The Stark Munro Letters | Page 5

his
bull's bellow. "Perhaps you'll make me," said the fellow, turning a
contemptuous face over his shoulder. Cullingworth closed his
note-book, and began to walk down on the tops of the desks to the
delight of the three hundred spectators. It was fine to see the deliberate
way in which he picked his way among the ink bottles. As he sprang
down from the last bench on to the floor, his opponent struck him a
smashing blow full in the face. Cullingworth got his bulldog grip on
him, however, and rushed him backwards out of the class- room. What
he did with him I don't know, but there was a noise like the delivery of
a ton of coals; and the champion of law and order returned, with the
sedate air of a man who had done his work. One of his eyes looked like
an over-ripe damson, but we gave him three cheers as he made his way
back to his seat. Then we went on with the dangers of Placenta Praevia.
He was not a man who drank hard, but a little drink would have a very
great effect upon him. Then it was that the ideas would surge from his
brain, each more fantastic and ingenious than the last. And if ever he
did get beyond the borderland he would do the most amazing things.
Sometimes it was the fighting instinct that would possess him,
sometimes the preaching, and sometimes the comic, or they might
come in succession, replacing each other so rapidly as to bewilder his
companions. Intoxication brought all kinds of queer little peculiarities
with it. One of them was that he could walk or run perfectly straight,
but that there always came a time when he unconsciously returned upon
his tracks and retraced his steps again. This had a strange effect
sometimes, as in the instance which I am about to tell you.
Very sober to outward seeming, but in a frenzy within, he went down
to the station one night, and, stooping to the pigeon-hole, he asked the
ticket-clerk, in the suavest voice, whether he could tell him how far it
was to London. The official put forward his face to reply when
Cullingworth drove his fist through the little hole with the force of a
piston. The clerk flew backwards off his stool, and his yell of pain and
indignation brought some police and railway men to his assistance.

They pursued Cullingworth; but he, as active and as fit as a greyhound,
outraced them all, and vanished into the darkness, down the long,
straight street. The pursuers had stopped, and were gathered in a knot
talking the matter over, when, looking up, they saw, to their amazement,
the man whom they were after, running at the top of his speed in their
direction. His little peculiarity had asserted itself, you see, and he had
unconsciously turned in his flight. They tripped him up, flung
themselves upon him, and after a long and desperate struggle dragged
him to the police station. He was charged before the magistrate next
morning, but made such a brilliant speech from the dock in his own
defence that he carried the Court with him, and escaped with a nominal
fine. At his invitation, the witnesses and the police trooped after him to
the nearest hotel, and the affair ended in universal whisky-and-sodas.
Well, now, if, after all these illustrations, I have failed to give you some
notion of the man, able, magnetic, unscrupulous, interesting,
many-sided, I must despair of ever doing so. I'll suppose, however, that
I have not failed; and I will proceed to tell you, my most patient of
confidants, something of my personal relations with Cullingworth.
When I first made a casual acquaintance with him he was a bachelor.
At the end of a long vacation, however, he met me in the street, and
told me, in his loud-voiced volcanic shoulder-slapping way, that he had
just been married. At his invitation, I went up with him then and there
to see his wife; and as we walked he told me the history of his wedding,
which was as extraordinary as everything else he did. I won't tell it to
you here, my dear Bertie, for I feel that I have dived down too many
side streets already; but it was a most bustling business, in which the
locking of a governess into her room and the dyeing of Cullingworth's
hair played prominent parts. Apropos of the latter he was never quite
able to get rid of its traces; and from this time forward there was added
to his other peculiarities the fact that when the sunlight struck upon his
hair at certain angles, it turned it all iridescent and shimmering.
Well, I went up to his