Part 9

It will puzzle me all my life (or what’s left of it, let’s say) to know why that diabolically handsome young Jew took such an instant dislike to me; and why I took such a dislike to him! For that was really at the bottom of all that followed--just good old black hatred, Hilary, from the first moment our eyes met. But I want to give you all the facts. Maybe the girl had something to do with it even then--the girl and his own shocking smile. You simply couldn’t help fancying that those gentle eyes were in for a very bad time from that smile. Decidedly not my business, of course. Nothing that interests one ever is, is it? But, on the other hand, the young man went on whispering and laughing so all through my confounded lecture that by the time I had finished there was just one small spot of red floating about my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever before been so angry. There’s one particular thing about people who sneer that I can’t bear, Hilary. They simply insist on your disliking them, and I hate having to dislike people more than I can tell you.

They began to clear out as soon as I had finished. The young Jew’s behaviour hadn’t, naturally, made my effort go any better. He needed a lesson, that bright young man. I collared him in the passage outside. Of course he and his young lady were much too smart to hurry themselves, and the rest of the lecturees had almost gone. Inside, Venice had given up poisoning her club with coffee and was trying to bring it round with shocking noises from a wireless set.

I can see that passage now. A narrow stairway leading up to God knows where. Just one gas-jet, yellow as a Chinaman. The front-door wide open to a narrow street like a canal of mud, for it was pelting with rain, you could see sheets of it falling between us and the lamp on the opposite side of the road. A man outside somewhere whistling “Horsey, keep your tail up,” and whistling it well. Radio inside.

Our young Jewboy was tall. I simply didn’t feel I was old enough to be his father, although he couldn’t have been more than three or four-and-twenty. And he liked colours, that boy. He had on a nice bright brown suit, a silk shirt to match, and not a tartan in the Highlands had anything on his tie. His young lady’s eyes, in that sick light, shone like black onyx. It struck me she was terrified, the way she was staring at me. I was sorry for that, it wasn’t her terror I wanted. And where I did want it, not a sign. Then I realised she wasn’t terrified for him but for me. Cheek.

I had the fancy youth by the shoulder. Tight. He was still laughing at me. “This lout!” that laugh said. I can hear that laugh now. And, confound it, there was a quite extraordinary authority to that boy’s eyes. He wasn’t used to following anyone, not he.

I said: “Young man, your manners are very bad. What are you going to do about it?”

I was calm enough. But he was too calm by half. He didn’t answer, but he had given up smiling. He was looking sideways down at my hand on his shoulder. I’ve never had a pretty hand, but it has been quite useful to me one way and another and I’ve grown attached to it. I can’t attempt to describe the disgust and contempt in that boy’s look. It sort of said: “By the bosom of Abraham, what _is_ that filthy thing on my shoulder?”

I said sharply: “I’m waiting.”

The girl sighed: “Don’t! Don’t, Julian!”

As though, you know, he might hit me! Me!

Well, he might! I said: “Careful, young man!”

The girl whispered almost frantically: “Let him go, sir! Please! You don’t know....”

I comforted her. I said I could take care of myself. She wasn’t, I fancy, convinced. The way she looked at a man, with those scared black eyes!

But our young friend wasn’t taking any notice of either of us. He was busy. All this, of course, happened in a few seconds. The Jew had raised his hand, slowly, very slowly, and had caught the wrist of my hand on his shoulder. I felt his fingers round my wrist. Tight.

“Steady, boy!” I said. I’d have to hit him, and I didn’t want to do that. At least, I told myself I didn’t want to. That young Jew had strong fingers. He simply hadn’t spoken one word yet. His conversation was limited to trying to break my wrist. _My_ wrist! Then he spoke. He said: “You swine!” The girl suddenly pulled at my arm, hard. His back was to the open doorway, the rain, the gutter. I caught him one on the chin so that he was in it flat on his back. His tie looked fancier than ever in the mud, too. The girl sort of screamed.

“All right,” I said. “All right.” Trying, you know, to comfort the poor kid. She was rushing after her man, but I had my arm like a bar across the door. She stared at me.

I said: “Listen to me, my child. You’re in bad company.”

