“Yes, sir?” responded his manservant.
“Do you know a word which perfectly describes both you and me?”
Jolly, a man of many pauses and great deliberation, studied Rollison’s face earnestly. In that subconscious way which old friends acquire, he saw the other as a kind of reflection of himself. There were, of course, marked differences. Rollison’s eyes were clear and grey and fringed with upward sweeping lashes; Jolly’s were brown and sad, their brightness only lurking, their lashes sparse. Rollison’s face was that of a man younger by ten than his forty-odd years; a handsome one too; Jolly, who was sixty, could pass anywhere for seventy. Rollison’s face was hardly lined and his handsomeness was heightened by the bronze of Alpine winter sunshine; Jolly’s face was pale and wizened.
“You’re taking your time,” remarked Rollison.
“You are a difficult person to describe, sir. May I ask whether you mean a physical description?”
“No. A description—” Rollison hesitated, then beamed as if a
After another pause, Jolly asked: “How many letters, sir?”
Rollison’s face dropped.
“You know very well that I can’t spell.”
“I know you enjoy pretending that you can’t, sir. A description which sets our age and our place in this world. Ah. Let me see.” Jolly screwed up his eyes as if praying to an oracle, while Rollison watched him affectionately; there had never been a time when he had not known Jolly.
Jolly opened his eyes very wide.
“Anachronistic, sir?” he hazarded.
Rollison laughed.
“I should have expected it! You’re as ready to face the facts of life as I am. Anachronistic it is indeed. We belong to yesterday. Perhaps even the day before yesterday. No man has a man today.”
“Most unfortunate when true, sir,” remarked Jolly.
“And no man serves another with the same unfailing loyalty as you do,” observed Rollison. “Do you think there will ever be another like you?”
“There will certainly
“Hm,” said Rollison pensively. “We may both be right. The day of dudes and dukes and private eyes is past, this is an age of bugs and computers and brainwashing. Do you know what has prompted my near-nostalgic mood?”
“I think so, sir,” said Jolly.
They both smiled as they turned their gaze upon the wall behind the large pedestal desk where Rollison sat much of most days. On this wall were the trophies, as Jolly had come to call them, of the hunt; so it was known as the Trophy Wall. On it hung a strange assortment of objects, from a poison phial to a pencil-pistol, from a bloodstained dagger once used to stab to a lip-sticked silk stocking once used to strangle. There was a preserved scorpion and a feather from the neck of a dead chicken; a torn glove; and the faded score of an old song sheet. Each was the trophy of a hunt, by Rollison, of a criminal—of a man who had killed. Each hunt had been successful and each exhibit told the story—why. Even the top hat, closest to the ceiling, two bullet holes drilled through the shiny nap of the crown, told a story: that hat, worn during an escapade nearly twenty-five years ago, had first earned Richard Rollison his soubriquet—the Toff.
It had since become famous in many parts of the world.
On the Trophy Wall were forty-nine exhibits—representative of the forty-nine men and women who had been brought to justice by the Toff. Some had been hanged; some (the later ones) were serving their so-called life sentences. Several, reprieved during the doleful days of hanging, were now leading outwardly happy and respectable lives.
“The next,” said Rollison, “will be the fiftieth trophy.”
“I was wondering, sir,” said Jolly.
“Wonder on.”
“A number fifty?”
“That is what I ask myself from time to time, sir.”
“Jolly,” said Rollison, “don’t you believe in fate?”
“Not altogether, sir.”
“Elucidate.”
“Not if you mean you are
“I don’t, Jolly.”
“I cannot believe that all our actions are predestined,” Jolly protested, with notable dignity. “We are surely masters of our own fate to some degree.”
“You were born into service,” Rollison reminded him.
“And stayed because I liked it, sir.”
