of her paddle-wheels revolving with mad rapidity tore up the whole reach
into foam. The Diana in mid-stream waltzed round with as much grace
as an old barn, and flew after her ravisher. Through the ragged fog of
smoke driving headlong upon the water I had a glimpse of Falk’s square
motionless shoulders under a white hat as big as a cart-wheel, of his
red face, his yellow staring eyes, his great beard. Instead of keeping
a lookout ahead, he was deliberately turning his back on the river to
glare at his tow. The tall heavy craft, never so used before in her
life, seemed to have lost her senses; she took a wild sheer against her
helm, and for a moment came straight at us, menacing and clumsy, like
a runaway mountain. She piled up a streaming, hissing, boiling wave
half-way up her blunt stem, my crew let out one great howl,--and then we
held our breaths. It was a near thing. But Falk had her! He had her in
his clutch. I fancied I could hear the steel hawser ping as it surged
across the Diana’s forecastle, with the hands on board of her bolting
away from it in all directions. It was a near thing. Hermann, with his
hair rumpled, in a snuffy flannel shirt and a pair of mustard-coloured
trousers, had rushed to help with the wheel. I saw his terrified round
face; I saw his very teeth uncovered by a sort of ghastly fixed grin;
and in a great leaping tumult of water between the two ships the Diana
whisked past so close that I could have flung a hair-brush at his head,
for, it seems, I had kept them in my hands all the time. Meanwhile
Mrs. Hermann sat placidly on the skylight, with a woollen shawl on
her shoulders. The excellent woman in response to my indignant
gesticulations fluttered a handkerchief, nodding and smiling in the
kindest way imaginable. The boys, only half-dressed, were jumping about
the poop in great glee, displaying their gaudy braces; and Lena in a
short scarlet petticoat, with peaked elbows and thin bare arms, nursed
the rag-doll with devotion. The whole family passed before my sight as
if dragged across a scene of unparalleled violence. The last I saw was
Hermann’s niece with the baby Hermann in her arms standing apart from
the others. Magnificent in her close-fitting print frock she displayed
something so commanding in the manifest perfection of her figure that
the sun seemed to be rising for her alone. The flood of light brought
out the opulence of her form and the vigour of her youth in a glorifying
way. She went by perfectly motionless and as if lost in meditation; only
the hem of her skirt stirred in the draught; the sun rays broke on her
sleek tawny hair; that bald-headed ruffian, Nicholas, was whacking her
on the shoulder. I saw his tiny fat arm rise and fall in a workmanlike
manner. And then the four cottage windows of the Diana came into view
retreating swiftly down the river. The sashes were up, and one of the
white calico curtains was fluttered straight out like a streamer above
the agitated water of the wake.
To be thus tricked out of one’s turn was an unheard of occurrence. In
my agent’s office, where I went to complain at once, they protested with
apologies they couldn’t understand how the mistake arose: but Schomberg
when I dropped in later to get some tiffin, though surprised to see me,
was perfectly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at the end
of a long narrow table, facing his wife--a scraggy little woman, with
long ringlets and a blue tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked
frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a waggling punkah fanned
twenty cane-bottomed chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three
Chinamen in white jackets loafed with napkins in their hands around that
desolation. Schomberg’s pet table d’hote was not much of a success that
day. He was feeding himself ferociously and seemed to overflow with
bitterness.
He began by ordering in a brutal voice the chops to be brought back for
me, and turning in his chair: “Mistake they told you? Not a bit of it!
Don’t you believe it for a moment, captain! Falk isn’t a man to make
mistakes unless on purpose.” His firm conviction was that Falk had been
trying all along to curry favour on the cheap with Hermann. “On the
cheap--mind you! It doesn’t cost him a cent to put that insult upon you,
and Captain Hermann gets in a day ahead of your ship. Time’s money! Eh?
You are very friendly with Captain Hermann I believe, but a man is bound
to be pleased at any little advantage he may get. Captain Hermann is a
good business man, and there’s no such thing as a friend in business. Is
there?” He leaned forward and began to cast stealthy glances as usual.
