something to kill time. Killing time was not forbidden. For the rest,
being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones said languidly and in a voice
indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb, that he depended on himself, as
if the world were still one great, wild jungle without law. Martin was
something like that, too--for reasons of his own.
All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins.
Schomberg lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men intimidated
him; but he was losing patience.
“Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate
characters--something like what you say. But what would you think if
I told you that I am pretty near as desperate as you two gentlemen?
'Here's that Schomberg has an easy time running his hotel,' people
think; and yet it seems to me I would just as soon let you rip me open
and burn the whole show as not. There!”
A low whistle was heard. It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.
Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor. He was really
desperate. Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.
“Tut, tut! You have a tolerable business. You are perfectly tame; you--”
He paused, then added in a tone of disgust: “You have a wife.”
Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an
indistinct, laughing curse.
“What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?” he cried.
“I wish you would carry her off with you some where to the devil! I
wouldn't run after you.”
The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely. He had a horrified
recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a wriggling viper in
his face.
“What's this infernal nonsense?” he muttered thickly. “What do you mean?
How dare you?”
Ricardo chuckled audibly.
“I tell you I am desperate,” Schomberg repeated. “I am as desperate as
any man ever was. I don't care a hang what happens to me!”
“Well, then”--Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly threatening
effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other deadly
meaning to his mind--“well, then, why should you make yourself
ridiculously disagreeable to us? If you don't care, as you say, you
might just as well let us have the key of that music-shed of yours for
a quiet game; a modest bank--a dozen candles or so. It would be greatly
appreciated by your clients, as far as I can judge from the way they
betted on a game of ecarte I had with that fair, baby-faced man--what's
his name? They just yearn for a modest bank. And I am afraid Martin here
would take it badly if you objected; but of course you won't. Think of
the calls for drinks!”
Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark caverns
under Mr. Jones's devilish eyebrows, directed upon him impenetrably. He
shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been lurking there, and
said, nodding towards Ricardo:
“I dare say he wouldn't think twice about sticking me, if he had you at
his back! I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone to the bottom myself
in her, before I boarded the steamer you came by. Ah, well, I've been
already living in hell for weeks, so you don't make much difference.
I'll let you have the concert-room--and hang the consequences. But
what about the boy on late duty? If he sees the cards and actual money
passing, he will be sure to blab, and it will be all over the town in no
time.”
A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.
“Ah, I see you want to make a success of it. Very good. That's the way
to get on. Don't let it disturb you. You chase all the Chinamen to bed
early, and we'll get Pedro here every evening. He isn't the conventional
waiter's cut, but he will do to run to and fro with the tray, while
you sit here from nine to eleven serving out drinks and gathering the
money.”
“There will be three of them now,” thought the unlucky Schomberg.
But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no
suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an
insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and
a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and
queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by comparison, delightfully
natural. Besides, Schomberg could no longer help himself.
“That will do very well,” he asserted mournfully. “But if you gentlemen,
if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less than three
months ago--you would have found somebody very different from what I am
now to talk to you. It's true. What do you think of that?”
“I scarcely know what to think. I should think it was a lie. You were
probably as tame three months ago as you are now. You were born tame,
like most people in the world.”
Mr. Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl and a
stretch. Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to himself:
“There has been an orchestra here--eighteen women.”
Mr. Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if the
walls around him and the whole house had been infected with plague. Then
he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg for daring to
bring up such subjects. The hotel-keeper was too much surprised to get
up. He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger, which had nothing
spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible for that.
“What's the matter?” he stammered out. “What subject? Didn't you hear me
say it was an orchestra? There's nothing wrong in that. Well, there was
a girl amongst them--” Schomberg's eyes went stony; he clasped his hands
in front of his breast with such force that his knuckles came out white.
“Such a girl! Tame, am I? I would have kicked everything to pieces about
me for her. And she, of course . . . I am in the prime of life . . .
then a fellow bewitched her--a vagabond, a false, lying, swindling,
underhand, stick-at-nothing brute. Ah!”
His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his
arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other
two looked at his shaking back--the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled
scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a cat which
sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach. Schomberg flung himself
backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if swallowing sobs.