“She is now,” a voice said. The young Jew had picked himself up. He looked a mess, fine clothes and all. I thought he would try to rush me, but not he! He just smiled and said quite calmly: “I’ll make a note of that, Sir Charles Fasset-Faith. Come on, Manana.”

But I wasn’t letting “Manana” go just yet. The poor kid.

“What’s his name?” I asked her.

She stared at me. I never knew what “white” really meant until I saw that child’s teeth.

“His name?” I repeated. Gently, you know.

She whispered: “Julian Raphael.”

That young Jew’s voice hit me on the back of the neck like a knife. “You’ll pay for that, Manana! See if you don’t!”

By the way, it isn’t just rhetoric about the knife. It was like a knife. But I’ll tell you more about knives later.

“Oh,” she sobbed.

“Look here,” I said to the devilish boy, “if you so much as----”

He laughed. The girl bolted under my arm and joined him. He just laughed. I said: “Good-night, Manana. Don’t let him hurt you.” She didn’t seem to dare look at me.

They went, up that muddy lane. He had her by the arm, and you could see he had her tight. There aren’t many lamps in that _beau quartier_, and a few steps took them out of my sight. I heard a scream, and then a sob.

That settled Julian Raphael so far as I was concerned. Then another sob--from the back of that nasty darkness. I couldn’t, of course, go after them then. It would look too much as though I was bidding for possession of the young Jew’s love-lady. But at that moment I made up my mind I’d land that pretty boy sometime soon. That scream had made me feel just a trifle sick. That was personal. Then I was against Julian Raphael impersonally because I’ve always been for law and order. You have too, Hilary. I shouldn’t wonder if that’s not another reason why women find men like us dull. But some of us must be, God knows, in this world. And it was against all law and order that young Mr. Julian Raphael--imagine any man actually _using_ a name like that!--should be loose in the world. Crook was too simple a word for Mr. Raphael. And he was worse for being so devilish handsome. One imagined him with women--with this poor soul of a Manana. Of course, Venice and Napier and the other people at their potty old club knew nothing about either of them. They must have just drifted in, they said. They had, into my life.

The very next morning I rang up our friend H---- at Scotland Yard and asked him if he knew anything about a Julian Raphael. Oh, didn’t he! Had a _dossier_ of him as long as my arm. H---- said: “The Prince of the Jews, that’s Julian Raphael’s pet name. Profession: counterfeiter. But we’ve never yet caught him or his gang.”

Oh, the cinema wasn’t in it with our fancy young friend. The police had been after him for about five years. Once they had almost got him for knifing a Lascar. Murder right enough, but they’d had to release him for lack of evidence. The Lascar, H---- said, had probably threatened to give away a cocaine plant, and Julian Raphael had slit his throat. Suspected of cocaine-smuggling, living on immoral earnings of women, and known to be the finest existing counterfeiter of Bank of England £5 notes. Charming man, Mr. Julian Raphael.

“I want to land him,” I told H----.

“Thanks very much,” said he. “So do we.”

“Well, how about that girl of his--Manana something?”

“Manana Cohen? Catch her giving him away! She adores the beast, and so do they all, those who aren’t terrified of him.”

I said: “Well, we’ll see. I want to get that boy. I don’t like him.”

H----’s last words to me were: “Now look here, Charles, don’t go playing the fool down there. I know the East End is nowadays supposed to be as respectable as Kensington and that the cinema has got it beat hollow for pools of blood, but believe me a chap is still liable to be punctured in the ribs by a clever boy like Julian Raphael. So be a good fellow and go back to your nice old Navy and write a book saying which of your brother Admirals didn’t win Jutland just to show you’re an Admiral as well.”

H---- was right. I was a fool, certainly. But God drops the folly into the world as well as the wisdom, and surely it’s part of our job to pick up bits of it. Besides, I’ve never been one for dinner-parties or the artless prattle of young ladies, and so, thought I, could a man spend his leave more profitably than in landing a snake like Julian Raphael?