“But Falk is, and always was, a miserable fellow. I would despise him.”
I muttered, grumpily, that I had no particular respect for Falk.
“I would despise him,” he insisted, with an appearance of anxiety which
would have amused me if I had not been fathoms deep in discontent. To a
young man fairly conscientious and as well-meaning as only the young
man can be, the current ill-usage of life comes with a peculiar cruelty.
Youth that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence, and in
itself, will always doubt whether it have not perchance deserved its
fate. Sombre of mind and without appetite, I struggled with the
chop while Mrs. Schomberg sat with her everlasting stupid grin and
Schomberg’s talk gathered way like a slide of rubbish.
“Let me tell you. It’s all about that girl. I don’t know what Captain
Hermann expects, but if he asked me I could tell him something about
Falk. He’s a miserable fellow. That man is a perfect slave. That’s what
I call him. A slave. Last year I started this table d’hote, and sent
cards out--you know. You think he had one meal in the house? Give the
thing a trial? Not once. He has got hold now of a Madras cook--a blamed
fraud that I hunted out of my cookhouse with a rattan. He was not fit to
cook for white men. No, not for the white men’s dogs either; but, see,
any damned native that can boil a pot of rice is good enough for Mr.
Falk. Rice and a little fish he buys for a few cents from the fishing
boats outside is what he lives on. You would hardly credit it--eh? A
white man, too....”
He wiped his lips, using the napkin with indignation, and looking at me.
It flashed through my mind in the midst of my depression that if all the
meat in the town was like these table d’hote chops, Falk wasn’t so far
wrong. I was on the point of saying this, but Schomberg’s stare was
intimidating. “He’s a vegetarian, perhaps,” I murmured instead.
“He’s a miser. A miserable miser,” affirmed the hotel-keeper with great
force. “The meat here is not so good as at home--of course. And dear
too. But look at me. I only charge a dollar for the tiffin, and one
dollar and fifty cents for the dinner. Show me anything cheaper. Why am
I doing it? There’s little profit in this game. Falk wouldn’t look
at it. I do it for the sake of a lot of young white fellows here that
hadn’t a place where they could get a decent meal and eat it decently in
good company. There’s first-rate company always at my table.”
The convinced way he surveyed the empty chairs made me feel as if I had
intruded upon a tiffin of ghostly Presences.
“A white man should eat like a white man, dash it all,” he burst out
impetuously. “Ought to eat meat, must eat meat. I manage to get meat for
my patrons all the year round. Don’t I? I am not catering for a dam’ lot
of coolies: Have another chop captain.... No? You, boy--take away!”
He threw himself back and waited grimly for the curry. The half-closed
jalousies darkened the room pervaded by the smell of fresh whitewash:
a swarm of flies buzzed and settled in turns, and poor Mrs. Schomberg’s
smile seemed to express the quintessence of all the imbecility that had
ever spoken, had ever breathed, had ever been fed on infamous buffalo
meat within these bare walls. Schomberg did not open his lips till he
was ready to thrust therein a spoonful of greasy rice. He rolled his
eyes ridiculously before he swallowed the hot stuff, and only then broke
out afresh.
“It is the most degrading thing. They take the dish up to the wheelhouse
for him with a cover on it, and he shuts both the doors before he begins
to eat. Fact! Must be ashamed of himself. Ask the engineer. He can’t
do without an engineer--don’t you see--and as no respectable man can be
expected to put up with such a table, he allows them fifteen dollars
a month extra mess money. I assure you it is so! You just ask Mr.
