Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (450 page)

Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress. This tribute seemed to flatter Ricardo. His mouth twitched grimly.

“Like that — enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh? Awful. Well, there was a cook there who loved me — an old fat, Negro woman with spectacles. I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make me dulces — sweet things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar — to pass the time away. I am like a kid for sweet things. And, by the way, why don’t you ever have a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg? Nothing but fruit, morning, noon, and night. Sickening! What do you think a fellow is — a wasp?”

Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.

“And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?” he asked anxiously.

“Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me,” returned Mr. Ricardo with feeling. “Of an evening the governor would stroll out into the sala and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez of the place — a little Dago with a pair of black whiskers — ekarty, you know, a quick French game, for small change. And the comandante, a one-eyed, half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we had to stand around and bet on their hands. It was awful!”

“Awful,” echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair. “Look here, I need your rooms.”

“To be sure. I have been thinking that for some time past,” said Ricardo indifferently.

“I was mad when I listened to you. This must end!”

“I think you are mad yet,” said Ricardo, not even unfolding his arms or shifting his attitude an inch. He lowered his voice to add: “And if I thought you had been to the police, I would tell Pedro to catch you round the waist and break your fat neck by jerking your head backward — snap! I saw him do it to a big buck nigger who was flourishing a razor in front of the governor. It can be done. You hear a low crack, that’s all — and the man drops down like a limp rag.”

Not even Ricardo’s head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder, had moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring out of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to Schomberg and stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage, ooze out of him. It was not so much the threat of death as the weirdly circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him. A mere “I’ll murder you,” however ferocious in tone, and earnest, in purpose, he could have faced; but before this novel mode of speech and procedure, his imagination being very sensitive to the unusual, he collapsed as if indeed his moral neck had been broken — snap!

“Go to the police? Of course not. Never dreamed of it. Too late now. I’ve let myself be mixed up in this. You got my consent while I wasn’t myself. I explained it to you at the time.”

Ricardo’s eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.

“Ay! Some trouble with a girl. But that’s nothing to us.”

“Naturally. What I say is, what’s the good of all that savage talk to me?” A bright argument occurred to him. “It’s out of proportion; for even if I were fool enough to go to the police now, there’s nothing serious to complain about. It would only mean deportation for you. They would put you on board the first west-bound steamer to Singapore.” He had become animated. “Out of this to the devil,” he added between his teeth for his own private satisfaction.

Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single word. This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.

“Why do you want to stick here?” he cried. “It can’t pay you people to fool around like this. Didn’t you worry just now about moving your governor? Well, the police would move him for you; and from Singapore you can go on to the east coast of Africa.”

“I’ll be hanged if the fellow isn’t up to that silly trick!” was Ricardo’s comment, spoken in an ominous tone which recalled Schomberg to the realities of his position.

“No! No!” he protested. “It’s a manner of speaking. Of course I wouldn’t.”

“I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your brains, Mr. Schomberg. Believe me, you had better part friends with us; for, deportation or no deportation, you’ll be seeing one of us turning up before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge you may be hatching in that fat head of yours.”

“Gott im Himmel!” groaned Schomberg. “Will nothing move him out? Will he stop here immer — I mean always? Suppose I were to make it worth your while, couldn’t you — ”

“No,” Ricardo interrupted. “I couldn’t, unless I had something to lever him out with. I’ve told you that before.”

“An inducement?” muttered Schomberg.

“Ay. The east coast of Africa isn’t good enough. He told me the other day that it will have to wait till he is ready for it; and he may not be ready for a long time, because the east coast can’t run away, and no one is likely to run off with it.”

These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr. Jones’s mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-suffering Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying that places the darkest hour before the dawn. The sound of words, apart from the context, has its power; and these two words, ‘run off,’ had a special affinity to the hotel-keeper’s, haunting idea. It was always present in his brain, and now it came forward evoked by a purely fortuitous expression. No, nobody could run off with a continent; but Heyst had run off with the girl!

Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg’s changed expression. Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him so much that he stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said, looking at the hotel-keeper:

“There’s not much use arguing against that sort of talk — is there?”

Schomberg was not listening.

“I could put you on another track,” he said slowly, and stopped, as if suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness combined with fear of failure. Ricardo waited, attentive, yet not without a certain contempt.

“On the track of a man!” Schomberg uttered convulsively, and paused again, consulting his rage and his conscience.

“The man in the moon, eh?” suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.

Schomberg shook his head.

“It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the moon. You go and try. It isn’t so very far.”

He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as gamblers. Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly complete. But he preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it to himself summarily that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at the same time, relieve himself of these men’s oppression. He had only to let loose his natural gift for talking scandalously about his fellow creatures. And in this case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own. With the utmost ease he portrayed for Ricardo, now seriously attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private and public rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of his natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the military bearing.