I took myself off down to the East End with my oldest tweeds, a toothbrush and a growth on my chin. George Tarlyon came with me. He had scented a row that night, and not the devil himself can keep George from putting both his feet into the inside of a row. Besides, he wanted to have a look at Miss Manana Cohen, saying he was a connoisseur of Cohens and liked nothing so much as to watch them turning into Curzons or Colquhouns. I wasn’t sorry, for you can’t have a better man in a row than George Tarlyon, and with his damfool remarks he’d make a miser forget he was at the Ritz. We took two rooms in Canning Town E., and very nice rooms they were, over a ham and beef shop, and walked from pub to pub watching each other’s beards grow and listening for Julian Raphael. At least, I listened and George talked.

You would naturally have thought that the likely place to find that smart young man would be round about what journalists call the “exclusive hotels and night-clubs of the West End.” Not a bit of it. We soon heard something of Julian Raphael’s ways from one tough or another. Tarlyon’s idea of getting information delicately about a man was to threaten to fight anyone who wouldn’t give it to him, and we soon collected quite a bit that way.

Mr. Raphael was a Socialist, it appeared--remember, I’d guessed he was clever?--and hated the rich. He hated the rich so bitterly that, though he had a pretty fat bank-account of his own, he still clung to his old quarters in the East End. But no one knew, or cared to give, the address of his “old quarters,” which were probably various. Tarlyon threatened to fight any number of toughs who didn’t “know” Mr. Raphael’s address, but they preferred to fight, and in the end George got tired.

Oh, yes, Julian Raphael was certainly watched by the police, but he was generally somewhere else while the police were watching him. And Miss Manana Cohen was certainly his young lady-love, and she loved him and lived with him but he wouldn’t marry her because of another principle he had, that it was wrong for a man of independent spirit to have a wife of his own. Nice boy, Mr. Julian Raphael. But it appeared that he loved Miss Manana very decidedly and discouraged competition. It also appeared that before he had taken to the downward path he had been a juggler with knives on the music-halls. Knives again. Tarlyon thought that a pretty good joke at the time, but he didn’t enjoy it nearly so much later on.

We had been pottering about down there several days and George was just beginning to think of a nice shave and a bath when we hit on our first clue. The clue was walking up a grimy side-street by the East India Docks.

“Oh, pretty!” says George. And she certainly was. She hadn’t seen us. She was in a hurry.

“We follow,” I said.

“Naturally,” says George. “A nice girl like that! What do you take me for, a Y. M. C. A.?”

We followed. She walked fast, did Miss Manana. And it was queer, how she lit up that grimy God-forsaken street. The way she was walking, you might have taken her for a young gentlewoman “doing” the East End in a hurry. Tall, lithe, quietly dressed--Julian Raphael’s property! And he’d made her scream with pain.

“Now what?” snapped George.

She had been about twenty yards ahead of us. Street darkish, deserted, lined with warehouses, and all closed because it was a Saturday afternoon. Suddenly, no Manana Cohen. We slipped after her quick as you like. She had dived down a narrow passage between the warehouses. We were just in time to see the tail of her skirt whisking through a door in the wall a few yards up--and just in time to cut in after her.

“Oh!” she gasped. We must have looked a couple of cut-throats. And it was dark in there. I was panting--nothing like a sailor’s life for keeping you thoroughly out of training, unless it’s a soldier’s. But George was all there, being a good dancer.

“Miss Cohen, I believe?” he asks. All in whispers. She just stared at us. George didn’t want to scare her any more than I did. He was gay, in that mood of his when he seems to be laughing more at himself than at anyone else. But she just stared at us. She was tall, as women go, but we simply towered over the poor child. Then she recognised me and went as red as a carnation. I couldn’t think why. Tarlyon said comfortingly: “There, there!”

Then she panted all in a jumble: “I’m sorry I was rude to you the other night. Really I am. Please go away now, please!”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” I whispered. “We want----”

George, with his foot, gently shut the door behind us. We were in the passage of the house or whatever it was. It was pitch-dark. I lit another match.

“But what is it, what do you want?” the girl moaned.

“We just want to have a word with your young man,” said George, the idiot, in his ordinary voice.

“Oh!” she caught her breath. That gave the show away all right. Julian Raphael was at home, whatever home was. Then the match went out. And the lights went on, snap! Julian Raphael stood at the end of the passage, pointing a revolver.

George said: “Don’t be an ass!”