Ferdinand da Costa. That’s the engineer he has now. You may have seen
him about my place, a delicate dark young man, with very fine eyes and a
little moustache. He arrived here a year ago from Calcutta. Between you
and me, I guess the money-lenders there must have been after him. He
rushes here for a meal every chance he can get, for just please tell me
what satisfaction is that for a well-educated young fellow to feed all
alone in his cabin--like a wild beast? That’s what Falk expects his
engineers to put up with for fifteen dollars extra. And the rows on
board every time a little smell of cooking gets about the deck! You
wouldn’t believe! The other day da Costa got the cook to fry a steak for
him--a turtle steak it was too, not beef at all--and the fat caught
or something. Young da Costa himself was telling me of it here in this
room. ‘Mr. Schomberg’--says he-’if I had let a cylinder cover blow off
through the skylight by my negligence Captain Falk couldn’t have been
more savage. He frightened the cook so that he won’t put anything on the
fire for me now.’ Poor da Costa had tears in his eyes. Only try to put
yourself in his place, captain: a sensitive, gentlemanly young fellow.
Is he expected to eat his food raw? But that’s your Falk all over. Ask
any one you like. I suppose the fifteen dollars extra he has to give
keep on rankling--in there.”
And Schomberg tapped his manly breast. I sat half stunned by his
irrelevant babble. Suddenly he gripped my forearm in an impressive and
cautious manner, as if to lead me into a very cavern of confidence.
“It’s nothing but enviousness,” he said in a lowered tone, which had a
stimulating effect upon my wearied hearing. “I don’t suppose there
is one person in this town that he isn’t envious of. I tell you he’s
dangerous. Even I myself am not safe from him. I know for certain he
tried to poison....”
“Oh, come now,” I cried, revolted.
“But I know for certain. The people themselves came and told me of it.
He went about saying everywhere I was a worse pest to this town than the
cholera. He had been talking against me ever since I opened this hotel.
And he poisoned Captain Hermann’s mind too. Last time the Diana was
loading here Captain Hermann used to come in every day for a drink or a
cigar. This time he hasn’t been here twice in a week. How do you account
for that?”
He squeezed my arm till he extorted from me some sort of mumble.
“He makes ten times the money I do. I’ve another hotel to fight against,
and there is no other tug on the river. I am not in his way, am I? He
wouldn’t be fit to run an hotel if he tried. But that’s just his nature.
He can’t bear to think I am making a living. I only hope it makes him
properly wretched. He’s like that in everything. He would like to keep a
decent table well enough. But no--for the sake of a few cents. Can’t do
it. It’s too much for him. That’s what I call being a slave to it. But
he’s mean enough to kick up a row when his nose gets tickled a bit. See
that? That just paints him. Miserly and envious. You can’t account for
it any other way. Can you? I have been studying him these three years.”
He was anxious I should assent to his theory. And indeed on thinking it
over it would have been plausible enough if there hadn’t been always the
essential falseness of irresponsibility in Schomberg’s chatter. However,
I was not disposed to investigate the psychology of Falk. I was engaged
just then in eating despondently a piece of stale Dutch cheese, being
too much crushed to care what I swallowed myself, let along bothering my
head about Falk’s ideas of gastronomy. I could expect from their study
no clue to his conduct in matters of business, which seemed to me
totally unrestrained by morality or even by the commonest sort of
decency. How insignificant and contemptible I must appear, for the
fellow to dare treat me like this--I reflected suddenly, writhing in
silent agony. And I consigned Falk and all his peculiarities to the
devil with so much mental fervour as to forget Schomberg’s existence,
till he grabbed my arm urgently. “Well, you may think and think till
every hair of your head falls off, captain; but you can’t explain it in
any other way.”
For the sake of peace and quietness I admitted hurriedly that I
couldn’t: persuaded that now he would leave off. But the only result was
to make his moist face shine with the pride of cunning. He removed his
hand for a moment to scare a black mass of flies off the sugar-basin and
caught hold of my arm again.
