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Mary Roberts Rinehart - "The Man in Lower Ten"

Hermann Hesse - "Siddhartha"

Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell - "The Square Root of 3"

James Fenimore Cooper - "New York"

Raffles, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman

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




I simply stared at Raffles. Instead of deepening, his lines had
vanished. He looked years younger, mischievous and merry and
alert as I remembered him of old in the breathless crisis of
some madcap escapade. He was holding up his finger; he was
stealing to the window; he was peeping through the blind as
though our side street were Scotland Yard itself; he was stealing
back again, all revelry, excitement, and suspense.

"I half thought they were after me before," said he. "That was
why I made you look. I daren't take a proper look myself, but
what a jest if they were! What a jest!"

"Do you mean the police?" said I.

"The police! Bunny, do you know them and me so little that you
can look me in the face and ask such a question? My boy, I'm
dead to them--off their books--a good deal deader than being off
the hooks! Why, if I went to Scotland Yard this minute, to give
myself up, they'd chuck me out for a harmless lunatic. No, I
fear an enemy nowadays, and I go in terror of the sometime
friend, but I have the utmost confidence in the dear police."

"Then whom do you mean?"

"The Camorra!"

I repeated the word with a different intonation. Not that I had
never heard of that most powerful and sinister of secret
societies; but I failed to see on what grounds Raffles should
jump to the conclusion that these everyday organ-grinders
belonged to it.

"It was one of Corbucci's threats," said he. "If I killed him
the Camorra would certainly kill me; he kept on telling me so;
it was like his cunning not to say that he would put them on my
tracks whether or no."

"He is probably a member himself!"

"Obviously, from what he said."

"But why on earth should you think that these fellows are?" I
demanded, as that brazen voice came rasping through a second
verse.

"I don't think. It was only an idea. That thing is so
thoroughly Neapolitan, and I never heard it on a London organ
before. Then again, what should bring them back here?"

I peeped through the blind in my turn; and, to be sure, there
was the fellow with the blue chin and the white teeth watching
our windows, and ours only, as he bawled.

"And why?" cried Raffles, his eyes dancing when I told him.

"Why should they come sneaking back to us? Doesn't that look
suspicious, Bunny; doesn't that promise a lark?"

"Not to me," I said, having the smile for once. "How many
people, should you imagine, toss them five shilling for as many
minutes of their infernal row? You seem to forget that's what
you did an hour ago!"

Raffles had forgotten. His blank face confessed the fact. Then
suddenly he burst outlaughing at himself.

"Bunny," said he, "you've no imagination, and I never knew I had
so much! Of course you're right. I only wish you were not, for
there's nothing I should enjoy more than taking on another
Neapolitan or two. You see, I owe them something still! I
didn't settle in full. I owe them more than ever I shall pay
them on this side Styx!"

He had hardened even as he spoke: the lines and the years had
come again, and his eyes were flint and steel, with an honest
grief behind the glitter.


THE LAST LAUGH

As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, the pick of our
exploits, from a frankly criminal point of view, are of least
use for the comparatively pure purposes of these papers. They
might be appreciated in a trade journal (if only that want could
be supplied), by skilled manipulators of the jemmy and the large
light bunch; but, as records of unbroken yet insignificant
success, they would be found at once too trivial and too
technical, if not sordid and unprofitable into the bargain. The
latter epithets, and worse, have indeed already been applied, if
not to Raffles and all his works, at least to mine upon Raffles,
by more than one worthy wielder of a virtuous pen. I need not
say how heartily I disagree with that truly pious opinion. So
far from admitting a single word of it, I maintain it is the
liveliest warning that I am giving to the world. Raffles was a
genius, and he could not make it pay! Raffles had invention,
resource, incomparable audacity, and a nerve in ten thousand.
He was both strategian and tactician, and we all now know the
difference between the two. Yet for months he had been hiding
like a rat in a hole, unable to show even his altered face by
night or day without risk, unless another risk were courted by
three inches of conspicuous crepe. Then thus far our rewards
had oftener than not been no reward at all. Altogether it was
a very different story from the old festive, unsuspected, club
and cricket days, with their noctes ambrosianae at the Albany.

