Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (686 page)

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.