Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman | Page 3

I know it! You think the luck must
turn; suppose it didn't? We should only have made bad worse. No, my
dear chap, you've plunged enough. Do you put yourself in my hands or
do you not? Very well, then you plunge no more, and I undertake not to
present my check. Unfortunately there are the other men; and still more
unfortunately, Bunny, I'm as hard up at this moment as you are
yourself!"
It was my turn to stare at Raffles. "You?" I vociferated. "You hard up?
How am I to sit here and believe that?"
"Did I refuse to believe it of you?" he returned, smiling. "And, with
your own experience, do you think that because a fellow has rooms in
this place, and belongs to a club or two, and plays a little cricket, he
must necessarily have a balance at the bank? I tell you, my dear man,
that at this moment I'm as hard up as you ever were. I have nothing but
my wits to live on--absolutely nothing else. It was as necessary for me
to win some money this evening as it was for you. We're in the same
boat, Bunny; we'd better pull together."
"Together!" I jumped at it. "I'll do anything in this world for you,
Raffles," I said, "if you really mean that you won't give me away.
Think of anything you like, and I'll do it! I was a desperate man when I
came here, and I'm just as desperate now. I don't mind what I do if only
I can get out of this without a scandal."
Again I see him, leaning back in one of the luxurious chairs with which

his room was furnished. I see his indolent, athletic figure; his pale,
sharp, clean-shaven features; his curly black hair; his strong,
unscrupulous mouth. And again I feel the clear beam of his wonderful
eye, cold and luminous as a star, shining into my brain--sifting the very
secrets of my heart.
"I wonder if you mean all that!" he said at length. "You do in your
present mood; but who can back his mood to last? Still, there's hope
when a chap takes that tone. Now I think of it, too, you were a plucky
little devil at school; you once did me rather a good turn, I recollect.
Remember it, Bunny? Well, wait a bit, and perhaps I'll be able to do
you a better one. Give me time to think."
He got up, lit a fresh cigarette, and fell to pacing the room once more,
but with a slower and more thoughtful step, and for a much longer
period than before. Twice he stopped at my chair as though on the point
of speaking, but each time he checked himself and resumed his stride in
silence. Once he threw up the window, which he had shut some time
since, and stood for some moments leaning out into the fog which filled
the Albany courtyard. Meanwhile a clock on the chimney-piece struck
one, and one again for the half-hour, without a word between us.
Yet I not only kept my chair with patience, but I acquired an
incongruous equanimity in that half-hour. Insensibly I had shifted my
burden to the broad shoulders of this splendid friend, and my thoughts
wandered with my eyes as the minutes passed. The room was the
good-sized, square one, with the folding doors, the marble mantel-piece,
and the gloomy, old-fashioned distinction peculiar to the Albany. It was
charmingly furnished and arranged, with the right amount of
negligence and the right amount of taste. What struck me most,
however, was the absence of the usual insignia of a cricketer's den.
Instead of the conventional rack of war-worn bats, a carved oak
bookcase, with every shelf in a litter, filled the better part of one wall;
and where I looked for cricketing groups, I found reproductions of such
works as "Love and Death" and "The Blessed Damozel," in dusty
frames and different parallels. The man might have been a minor poet
instead of an athlete of the first water. But there had always been a fine

streak of aestheticism in his complex composition; some of these very
pictures I had myself dusted in his study at school; and they set me
thinking of yet another of his many sides--and of the little incident to
which he had just referred.
Everybody knows how largely the tone of a public school depends on
that of the eleven, and on the character of the captain of cricket in
particular; and I have never heard it denied that in A. J. Raffles's time
our tone was good, or that such influence as he troubled to exert was on
the side of the angels. Yet it was whispered in the school