And now, in addition to the eternal peril of recognition, there
was yet another menace of which I knew nothing. I thought no
more of our Neapolitan organ-grinders, though I did often think
of the moving page that they had torn for me out of my friend's
strange life in Italy. Raffles never alluded to the subject
again, and for my part I had entirely forgotten his wild ideas
connecting the organ-grinders with the Camorra, and imagining
them upon his own tracks. I heard no more of it, and thought as
little, as I say. Then one night in the autumn--I shrink from
shocking the susceptible for nothing--but there was a certain
house in Palace Gardens, and when we got there Raffles would
pass on. I could see no soul in sight, no glimmer in the
windows. But Raffles had my arm, and on we went without talking
about it. Sharp to the left on the Notting Hill side, sharper
still up Silver Street, a little tacking west and south, a
plunge across High Street, and presently we were home.

"Pyjamas first," said Raffles, with as much authority as though
it mattered. It was a warm night, however, though September,
and I did not mind until I came in clad as he commanded to find
the autocrat himself still booted and capped. He was peeping
through the blind, and the gas was still turned down. But he
said that I could turn it up, as he helped himself to a
cigarette and nothing with it.

"May I mix you one?" said I.

"No, thanks."

"What's the trouble?"

"We were followed."

"Never!"

"You never saw it."

"But YOU never looked round."

"I have an eye at the back of each ear, Bunny."

I helped myself and I fear with less moderation than might have
been the case a minute before.

"So that was why--"

"That was why," said Raffles, nodding; but he did not smile, and
I put down my glass untouched.

"They were following us then!"

"All up Palace Gardens."

"I thought you wound about coming back over the hill."

"Nevertheless, one of them's in the street below at this moment."

No, he was not fooling me. He was very grim. And he had not
taken off a thing; perhaps he did not think it worth while.

"Plain clothes?" I sighed, following the sartorial train of
thought, even to the loathly arrows that had decorated my person
once already for a little aeon. Next time they would giveme
double. The skilly was in my stomach when I saw Raffles's face.

"Who said it was the police, Bunny?" said he. "It's the
Italians. They're only after me; they won't hurt a hair of YOUR
head, let alone cropping it! Have a drink, and don't mind me.
I shall score them off before I'm done."

"And I'll help you!"

"No, old chap, you won't. This is my own little show. I've
known about it for weeks. I first tumbled to it the day those
Neapolitans came back with their organs, though I didn't
seriously suspect things then; they never came again, those
two, they had done their part. That's the Camorra all over,
from all accounts. The Count I told you about is pretty high up
in it, by the way he spoke, but there will be grades and grades
between him and the organ-grinders. I shouldn't be surprised
if he had every low-down Neapolitan ice-creamer in the town upon
my tracks! The organization's incredible. Then do you remember
the superior foreigner who came to the door a few days
afterwards? You said he had velvet eyes."

"I never connected him with those two!"

"Of course you didn't, Bunny, so you threatened to kick the
fellow downstairs, and only made them keener on the scent. It
was too late to say anything when you told me. But the very
next time I showed my nose outside I heard a camera click as I
passed, and the fiend was a person with velvet eyes. Then there
was a lull--that happened weeks ago. They had sent me to Italy
for identification by Count Corbucci."

"But this is all theory," I exclaimed. "How on earth can you
know?"

"I don't know," said Raffles, "but I should like to bet. Our
friend the bloodhound is hanging about the corner near the
pillar-box; look through my window, it's dark in there, and tell
me who he is."

The man was too far away for me to swear to his face, but he
wore a covert-coat of un-English length, and the lamp across the
road played steadily on his boots; they were very yellow, and
they made no noise when he took a turn. I strained my eyes,
and all at once I remembered the thin-soled, low-heeled, splay
yellow boots of the insidious foreigner, with the soft eyes and
the brown-paper face, whom I had turned from the door as a
palpable fraud. The ring at the bell was the first I had heard
of him, there had been no warning step upon the stairs, and my
suspicious eye had searched his feet for rubber soles.

"It's the fellow," I said, returning to Raffles, and I described
his boots.

Raffles was delighted.

"Well done, Bunny; you're coming on," said he. "Now I wonder if
he's been over here all the time, or if they sent him over
expressly? You did better than you think in spotting those
boots, for they can only have been made in Italy, and that
looks like the special envoy. But it's no use speculating. I
must find out."

"How can you?"

"He won't stay there all night."

"Well?"

"When he gets tired of it I shall return the compliment and
follow HIM."

"Not alone," said I, firmly.