“To be sure. And in the same way everybody is aware he would like to get
married. Only he can’t. Let me quote you an instance. Well, two years
ago a Miss Vanlo, a very ladylike girl, came from home to keep house for
her brother, Fred, who had an engineering shop for small repairs by
the water side. Suddenly Falk takes to going up to their bungalow after
dinner, and sitting for hours in the verandah saying nothing. The poor
girl couldn’t tell for the life of her what to do with such a man, so
she would keep on playing the piano and singing to him evening after
evening till she was ready to drop. And it wasn’t as if she had been
a strong young woman either. She was thirty, and the climate had been
playing the deuce with her. Then--don’t you know--Fred had to sit up with
them for propriety, and during whole weeks on end never got a single
chance to get to bed before midnight. That was not pleasant for a tired
man--was it? And besides Fred had worries then because his shop didn’t
pay and he was dropping money fast. He just longed to get away from here
and try his luck somewhere else, but for the sake of his sister he hung
on and on till he ran himself into debt over his ears--I can tell you.
I, myself, could show a handful of his chits for meals and drinks in
my drawer. I could never find out tho’ where he found all the money at
last. Can’t be but he must have got something out of that brother of
his, a coal merchant in Port Said. Anyhow he paid everybody before he
left, but the girl nearly broke her heart. Disappointment, of course,
and at her age, don’t you know.... Mrs. Schomberg here was very
friendly with her, and she could tell you. Awful despair. Fainting
fits. It was a scandal. A notorious scandal. To that extent that old Mr.
Siegers--not your present charterer, but Mr. Siegers the father, the old
gentleman who retired from business on a fortune and got buried at sea
going home, _he_ had to interview Falk in his private office. He was a man
who could speak like a Dutch Uncle, and, besides, Messrs. Siegers had
been helping Falk with a good bit of money from the start. In fact you
may say they made him as far as that goes. It so happened that just at
the time he turned up here, their firm was chartering a lot of sailing
ships every year, and it suited their business that there should be good
towing facilities on the river. See?... Well--there’s always an
ear at the keyhole--isn’t there? In fact,” he lowered his tone
confidentially, “in this case a good friend of mine; a man you can see
here any evening; only they conversed rather low. Anyhow my friend’s
certain that Falk was trying to make all sorts of excuses, and old
Mr. Siegers was coughing a lot. And yet Falk wanted all the time to be
married too. Why! It’s notorious the man has been longing for years to
make a home for himself. Only he can’t face the expense. When it comes
to putting his hand in his pocket--it chokes him off. That’s the truth
and no other. I’ve always said so, and everybody agrees with me by this
time. What do you think of that--eh?”
He appealed confidently to my indignation, but having a mind to annoy
him I remarked, “that it seemed to me very pitiful--if true.”
He bounced in his chair as if I had run a pin into him. I don’t know
what he might have said, only at that moment we heard through the half
open door of the billiard-room the footsteps of two men entering from
the verandah, a murmur of two voices; at the sharp tapping of a coin on
a table Mrs. Schomberg half rose irresolutely. “Sit still,” he hissed at
her, and then, in an hospitable, jovial tone, contrasting amazingly with
the angry glance that had made his wife sink in her chair, he cried very
loud: “Tiffin still going on in here, gentlemen.”
There was no answer, but the voices dropped suddenly. The head Chinaman
went out. We heard the clink of ice in the glasses, pouring sounds, the
shuffling of feet, the scraping of chairs. Schomberg, after wondering in
a low mutter who the devil could be there at this time of the day, got
up napkin in hand to peep through the doorway cautiously. He retreated
rapidly on tip-toe, and whispering behind his hand informed me that
it was Falk, Falk himself who was in there, and, what’s more, he had
Captain Hermann with him.
The return of the tug from the outer Roads was unexpected but possible,
for Falk had taken away the Diana at half-past five, and it was now two
o’clock. Schomberg wished me to observe that neither of these men would
spend a dollar on a tiffin, which they must have wanted. But by the time
I was ready to leave the dining-room Falk had gone. I heard the last of
his big boots on the planks of the verandah. Hermann was sitting quite
alone in the large, wooden room with the two lifeless billiard tables
shrouded in striped covers, mopping his face diligently. He wore
his best go-ashore clothes, a stiff collar, black coat, large white
waistcoat, grey trousers. A white cotton sunshade with a cane handle
reposed between his legs, his side whiskers were neatly brushed, his
chin had been freshly shaved; and he only distantly resembled the
dishevelled and terrified man in a snuffy night shirt and ignoble old
trousers I had seen in the morning hanging on to the wheel of the Diana.
