PLAIN SPEAKING.
“A tous maux, il y a deux remèdes--le temps et le silence.”
“They call me Uncle Ben--comprenny?” one man explained very slowly to
another for the sixth time across a small iron table set out upon the
pavement.
They were seated in front of the humble Café de l'Europe, which lies
concealed in an alley that runs between the Keize Straat and the
lighthouse of Scheveningen. It was quite dark and a lonely reveler at
the next table seemed to be asleep. The economical proprietor of the
Café de l'Europe had conceived the idea of constructing a long-shaped
lantern, not unlike the arm of a railway signal, which should at once
bear the insignia of his house and afford light to his out-door custom.
But the idea, like many of the higher flights of the human imagination,
had only left the public in the dark.
“Yes,” continued the unchallenged speaker, in a voice which may be
heard issuing from the door of any tavern in England on almost any
evening of the week--the typical voice of the tavern-talker--“yes,
they've always called me Uncle Ben. Seems as if they're sort o' fond of
me. Me has seen many hundreds of 'em come and go. But nothing like
this. Lord save us!”
His hand fell heavily on the iron table, and he looked round him in
semi-intoxicated stupefaction. He was in a confidential humour, and
when a man is in this humour, drunk or sober, he is in a parlous state.
It was certainly rather unfortunate that Uncle Ben should have in this
expansive moment no more sympathetic companion than an ancient,
intoxicated Frenchman, who spoke no word of English.
“What I want to know, Frenchy,” continued the Englishman, in a thick,
aggrieved voice, “is how long you've been at this trade, and how much
you know about it--you and the other Frenchy. But there's none of us
speaks the other's lingo. It is a regular Tower of Babble we are!” And
Uncle Ben added to his mental confusion a further alcoholic fog.
“That's why I showed yer the way out of the works over the iron fence
by the empty casks, and brought yer by the beach to this 'ere house of
entertainment, and stood yer a bottle of brandy between two of
us--which is handsome, not bein' my own money, seeing as how the others
deputed me to do it--me knowing a bit of French, comprenny?” Benjamin,
like most of his countrymen, considering that if one speaks English in
a loud, clear voice, and adds “comprenny” rather severely, as
indicating the intention of standing no nonsense, the previous remarks
will translate themselves miraculously in the hearer's mind. “You
comprenny--eh? Yes. Oui.” “Oui,” replied the Frenchman, holding out his
glass; and Uncle Ben's was that pride which goes with a gift of
tongues.
He struck a match to light his pipe--one of the wooden, sulphur-headed
matches supplied by the _café_--and the guest at the next table turned
in his chair. The match flared up and showed two faces, which he
studied keenly. Both faces were alike unwashed and deeply furrowed.
White, straggling beards and whiskers accentuated the redness of the
eyelids, the dull yellow of the skin. They were hopeless and debased
faces, with that disquieting resemblance which is perceptible in the
faces of men of dissimilar features and no kinship, who have for a
number of years followed a common calling, or suffered a common pain.
These two men were both half blind; they had equally unsteady hands.
The clothing of both alike, and even their breath, was scented by a not
unpleasant odour of sealing-wax.
It was quite obvious that not only were they at present half
intoxicated, but in their soberest moments they could hardly be of a
high intelligence.
The reveller at the next table, who happened to be Tony Cornish, now
drew his chair nearer.
“Englishman?” he inquired.
“That's me,” answered Uncle Ben, with commendable pride, “from the top
of my head to me boots. Not that I've anything to say against
foreigners.”
“Nor I; but it's pleasant to meet a countryman in a foreign land.”
Cornish deliberately brought his chair forward. “Your bottle is empty,”
he added; “I'll order another. Friend's a Frenchman, eh?”
“That he is--and doesn't understand his own language either,” answered
Uncle Ben, in a voice indicating that that lack of comprehension rather
intensified his friend's Frenchness than otherwise.
The proprietor of the Café de l'Europe now came out in answer to
Cornish's rap on the iron table, and presently brought a small bottle
of brandy.
