The Black Mask - E. W. Hornung (10 best books of all time txt) 📗

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 kindhearted woman I have never known. 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 schoolfellows 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 sheepdog 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 horseflesh, 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,