He gave a start at my entrance, and addressed me at once in some
confusion, but with genuine eagerness. He was anxious to make it clear
he had nothing to do with what he called the “tam pizness” of the
morning. It was most inconvenient. He had reckoned upon another day up
in town to settle his bills and sign certain papers. There were also
some few stores to come, and sundry pieces of “my ironwork,” as he
called it quaintly, landed for repairs, had been left behind. Now he
would have to hire a native boat to take all this out to the ship. It
would cost five or six dollars perhaps. He had had no warning from
Falk. Nothing.... He hit the table with his dumpy fist.... Der
verfluchte Kerl came in the morning like a “tam’ ropper,” making a great
noise, and took him away. His mate was not prepared, his ship was moored
fast--he protested it was shameful to come upon a man in that way.
Shameful! Yet such was the power Falk had on the river that when I
suggested in a chilling tone that he might have simply refused to have
his ship moved, Hermann was quite startled at the idea. I never realised
so well before that this is an age of steam. The exclusive possession
of a marine boiler had given Falk the whip-hand of us all. Hermann,
recovering, put it to me appealingly that I knew very well how unsafe it
was to contradict that fellow. At this I only smiled distantly.
“Der Kerl!” he cried. He was sorry he had not refused. He was indeed.
The damage! The damage! What for all that damage! There was no occasion
for damage. Did I know how much damage he had done? It gave me a certain
satisfaction to tell him that I had heard his old waggon of a ship crack
fore and aft as she went by. “You passed close enough to me,” I added
significantly.
He threw both his hands up to heaven at the recollection. One of them
grasped by the middle the white parasol, and he resembled curiously
a caricature of a shop-keeping citizen in one of his own German comic
papers. “Ach! That was dangerous,” he cried. I was amused. But directly
he added with an appearance of simplicity, “The side of your iron ship
would have been crushed in like--like this matchbox.”
“Would it?” I growled, much less amused now; but by the time I had
decided that this remark was not meant for a dig at me he had
worked himself into a high state of resentfulness against Falk. The
inconvenience, the damage, the expense! Gottferdam! Devil take the
fellow. Behind the bar Schomberg with a cigar in his teeth, pretended
to be writing with a pencil on a large sheet of paper; and as Hermann’s
excitement increased it made me comfortingly aware of my own calmness
and superiority. But it occurred to me while I listened to his
revilings, that after all the good man had come up in the tug. There
perhaps--since he must come to town--he had no option. But evidently he
had had a drink with Falk, either accepted or offered. How was that? So
I checked him by saying loftily that I hoped he would make Falk pay for
every penny of the damage.
“That’s it! That’s it! Go for him,” called out Schomberg from the bar,
flinging his pencil down and rubbing his hands.
We ignored his noise. But Hermann’s excitement suddenly went off
the boil as when you remove a saucepan from the fire. I urged on his
consideration that he had done now with Falk and Falk’s confounded tug.
He, Hermann, would not, perhaps, turn up again in this part of the world
for years to come, since he was going to sell the Diana at the end
of this very trip (“Go home passenger in a mail boat,” he murmured
mechanically). He was therefore safe from Falk’s malice. All he had to
do was to race off to his consignees and stop payment of the towage bill
before Falk had the time to get in and lift the money.
Nothing could have been less in the spirit of my advice than the
thoughtful way in which he set about to make his parasol stay propped
against the edge of the table.
While I watched his concentrated efforts with astonishment he threw at
me one or two perplexed, half-shy glances. Then he sat down. “That’s all
very well,” he said reflectively.