“Yes,” said Cornish, pouring out the spirit, which his companions drank
in its undiluted state from small tumblers--“yes, I'm glad to meet an
Englishman. I suppose you are in the works--the Malgamite?”
“I am. And what do you know about malgamite, mister?”
“Well, not much, I am glad to say.”
“There is precious few that knows anything,” said the man, darkly, and
his eye for a moment sobered into cunning.
“I have heard that it is a very dangerous trade, and if you want to get
out of it I'm connected with an association in London to provide
situations for elderly men who are no longer up to their work,” said
Cornish, carelessly.
“Thank ye, mister; not for me. I'm making my five-pound note a week, I
am, and each cove that dies off makes the survivors one richer, so to
speak--survival of the fittest, they call it. So we don't talk much, and
just pockets the pay.”
“Ah, that is the arrangement, is it?” said Cornish, indifferently.
“Yes. We've got a clever financier, as they call it, I can tell yer.
We're a good-goin' concern, we are. Some of us are goin' pretty quick,
too.”
“Are there many deaths, then?”
“Ah! there you're asking a question,” returned the man, who came of a
class which has no false shame in refusing a reply.
Cornish looked at the man beneath the dim light of the unsuccessful
lamp--a piteous specimen of humanity, depraved, besotted, without
outward sign of a redeeming virtue, although a certain courage must
have been there--this and such as this stood between him and
Dorothy Roden. Uncle Ben had known starvation at one time, for
starvation writes certain lines which even turtle soup may never wipe
out--lines which any may read and none may forget. Tony Cornish had
seen them before--on the face of an old dandy coming down the steps of
a St. James's Street club. The malgamiter had likewise known drink long
and intimately, and it is no exaggeration to say that he had stood
cheek by jowl with death nearly all his life.
Such a man was plainly not to be drawn away from five pounds a week.
Cornish turned to the Frenchman--a little, cunning, bullet-headed
Lyonnais, who would not speak of his craft at all, though he expressed
every desire to be agreeable to monsieur.
“When one is _en fête_,” he cried, “it is good to drink one's glass or
two and think no more of work.”
“I knew one or two of your men once,” said Cornish, returning to the
genial Uncle Ben. “William Martins, I remember, was a decent fellow,
and had seen a bit of the world. I will come to the works and look him
up some day.”
“You can look him up, mister, but you won't find him.”
“Ah, has he gone home?”
“He's gone to his long home, that's where he's gone.”
“And his brother, Tom Martins, both London men, like myself?” inquired
Cornish, without asking that question which Uncle Ben considered such
exceedingly bad form.
“Tom's dead, too.”
“And there were two Americans, I recollect--I came across from Harwich
in the same boat with them--Hewlish they were called.”
“Hewlishes has stepped round the corner, too,” admitted Uncle Ben. “Oh
yes; there's been changes in the works, there's no doubt. And there's
only one sort o' change in the malgamite trade. Come on, Frenchy,
time's up.”
The men stood up and bade Cornish good night, each after his own
manner, and went away steadily enough. It was only their heads that
were intoxicated, and perhaps the brandy of the Café de l'Europe had
nothing to do with this.
Cornish followed them, and, in the Keize Straat, he called a cab,
telling the man to drive to the house at the corner of Oranje Straat
and Park Straat, occupied by Mrs. Vansittart. That lady, the servant
said, in reply to his careful inquiry, was at home and alone, and,
moreover, did not expect visitors. The man was not at all sure that
madame would receive.
“I will try,” said Cornish, writing two words in German on the corner
of his visiting-card. “You see,” he continued, noticing a well-trained
glance, “that I am not dressed, so if other visitors arrive, I would
rather not be discovered in madame's salon, you understand?”
Mrs. Vansittart shook hands with Cornish in silence, her quick eyes
noted the change in him which the shrewd butler had noticed in the
entrance-hall. The Cornish of a year earlier would have gone back to
the hotel to dress.
“I was just going out to the Witte society concert,” said Mrs.
Vansittart. “I thought the open air and the wood would be pleasant this
evening. Shall we go or shall we remain?” She stood with her hand on
the bell looking at him.