"Well, we'll see. We'll see at once," said Raffles, rising.
"Out with the gas, Bunny, while I take a look. Thank you. Now
wait a bit . . . yes! He's chucked it; he's off already; and so

am I!"

But I slipped to our outer door, and held the passage.

"I don't let you go alone, you know."

"You can't come with me in pyjamas."

"Now I see why you made me put them on!"

"Bunny, if you don't shift I shall have to shift you. This is
my very own private one-man show. But I'll be back in an
hour--there!"

"You swear?"

"By all my gods."

I gave in. How could I help giving in? He did not look the man
that he had been, but you never knew with Raffles, and I could
not have him lay a hand on me. I let him go with a shrug and
my blessing, then ran into his room to see the last of him from
the window.

The creature in the coat and boots had reached the end of our
little street, where he appeared to have hesitated, so that
Raffles was just in time to see which way he turned. And
Raffles was after him at an easy pace, and had himself almost
reached the corner when my attention was distracted from the
alert nonchalance of his gait. I was marvelling that it alone
had not long ago betrayed him, for nothing about him was so
unconsciously characteristic, when suddenly I realized that
Raffles was not the only person in the little lonely street.
Another pedestrian had entered from the other end, a man heavily
built and clad, with an astrakhan collar to his coat on this
warm night, and a black slouch hat that hid his features from
my bird's-eye view. His steps were the short and shuffling ones
of a man advanced in years and in fatty degeneration, but of a
sudden they stopped beneath my very eyes. I could have dropped
a marble into the dinted crown of the black felt hat. Then, at
the same moment, Raffles turned the corner without looking
round, and the big man below raised both his hands and his face.
Of the latter I saw only the huge white moustache, like a
flying gull, as Raffles had described it; for at a glance I
divined that this was his arch-enemy, the Count Corbucci himself.

I did not stop to consider the subtleties of the system by which
the real hunter lagged behind while his subordinate pointed the
quarry like a sporting dog. I left the Count shuffling onward
faster than before, and I jumped into some clothes as though the
flats were on fire. If the Count was going to follow Raffles in
his turn, then I would follow the Count in mine, and there would
be a midnight procession of us through the town. But I found
no sign of him in the empty street, and no sign in the Earl's
Court Road, that looked as empty for all its length, save for a
natural enemy standing like a waxwork figure with a glimmer at
his belt.

"Officer," I gasped, "have you seen anything of an old gentleman
with a big white mustache?"

The unlicked cub of a common constable seemed to eye me the more
suspiciously for the flattering form of my address.

"Took a hansom," said he at length.

A hansom! Then he was not following the others on foot; there
was no guessing his game. But something must be said or done.

"He's a friend of mine," I explained, "and I want to overtake
him. Did you hear where he told the fellow to drive?"

A curt negative was the policeman's reply to that; and if ever I
take part in a night assault-at-arms, revolver versus baton, in
the back kitchen, I know which member of the Metropolitan Police
Force I should like for my opponent.

If there was no overtaking the Count, however,it should be a
comparatively simple matter in the case of the couple on foot,
and I wildly hailed the first hansom that crawled into my ken.
I must tell Raffles who it was that I had seen; the Earl's
Court Road was long, and the time since he vanished in it but a
few short minutes. I drove down the length of that useful
thoroughfare, with an eye apiece on either pavement, sweeping
each as with a brush, but never a Raffles came into the pan.
Then I tried the Fulham Road, first to the west, then to the
east, and in the end drove home to the flat as bold as brass. I
did not realize my indiscretion until I had paid the man and was
on the stairs. Raffles never dreamt of driving all the way
back; but I was hoping now to find him waiting up above. He had
said an hour. I had remembered it suddenly. And now the hour
was more than up. But the flat was as empty as I had left it;
the very light that had encouraged me, pale though it was, as I
turned the corner in my hansom, was but the light that I myself
had left burning in the desolate passage.

I can give you no conception of the night that I spent. Most of
it I hung across the sill, throwing a wide net with my ears,
catching every footstep afar off, every hansom bell farther
still, only to gather in some alien whom I seldom even landed
in our street. Then I would listen at the door.

He might come over the roof; and eventually some one did; but
now it was broad daylight, and I flung the door open in the
milkman's face, which whitened at the shock as though I had
ducked him in his own pail.

"You're late," I thundered as the first excuse for my
excitement.

"Beg your pardon," said he, indignantly, "but I'm half an hour
before my usual time."

