rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible “account.” The
steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he obtained the
preference.
“You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?” the face asked quite unexpectedly.
“I am at your service,” he answered from below; for business is
business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's
manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of
baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.
Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was seated
beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch. His body was long
and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined, clasped the leg
resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless yet tense attitude.
On the other side of Schomberg sat another passenger, who was introduced
by the clean-shaven man as--
“My secretary. He must have the room next to mine.”
“We can manage that easily for you.”
Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very much
interested by these two promising “accounts.” Their belongings, a couple
of large leather trunks browned by age and a few smaller packages,
were piled up in the bows. A third individual--a nondescript, hairy
creature--had modestly made his way forward and had perched himself on
the luggage. The lower part of his physiognomy was over-developed;
his narrow and low forehead, unintelligently furrowed by horizontal
wrinkles, surmounted wildly hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide,
baboon-like nostrils. There was something equivocal in the appearance of
his shaggy, hair-smothered humanity. He, too, seemed to be a follower of
the clean-shaven man, and apparently had travelled on deck with native
passengers, sleeping under the awnings. His broad, squat frame denoted
great strength. Grasping the gunwales of the launch, he displayed a
pair of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick, brown hairy paws of
simian aspect.
“What shall we do with the fellow of mine?” the chief of the party asked
Schomberg. “There must be a boarding-house somewhere near the port--some
grog-shop where they could let him have a mat to sleep on?”
Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.
“A servant of yours?” he asked.
“Well, he hangs on to me. He is an alligator-hunter. I picked him up in
Colombia, you know. Ever been in Colombia?”
“No,” said Schomberg, very much surprised. “An alligator-hunter? Funny
trade! Are you coming from Colombia, then?”
“Yes, but I have been coming for a long time. I come from a good many
places. I am travelling west, you see.”
“For sport, perhaps?” suggested Schomberg.
“Yes. Sort of sport. What do you say to chasing the sun?”
“I see--a gentleman at large,” said Schomberg, watching a sailing canoe
about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of the helm.
The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.
“Hang these native craft! They always get in the way.”
He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh
voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin,
dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid
nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing secretarial
about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore the usual white
suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes--all correct.
The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage in the bow had a
check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He gazed in their direction from
forward in an expectant, trained-animal manner.
“You spoke to me first,” said Schomberg in his manly tones. “You were
acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen, may I
ask?”
“In Manila,” answered the gentleman at large, readily. “From a man with
whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille.”
“What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of,” wondered Schomberg
with a severe frown.
“I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you
worry. He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all the
names he could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going about
him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it. You were
running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't you?”
Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw
out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve
manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always--for the sake of white
men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in this place, too.
“That's all right, then.” The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping
the brass tiller in a sweating palm. “Many people in the evening at your
place?”
Schomberg had recovered somewhat.
“Twenty covers or so, take one day with another,” he answered feelingly,
as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. “Ought to be more,
if only people would see that it's for their own good. Precious little
profit I get out of it. You are partial to tables d'hote, gentlemen?”
The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
some local people in the evening. It was infernally dull otherwise. The
secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing ferocity,
as if proposing to himself to eat the local people. All this sounded
like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under his grave air;
till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by the last guest who
had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground his teeth so audibly
that the other two looked at him in wonder. The momentary convulsion
of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike them dumb. They exchanged a
quick glance. Presently the clean-shaven man fired out another question
in his curt, unceremonious manner:
“You have no women in your hotel, eh?”
“Women!” Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as if a little
frightened. “What on earth do you mean by women? What women? There's
Mrs. Schomberg, of course,” he added, suddenly appeased, with lofty
indifference.
“If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do. I can't stand
women near me. They give me the horrors,” declared the other. “They are
a perfect curse!”