“No wonder you can do with me what you like. You have no idea--just let
me tell you of my trouble--”
“I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble,” said Mr. Jones,
in his most lifelessly positive voice.
He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the uncanniness
of his thin shanks. Ricardo followed at his leader's heels; but he
showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.
CHAPTER SIX
From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena in
Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's casual
notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to return
Mrs. Schomberg's Indian shawl. And strangely enough, they lasted
some considerable time. It argued either honesty and bad luck or
extraordinary restraint on the part of “plain Mr. Jones and Co.” in
their discreet operations with cards.
It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled up
on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by two
dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with green
cloth. In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker,
faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier.
By contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty
and thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely
artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their innocent watch for the
small turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for
them. They had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray
with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk
on its hind legs.
As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the
billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air
of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks
went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room over there
under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel. He submitted himself
to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism compounded of fear and
resignation. Directly the party had broken up, (he could see dark
shapes of the men drifting singly and in knots through the gate of
the compound), he would withdraw out of sight behind a door not quite
closed, in order to avoid meeting his two extraordinary guests; but he
would watch through the crack their contrasted forms pass through the
billiard-room and disappear on their way to bed. Then he would hear
doors being slammed upstairs; and a profound silence would fall upon the
whole house, upon his hotel appropriated, haunted by those insolently
outspoken men provided with a whole armoury of weapons in their trunks.
A profound silence. Schomberg sometimes could not resist the notion that
he must be dreaming. Shuddering, he would pull himself together,
and creep out, with movements strangely inappropriate to the
Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried to keep up his
self-respect before the world.
A great loneliness oppressed him. One after another he would extinguish
the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where Mrs. Schomberg
waited for him--no fit companion for a man of his ability and “in the
prime of life.” But that life, alas, was blighted. He felt it; and never
with such force as when on opening the door he perceived that woman
sitting patiently in a chair, her toes peeping out under the edge of her
night-dress, an amazingly small amount of hair on her head drooping
on the long stalk of scraggy neck, with that everlasting scared grin
showing a blue tooth and meaning nothing--not even real fear. For she
was used to him.
Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk. He imagined
himself doing it--with one hand, a twisting movement. Not seriously, of
course. Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated feelings. He wasn't
capable of murder. He was certain of that. And, remembering suddenly the
plain speeches of Mr. Jones, he would think: “I suppose I am too tame
for that”--quite unaware that he had murdered the poor woman morally
years ago. He was too unintelligent to have the notion of such a crime.
Her bodily presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast with
a very different feminine image. And it was no use getting rid of her.
She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to put in her
place. At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half the night if he
chose.
That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to face
his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had merely
received the usual warning: “Be careful, Wilhelm.” He did not want to be
told to be careful by an imbecile female. What he needed was a pair of
woman's arms which, flung round his neck, would brace him up for the
encounter. Inspire him, he called it to himself.
He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
unsatisfactory and short. The morning light had no joy for his eyes.
He listened dismally to the movements in the house. The Chinamen were
unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public rooms which opened
on the veranda. Horrors! Another poisoned day to get through somehow!
The recollection of his resolve made him feel actually sick for a
moment. First of all the lordly, abandoned attitudes of Mr. Jones
disconcerted him. Then there was his contemptuous silence. Mr. Jones
never addressed himself to Schomberg with any general remarks, never
opened his lips to him unless to say “Good morning”--two simple words
which, uttered by that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character.
And, lastly, it was not a frank physical fear he inspired--for as to
that, even a cornered rat will fight--but a superstitious shrinking awe,
something like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked
ghost. That it was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his
attitudes, and for the most part spread out on three chairs, did
not make it any easier. Daylight only made him a more weird, a more
disturbing and unlawful apparition. Strangely enough in the evening when
he came out of his mute supineness, this unearthly side of him was less
obtrusive. At the gaming-table, when actually handling the cards, it was
probably sunk quite out of sight; but Schomberg, having made up his mind
in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what was going on, never entered the
desecrated music-room. He had never seen Mr. Jones in the exercise of
his vocation--or perhaps it was only his trade.