"Then I beg yours," said I; "but the fact is, Mr. Maturin has had
one of his bad nights, and I seem to have been waiting hours for
milk to make him a cup of tea."

This little fib (ready enough for Raffles, though I say it)
earned me not only forgiveness but that obliging sympathy which
is a branch of the business of the man at the door. The good
fellow said that he could see I had been sitting up all night,
and he left me pluming myself upon the accidental art with which
I had told my very necessary tarra-diddle. On reflection I gave
the credit to instinct, not accident, and then sighed afresh as I
realized how the influence of the master was sinking into me,
and he Heaven knew where! But my punishment was swift to
follow, for within the hour the bell rang imperiously twice, and
there was Dr. Theobald on our mat; in a yellow Jaeger suit, with
a chin as yellow jutting over the flaps that he had turned up to
hide his pyjamas.

"What's this about a bad night?" said he.

"He couldn't sleep, and he wouldn't let me," I whispered, never
loosening my grasp of the door, and standing tight against the
other wall. "But he's sleeping like a baby now."

"I must see him."

"He gave strict orders that you should not."

"I'm his medical man, and I--"

"You know what he is," I said, shrugging; "the least thing wakes
him, and you will if you insist on seeing him now. It will be
the last time, I warn you! I know what he said, and you don't."

The doctor cursed me under his fiery moustache.

"I shall come up during the course of the morning," he snarled.

"And I shall tie up the bell," I said, "and if it doesn't ring
he'll be sleeping still, but I will not risk waking him by
coming to the door again."

And with that I shut it in his face. I was improving, as
Raffles had said; but what would it profit me if some evil had
befallen him? And now I was prepared for the worst. A boy came
up whistling and leaving papers on the mats; it was getting on
for eight o'clock, and the whiskey and soda of half-past twelve
stood untouched and stagnant in the tumbler. If the worst had
happened to Raffles, I felt that I would either never drink
again, or else seldom do anything else.

Meanwhile I could not even break my fast, but roamed the flat in
a misery not to be described, my very linen still unchanged, my
cheeks and chin now tawny from the unwholesome night. How long
would it go on? I wondered for a time. Then I changed my tune:
how long could I endure it?

It went on actually until the forenoon only, but my endurance
cannot be measured by the time, for to me every hour of it was
an arctic night. Yet it cannot have been much after eleven when
the ring came at the bell, which I had forgotten to tie up after
all. But this was not the doctor; neither, too well I knew, was
it the wanderer returned. Our bell was the pneumatic one that
tells you if the touch be light or heavy; the hand upon it now
was tentative and shy.

The owner of the hand I had never seen before. He was young and
ragged, with one eye blank, but the other ablaze with some fell
excitement. And straightway he burst into a low torrent of
words, of which all I knew was that they were Italian, and
therefore news of Raffles, if only I had known the language!
But dumb-show might help us somewhat, and in I dragged him,
though against his will, a new alarm in his one wild eye.

"Non capite?" he cried when I had him inside and had withstood
the torrent.

"No, I'm bothered if I do!" I answered, guessing his question
from his tone.

"Vostro amico," he repeated over and over again; and then, "Poco
tempo, poco tempo, poco tempo!"

For once in my life the classical education of my public-school
days was of real value. "My pal, my pal, and no time to be
lost!" I translated freely, and flew for my hat.

"Ecco, signore!" cried the fellow, snatching the watch from my
waistcoat pocket, and putting one black thumb-nail on the long
hand, the other on he numeral twelve. "Mezzogiorno--poco tempo
--poco tempo!" And again I seized his meaning, that it was
twenty past eleven, and we must be there by twelve. But where,
but where? It was maddening to be summoned like this, and not to
know what had happened, nor to have any means of finding out.
But my presence of mind stood by me still, I was improving by
seven-league strides, and I crammed my handkerchief between the
drum and hammer of the bell before leaving. The doctor could
ring now till he was black in the face, but I was not coming, and
he need not think it.

I half expected to find a hansom waiting, but there was none, and
we had gone some distance down the Earl's Court Road before we
got one; in fact, we had to run to the stand. Opposite is the
church with the clock upon it, as everybody knows, and at sight
of the dial my companion had wrung his hands; it was close upon
the half-hour.

"Poco tempo--pochissimo!" he wailed. "Bloom-buree Ske-warr," he
then cried to the cabman--"numero trentotto!"