During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin. The chief guest
closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the back of his head
against the stanchion of the awning. In this pose, his long, feminine
eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular features, sharp line of
the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into prominence, giving him a
used-up, weary, depraved distinction. He did not open his eyes till
the steam-launch touched the quay. Then he and the other man got ashore
quickly, entered a carriage, and drove away to the hotel, leaving
Schomberg to look after their luggage and take care of their strange
companion. The latter, looking more like a performing bear abandoned by
his show men than a human being, followed all Schomberg's movements step
by step, close behind his back, muttering to himself in a language
that sounded like some sort of uncouth Spanish. The hotel-keeper felt
uncomfortable till at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where
a very clean, portly Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the
doorway, seemed to understand exactly how to deal with clients of every
kind. He took from the creature the strapped bundle it had been hugging
closely through all its peregrinations in that strange town, and cut
short Schomberg's attempts at explanation by a most confident--
“I comprehend very well, sir.”
“It's more than I do,” thought Schomberg, going away thankful at being
relieved of the alligator-hunter's company. He wondered what these
fellows were, without being able to form a guess of sufficient
probability. Their names he learned that very day by direct inquiry “to
enter in my books,” he explained in his formal military manner, chest
thrown out, beard very much in evidence.
The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered
youth, raised his eyes languidly.
“My name? Oh, plain Mr. Jones--put that down--a gentleman at large. And
this is Ricardo.” The pock-marked man, lying prostrate in another long
chair, made a grimace, as if something had tickled the end of his nose,
but did not come out of his supineness. “Martin Ricardo, secretary. You
don't want any more of our history, do you? Eh, what? Occupation? Put
down, well--tourists. We've been called harder names before now; it
won't hurt our feelings. And that fellow of mine--where did you tuck him
away? Oh, he will be all right. When he wants anything he'll take it.
He's Peter. Citizen of Colombia. Peter, Pedro--I don't know that he ever
had any other name. Pedro, alligator hunter. Oh, yes--I'll pay his board
with the half-caste. Can't help myself. He's so confoundedly devoted to
me that if I were to give him the sack he would fly at my throat. Shall
I tell you how I killed his brother in the wilds of Colombia? Well,
perhaps some other time--it's a rather long story. What I shall always
regret is that I didn't kill him, too. I could have done it without any
extra trouble then; now it's too late. Great nuisance; but he's useful
sometimes. I hope you are not going to put all this in your book?”
The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of “plain Mr. Jones”
disconcerted Schomberg utterly. He had never been spoken to like this
in his life. He shook his head in silence and withdrew, not exactly
scared--though he was in reality of a timid disposition under his manly
exterior--but distinctly mystified and impressed.
CHAPTER FIVE
Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned
towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
“I must get rid of these two. It won't do!”
Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but she
had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself. Sitting
in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was careful not
to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very assent would be
resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg, clad in
his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.
He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in
her night attire, looked the most unattractive object in
existence--miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the
contrast with the feminine form he had ever in his mind's eye made his
wife's appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.
Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing
his courage up to the sticking point.
“Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his
bedroom, and tell him to be off--him and that secretary of his--early in
the morning. I don't mind a round game of cards, but to make a decoy of
my table d'hote--my blood boils! He came here because some lying rascal
in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote.”
He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but simply
thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point where it would
give him courage enough to face “plain Mr. Jones.”
“Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper,” he went on. “I have a good
mind to--”
He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike
the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes
strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened in
the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a fear
for his precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else but
that to hold on to in the world. She knew him well; but she did not know
him altogether. The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man
whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. And,
timid in her corner, she ventured to say pressingly:
“Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their
trunks.”
In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
the direction of her shrinking person. In her scanty nightdress, and
barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for her
sins in blasphemous terms. Those lethal weapons were always present to
Schomberg's mind. Personally, he had never seen them. His part, ten
days after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in manly, careless
attitudes on the veranda--keeping watch--while Mrs. Schomberg, provided
with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured teeth chattering and her
globular eyes absolutely idiotic with fright, was “going through” the
luggage of these strange clients. Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on
it.
