Council of War
Raffles was humming a snatch of something too choice for me to recognise
when I drew in my head from the glorious night. The folding-doors were
shut, and the grandfather's clock on one side of them made it almost
midnight. Raffles would not stop his tune for me, but he pointed to the
syphon and decanter, and I replenished my glass. He had a glass beside
him also, which was less usual, but he did not sit down beside his glass;
he was far too fidgety for that; even bothering about a pair of pictures
which had changed places under some zealous hand in his absence, or
rather two of Mr. Hollyer's fine renderings of Watts and Burne-Jones of
which I had never seen Raffles take the slightest notice before. But it
seemed that they must hang where he had hung them, and for once I saw
them hanging straight. The books had also suffered from good intentions;
he gave them up with a shrug. Archives and arcana he tested or examined,
and so a good many minutes passed without a word. But when he stole back
into the inner room, after waiting a little at the folding-doors, there
was still some faint strain upon his lips; it was only when he returned,
shutting the door none too quietly behind him, that he stopped humming
and spoke out with a grimmer face than he had worn all night.
"That boy's in a bigger hole than he thinks. But we must pull him out
between us before play begins. It's one clear call for us, Bunny!"
"Is it a bigger hole than you thought?" I asked, thinking myself of the
conversation which I had managed not to overhear.
"I don't say that, Bunny, though I never should have dreamt of his old
father being in one too. I own I can't understand that. They live in a
regular country house in the middle of Kensington, and there are only the
two of them. But I've given Teddy my word not to go to the old man for
the money, so it's no use talking about it."
But apparently it was what they had been talking about behind the
folding-doors; it only surprised me to see how much Raffles took
it to heart.
"So you have made up your mind to raise the money elsewhere?"
"Before that lad in there opens his eyes."
"Is he asleep already?"
"Like the dead," said Raffles, dropping into his chair and drinking
thoughtfully; "and so he will be till we wake him up. It's a ticklish
experiment, Bunny, but even a splitting head for the first hour's play is
better than a sleepless night; I've tried both, so I ought to know. I
shouldn't even wonder if he did himself more than justice to-morrow; one
often does when just less than fit; it takes off that dangerous edge of
over-keenness which so often cuts one's own throat."
"But what do you think of it all, A.J.?"
"Not so much worse than I let him think I thought."
"But you must have been amazed?"
"I am past amazement at the worst thing the best of us ever does, and
contrariwise of course. Your rich man proves a pauper, and your honest
man plays the knave; we're all of us capable of every damned thing. But
let us thank our stars and Teddy's that we got back just when we did."
"Why at that moment?"
Raffles produced the unfinished cheque, shook his head over it, and sent
it fluttering across to me.
"Was there ever such a childish attempt? They'd have kept him in the bank
while they sent for the police. If ever you want to play this game,
Bunny, you must let me coach you up a bit."
"But it was never one of your games, A.J.!"
"Only incidentally once or twice; it never appealed to me," said Raffles,
sending expanding circlets of smoke to crown the girls on the Golden
Stair that was no longer tilted in a leaning tower. "No, Bunny, an
occasional _exeat_ at school is my modest record as a forger, though I
admit that augured ill. Do you remember how I left my cheque-book about
on purpose for what's happened? To be sinned against instead of sinning,
in all the papers, would have set one up as an honest man for life. I
thought, God forgive me, of poor old Barraclough or somebody of that
kind. And to think it should be 'the friend in whom my soul confided'!
Not that I ever did confide in him, Bunny, much as I love this lad."
Despite the tense of that last statement, it was the old Raffles who was
speaking now, the incisively cynical old Raffles that I still knew the
best, the Raffles of the impudent quotations and jaunty _jeux d'esprit_.
This Raffles only meant half he said--but had generally done the other
half! I met his mood by reminding him (out of his own _Whitaker_) that
the sun rose at 3.51, in case he thought of breaking in anywhere that
night. I had the honour of making Raffles smile.
"I did think of it, Bunny," said he. "But there's only one crib that we
could crack in decency for this money; and our Mr. Shylock's is not the
sort of city that Caesar himself would have taken _ex itinere_. It's a
case for the _testudo_ and all the rest of it. You must remember that
I've been there, Bunny; at least I've visited his 'moving tent,' if one
may jump from an ancient to an 'Ancient and Modern.' And if that was as
impregnable as I found it, his permanent citadel must be perched upon the
very rock of defence!"
"You must tell me about that, Raffles," said I, tiring a little of his
kaleidoscopic metaphors. Let him be as allusive as he liked when there
was no risky work on hand, and I was his lucky and delighted audience
till all hours of the night or morning. But for a deed of darkness I
wanted fewer fireworks, a steadier light from his intellectual
lantern. And yet these were the very moments that inspired his
pyrotechnic displays.