“Come here!” says Mr. Raphael to the girl.

“No, you don’t!” said George, hauling her to him by the arm.

Julian Raphael smiled in that way he had. “If you don’t let her go at once,” he says, “I shoot.”

“You what!” I said.

Tarlyon laughed. You can hear him. He said: “Now don’t be a fool all your life but stand at attention when you speak to my friend here, because he’s a knight. And put that comic gun away else I’ll come and hit you.”

I couldn’t help laughing. The young Jew looked so surprised. He’d never before been talked to just in that way and it bothered him, he was used to doing the laughing and being taken seriously. But I had laughed too soon. There was a whizz by my ear, a thud on the door behind me, and a knife an inch deep in the panel. The surprise had given Manana a chance to slip away. She was by Mr. Raphael now at the end of the passage. There wasn’t light enough to make out what was behind them, a stairway up or a stairway down. Down, I guessed, into the bowels of the earth. Julian Raphael was smiling. I’ll say it was well thrown, that knife.

Tarlyon was livid. “By God,” he whispered, “threw a knife at us! We _are_ having a nice weekend!”

I held him back. What was the use? A little child could have led us at knife-throwing. Julian Raphael said, with that infernal sneer of his:

“Gentlemen, I merely wanted to show you what to expect if you were to advance another step. I wouldn’t kill you--not yet. One of you, yes. But it would cause comment, the disappearance of two fools. However, I might slice bits off your ears. Further, this is my house. Are you not intruding? Gentlemen, you may go.”

And, you know, we did. What the deuce else was there to do? If Tarlyon with his infernal chuckling hadn’t roused the man out of his lair we might have taken him by surprise and learnt something of the whereabouts of that counterfeiting business. But as it was, “go” was us while the going was good. And the way Tarlyon swore when we were outside made me glad it was a Saturday afternoon and the warehouses were closed, else he might have corrupted the poor workmen.

“What do we do now?” he asked at last. “Lump it?”

“Well, at any rate, we know his address now.”

“Address be blowed! That’s not an address, Charles, but an exit. I’ll bet our smart friend doesn’t press his trousers in that hole--and, by Heaven, there you are!”

He made me jump. I hadn’t, didn’t, see anything. I thought it was another knife.

“Never mind,” snapped George. “Too late now. Come on, man, come on!”

He made me walk on. After reaching daylight from that passage between the warehouses we had turned to the left, walked on a hundred yards or so by the front of the warehouses, then to the left again. This, running parallel to the passage, was a row of quite respectable-looking houses all stuck together, as quite respectable-looking houses should do in these times. There are streets and streets of them down there, and I’m told white women sometimes marry Chinamen just for the pleasure of living in them. But, as someone has said, white women will do anything. We had come to the end of a block when Tarlyon set up that howl and then shut me up.

“What the deuce!” I said again.

George said, walking on: “Jewboy has made one mistake. Naughty Jewboy. Now have a look at that house we passed. Don’t stare as though you were an American tailor looking at the Prince of Wales. Casually. The corner one.”

I turned and looked, casually. It was a house like another, and I said so. George asked me how far I thought it was from the passage in which I had nearly fielded Raphael’s knife with my ear. I said it must be a good way. Two hundred yards at least. There was a whole block of warehouses and a row of houses in between.

“Quite,” said George. We walked on. “Then how did Mr. Raphael get there so quick? Not by the road. I just saw a piece of his delightful face round the curtain of one of the windows. His one mistake, to have let me see him. There must be an underground passage about two hundred yards long between his warehouse address and his residence. You’ll bet the police have never spotted it yet, and I only spotted it because he was so eager to see us well away. I don’t think he likes us, Charles. But I’d be pleased to know who is supposed to be living in that house. And I’d take a bet that there’s a nice counterfeiting _matinée_ going on this very moment somewhere between that house and that warehouse passage. Now you say something.”

“The point is, George, do you think he saw you spot him?”

Tarlyon smiled. “There’s always a catch. Trust the God of the Jews to lay a snag for poor Gentiles. But I don’t know. He mayn’t have seen I got him. But we will have to act as if he had. Get him quick, else he’ll be in the air. What’s the time now? Nearly eight. We’ll get back to civilisation, try and catch H---- at his home address, come down here to-night and surround the place. Fun. Hurray!”