“I will speak to him tonight,” Schomberg said to himself, while he drank
his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the rising sun had
topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried dew still
lay silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the central
flower-bed, and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive. “That's what
I'll do. I won't keep out of sight tonight. I shall come out and catch
him as he goes to bed carrying the cash-box.”
After all, what was the fellow but a common desperado? Murderous? Oh,
yes; murderous enough, perhaps--and the muscles of Schomberg's stomach
had a quivering contraction under his airy attire. But even a common
desperado would think twice or, more likely, a hundred times, before
openly murdering an inoffensive citizen in a civilized, European-ruled
town. He jerked his shoulders. Of course! He shuddered again, and
paddled back to his room to dress himself. His mind was made up, and he
would think no more about it; but still he had his doubts. They grew and
unfolded themselves with the progress of the day, as some plants do. At
times they made him perspire more than usual, and they did away with
the possibility of his afternoon siesta. After turning over on his couch
more than a dozen times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and
went downstairs.
It was between three and four o'clock, the hour of profound peace. The
very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with sleepy leaves. Not
even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was not due till later. The
servants were out of sight, catching naps in the shade somewhere behind
the house. Mrs. Schomberg in a dim up-stair room with closed jalousies,
was elaborating those two long pendant ringlets which were such a
feature of her hairdressing for her afternoon duties. At that time no
customers ever troubled the repose of the establishment. Wandering about
his premises in profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the
billiard-room, as if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the
billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr.
Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity
something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards,
which he always carried about in his pocket. Schomberg would have backed
out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head. Having been seen, the
hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two. The
consciousness of his inwardly abject attitude towards these men caused
him always to throw his chest out and assume a severe expression.
Ricardo watched his approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.
“You want something, perhaps?” suggested Schomberg in his
lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.
Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant. With him
Schomberg exchanged at least twenty words every day. He was infinitely
more communicative than his patron. At times he looked very much like
an ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed to be in an amiable
mood at that moment. Suddenly spreading some ten cards face downward in
the form of a fan, he thrust them towards Schomberg.
“Come, man, take one quick!”
Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
perceptible start. The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed phosphorescent
in the half-light of the room screened from the heat and glare of the
tropics.
“That's the king of hearts you've got,” he chuckled, showing his teeth
in a quick flash.
Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid it
down on the table.
“I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten,” exulted the
secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker in his
raised eyes.
Schomberg looked down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of them
stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers,
let the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down. He sat down
because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason. His mouth
was dry. Having sat down, he felt that he must speak. He squared his
shoulders in parade style.
“You are pretty good at that sort of thing,” he said.
“Practice makes perfect,” replied the secretary.
His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get away.
Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself engaged
in a conversation the thought of which filled him with apprehension. It
must be said, in justice to Schomberg, that he concealed his funk very
creditably. The habit of throwing out his chest and speaking in a severe
voice stood him in good stead. With him, too, practice made perfect; and
he would probably have kept it up to the end, to the very last moment,
to the ultimate instant of breaking strain which would leave him
grovelling on the floor. To add to his secret trouble, he was at a loss
what to say. He found nothing else but the remark:
“I suppose you are fond of cards.”
“What would you expect?” asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical tone.
“It is likely I should not be?” Then, with sudden fire: “Fond of cards?
Ay, passionately!”
The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of the
eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a confession of
another kind of love. Schomberg cudgelled his brains for a new topic,
but he could not find one. His usual scandalous gossip would not serve
this turn. That desperado did not know anyone anywhere within a thousand
miles. Schomberg was almost compelled to keep to the subject.
“I suppose you've always been so--from your early youth.”
Ricardo's eyes remained cast down. His fingers toyed absently with the
pack on the table.
“I don't know that it was so early. I first got in the way of it playing
for tobacco--in forecastles of ships, you know--common sailor games. We
used to spend whole watches below at it, round a chest, under a
slush lamp. We would hardly spare the time to get a bite of salt
horse--neither eat nor sleep. We could hardly stand when the watches
were mustered on deck. Talk of gambling!” He dropped the reminiscent
tone to add the information, “I was bred to the sea from a boy, you
know.”
Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense of
impending calamity. The next words he heard were:
“I got on all right at sea, too. Worked up to be mate. I was mate of a
schooner--a yacht, you might call her--a special good berth too, in the
Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don't run across more than once in a
lifetime. Yes, I was mate of her when I left the sea to follow him.”
Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr. Jones's
existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his bedroom.
Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went on:
“It so happened that we were shipmates.”
“Mr. Jones, you mean? Is he a sailor too?”
Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.
“He's no more Mr. Jones than you are,” he said with obvious pride. “He a
sailor! That just shows your ignorance. But there! A foreigner can't be
expected to know any better. I am an Englishman, and I know a gentleman
at sight. I should know one drunk, in the gutter, in jail, under the
gallows. There's a something--it isn't exactly the appearance, it's
a--no use me trying to tell you. You ain't an Englishman, and if you
were, you wouldn't need to be told.”
An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his pitiless
fibre. Schomberg experienced mingled relief and apprehension, as if
suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to wind itself about his legs
in inexplicable friendliness. No prudent man under such circumstances
would dare to stir. Schomberg didn't stir. Ricardo assumed an easy
attitude, with an elbow on the table. Schomberg squared his shoulders
afresh.
“I was employed, in that there yacht--schooner, whatever you call it--by
ten gentlemen at once. That surprises you, eh? Yes, yes, ten. Leastwise
there were nine of them gents good enough in their way, and one
downright gentleman, and that was . . .”
Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say: He! The
only one.
“And no mistake,” he went on. “I spotted him from the first day. How?
Why? Ay, you may ask. Hadn't seen that many gentlemen in my life. Well,
somehow I did. If you were an Englishman, you would--”
“What was your yacht?” Schomberg interrupted as impatiently as he dared;
for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried nerves.
“What was the game?”
“You have a headpiece on you! Game! 'Xactly. That's what it was--the
sort of silliness gentlemen will get up among themselves to play at
adventure. A treasure-hunting expedition. Each of them put down so much
money, you understand, to buy the schooner. Their agent in the city
engaged me and the skipper. The greatest secrecy and all that. I reckon
he had a twinkle in his eye all the time--and no mistake. But that
wasn't our business. Let them bust their money as they like. The pity of
it was that so little of it came our way. Just fair pay and no more. And
damn any pay, much or little, anyhow--that's what I say!”
He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light. The heat seemed to
have stilled everything in the world but his voice. He swore at large,
abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say why, then
calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor yarns.
“At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks, then, just a
day or two before the sailing date, he turned up. Heard of it somehow,
somewhere--I would say from some woman, if I didn't know him as I do. He
would give any woman a ten-mile berth. He can't stand them. Or maybe in
a flash bar. Or maybe in one of them grand clubs in Pall Mall. Anyway,
the agent netted him in all right--cash down, and only about four and
twenty hours for him to get ready; but he didn't miss his ship. Not he!
You might have called it a pier-head jump--for a gentleman. I saw him
come along. Know the West India Docks, eh?”
Schomberg did not know the West India Docks. Ricardo looked at him
pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance had to
be disregarded.
“Our tug was already alongside. Two loafers were carrying his dunnage
behind him. I told the dockman at our moorings to keep all fast for a
minute. The gangway was down already; but he made nothing of it. Up he
jumps, one leap, swings his long legs over the rail, and there he is
on board. They pass up his swell dunnage, and he puts his hand in his
trousers pocket and throws all his small change on the wharf for them
chaps to pick up. They were still promenading that wharf on all fours
when we cast off. It was only then that he looked at me--quietly, you
know; in a slow way. He wasn't so thin then as he is now; but I noticed
he wasn't so young as he looked--not by a long chalk. He seemed to touch
me inside somewhere. I went away pretty quick from there; I was wanted
forward anyhow. I wasn't frightened. What should I be frightened for? I
only felt touched--on the very spot. But Jee-miny, if anybody had told
me we should be partners before the year was out--well, I would have--”