“I'll be on the look-out, I tell you,” he said. “I shall give you a
whistle when I see them coming back. You couldn't whistle. And if he
were to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the neck, it
wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman. Not he! He has told
me so. Affected beast. I must find out something about their little
game, and so there's an end of it. Go in! Go now! Quick march!”
It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much more
afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the act. Her
greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had provided her with
should fit the locks. It would have been such a disappointment for
Wilhelm. However, the trunks, she found, had been left open; but her
investigation did not last long. She was frightened of firearms, and
generally of all weapons, not from personal cowardice, but as some women
are, almost superstitiously, from an abstract horror of violence and
murder. She was out again on the veranda long before Wilhelm had any
occasion for a warning whistle. The instinctive, motiveless fear being
the most difficult to overcome, nothing could induce her to return to
her investigations, neither threatening growls nor ferocious hisses, nor
yet a poke or two in the ribs.
“Stupid female!” muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed by the notion
of that armoury in one of his bedrooms. This was from no abstract
sentiment, with him it was constitutional. “Get out of my sight,” he
snarled. “Go and dress yourself for the table d'hote.”
Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated. What the devil did this mean?
His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic; but suddenly the
truth came to him.
“By heavens, they are desperadoes!” he thought.
Just then he beheld “plain Mr. Jones” and his secretary with the
ambiguous name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel. They had
been down to the port on some business, and now were returning; Mr.
Jones lank, spare, opening his long legs with angular regularity like
a pair of compasses, the other stepping out briskly by his side.
Conviction entered Schomberg's heart. They were two desperadoes--no
doubt about it. But as the funk which he experienced was merely
a general sensation, he managed to put on his most severe
Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they had closed with him.
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his sudden
conviction of their desperate character. The way Mr. Jones turned his
hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the way the other,
when addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and exhibited his teeth
without looking round--here was evidence enough to settle that point.
Desperadoes! They passed through the billiard-room, inscrutably
mysterious, to the back of the house, to join their violated trunks.
“Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen.” Schomberg called
after them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his tone.
He had managed to upset himself very much. He expected to see them come
back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack of restraint.
Desperadoes! However they didn't; they had not noticed anything unusual
about their trunks and Schomberg recovered his composure and said
to himself that he must get rid of this deadly incubus as soon as
practicable. They couldn't possibly want to stay very long; this was not
the town--the colony--for desperate characters. He shrank from action.
He dreaded any kind of disturbance--“fracas” he called it--in his hotel.
Such things were not good for business. Of course, sometimes one had to
have a “fracas;” but it had been a comparatively trifling task to seize
the frail Zangiacomo--whose bones were no larger than a chicken's--round
the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him to the ground, and fall on
him. It had been easy. The wretched, hook-nosed creature lay without
movement, buried under its purple beard.
Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that “fracas,” Schomberg groaned
with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone, and gave himself up
to desolation. Ah, if he only had that girl with him he would have been
masterful and resolute and fearless--fight twenty desperadoes--care
for nobody on earth! Whereas the possession of Mrs. Schomberg was no
incitement to a display of manly virtues. Instead of caring for no one,
he felt that he cared for nothing. Life was a hollow sham; he wasn't
going to risk a shot through his lungs or his liver in order to preserve
its integrity. It had no savour--damn it!
In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of the
art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for criticism
to the powers regulating that branch of human activity, let things take
their course; though he saw very well where that course was tending.
It began first with a game or two after dinner--for the drinks,
apparently--with some lingering customer, at one of the little tables
ranged against the walls of the billiard-room. Schomberg detected the
meaning of it at once. “That's what it was! This was what they were!”
And, moving about restlessly (at that time his morose silent period had
set in), he cast sidelong looks at the game; but he said nothing. It was
not worth while having a row with men who were so overbearing. Even when
money appeared in connection with these postprandial games, into which
more and more people were being drawn, he still refrained from raising
the question; he was reluctant to draw unduly the attention of “plain
Mr. Jones” and of the equivocal Ricardo, to his person. One evening,
however, after the public rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg
made an attempt to grapple with the problem in an indirect way.
