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George MacDonald - "The Light Princess"

Dr. Martin Luther, 1537 - "The Smalcald Articles"

George MacDonald - "The Light Princess"

Martin Ward. - "At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald"

Raffles, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman

E >> E. W. Hornung >> Raffles, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman




"It's the most sporting chase I was ever in," said he.

"All my fault!"

"My dear Bunny, I wouldn't have missed it for the world!"

Nor would he forge ahead of me, though he could have done so in a
moment, he who from his boyhood had done everything of the kind
so much better than anybody else. No, he must ride a wheel's
length behind me, and now we could not only hear the boys
running, but breathing also. And then of a sudden I saw Raffles
on my right striking with his torch; a face flew out of the
darkness to meet the thick glass bulb with the glowing wire
enclosed; it was the face of the boy Olphert, with his enviable
moustache, but it vanished with the crash of glass, and the naked
wire thickened to the eye like a tuning-fork struck red-hot.

I saw no more of that. One of them had crept up on my side also;
as I looked, hearing him pant, he was grabbing at my left handle,
and I nearly sent Raffles into the hedge by the sharp turn I took
to the right. His wheel's length saved him. But my boy could
run, was overhauling me again, seemed certain of me this time,
when all at once the Sunbeam ran easily; every ounce of my weight
with either foot once more, and I was over the crest of the hill,
the gray road reeling out from under me as I felt for my brake.
I looked back at Raffles. He had put up his feet. I screwed my
head round still further, and there were the boys in their
pyjamas, their hands upon their knees, like so many
wicket-keepers, and a big man shaking his fist. There was a
lamp-post on the hill-top, and that was the last I saw.

We sailed down to the river, then on through Thames Ditton as far
as Esher Station, when we turned sharp to the right, and from the
dark stretch by Imber Court came to light in Molesey, and were
soon pedalling like gentlemen of leisure through Bushey Park, our
lights turned up, the broken torch put out and away. The big
gates had long been shut, but you can manoeuvre a bicycle through
the others. We had no further adventures on the way home, and
our coffee was still warm upon the hob.

"But I think it's an occasion for Sullivans," said Raffles, who
now kept them for such. "By all my gods, Bunny, it's been the
most sporting night we ever had in our lives! And do you know
which was the most sporting part of it?"

"That up-hill ride?"

"I wasn't thinking of it."

"Turning your torch into a truncheon?"

"My dear Bunny! A gallant lad--I hated hitting him."

"I know," I said. "The way you got us out of the house!"

"No, Bunny," said Raffles, blowing rings. "It came before that,
you sinner, and you know it!"

"You don't mean anything I did?" said I, self-consciously, for I
began to see that this was what he did mean. And now at latest
it will also be seen why this story has been told with undue and

inexcusable gusto; there is none other like it for me to tell; it
is my one ewe-lamb in all these annals. But Raffles had a ruder
name for it.

"It was the Apotheosis of the Bunny," said he, but in a tone I
never shall forget.

"I hardly knew what I was doing or saying," I said. "The whole
thing was a fluke."

"Then," said Raffles, "it was the kind of fluke I always trusted
you to make when runs were wanted."

And he held out his dear old hand.


THE KNEES OF THE GODS

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 neverknown. 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."


II

Now I made as bad a soldier (except at heart) as Raffles made a
good one, and I could not say a harder thing of myself. My
ignorance of matters military was up to that time unfathomable,
and is still profound. I was always a fool with horses, though I
did not think so at one time, and I had never been any good with
a gun. The average Tommy may be my intellectual inferior, but he
must know some part of his work better than I ever knew any of
mine. I never even learnt to be killed. I do not mean that I
ever ran away. The South African Field Force might have been
strengthened if I had.

The foregoing remarks do not express a pose affected out of
superiority to the usual spirit of the conquering hero, for no
man was keener on the war than I, before I went to it. But one
can only write with gusto of events (like that little affair at
Surbiton) in which one has acquitted oneself without discredit,
and I cannot say that of my part in the war, of which I now
loathe the thought for other reasons. The battlefield was no
place for me, and neither was the camp. My ineptitude made me
the butt of the looting, cursing, swash-buckling lot who formed
the very irregular squadron which we joined; and it would have
gone hard with me but for Raffles, who was soon the darling
devil of them all, but never more loyally my friend. Your
fireside fire-eater does not think of these things. He imagines
all the fighting to be with the enemy. He will probably be
horrified to hear that men can detest each other as cordially in
khaki as in any other wear, and with a virulence seldom inspired
by the bearded dead-shot in the opposite trench. To the
fireside fire-eater, therefore (for you have seen me one myself),
I dedicate the story of Corporal Connal, Captain Bellingham, the
General, Raffles, and myself.