"Bloomsbury Square," I roared on my own account, "I'll show you
the house when we get there, only drive like be-damned!"

My companion lay back gasping in his corner. The small glass
told me that my own face was pretty red.

"A nice show!" I cried; "and not a word can you tell me. Didn't
you bring me a note?"

I might have known by this time that he had not, still I went
through the pantomime of writing with my finger on my cuff. But
he shrugged and shook his head.

"Niente," said he. "Una quistione di vita, di vita!"

"What's that?" I snapped, my early training come in again. "Say
it slowly--andante--rallentando."

Thank Italy for the stage instructions in the songs one used to
murder! The fellow actually understood.

"Una--quistione--di--vita."

"Or mors, eh?" I shouted, and up went the trap-door over our
heads.

"Avanti, avanti, avanti!" cried the Italian, turning up his
one-eyed face.

"Hell-to-leather," I translated, "and double fare if you do it
by twelve o'clock."

But in the streets of London how is one to know the time? In
the Earl's Court Road it had not been half-past, and at Barker's
in High Street it was but a minute later. A long half-mile a
minute, that was going like the wind, and indeed we had done
much of it at a gallop. But the next hundred yards took us five
minutes by the next clock, and which was one to believe? I fell
back upon my own old watch (it was my own), which made it
eighteen minutes to the hour as we swung across the Serpentine
bridge, and by the quarter we were in the Bayswater Road--not up
for once.

"Presto, presto," my pale guide murmured. "Affretatevi--avanti!"

"Ten bob if you do it," I cried through the trap, without the
slightest notion of what we were to do. But it was "una
quistione di vita," and "vostro amico" must and could only be my
miserable Raffles.

What a very godsend is the perfect hansom to the man or woman in
a hurry! It had been our great good fortune to jump into a
perfect hansom; there was no choice, we had to take the first
upon the rank, but it must have deserved its place with the rest
nowhere. New tires, superb springs, a horse in a thousand, and
a driver up to every trick of his trade! In and out we went
like a fast half-back at the Rugby game, yet where the traffic
was thinnest, there were we. And how he knew his way! At the
Marble Arch he slipped out of the main stream, and so into
Wigmore Street, then up and in and out and on until I saw the
gold tips of the Museum palisade gleaming between the horse's
ears in the sun. Plop, plop, plop; ting, ling, ling; bell and
horse-shoes, horse-shoes and bell, until the colossal figure of
C. J. Fox in a grimy toga spelt Bloomsbury Square with my watch
still wanting three minutes to the hour.

"What number?" cried the good fellow over-head.

"Trentotto, trentotto," said my guide, but he was looking to the
right, and I bundled him out to show the house on foot. I had
not half-a-sovereign after all, but I flung our dear driver a
whole one instead, and only wish that it had been a hundred.

Already the Italian had his latch-key in the door of 38, and in
another moment we were rushing up the narrow stairs of as dingy
a London house as prejudiced countryman can conceive. It was
panelled, but it was dark and evil-smelling, and how we should
have found our way even to the stairs but for an unwholesome jet
of yellow gas in the hall, I cannot myself imagine. However,
up we went pell-mell, to the right-about on the half-landing,
and so like a whirlwind into the drawing-room a few steps
higher. There the gas was also burning behind closed shutters,
and the scene is photographed upon my brain, though I cannot
have looked upon it for a whole instant as I sprang in at my
leader's heels.

This room also was panelled, and in the middle of the wall on
our left, his hands lashed to a ring-bolt high above his head,
his toes barely touching the floor, his neck pinioned by a strap
passing through smaller ring-bolts under either ear, and every
inch of him secured on the same principle, stood, or rather
hung, all that was left of Raffles, for at the first glance I
believed him dead. A black ruler gagged him, the ends lashed
behind his neck, the blood upon it caked to bronze in the
gaslight. And in front of him, ticking like a sledge-hammer,
its only hand upon the stroke of twelve, stood a simple,
old-fashioned, grandfather's clock--but not for half an instant
longer--only until my guide could hurl himself upon it and send
the whole thing crashing into the corner. An ear-splitting
report accompanied the crash, a white cloud lifted from the
fallen clock, and I saw a revolver smoking in a vice screwed
below the dial, an arrangement of wires sprouting from the dial
itself, and the single hand at once at its zenith and in contact
with these.

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