"You find, then, in your line of business," I asked, "that apparent
frankness is advisable? As a rule," I explained, "secrecy is what a--a
person in your line--a--"
To save his feelings I hesitated at the word.
"A spy," he said. His face beamed with fatuous complacency.
"But if I had not known you were a spy," I asked, "would not that have
been better for you?"
"In dealing with a party like you, Mr. Crosby," Schnitzel began
sententiously, "I use a different method. You're on a secret mission
yourself, and you get your information about the nitrate row one way,
and I get it another. I deal with you just like we were drummers in the
same line of goods. We are rivals in business, but outside of business
hours perfect gentlemen."
In the face of the disbelief that had met my denials of any secret
mission, I felt to have Schnitzel also disbelieve me would be too great
a humiliation. So I remained silent.
"You make your report to the State Department," he explained, "and I
make mine to--my people. Who they are doesn't matter. You'd like to
know, and I don't want to hurt your feelings, but--that's _my_ secret."
My only feelings were a desire to kick Schnitzel heavily, but for
Schnitzel to suspect that was impossible. Rather, he pictured me as
shaken by his disclosures.
As he hung over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit
up his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter
lack of any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes the vacant,
half-crooked mind.
Schnitzel was smiling to himself with a smile of complete
self-satisfaction. In the light of his later conduct, I grew to
understand that smile. He had anticipated a rebuff, and he had been
received, as he read it, with consideration. The irony of my politeness
he had entirely missed. Instead, he read in what I said the admiration
of the amateur for the professional. He saw what he believed to be a
high agent of the Government treating him as a worthy antagonist. In no
other way can I explain his later heaping upon me his confidences. It
was the vanity of a child trying to show off.
In ten days, in the limited area of a two-thousand-ton steamer, one
could not help but learn something of the history of so communicative a
fellow-passenger as Schnitzel. His parents were German and still
lived in Germany. But he himself had been brought up on the East Side.
An uncle who kept a delicatessen shop in Avenue A had sent him to the
public schools and then to a "business college," where he had developed
remarkable expertness as a stenographer. He referred to his skill in
this difficult exercise with pitying contempt. Nevertheless, from a room
noisy with typewriters this skill had lifted him into the private office
of the president of the Nitrate Trust. There, as Schnitzel expressed it,
"I saw 'mine,' and I took it." To trace back the criminal instinct that
led Schnitzel to steal and sell the private letters of his employer was
not difficult. In all of his few early years I found it lying latent. Of
every story he told of himself, and he talked only of himself, there was
not one that was not to his discredit. He himself never saw this, nor
that all he told me showed he was without the moral sense, and with an
instinctive enjoyment of what was deceitful, mean, and underhand. That,
as I read it, was his character.
[Illustration: Schnitzel was smiling to himself]
In appearance he was smooth-shaven, with long locks that hung behind
wide, protruding ears. He had the unhealthy skin of bad blood, and his
eyes, as though the daylight hurt them, constantly opened and shut. He
was like hundreds of young men that you see loitering on upper Broadway
and making predatory raids along the Rialto. Had you passed him in that
neighborhood you would have set him down as a wire-tapper, a racing
tout, a would-be actor.
As I worked it out, Schnitzel was a spy because it gave him an
importance he had not been able to obtain by any other effort. As a
child and as a clerk, it was easy to see that among his associates
Schnitzel must always have been the butt. Until suddenly, by one dirty
action, he had placed himself outside their class. As he expressed it:
"Whenever I walk through the office now, where all the stenographers
sit, you ought to see those slobs look after me. When they go to the
president's door, they got to knock, like I used to, but now, when the
old man sees me coming to make my report after one of these trips he
calls out, 'Come right in, Mr. Schnitzel.' And like as not I go in with
my hat on and offer him a cigar. An' they see me do it, too!"
To me, that speech seemed to give Schnitzel's view of the values of his
life. His vanity demanded he be pointed at, if even with contempt. But
the contempt never reached him--he only knew that at last people took
note of him. They no longer laughed at him, they were afraid of him. In
his heart he believed that they regarded him as one who walked in the
dark places of world politics, who possessed an evil knowledge of great
men as evil as himself, as one who by blackmail held public ministers at
his mercy.
This view of himself was the one that he tried to give me. I probably
was the first decent man who ever had treated him civilly, and to
impress me with his knowledge he spread that knowledge before me. It was
_sale_, shocking, degrading.
At first I took comfort in the thought that Schnitzel was a liar. Later,
I began to wonder if all of it were a lie, and finally, in a way I could
not doubt, it was proved to me that the worst he charged was true.
The night I first began to believe him was the night we touched at
Cristobal, the last port in Valencia. In the most light-hearted manner
he had been accusing all concerned in the nitrate fight with every crime
known in Wall Street and in the dark reaches of the Congo River.
"But, I know him, Mr. Schnitzel," I said sternly. "He is incapable of
it. I went to college with him."
"I don't care whether he's a rah-rah boy or not," said Schnitzel, "I
know that's what he did when he was up the Orinoco after orchids, and if
the tribe had ever caught him they'd have crucified him. And I know
this, too: he made forty thousand dollars out of the Nitrate Company on
a ten-thousand-dollar job. And I know it, because he beefed to me about
it himself, because it wasn't big enough."
We were passing the limestone island at the entrance to the harbor,
where, in the prison fortress, with its muzzle-loading guns pointing
drunkenly at the sky, are buried the political prisoners of Valencia.
"Now, there," said Schnitzel, pointing, "that shows you what the Nitrate
Trust can do. Judge Rojas is in there. He gave the first decision in
favor of the Walker-Keefe people, and for making that decision William
T. Scott, the Nitrate manager, made Alvarez put Rojas in there. He's
seventy years old, and he's been there five years. The cell they keep
him in is below the sea-level, and the salt-water leaks through the
wall. I've seen it. That's what William T. Scott did, an' up in New York
people think 'Billy' Scott is a fine man. I seen him at the Horse Show
sitting in a box, bowing to everybody, with his wife sitting beside him,
all hung out with pearls. An' that was only a month after I'd seen Rojas
in that sewer where Scott put him."
"Schnitzel," I laughed, "you certainly are a magnificent liar."
Schnitzel showed no resentment.
"Go ashore and look for yourself," he muttered. "Don't believe me. Ask
Rojas. Ask the first man you meet." He shivered, and shrugged his
shoulders. "I tell you, the walls are damp, like sweat."
The Government had telegraphed the commandant to come on board and, as
he expressed it, "offer me the hospitality of the port," which meant
that I had to take him to the smoking-room and give him champagne. What
the Government really wanted was to find out whether I was still on
board, and if it were finally rid of me.