I must be vague, for obvious reasons. The troop is fighting as I
write; you will soon hear why I am not; but neither is Raffles,
nor Corporal Connal. They are fighting as well as ever, those
other hard-living, harder-dying sons of all soils; but I am not
going to say where it was that we fought with them. I believe
that no body of men of equal size has done half so much heroic
work. But they had got themselves a bad name off the field, so
to speak; and I am not going to make it worse by saddling them
before the world with Raffles and myself, and that ruffian
Connal.

The fellow was a mongrel type, a Glasgow Irishman by birth and
upbringing, but he had been in South Africa for years, and he
certainly knew the country very well. This circumstance, coupled
with the fact that he was a very handy man with horses, as all
colonists are, had procured him the first small step from the
ranks which facilitates bullying if a man be a bully by nature,
and is physically fitted to be a successful one. Connal was a
hulking ruffian, and in me had ideal game. The brute was
offensive to me from the hour I joined. The details are of no
importance, but I stood up to him at first in words, and finally
for a few seconds on my feet. Then I went down like an ox, and
Raffles came out of his tent. Their fight lasted twenty minutes,
and Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully
conventional, for the bully was a bully no more.

But I began gradually to suspect that he was something worse.
All this time we were fighting every day, or so it seems when I
look back. Never a great engagement, and yet never a day when we
were wholly out of touch with the enemy. I had thus several
opportunities of watching the other enemy under fire, and had
almost convinced myself of the systematic harmlessness of his own
shooting, when a more glaring incident occurred.

One night three troops of our squadron were ordered to a certain
point whither they had patrolled the previous week; but our own
particular troop was to stay behind, and in charge of no other
than the villanous corporal, both our officer and sergeant having
gone into hospital with enteric. Our detention, however, was
very temporary, and Connal would seem to have received the usual
vague orders to proceed in the early morning to the place where
the other three companies had camped. It appeared that we were
to form an escort to two squadron-wagons containing kits,
provisions, and ammunition.

Before daylight Connal had reported his departure to the
commanding officer, and we passed the outposts at gray dawn.
Now, though I was perhaps the least observant person in the
troop, I was not the least wideawake where Corporal Connal was
concerned, and it struck me at once that we were heading in the
wrong direction. My reasons are not material, but as a matter of
fact our last week's patrol had pushed its khaki tentacles both
east and west; and eastward they had met with resistance so
determined as to compel them to retire; yet it was eastward that
we were travelling now. I at once spurred alongside Raffles, as
he rode, bronzed and bearded, with warworn wide-awake over eyes
grown keen as a hawk's, and a cutty-pipe sticking straight out
from his front teeth. I can see him now, so gaunt and grim and
debonair, yet already with much of the nonsense gone out of him,
though I thought he only smiled on my misgivings.

"Did he get the instructions, Bunny, or did we? Very well, then;
give the devil a chance."

There was nothing further to be said, but I felt more crushed
than convinced; so we jogged along into broad daylight, until
Raffles himself gave a whistle of surprise.

"A white flag, Bunny, by all my gods!"

I could not see it; he had the longest sight in all our squadron;
but in a little the fluttering emblem, which had gained such a
sinister significance in most of our eyes, was patent even to
mine. A little longer, and the shaggy Boer was in our midst upon
his shaggy pony, with a half-scared, half-incredulous look in his
deep-set eyes. He was on his way to our lines with some
missive, and had little enough to say to us, though frivolous and
flippant questions were showered upon him from most saddles.

"Any Boers over there?" asked one, pointing in the direction in
which we were still heading.

"Shut up!" interjected Raffles in crisp rebuke.

The Boer looked stolid but sinister.

"Any of our chaps?" added another.

The Boer rode on with an open grin.

And the incredible conclusion of the matter was that we were
actually within their lines in another hour; saw them as large as
life within a mile and a half on either side of us; and must
every man of us have been taken prisoner had not every man but
Connal refused to go one inch further, and had not the Boers
themselves obviously suspected some subtle ruse as the only
conceivable explanation of so madcap a manoeuvre. They allowed
us to retire without firing a shot; and retire you may be sure
we did, the Kaffirs flogging their teams in a fury of fear, and
our precious corporal sullen but defiant.

I have said this was the conclusion of the matter, and I blush to
repeat that it practically was. Connal was indeed wheeled up
before the colonel, but his instructions were not written
instructions, and he lied his way out with equal hardihood and
tact.

"You said 'over there,' sir," he stoutly reiterated; and the
vagueness with which such orders were undoubtedly given was the
saving of him for the time being.

I need not tell you how indignant I felt, for one.

"The fellow is a spy!" I said to Raffles, with no nursery oath,
as we strolled within the lines that night.

He merely smiled in my face.

"And have you only just found it out, Bunny? I have known it
almost ever since we joined; but this morning I did think we had
him on toast."

"It's disgraceful that we had not," cried I. "He ought to have
been shot like a dog."