“That’s the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the world for years, spying into everybody’s business: but I am the only one who has seen through him from the first — contemptible, double-faced, stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow.”

“Dangerous, is he?”

Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo’s voice.

“Well, you know what I mean,” he said uneasily. “A lying, circumventing, soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open about him.”

Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the room in an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing, and a snarling:

“Ah! H’m!”

“Well, what more dangerous do you want?” argued Schomberg. “He’s in no way a fighting man, I believe,” he added negligently.

“And you say he has been living alone there?”

“Like the man in the moon,” answered Schomberg readily. “There’s no one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you understand, after bagging all that plunder.”

“Plunder, eh? Why didn’t he go home with it?” inquired Ricardo.

The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was something worth looking into. And he was pursuing truth in the manner of men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his own; that is he pursued it in the light of his own experience and prejudices. For facts, whatever their origin (and God only knows where they come from), can be only tested by our own particular suspicions. Ricardo was suspicious all round. Schomberg, such is the tonic of recovered self-esteem, Schomberg retorted fearlessly:

“Go home? Why don’t you go home? To hear your talk, you must have made a pretty considerable pile going round winning people’s money. You ought to be ready by this time.”

Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.

“You think yourself very clever, don’t you?” he said.

Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the snarling irony left him unmoved. There was positively a smile in his noble Teutonic beard, the first smile for weeks. He was in a felicitous vein.

“How do you know that he wasn’t thinking of going home? As a matter of fact, he was on his way home.”

“And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning out a blamed fairy tale?” interrupted Ricardo roughly. “I wonder at myself listening to the silly rot!”

Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved. He did not require to be very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to arouse some sort of feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo’s breast.

“You won’t believe me? Well! You can ask anybody that comes here if that — that Swede hadn’t got as far as this house on his way home. Why should he turn up here if not for that? You ask anybody.”

“Ask, indeed!” returned the other. “Catch me asking at large about a man I mean to drop on! Such jobs must be done on the quiet — or not at all.”

The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of Schomberg’s neck with a chill. He cleared his throat slightly and looked away as though he had heard something indelicate. Then, with a jump as it were:

“Of course he didn’t tell me. Is it likely? But haven’t I got eyes? Haven’t I got my common sense to tell me? I can see through people. By the same token, he called on the Tesmans. Why did he call on the Tesmans two days running, eh? You don’t know? You can’t tell?”

He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite openly at him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:

“A fellow doesn’t go to a counting-house in business hours for a chat about the weather, two days running. Then why? To close his account with them one day, and to get his money out the next! Clear, what?”

Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another approached Schomberg slowly.

“To get his money?” he purred.

“Gewiss,” snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority. “What else? That is, only the money he had with the Tesmans. What he has buried or put away on the island, devil only knows. When you think of the lot of hard cash that passed through that man’s hands, for wages and stores and all that — and he’s just a cunning thief, I tell you.” Ricardo’s hard stare discomposed the hotel-keeper, and he added in an embarrassed tone: “I mean a common, sneaking thief — no account at all. And he calls himself a Swedish baron, too! Tfui!”

“He’s a baron, is he? That foreign nobility ain’t much,” commented Mr. Ricardo seriously. “And then what? He hung about here!”

“Yes, he hung about,” said Schomberg, making a wry mouth. “He — hung about. That’s it. Hung — ”

His voice died out. Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo’s countenance.

“Just like that; for nothing? And then turned about and went back to that island again?”

“And went back to that island again,” Schomberg echoed lifelessly, fixing his gaze on the floor.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Ricardo with genuine surprise. “What is it?”

Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture. His face was crimson, and he kept it lowered. Ricardo went back to the point.

“Well, but how do you account for it? What was his reason? What did he go back to the island for?”

“Honeymoon!” spat out Schomberg viciously.

Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly unprepared Ricardo to leap aside. And only then did Schomberg look up with a dull, resentful expression.

Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the end of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound “Ay! Ay!” above Schomberg’s rigid head. That the hotel-keeper was capable of a great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of his severe, Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.

“Ay, ay!” repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if after a further survey of the circumstances, “I wish I hadn’t asked you, or that you had told me a lie. It don’t suit me to know that there’s a woman mixed up in this affair. What’s she like? It’s the girl you — ”

“Leave off!” muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff military front.

“Ay, ay!” Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more enlightened and perplexed. “Can’t bear to talk about it — so bad as that? And yet I would bet she isn’t a miracle to look at.”

Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn’t know, as if he didn’t care. Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.

“Swedish baron — h’m!” Ricardo continued meditatively. “I believe the governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I put it to him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call it so; but I don’t know a man that can stand up to him on the square. Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It’s a pretty sight!”

Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression, looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his breast.