"Oh, I shall tell you all right," said Raffles. "But just now the next
few hours are of more importance than the last few weeks. Of course
Shylock's the man for our money; but knowing our tribesmen as I do, I
think we had better begin by borrowing it like simple Christians."
"Then we have it to pay back again."
"And that's the psychological moment for raiding our 'miser's sunless
coffers'--if he happens to have any. It will give us time to find out."
"But he doesn't keep open office all night," I objected.
"But he opens at nine o'clock in the morning," said Raffles, "to catch
the early stockbroker who would rather be bled than hammered."
"Who told you that?"
"Our Mrs. Shylock."
"You must have made great friends with her?"
"More in pity than for the sake of secrets."
"But you went where the secrets were?"
"And she gave them away wholesale."
"She would," I said, "to you."
"She told me a lot about the impending libel action."
"Shylock _v. Fact?_"
"Yes; it's coming on before the vacation, you know."
"So I saw in some paper."
"But you know what it's all about, Bunny?"
"No, I don't."
"Another old rascal, the Maharajah of Hathipur, and his perfectly
fabulous debts. It seems he's been in our Mr. Shylock's clutches for
years, but instead of taking his pound of flesh he's always increasing
the amount. Of course that's the whole duty of money-lenders, but now
they say the figure runs well into six. No one has any sympathy with that
old heathen; he's said to have been a pal of Nana's before the Mutiny,
and in it up to the neck he only saved by turning against his own lot in
time; in any case it's the pot and the kettle so far as moral colour is
concerned. But I believe it's an actual fact that syndicates have been
formed to buy up the black man's debts and take a reasonable interest,
only the dirty white man always gets to windward of the syndicate.
They're on the point of bringing it off, when old Levy inveigles the
nigger into some new Oriental extravagance. _Fact_ has exposed the whole
thing, and printed blackmailing letters which Shylock swears are
forgeries. That's both their cases in a philippine! The leeches told the
Jew he must do his Carlsbad this year before the case came on; and the
tremendous amount it's going to cost may account for his dunning old
clients the moment he gets back."
"Then why should he lend to you?"
"I'm a new client, Bunny; that makes all the difference. Then we were
very good pals out there."
"But you and Mrs. Shylock were better still?"
"Unbeknowns, Bunny! She used to tell me her troubles when I lent her an
arm and took due care to look a martyr; my hunting friend had coarse
metaphors about heavy-weights and the knacker's yard."
"And yet you came away with the poor soul's necklace?"
Raffles was tapping the chronic cigarette on the table at his elbow; he
stood up to light it, as one does stand up to make the dramatic
announcements of one's life, and he spoke through the flame of the match
as it rose and fell between his puffs.
"No--Bunny--I did not!"
"But you told me you won the Emerald Stakes!" I cried, jumping up
in my turn.
"So I did, Bunny, but I gave them back again."
"You gave yourself away to her, as she'd given him away to you?"
"Don't be a fool, Bunny," said Raffles, subsiding into his chair. "I
can't tell you the whole thing now, but here are the main heads. They're
at the Savoy Hotel, in Carlsbad I mean. I go to Pupp's. We meet. They
stare. I come out of my British shell as the humble hero of the affair at
the other Savoy. I crab my hotel. They swear by theirs. I go to see their
rooms. I wait till I can get the very same thing immediately overhead on
the second floor--where I can even hear the old swine cursing her from
under his mud-poultice! Both suites have balconies that might have been
made for me. Need I go on?"
"I wonder you weren't suspected."
"There's no end to your capacity for wonder, Bunny. I took some sweet old
rags with me on purpose, carefully packed inside a decent suit, and I had
the luck to pick up a foul old German cap that some peasant had cast off
in the woods. I only meant to leave it on them like a card; as it
was--well, I was waiting for the best barber in the place to open his
shop next morning."
"What had happened?"
"A whole actful of unrehearsed effects; that's why I think twice before
taking on old Shylock again. I admire him, Bunny, as a steely foeman. I
look forward to another game with him on his own ground. But I must find
out the pace of the wicket before I put myself on."
"I suppose you had tea with them, and all that sort of thing?"
"Gieshübler!" said Raffles with a shudder. "But I made it last as long as
tea, and thought I had located the little green lamps before I took my
leave. There was a japanned despatch box in one corner. 'That's the
Emerald Isle,' I thought, 'I'll soon have it out of the sea. The old man
won't trust 'em to the old lady after what happened in town,' I needn't
tell you I knew they were there somewhere; he made her wear them even at
the tragic travesty of a Carlsbad hotel dinner."