In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
against the wall. Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between ten
and eleven. Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the room and
the veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go to bed. Then
suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest thrown out, his voice
curt and soldierly.
“Hot night, gentlemen.”
Mr. Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up. Ricardo, as idle, but
more upright, made no sign.
“Won't you have a drink with me before retiring?” went on Schomberg,
sitting down by the little table.
“By all means,” said Mr. Jones lazily.
Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin. Schomberg felt
painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men, both
so quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious. He ordered the
Chinaman to bring in the drinks. His purpose was to discover how long
these guests intended to stay. Ricardo displayed no conversational vein,
but Mr. Jones appeared communicative enough. His voice somehow matched
his sunken eyes. It was hollow without being in the least mournful;
it sounded distant, uninterested, as though he were speaking from the
bottom of a well. Schomberg learned that he would have the privilege of
lodging and boarding these gentlemen for at least a month more. He could
not conceal his discomfiture at this piece of news.
“What's the matter? Don't you like to have people in your house?” asked
plain Mr. Jones languidly. “I should have thought the owner of a hotel
would be pleased.”
He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows. Schomberg
muttered something about the locality being dull and uninteresting to
travellers--nothing going on--too quiet altogether, but he only provoked
the declaration that quiet had its charm sometimes, and even dullness
was welcome as a change.
“We haven't had time to be dull for the last three years,” added plain
Mr. Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further more
invited to have another drink, this time with him, and not to worry
himself about things he did not understand; and especially not to be
inhospitable--which in a hotel-keeper is highly unprofessional.
“I don't understand,” grumbled Schomberg. “Oh, yes, I understand
perfectly well. I--”
“You are frightened,” interrupted Mr. Jones. “What is the matter?”
“I don't want any scandal in my place. That's what's the matter.”
Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady, black
stare affected him. And when he glanced aside uncomfortably, he met
Ricardo's grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man seemed absorbed
in his thoughts all the time.
“And, moreover,” went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone of his, “you
can't help yourself. Here we are and here we stay. Would you try to
put us out? I dare say you could do it; but you couldn't do it without
getting hurt--very badly hurt. We can promise him that, can't we,
Martin?”
The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg, as
if only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.
Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Mr. Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and looked
remarkably like a corpse for a moment. This was bad enough; but when he
opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for Schomberg's nerves.
The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on the hotel-keeper (and
this was most frightful) without any definite expression, seemed to
dissolve the last grain of resolution in his character.
“You don't think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary
people, do you?” inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which
seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.
“He's a gentleman,” testified Martin Ricardo with a sudden snap of the
lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves in an odd, feline
manner.
“Oh, I wasn't thinking of that,” said plain Mr. Jones, while Schomberg,
dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked from one to the other,
leaning forward a little. “Of course I am that; but Ricardo attaches
too much importance to a social advantage. What I mean, for instance, is
that he, quiet and inoffensive as you see him sitting here, would think
nothing of setting fire to this house of entertainment of yours. It
would blaze like a box of matches. Think of that! It wouldn't advance
your affairs much, would it?--whatever happened to us.”
“Come, come gentlemen,” remonstrated Schomberg, in a murmur. “This is
very wild talk!”
“And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven't you? But we
aren't tame. We once kept a whole angry town at bay for two days, and
then we got away with our plunder. It was in Venezuela. Ask Martin
here--he can tell you.”
Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip of
his tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did not
offer to begin.
“Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story,” Mr. Jones conceded
after a short silence.
“I have no desire to hear it, I am sure,” said Schomberg. “This isn't
Venezuela. You wouldn't get away from here like that. But all this is
silly talk of the worst sort. Do you mean to say you would make deadly
trouble for the sake of a few guilders that you and that other”--eyeing
Ricardo suspiciously, as one would look at a strange animal--“gentleman
can win of an evening? Isn't as if my customers were a lot of rich men
with pockets full of cash. I wonder you take so much trouble and risk
for so little money.”