I burst out laughing.
‘You needn’t be ashamed. You are doing the very thing I was rather hoping you were going to propose the other day on the river.’
‘You were hoping it?’ said Raffles, with his eyes wide open. Indeed, it was his turn to show surprise, and mine to be much more ashamed than I felt.
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘I was quite keen on the idea, but I wasn’t going to propose it.’
‘Yet you would have listened to me the other day?’
Certainly I would, and I told him so without reserve; not brazenly, you understand; not even now with the gusto of a man who savours such an adventure for its own sake, but doggedly, defiantly, through my teeth, as one who had tried to live honestly and had failed. And, while I was about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I dare say, I gave him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that record was written only in one’s own soul. It was the old story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against nature, and there was an end of it.
Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of chequers; why not reconcile oneself to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board, and liked the light the better for the shade. My conclusion he considered absurd.
‘But you err in good company, Bunny, for all the cheap moralists who preach the same twaddle: old Virgil was the first and worst offender of you all. I back myself to climb out of Avernus any day I like, and sooner or later I shall climb out for good. I suppose I can’t very well turn myself into a Limited Liability Company. But I could retire and settle down and live blamelessly ever after. I’m not sure that it couldn’t be done on this pearl alone!’
‘Then you don’t still think it too remarkable to sell?’
‘We might take a fishery and haul it up with smaller fry. It would come after months of ill-luck—just as we were going to sell the schooner; by Jove, it would be the talk of the Pacific!’
‘Well, we’ve got to get it first. Is this von What’s-his-name a formidable cuss?’
‘More so than he looks; and he has the cheek of the devil!’
As he spoke a white drill skirt fluttered past the open state-room door, and I caught a glimpse of an upturned moustache beyond.
‘But is he the chap we have to deal with? Won’t the pearl be in the purser’s keeping?’
Raffles stood at the door, frowning out upon the Solent, but for an instant he turned to me with a sniff.
‘My good fellow, do you suppose the whole ship’s company knows there’s a gem like that aboard? You said that it was worth a hundred thousand pounds; in Berlin they say it’s priceless. I doubt if the skipper himself knows that von Heumann has it on him.’
‘And he has?’
‘Must have.’
‘Then we have only him to deal with?’
He answered me without a word. Something white was fluttering past once more, and Raffles, stepping forth, made the promenaders three.
II
I do not ask to set foot aboard a finer steamship than the Uhlan of the Norddeutscher Lloyd, to meet a kindlier gentleman than her then commander or better fellows than his officers. This much at least let me have the grace to admit. I hated the voyage. It was no fault of anybody connected with the ship; it was no fault of the weather, which was monotonously ideal. Not even in my own heart did the reason reside; conscience and I were divorced at last, and the decree made absolute. With my scruples had fled all fear, and I was ready to revel between bright skies and sparkling sea with the light-hearted detachment of Raffles himself. It was Raffles himself who prevented me, but not Raffles alone. It was Raffles and that Colonial minx on her way home from school.
What he could see in her—but that begs the question. Of course he saw no more than I did, but to annoy me, or perhaps to punish me for my long defection, he must turn his back on me and devote himself to this chit from Southampton to the Mediterranean. They were always together. It was too absurd. After breakfast they would begin, and go on until eleven or twelve at night; there was no intervening hour at which you might not hear her nasal laugh, or his quiet voice talking soft nonsense into her ear. Of course it was nonsense! Is it conceivable that a man like Raffles, with his knowledge of the world, and his experience of women (a side of his character upon which I have purposely never touched, for it deserves another volume)—is it credible, I ask, that such a man could find anything but nonsense to talk by the day together to a giddy young schoolgirl? I would not be unfair for the world. I think I have admitted that the young person had points. Her eyes, I suppose, were really fine, and certainly the shape of the little brown face was charming, so far as mere contour can charm. I admit also more audacity than I cared about, with enviable health, mettle, and vitality. I may not have occasion to report any of this young lady’s speeches (they would scarcely bear it), and am therefore the more anxious to describe her without injustice. I confess to some little prejudice against her. I resented her success with Raffles, of whom, in consequence, I saw less and less each day. It is a mean thing to have to confess, but there must have been something not unlike jealousy rankling within me.
Jealousy there was in another quarter—crude, rampant, undignified jealousy. Captain von Heumann would twirl his moustaches into twin spires, shoot his white cuffs over his rings, and stare at me insolently through his rimless eyeglasses; we ought to have consoled each other, but we never exchanged a syllable. The captain had a murderous scar across one of his cheeks, a present from Heidelberg, and I used to think how he must long to have Raffles there to serve the same. It was not as though von Heumann never had his innings. Raffles let him go in several times a day, for the malicious pleasure of bowling him out as he was ‘getting set’; those were his words when I taxed him disingenuously with obnoxious conduct towards a German on a German boat.
‘You’ll make yourself disliked on board!’
‘By von Heumann merely.’
‘But is that wise when he’s the man we’ve got to diddle?’
‘The wisest thing I ever did. To have chummed up with him would have been fatal—the common dodge.’