Raffles was forgetting to be laconic now. I believe he had forgotten
the lad in the next room, and everything else but the breathless battle
that he was fighting over again for my benefit. He told me how he
waited for a dark night, and then slid down from his sitting-room
balcony to the one below. And my emeralds were not in the japanned box
after all; and just as he had assured himself of the fact, the
folding-doors opened "as it might be these," and there stood Dan Levy
"in a suit of swagger silk pyjamas."
"They gave me a sudden respect for him," continued Raffles; "it struck
me, for the first time, that mud baths mightn't be the only ones he ever
took. His face was as evil as ever, but he was utterly unarmed, and I was
not; and yet there he stood and abused me like a pickpocket, as if there
was no chance of my firing, and he didn't care whether I did or not. So I
stuck my revolver nearly in his face, and pulled the hammer up and up.
Good God, Bunny, if I had pulled too hard! But that made him blink a bit,
and I was jolly glad to let it down again. 'Out with those emeralds,'
says I in low German mugged up in case of need. Of course you realise
that I was absolutely unrecognisable, a low blackguard with a blackened
face. 'I don't know what you mean,' says he, 'and I'm damned if I care.'
'_Das halsband_, says I, which means the necklace. 'Go to hell,' says he.
But I struck myself and shook my head and then my fist at him and nodded.
He laughed in my face; and upon my soul we were at a deadlock. So I
pointed to the clock and held up one finger. 'I've one minute to live,
old girl,' says he through the doors, 'if this rotter has the guts to
shoot, and I don't think he has. Why the hell don't you get out the other
way and alarm the 'ouse?' And that raised the siege, Bunny. In comes the
old woman, as plucky as he was, and shoves the necklace into my left
hand. I longed to refuse it. I didn't dare. And the old beast took her
and shook her like a rat, until I covered him again, and swore in German
that if he showed himself on the balcony for the next two minutes he'd be
_ein toter Englander_! That was the other bit I'd got off pat; it was
meant to mean 'a dead Englishman.' And I left the fine old girl clinging
on to him, instead of him to her!"
I emptied my lungs and my glass too. Raffles took a sip himself.
"But the rope was fixed to _your_ balcony, A.J.?"
"But I began by fixing the other end to theirs, and the moment I was
safely up I undid my end and dropped it clear to the ground. They found
it dangling all right when out they rushed together. Of course I'd picked
the right ball in the way of nights; it was bone-dry as well as
pitch-dark, and in five minutes I was helping the rest of the hotel to
search for impossible footprints on the gravel, and to stamp out any
there might conceivably have been."
"So nobody ever suspected you?"
"Not a soul, I can safely say; I was the first my victims bored with the
whole yarn."
"Then why return the swag? It's an old trick of yours, Raffles, but in a
case like this, with a pig like that, I confess I don't see the point."
"You forget the poor old lady, Bunny. She had a dog's life before; after
that the beans he gave her weren't even fit for a dog. I loved her for
her pluck in standing up to him; it beat his hollow in standing up to me;
there was only one reward for her, and it was in my gift."
"But how on earth did you manage that?"
"Not by public presentation, Bunny, nor yet by taking the old dame into
my confidence _more cuniculi!"_
"I suppose you returned the necklace anonymously?"
"As a low-down German burglar would be sure to do! No, Bunny, I planted
it in the woods where I knew it would be found. And then I had to watch
lest it was found by the wrong sort. But luckily Mr. Shylock had sprung a
substantial reward, and all came right in the end. He sent his doctor to
blazes, and had a buck feed and lashings on the night it was recovered.
The hunting man and I were invited to the thanksgiving spread; but I
wouldn't budge from the diet, and he was ashamed to unless I did. It made
a coolness between us, and now I doubt if we shall ever have that
enormous dinner we used to talk about to celebrate our return from a
living tomb."
But I was not interested in that shadowy fox-hunter. "Dan Levy's a
formidable brute to tackle," said I at length, and none too buoyantly.
"That's a very true observation, Bunny; it's also exactly why I so looked
forward to tackling him. It ought to be the kind of conflict that the
halfpenny press have learnt to call Homeric."
"Are you thinking of to-morrow, or of when it comes to robbing Peter to
pay Peter?"
"Excellent, Bunny!" cried Raffles, as though I had made a shot worthy of
his willow. "How the small hours brighten us up!" He drew the curtains
and displayed a window like a child's slate with the sashes ruled across
it. "You perceive how we have tired the stars with talking, and cleaned
them from the sky! The mellifluous Heraclitus can have been no sitter up
o' nights, or his pal wouldn't have boasted about tiring the sun by our
methods. What a lot the two old pets must have missed!"
"You haven't answered my question," said I resignedly. "Nor have you told
me how you propose to go to work to raise this money in the first
instance."
"If you like to light another Sullivan," said Raffles, "and mix yourself
another very small and final one, I can tell you now, Bunny."
And tell me he did.