“Let us remain here,” he answered.
She rang the bell and countermanded the carriage. Then she sat slowly
down, moving as under a sort of oppression, as if she foresaw what the
next few minutes contained, and felt herself on the threshold of one of
the surprises that Fate springs upon us at odd times, tearing aside the
veils behind which human hearts have slept through many years. For
indifference is not the death, but only the sleep of the heart.
“You have just arrived?”
“No; I have been here a week.”
“At The Hague?”
“No,” answered Cornish, with a grave smile; “at a little inn in
Scheveningen, where no questions are asked.”
Mrs. Vansittart nodded her head slowly. “Then, _mon ami_,” she said,
“the time has come for plain speaking?”
“I suppose so.”
“It is always the woman who wants to get to the plain speaking,” she
said, with a smile, “and who speaks the plainest when one gets there.
You men are afraid of so many words; you think them, but you dare not
make use of them. And how are women to know that you are thinking
them?” She spoke with a sort of tolerant bitterness, as if all these
questions no longer interested her personally. She sat forward, with
one hand on the arm of her chair. “Come,” she said, with a little laugh
that shook and trembled on the brink of a whole sea of unshed tears, “I
will speak the first word. When my husband died, my heart broke--and
it was Otto von Holzen who killed him.” Her eyes flashed suddenly, and
she threw herself back in the chair. Her hands were trembling.
Cornish made a quick gesture of the hand--a trick he had learnt
somewhere on the Continent, more eloquent than a hundred words--which
told of his sympathy and his comprehension of all that she had left
unsaid. For truly she had told him her whole history in a dozen words.
“I have followed him and watched him ever since,” she went on at
length, in a quiet voice; “but a woman is so helpless. I suppose if any
of us were watched and followed as he has been our lives would appear a
strange mixture of a little good and much bad, mixed with a mass of
neutral idleness. But surely his life is worse than the rest--not that
it matters. Whatever his life had been, if he had been a living saint,
Tony, he would have had to pay--for what he has done to me.”
She looked steadily into the keen face that was watching hers. She was
not in the least melodramatic, and what was stranger, perhaps, she was
not ashamed. According to her lights, she was a good woman, who went to
church regularly, and did a little conventional good with her
superfluous wealth. She obeyed the unwritten laws of society, and
busied herself little in her neighbours' affairs. She was kind to her
servants, and did not hate her neighbours more than is necessary in a
crowded world. She led a blameless, unoccupied, and apparently
purposeless life. And now she quietly told Tony Cornish that her life
was not purposeless, but had for its aim the desire of an eye for an
eye and a life for a life.
“You remember my husband,” continued Mrs. Vansittart, after a pause.
“He was always absorbed in his researches. He made a great discovery,
and confided in Otto von Holzen, who thought that he could make a
fortune out of it. But Von Holzen cheated and was caught. There was a
great trial, and Von Holzen succeeded in incriminating my husband, who
was innocent, instead of himself. The company, of course, failed, which
meant ruin and dishonour. In a fit of despair my husband shot himself.
And afterwards it transpired that by shooting himself at that time he
saved my money. One cannot take proceedings against a dead man, it
appears. So I was left a rich woman, after all, and my husband had
frustrated Otto von Holzen. The world did not believe that my husband
had done it on purpose; but I knew better. It is one of those beliefs
that one keeps to one's self, and is indifferent whether the world
believes or not. So there remain but two things for me to do--the one
is to enjoy the money, and to let my husband see that I spend it as he
would have wished me to spend it--upon myself; the other is to make
Otto von Holzen pay--when the time comes. Who knows? the Malgamite is
perhaps the time; you are perhaps the man.” She gave her disquieting
little laugh again, and sat looking at him.
“I understand,” he said at length. “Before, I was puzzled. There seemed
no reason why you should take any interest in the scheme.”
“My interest in the Malgamite scheme narrows down to an interest in one
person,” answered Mrs. Vansittart, “which is what really happens to all
human interests, my friend.”