I was consoled, encouraged, almost content. I had feared Raffles was neglecting things, and I told him so in a burst. Here we were near Gibraltar, and not a word since the Solent. He shook his head with a smile.
‘Plenty of time, Bunny, plenty of time. We can do nothing before we get to Genoa, and that won’t be till Sunday night. The voyage is still young, and so are we; let’s make the most of things while we can.’
It was after dinner on the promenade deck, and as Raffles spoke he glanced sharply fore and aft, leaving me next moment with a step full of purpose. I retired to the smoking-room, to smoke and read in a corner, and to watch von Heumann, who very soon came to drink beer and to sulk in another.
Few travellers tempt the Red Sea at midsummer; the Uhlan was very empty indeed. She had, however, but a limited supply of cabins on the promenade deck, and there was just that excuse for my sharing Raffles’s room. I could have had one to myself downstairs, but I must be up above. Raffles had insisted that I should insist on the point. So we were together, I think, without suspicion, though also without any object that I could see.
On the Sunday afternoon I was asleep in my berth, the lower one, when the curtains were shaken by Raffles, who was in his shirt-sleeves on the settee.
‘Achilles sulking in his bunk!’
‘What else is there to do?’ I asked him as I stretched and yawned. I noted, however, the good-humour of his tone, and did my best to catch it.
‘I have found something else, Bunny.’
‘I daresa
y!’
‘You misunderstand me. The whippersnapper’s making his century this afternoon. I’ve had other fish to fry.’
I swung my legs over the side of my berth and sat forward, as he was sitting, all attention. The inner door, a grating, was shut and bolted, and curtained like the open port-hole.
‘We shall be at Genoa before sunset,’ continued Raffles. ‘It’s the place where the deed’s got to be done.’
‘So you still mean to do it!’
‘Did I ever say I didn’t?’
‘You have said so little either way.’
‘Advisedly so, my dear Bunny; why spoil a pleasure trip by talking unnecessary shop? But now the time has come. It must be done at Genoa or not at all.’
‘On land?’
‘No, on board, tomorrow night. Tonight would do, but tomorrow is better, in case of mishap. If we were forced to use violence we could get away by the earliest train, and nothing be known till the ship was sailing and von Heumann found dead or drugged—’
‘Not dead!’ I exclaimed.
‘Of course not,’ assented Raffles, ‘or there would be no need for us to bolt; but if we should have to bolt, Tuesday morning is our time, when this ship has got to sail, whatever happens. But I don’t anticipate any violence. Violence is a confession of terrible incompetence. In all these years how many blows have you known me strike? Not one, I believe; but I have been quite ready to kill my man every time, if the worst came to the worst.’
I asked him how he proposed to enter von Heumann’s state-room unobserved, and even through the curtained gloom of ours his face lighted up.
‘Climb into my bunk, Bunny, and you shall see.’
I did so, but could see nothing. Raffles reached across me and tapped the ventilator, a sort of trap-door in the wall above his bed, some eighteen inches long and half that height. It opened outwards into the ventilating shaft.
‘That,’ said he, ‘is our door to fortune. Open it if you like; you won’t see much, because it doesn’t open far; but loosening a couple of screws will set that all right. The shaft, as you may see, is more or less bottomless; you pass under it whenever you go to your bath, and the top is a skylight on the bridge. That’s why this thing has to be done while we’re at Genoa, because they keep no watch on the bridge in port. The ventilator opposite ours is von Heumann’s. It again will only mean a couple of screws, and there’s a beam to stand on while you work.’
‘But if anybody should look from below?’
‘It’s extremely unlikely that anybody will be astir below, so unlikely that we can afford to chance it. No, I can’t have you there to make sure. The great point is that neither of us should be seen from the time we turn in. A couple of ship’s boys do sentry-go on these decks, and they shall be our witnesses; by Jove, it’ll be the biggest mystery that ever was made!’
‘If von Heumann doesn’t resist.’
‘Resist! He won’t get the chance. He drinks too much beer to sleep light, and nothing is so easy as to chloroform a heavy sleeper; you’ve even done it yourself on an occasion of which it’s perhaps unfair to remind you. Von Heumann will be past sensation almost as soon as I get my hand through his ventilator. I shall crawl in over his body, Bunny, my boy!’
‘And I?’
‘You will hand me what I want, and hold the fort in case of accidents, and generally lend me the moral support you’ve made me require. It’s a luxury, Bunny, but I found it devilish difficult to do without it after you turned pi!’
He said that von Heumann was certain to sleep with a bolted door, which he, of course, would leave unbolted, and spoke of other ways of laying a false scent while rifling the cabin. Not that Raffles anticipated a tiresome search. The pearl would be about von Heumann’s person; in fact, Raffles knew exactly where and in what he kept it. Naturally I asked how he could have come by such knowledge, and his answer led up to a momentary unpleasantness.
‘It’s a very old story, Bunny. I really forget in what book it comes; I’m only sure of the Testament. But Samson was the unlucky hero and one Delilah the heroine.’
And he looked so knowing that I could not be in a moment’s doubt as to his meaning.
