James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

Such were the details of our journey down the Wangi River as I related them that day at the Explorers Club. Everyone present at the table except Tubby Frobisher had, of course, been along on that little adventure, and I rather suspected that Tubby would just as soon I’d kept the story to myself, he being full of his own wanderings in the bush and having no acquaintance whatsoever with eastern Java or Bill Kraken. It was the ruby, in the end, that fetched his attention.

For some moments he’d been hunched forward in his chair, squinting at me, puffing so on his cigar that it burned like a torch. He slumped back as I ended the tale and plucked the cigar from his mouth. He paused for a moment before standing up and stepping slowly across to the window to look for his stranger on the street. But the man had apparently moved along.

There was a crashing downstairs about then — a slamming of doors, high voices, the clattering of failing cutlery. “Close that off!” shouted Frobisher down the stairwell. There was an answering shout, indecipherable, from below. “Shut yer gob!” Frobisher shouted, tapping ashes onto the rug.

One of the club members, Isaacs, I believe, from the Himalayan business, advised Frobisher to shut his. Under other circumstances, I’m sure, Tubby would have flown at the man, but he was too full of our Javanese ruby, and he barely heard the man’s retort. It was quiet again downstairs. “By God,” said Frobisher, “I’d give my pension to have a look at that damned ruby!”

“Impossible,” I said, relighting my pipe which I’d let grow cold during my narrative. “The ruby hasn’t been seen in five years. Not since Giles Connover stole it from the museum. It was the ruby that brought about his end; that’s what I believe — just as surely as it brought about the death of Bill Kraken.”

I expected St. Ives to disagree with me, point out that I was possessed by super-stition, that logic didn’t and couldn’t support me. But he kept silent, having once been possessed, I suppose, by the same unfounded fears — fears that had been a pro-duct of the weird, moaning cry that had assailed us there in the jungle some twenty years before.

“It certainly has had a curious history,” said St. Ives with just the trace of a smile on his face. “A very curious history.”

“Has it?” said Frobisher, stabbing his cigar out into the ashtray. “You didn’t manage to sell it, then?”

“Oh, we sold it,” St. Ives said. “Almost at once. Within the week of our return, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Four days, sir, to be precise,” put in Hasbro, who had an irritating habit of exactitude, one that had been polished and tightened over his eighty- odd years. “We docked on a Tuesday, sir, and sold the ruby to a jeweler in Knightsbridge on the following Saturday afternoon.”

“Quite,” said St. Ives, nodding toward him.

A waiter wandered past about then with a tea towel over his arm. Simultaneously there was another crash downstairs, a chair being upset it sounded like, and an accompanying shout. “What the devil is that row?” demanded Frobisher of the waiter. “This is a club, man, not a bowling green”

“Quite right, sir,” the waiter said. “We’ve had a bit of a time with an unwanted guest. Insists on coming in to have a look around. He’s very persistent.”

“Throw the blighter into the rubbish can,” said Frobisher. “And bring us a decanter of whisky, if you will. Laphroaig. And some fresh glasses.”

“Ice?” the waiter asked.

Frobisher gave him a wilting look and chewed on his cigar. “Just the filthy whisky. And tell that navvy downstairs that Tubby Frobisher will horsewhip him on the club steps at three o’clock if he’s still about.” Frobisher checked his watch. “That’s about six and a half minutes from now.”

“I’ll tell him, sir, just as you say. But the man is deaf as a stone, as far as I can make out, and he wears smoked glasses, so he’s quite possibly blind too. Threats haven’t done much to dissuade him.”

“Haven’t they, by God!” shouted Frobisher. “Dissuade him, is it! I’ll dissuade the man. I’ll dissuade him from here to Chelsea. But let’s have that whisky first. Did I say we needed glasses too?”

“Yes, sir,” said the waiter. And off he went toward the bar.

“So this ruby,” Frobisher said, settling back in his seat and plucking another cigar from inside his coat. “How much did it fetch?”

“A little above twenty-five thousand pounds,” said St. Ives, nodding to Hasbro for affirmation.

“Twenty-five thousand six hundred fifty, sir,” the colonel said.

Frobisher let out a low whistle.

“And it brought almost twice that at an auction at Sotheby’s two weeks after,” I put in. “Since then it’s been bought and sold a dozen times, I imagine. The truth is, no one wants to keep it. It was owned, in time, by Isador Persano, and we all know what came of that, and later by Lady Braithewaite-Long, whose husband, of course, was involved in that series of ghastly murders near Waterloo Station.”

“Don’t overlook Preston Waters, the jeweler,” said Priestly with an apparent shudder — a recollection, no doubt, of the grisly horror that had befallen the very Knightsbridge jeweler who had given us the twenty-five thousand pounds.

“The thing’s cursed, if you ask me,” I said, clearing debris from the table to make room for our newly arrived decanter of Scots whisky. Frobisher, sighing heartily, poured a neat bit into four glasses.

“None for me, thanks,” Priestly said when Frobisher approached the fifth glass with the upturned decanter. “I’ll just nip at this port for a bit. Whisky eats me up. Tears my throat bones to shreds. I’d be on milk and bread for a week.”

Frobisher nodded, pleased, no doubt, to consume Priestly’s share himself. He tilted his glass back and sucked a bit in, rolling it about in his mouth, relishing it. “That’s the stuff what?” he said, relaxing. “If there were one thing that would drag me back in out of the bush, it wouldn’t be gold or women, I can tell you. No, sir. Not gold or women.”

I assumed that it was whisky, finally, that would drag Tubby Frobisher out of the bush, though he never got around to saying so. I got in ahead of him. “Where do you suppose that ruby lies today, Professor?” I asked, having a taste of the Scotch myself. “Did the museum ever get it back?”

“They didn’t want it, actually,” said St. Ives. “They were offered the thing free, and they turned it down.”

“The fools,” Frobisher said. “They didn’t go for all that hocus-pocus about a curse, I don’t suppose. Not the bloody museum.”

St. Ives shrugged. “There’s no denying that it cost them a tremendous amount of trouble — robbery and murder and the like. And it’s possible that they thought the man who offered it to them was a prankster. No one, of course, with any sense would give the thing away. I rather believe that they never considered the offer serious.”

“I’d bet they were afraid of it,” said Priestly, who had come to fear the jewel himself in the years since our return. “I wish now that we’d buried the bloody thing with Kraken. Do you remember that ghastly cry in the jungle? That wasn’t made by any cannibals.”

Hasbro raised an eyebrow. “Who do you suggest cried out, sir?” he asked in his cultivated butler’s tone — a tone that alerted you to the sad fact that you were about to say something worthless and foolish.

Priestly gazed into his port and shrugged.

“I like to believe,” said St. Ives, always the philosopher, “that the jungle itself cried out. That we had stolen a bit of her very heart, broken off a piece of her soul. I was possessed with the same certainty that we’d committed a terrible crime that possesses me when I see a fine old building razed or a great tree cut down — a tree, perhaps, that had seen the passing of two score generations of kings and, being a part of those ages, has been imbued with their history, with their glory. Do you follow me?”