I said: “Look here, George----”

He looked at me sharply. “I know what you are going to say, Charles. Don’t say it. You’re old enough to know better.”

But I stuck to my point. We must let H---- know at once, yes. Post men at the warehouse entrance and the house entrance, certainly. Catch Julian Raphael and his friends, decidedly. But we must give Manana Cohen another chance. She was only a child--twenty-one or two at most.

George said: “Charles, don’t be a silly old man. She is probably as bad as any of them. You can’t tell. Girls don’t live a life like that unless they want to.”

I knew he was wrong. I just knew it. So I didn’t argue, but stuck to my point. The girl must be got out of the way before the place was raided. If the police found her there, she would be jailed--perhaps for years. I simply wouldn’t have it. The girl was at the beginning of her life. To jail her now would be to ruin her for all her life.

Tarlyon, of course, didn’t need to be convinced. He was only leading me on. Tarlyon wouldn’t have put the police on a girl for trying to boil him in oil. But I was right about Manana Cohen. Good God, don’t I know I was right! This had been her life, was her life, these dreary streets, these foul alleys. Julian Raphael had found her, dazzled her, seduced her, bullied her, broken her. What chance had the girl, ever? She was timorous, you could see. A timid girl. No matter how kindly you talked to her, she stared at you like a rabbit at a stoat. Life was the stoat to Manana Cohen. Who knows what the girl hadn’t already suffered in her small life, what hell? Maybe she had loved Julian Raphael, maybe she loved him now. That wasn’t against her. Saints love cads. It’s the only way you can know a saint, mostly. Some of the nicest women you and I know, Hilary, have been divorced for the love of blackguards. Well, if Manana loved Raphael she would be punished enough by seeing him go to prison for a long stretch. One might find her a job on the stage, with her looks and figure. Good Lord, the way that girl looked at you when you so much as opened your mouth, her black eyes shivering as though her heart was hurt.

We found a taxi in the Whitechapel Road. To civilisation. Tarlyon was quiet. I wondered if he thought I was in love with the girl. Me, at my age. As we rattled through Cheapside--deserted on a Saturday afternoon--Tarlyon said: “We will have to think of a way of getting the girl out of the place beforehand. But how? If we warn her she will naturally pass the glad news on to her man. Naturally.”

Naturally, I agreed. She wouldn’t be herself if she went back on her man. I said I would think of a way as I bathed and dressed for dinner. As George dropped me at my flat he said:

“Let’s say dinner in an hour’s time at White’s. Meanwhile I’ll ring up H----. Maybe he will dine with us. I suppose it will be about midnight before we get down there with his men. I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not going to have knives chucked at me on an empty stomach--for I’ll not be left out of this, not for all the knives in Christendom and Jewry. This is a real treasure-hunt as compared to chasing poppycock with children round Regent’s Park and chickenfood with flappers up Piccadilly. I said midnight, Charles, to give you a chance of getting Miss Manana Colquhoun clear away. Wish you luck!”

But fate wouldn’t be bullied by George Almeric St. George Tarlyon. Fate had ideas of her own. Or is fate a he? No, it would be a woman, for she hates slim women. I’ve noticed that in the East, where no slim woman ever comes to any good. I hadn’t finished glancing at my letters, while my bath was running, when my man announced a young lady.

“A young what?” I said.

He was surprised, too. I went into the sitting-room. Manana Cohen was by the open door, as though she was afraid to come right in.

I said: “Thank Heaven you’ve come!” Extraordinary thing to say, but I said it.

She tried to smile. All scared eyes. I thought she was going to faint, tried to make her sit down, fussed about. Hilary, I’m trying to tell you I was shy.

“I’m frightened,” she said, as though that would be news for me. Then it all came out in that jumbled way of hers. She had given Raphael the slip, had found my address in the telephone-book, had come to me to warn me.

“To warn me!” I gasped. The cheek of these young people! Here were we and all Scotland Yard after them--and she had come to warn me!

“Yes. Listen.” Then she stopped. Suddenly, she blushed crimson.

I said: “Now, Manana, what is it? What on earth is there to blush about?”