"Not so loud, Bunny, though I quite agree; but I don't regret
what has happened as much as you do. Not that I am less
bloodthirsty than you are in this case, but a good deal more so!
Bunny, I'm mad-keen on bowling him out with my own unaided
hand--though I may ask you to take the wicket. Meanwhile, don't
wear all your animosity upon your sleeve; the fellow has friends
who still believe in him; and there is no need for you to be
more openly his enemy than you were before."

Well, I can only vow that I did my best to follow this sound
advice; but who but a Raffles can control his every look? It was
never my forte, as you know, yet to this day I cannot conceive
what I did to excite the treacherous corporal's suspicions. He
was clever enough, however, not to betray them, and lucky enough
to turn the tables on us, as you shall hear.


III

Bloemfontein had fallen since our arrival, but there was plenty
of fight in the Free Staters still, and I will not deny that it
was thes gentry who were showing us the sport for which our
corps came in. Constant skirmishing was our portion, with now
and then an action that you would know at least by name, did I
feel free to mention them. But I do not, and indeed it is better
so. I have not to describe the war even as I saw it, I am
thankful to say, but only the martial story of us two and those
others of whom you wot. Corporal Connal was the dangerous
blackguard you have seen. Captain Bellingham is best known for
his position in the batting averages a year or two ago, and for
his subsequent failure to obtai a place in any of the five Test
Matches. But I only think of him as the officer who recognized
Raffles.

We had taken a village, making quite a little name for it and for
ourselves, and in the village our division was reinforced by a
fresh brigade of the Imperial troops. It was a day of rest, our
first for weeks, but Raffles and I spent no small part of it in
seeking high and low for a worthy means of quenching the kind of
thirst which used to beset Yeomen and others who had left good
cellars for the veldt. The old knack came back to us both,
though I believe that I alone was conscious of it at the time;
and we were leaving the house, splendidly supplied, when we
almost ran into the arms of an infantry officer, with a scowl
upon his red-hot face, and an eye-glass flaming at us in the sun.

"Peter Bellingham!" gasped Raffles under his breath, and then we
saluted and tried to pass on, with the bottles ringing like
church-bells under our khaki. But Captain Bellingham was a hard
man.

"What have you men been doin'?" drawled he.

"Nothing, sir," we protested, like innocence with an injury.

"Lootin' 's forbidden," said he. "You had better let me see
those bottles."

"We are done," whispered Raffles, and straightway we made a
sideboard of the stoop across which he had crept at so
inopportune a moment. I had not the heart to raise my eyes
again, yet it was many moments before the officer broke silence.

"Uam Var!" he murmured reverentially at last. "And Long John of
Ben Nevis! The first drop that's been discovered in the whole
psalm-singing show! What lot do you two belong to?"

I answered.

"I must have your names."

In my agitation I gave my real one. Raffles had turned away, as
though in heart-broken contemplation of our lost loot. I saw the
officer studying his half-profile with an alarming face.

"What's YOUR name?" he rapped out at last.

But his strange, low voice said plainly that he knew, and Raffles
faced him with the monosyllable of confession and assent. I did
not count the seconds until the next word, but it was Captain
Bellingham who uttered it at last.

"I thought you were dead."

"Now you see I am not."

"But you are at your old games!"

"I am not," cried Raffles, and his tone was new to me. I have
seldom heard one more indignant. "Yes," he continued, "this is
loot, and the wrong 'un will out. That's what you're thinking,
Peter--I beg your pardon--sir. But he isn't let out in the
field! We're playing the game as much as you are, old--sir."

The plural number caused the captain to toss me a contemptuous
look. "Is this the fellah who was taken when you swam for it?"
he inquired, relapsing into his drawl. Raffles said I was, and
with that took a passionate oath upon our absolute rectitude as
volunteers. There could be no doubting him; but the officer's
eyes went back at the bottles on the stoop.

"But look at those," said he; and as he looked himself the light
eye melted in his fiery face. "And I've got Sparklets in my
tent," he sighed. "You make it in a minute!"

Not a word from Raffles, and none, you may be sure, from me.
Then suddenly Bellingham told me where his tent was, and, adding
that our case was one for serious consideration, strode in its
direction without another word until some sunlit paces separated
us.

"You can bring that stuff with you," he then flung over a
shoulder-strap, "and I advise you to put it where you had it
before."

A trooper saluted him some yards further on, and looked evilly at
us as we followed with our loot. It was Corporal Connal of ours,
and the thought of him takes my mind off the certainly gallant
captain who only that day had joined our division with the
reinforcements. I could not stand the man myself. He added
soda-water to our whiskey in his tent, and would only keep a
couple of bottles when we came away. Softened by the spirit, to
which disuse made us all a little sensitive, our officer was soon
convinced of the honest part that we were playing for once, and
for fifty minutes of the hour we spent with him he and Raffles
talked cricket without a break. On parting they even shook
hands; that was Long John in the captain's head; but the snob
never addressed a syllable to me.

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