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.?”