It cannot be doubted that the man had been thrown off his balance by
being hauled out of the harbour against his wish. His stolidity had been
profoundly stirred, else he would never have made up his mind to ask me
unexpectedly whether I had not remarked that Falk had been casting eyes
upon his niece. “No more than myself,” I answered with literal truth.
The girl was of the sort one necessarily casts eyes at in a sense. She
made no noise, but she filled most satisfactorily a good bit of space.
“But you, captain, are not the same kind of man,” observed Hermann.
I was not, I am happy to say, in a position to deny this. “What about
the lady?” I could not help asking. At this he gazed for a time into
my face, earnestly, and made as if to change the subject. I heard him
beginning to mutter something unexpected, about his children growing
old enough to require schooling. He would have to leave them ashore with
their grandmother when he took up that new command he expected to get in
Germany.
This constant harping on his domestic arrangements was funny. I suppose
it must have been like the prospect of a complete alteration in his
life. An epoch. He was going, too, to part with the Diana! He had served
in her for years. He had inherited her. From an uncle, if I remember
rightly. And the future loomed big before him, occupying his thought
exclusively with all its aspects as on the eve of a venturesome
enterprise. He sat there frowning and biting his lip, and suddenly he
began to fume and fret.
I discovered to my momentary amusement that he seemed to imagine I
could, should or ought, have caused Falk in some way to pronounce
himself. Such a hope was incomprehensible, but funny. Then the contact
with all this foolishness irritated me. I said crossly that I had seen
no symptoms, but if there were any--since he, Hermann, was so sure--then
it was still worse. What pleasure Falk found in humbugging people in
just that way I couldn’t say. It was, however, my solemn duty to warn
him. It had lately, I said, come to my knowledge that there was a man
(not a very long time ago either) who had been taken in just like this.
All this passed in undertones, and at this point Schomberg, exasperated
at our secrecy, went out of the room slamming the door with a crash
that positively lifted us in our chairs. This, or else what I had said,
huffed my Hermann, He supposed, with a contemptuous toss of his head
towards the door which trembled yet, that I had got hold of some of
that man’s silly tales. It looked, indeed, as though his mind had been
thoroughly poisoned against Schomberg. “His tales were--they were,” he
repeated, seeking for the word--“trash.” They were trash, he reiterated,
and moreover I was young yet...
This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer exposed to that sort of
insult) made me huffy too. I felt ready in my own mind to back up every
assertion of Schomberg’s and on any subject. In a moment, devil only
knows why, Hermann and I were looking at each other most inimically.
He caught up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the pleasure of
calling after him:
“Take my advice and make Falk pay for breaking up your ship. You aren’t
likely to get anything else out of him.”
When I got on board my ship later on, the old mate, who was very full of
the events of the morning, remarked:
“I saw the tug coming back from the outer Roads just before two P.M.”
(He never by any chance used the words morning or afternoon. Always P.M.
or A.M., log-book style.) “Smart work that. Man’s always in a state of
hurry. He’s a regular chucker-out, ain’t he, sir? There’s a few pubs I
know of in the East-end of London that would be all the better for
one of his sort around the bar.” He chuckled at his joke. “A regular
chucker-out. Now he has fired out that Dutchman head over heels, I
suppose our turn’s coming to-morrow morning.”
We were all on deck at break of day (even the sick--poor devils--had
crawled out) ready to cast off in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing
came. Falk did not come. At last, when I began to think that probably
something had gone wrong in his engine-room, we perceived the tug going
by, full pelt, down the river, as if we hadn’t existed. For a moment I
entertained the wild notion that he was going to turn round in the next
reach. Afterwards I watched his smoke appear above the plain, now here,
now there, according to the windings of the river. It disappeared. Then
without a word I went down to breakfast. I just simply went down to
breakfast.
Not one of us uttered a sound till the mate, after imbibing--by means
of suction out of a saucer--his second cup of tea, exclaimed: “Where the
devil is the man gone to?”
“Courting!” I shouted, with such a fiendish laugh that the old chap
didn’t venture to open his lips any more.