldn’t, one thought, have consistently
missed six-foot-four under a crown of flaming hair.
If there was a man who did not know, or know of, Antony Poole in the
careless years before the war, then there must have been something the
matter with his eyes or ears. For Red Antony was a famous sight in every
crowded place in London, and achieved considerable nonentity as the
noisiest and worst-tempered rascal since Fighting Fitzgerald of the
Regency. He crashed, did Antony, in furious idiocy from row to row and
roguery to roguery, so that the day inevitably came when no decent man
or woman would be seen speaking to the man. Oh, a calamitous pair, the
brothers Poole! For one night his brother, the Great Sir Roger,
brilliant and sardonic Roger, dark and successful Roger, good sportsman
and lovable fellow--one night our Roger put a bullet through his head,
and at the inquest the amazed world heard that he had done this
unbelievable thing because the police were hammering at the door with a
warrant for his arrest on a charge of fraud. This we, his friends, did
not believe. The police may have been hammering at the door, we said,
but the police are notoriously promiscuous about the doors they hammer
at. “Fraud be damned in connection with Roger Poole!”--that is what we
said. Why, he was fine, that Roger--_fine_! Thus we mourned him, once
the wealthiest and wittiest of our company, and we defended his memory
against the few who dared impugn it. But the disappearance of the red
giant who was now Sir Antony Poole we did not mourn, for from the day of
the inquest, at which he broke down and wept like a stricken child, he
had not been seen in London until this night in Park Lane.