‘So the fair Australian has been playing Delilah?’ said I.
‘In a very harmless, innocent sort of way.’
‘She got his mission out of him?’
‘Yes, I’ve forced him to score all the points he could, and that was his great stroke, as I hoped it would be. He has even shown Amy the pearl.’
‘Amy, eh! and she promptly told you?’
‘Nothing of the kind. What makes you think so? I had the greatest trouble in getting it out of her.’
His tone should have been a sufficient warning to me. I had not the tact to take it as such. At last I knew the meaning of his furious flirtation, and stood wagging my head and shaking my finger, blinded to his frowns by my own enlightenment.
‘Wily worm!’ said I. ‘Now I see through it all; how dense I’ve been!’
‘Sure you’re not still?’
‘No; now I understand what has beaten me all the week. I simply couldn’t fathom what you saw in that little girl. I never dreamt it was part of the game.’
‘So you think it was that and nothing more?’
‘You deep old dog—of course I do!’
‘You didn’t know she was the daughter of a wealthy squatter?’
‘There are wealthy women by the dozen who would marry you tomorrow.’
‘It doesn’t occur to you that I might like to draw stumps, start clean, and live happily ever after—in the bush?’
‘With that voice? It certainly does not!’
‘Bunny!’ he cried so fiercely that I braced myself for a blow.
But no more followed.
‘Do you think you would live happily?’ I made bold to ask him.
‘God knows!’ he answered. And with that he left me, to marvel at his look and tone, and, more than ever, at the insufficiently exciting cause.
III
Of all the mere feats of cracksmanship which I have seen Raffles perform, at once the most delicate and most difficult was that which he accomplished between one and two o’clock on the Tuesday morning, aboard the North German steamer Uhlan, lying at anchor in Genoa harbour.
Not a hitch occurred. Everything had been foreseen; everything happened as I had been assured everything must. Nobody was about below, only the ship’s boys on deck, and nobody on the bridge. It was twenty-five minutes past one when Raffles, without a stitch of clothing on his body, but with a glass phial, corked with cotton-wool, between his teeth, and a tiny screw-driver behind his ear, squirmed feet first through the ventilator over his berth; and it was nineteen minutes to two when he returned, head first, with the phial still between his teeth, and the cotton-wool rammed home to still the rattling of that which lay like a great grey bean within. He had taken screws out and put them in again; he had unfastened von Heumann’s ventilator and had left it fast as he had found it—fast as he instantly proceeded to make his own. As for von Heumann, it had been enough to place the drenched wad first on his moustache, and then to hold it between his gaping lips; thereafter the intruder had climbed both ways across his shins without eliciting a groan.
And here was the prize—this pearl as large as a filbert—with a pale pink tinge like a lady’s finger-nail—this spoil of the filibustering age—this gift from a European emperor to a South Sea chief. We gloated over it when all was snug. We toasted it in whisky and soda-water laid in overnight in view of the great moment. But the moment was greater, more triumphant, than our most sanguine dreams. All we had now to do was to secrete the gem (which Raffles had prised from its setting, replacing the latter), so that we could stand the strictest search and yet take it ashore with us at Naples; and this Raffles was doing when I turned in. I myself would have landed incontinently,
that night, at Genoa, and bolted with the spoil; he would not hear of it, for a dozen good reasons which will be obvious.
On the whole I do not think that anything was discovered or suspected before we weighed anchor; but I cannot be sure. It is difficult to believe that a man could be chloroformed in his sleep and feel no tell-tale effects, sniff no suspicious odour, in the morning. Nevertheless, von Heumann reappeared as though nothing had happened to him, his German cap over his eyes and his moustaches brushing the peak. And by ten o’clock we were quit of Genoa; the last lean, blue-chinned official had left our decks; the last fruit-seller had been beaten off with bucketsful of water and left cursing us from his boat; the last passenger had come aboard at the last moment—a fussy greybeard who kept the big ship waiting while he haggled with his boatmen over half a lira. But at length we were off, the tug was shed, the lighthouse passed, and Raffles and I leaned together over the rail, watching our shadows on the pale green, liquid, veined marble that again washed the vessel’s side.
Von Heumann was having his innings once more; it was part of the design that he should remain in all day, and so postponed the inevitable hour; and, though the lady looked bored, and was for ever glancing in our direction, he seemed only too willing to avail himself of his opportunities. But Raffles was moody and ill at ease. He had not the air of a successful man. I could but opine that the impending parting at Naples sat heavily on his spirit.
He would neither talk to me, nor would he let me go.
‘Stop where you are, Bunny. I’ve things to tell you. Can you swim?’
‘A bit.’
‘Ten miles?’
‘Ten?’ I burst out laughing. ‘Not one! Why do you ask?’
‘We shall be within a ten miles’ swim of the shore most of the day.’
‘What on earth are you driving at, Raffles?’
‘Nothing; only I shall swim for it if the worst comes to the worst. I suppose you can’t swim under water at all?’
I did not answer his question. I scarcely heard it: cold beads were bursting through my skin.
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