Indeed, these sprout in so widespread a way on the upper lips of those who bear the white man's burden that it is a tenable theory that the latter hold some sort of patent rights. One recalls the nostalgic words of the poet Kipling, when he sang "Put me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain't no ten commandments and a man can raise a small bristly moustache."
It was probably this moustache that gave the newcomer the exotic look he had. It made him seem out of place in the coffee-room of an English inn. You felt, eyeing him, that his natural setting was Black Mike's bar in Pago-Pago, where he would be the life and soul of the party, though of course most of the time he would be out on safari, getting rough with such fauna as happened to come his way. Here, you would have said, was a man who many a time had looked his rhinoceros in the eye and made it wilt.
And again, just as when you were making that penetrating analysis of Mrs. Spottsworth, you would have been perfectly right. This bristly moustached he-man of the wilds was none other than the Captain Biggar whom we mentioned a moment ago in connection with the regrettable fracas which had culminated in A. B. Spottsworth going to reside with the morning stars, and any of the crowd out along Bubbling Well Road or in the Long Bar at Shanghai could have told you that "Bwana"
Biggar had made more rhinoceri wilt than you could shake a stick at.
At the moment, he was thinking less of our dumb chums than of something cool in a tankard. The evening, as we have said, was warm, and he had driven many miles—from Epsom Downs, where he had started immediately after the conclusion of the race known as The Oaks, to this quiet inn in Southmoltonshire.
"Beer!" he thundered, and at the sound of his voice Mrs. Spottsworth dropped her book with a startled cry, her eyes leaping from the parent sockets.
And in the circumstances it was quite understandable that her eyes should have leaped, for her first impression had been that this was one of those interesting manifestations from the spirit world, of which she had been reading. Enough to make any woman's eyes leap.
The whole point about a hunter like Captain Biggar, if you face it squarely, is that he hunts. And, this being so, you expect him to stay put in and around his chosen hunting grounds.
Meet him in Kenya or Malaya or Borneo or India, and you feel no surprise.
"Hullo there, Captain Biggar," you say.
"How's the spooring?" And he replies that the spooring is tophole. Everything perfectly in order.
But when you see him in the coffee-room of an English country inn, thousands of miles from his natural habitat, you may be excused for harbouring a momentary suspicion that this is not the man in the flesh but rather his wraith or phantasm looking in, as wraiths and phantasms will, to pass the time of day.
"Eek!" Mrs. Spottsworth exclaimed, visibly shaken. Since interesting herself in psychical research, she had often wished to see a ghost, but one likes to pick one's time and place for that sort of thing. One does not want spectres muscling in when one is enjoying a refreshing gin and tonic.
To the Captain, owing to the dimness of the light in the Goose and Gherkin's coffee-room, Mrs.
Spottsworth, until she spoke, had been simply a vague female figure having one for the road. On catching sight of her, he had automatically twirled his moustache, his invariable practice when he observed anything female in the offing, but he had in no sense drunk her in.
Bending his gaze upon her now, he quivered all over like a nervous young hippopotamus finding itself face to face with its first White Hunter.
"Well, fry me in butter!" he ejaculated. He stood staring at her. "Mrs.
Spottsworth! Well, simmer me in prune juice! Last person in the world I'd have dreamed of seeing. I thought you were in America."
Mrs. Spottsworth had recovered her poise.
"I flew over for a visit a week ago," she said.
"Oh, I see. That explains it. What made it seem odd, finding you here, was that I remember you told me you lived in California or one of those places."
"Yes, I have a home in Pasadena. In Carmel, too, and one in New York and another in Florida and another up in Maine."
"Making five in all?"
"Six. I was forgetting the one in Oregon."
"Six?" The Captain seemed thoughtful. "Oh, well," he said, "it's nice to have a roof over your head, of course."
"Yes. But one gets tired of places after a while. One yearns for something new. I'm thinking of buying this house I'm on my way to now, Rowcester Abbey. I met Lord Rowcester's sister in New York on her way back from Jamaica, and she said her brother might be willing to sell. But what are you doing in England, Captain? I couldn't believe my eyes at first."
"Oh, I thought I'd take a look at the old country, dear lady. Long time since I had a holiday, and you know the old proverb—all work and no play makes Jack a peh-bah pom bahoo. Amazing the way things have changed since I was here last. No idle rich, if you know what I mean. Everybody working. Everybody got a job of some kind."
"Yes, it's extraordinary, isn't it? Lord Rowcester's sister, Lady Carmoyle, tells me her husband, Sir Roderick Carmoyle, is a floorwalker at Harrige's. And he's a tenth Baronet or something."
"Amazing, what? Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar won't believe me when I tell them."
"Who?"
"Couple of pals of mine out in Kuala Lumpur. They'll be astounded. But I like it," said the Captain stoutly. "It's the right spirit. The straight bat."
"I beg your pardon?"
"A cricket term, dear lady. At cricket you've got to play with a straight bat, or ... or, let's face it, you don't play with a straight bat, if you see what I mean."
"I suppose so. But do sit down, won't you?"
"Thanks, if I may, but only for a minute.
I'm chasing a foe of the human species."
In Captain Biggar's manner, as he sat down, a shrewd observer would have noted a trace of embarrassment, and might have attributed this to the fact that the last time he and Mrs. Spottsworth had seen each other he had been sorting out what was left of her husband with a view to shipping it to Nairobi. But it was not the memory of that awkward moment that was causing his diffidence. Its roots lay deeper than that.
He loved this woman. He had loved her from the very moment she had come into his life. How well he remembered that moment. The camp among the acacia trees. The boulder-strewn cliff. The boulder-filled stream. Old Simba the lion roaring in the distance, old Tembo the elephant doing this and that in the bimbo or tall grass, and A. B. Spottsworth driving up in the car with a vision in jodhpurs at his side. "My wife,"
A. B. Spottsworth had said, indicating the combination of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy by whom he was accompanied, and as he replied "Ah, the memsahib" and greeted her with a civil "Krai yu ti ny ma pay," it was as if a powerful electric shock had passed through Captain Biggar. This, he felt, was X.
Naturally, being a white man, he had not told his love, but it had burned steadily within him ever since, a strong, silent passion of such a calibre that sometimes, as he sat listening to the hyaenas and gazing at the snows of Kilimanjaro, it had brought him within an ace of writing poetry.
And here she was again, looking lovelier than ever.
It seemed to Captain Biggar that somebody in the vicinity was beating a bass drum. But it was only the thumping of his heart.