Then suddenly Müller the terrible, Müller the guest, flushed crimson with embarrassment as he sat on the purple, polished table in Kampert’s perfectly styled drawing room, eating North Sea shrimps out of a tin perched on the grand piano, swilling it down with tomato-flavoured whisky and looking with a sad, insecure, guilty expression at Kampert the hospitable. And he said, ‘My home is my castle.’
His main reason for saying this, I think, was that it was totally out of place, and deep down he had this longing for all that was most ill-matched, most illogical and most natural.
Bad Water
‘For every poison there is an antidote,’ said MacBride, stretching his legs philosophically, and seemed to have something specific in mind.
I had arrived on the island that morning and promptly witnessed a rather sad little to-do, the burial of a white man whom a native or, as it later turned out, a half-caste had despatched. They buried him late that afternoon, and for me that was a stroke of luck, for it enabled me to meet a lot of people all at once and save a good deal of time. Then I was sitting on MacBride’s verandah with MacBride himself, the colony’s trader, and Keeny who was in charge of the telegraph, over one of those outlandish equatorial drinks made with paprika and ice, listening to the whispering of the coconut palms overhead. From time to time this pleasant sound was interrupted by another, less pleasant one, which was confused and human in origin. It came from the men who were taking the murderer to be hanged.
We could, as it happened, sit there quietly without fear of missing anything. He would be led past the front of the house when the time came, and we would be able to watch him at our leisure, thanks to MacBride’s kind invitation.
MacBride had attended the trial and was still full of it. He said that the murderer, a certain Lewis, was an astonishingly placid and reasonable man, a half-caste, but more white than black, actually almost totally white, though reasonable only if regarded as coloured. Evidently MacBride was not entirely clear about him.
That morning there had been another burial, not at the same place as Smith’s, not in consecrated ground, and without the participation of the community. It was a woman whom they had buried in haste in the hope of attracting as little attention as possible. She was Atua Lewis, a Papuan. Lewis, whom they were just taking out to be hanged, was both her husband and her murderer. Atua Lewis and old Fatty Smith had met their ends simultaneously in incongruous circumstances, but the murder was not a crime of jealousy.
MacBride stood up, then went to the balustrade at the edge of the verandah and listened. It sounded not so much like a lot of voices mixing and amplifying one another, as like one primitive belly voice that had disintegrated: the voice of the people. The trader spat at one of the parched bread-fruit trees that formed the corner posts of his villa, came back and said, nodding back over his shoulder, ‘the voice of justice’.
It was already dark. I think his face was pale when he sat down again.
Then he told the story.
There was a time, according to MacBride, when this Lewis had a chance.
Where he had been before he arrived on the island nobody knew, or if they did they had forgotten. Probably in one of those equatorial ports where a whole section of humanity is tolerated as raw material, slaughtered when they look like competition and, otherwise, not taken too seriously. Lewis himself did not look particularly worn out, said MacBride. There was something naive about him. You can imagine how he would fare if he was naive in these latitudes.
He had a little capital with him, and traded in a small way in pearls. It is not hard to take enough off the natives to make a living in these parts. The white competition is a little tougher. But at the beginning Lewis was treated quite decently by the colony; though a half-caste, he was allowed to play poker with the men on the station and let them take his money, for he naturally did not win, his intelligence fell far short of that. They overlooked the bluish tinge of his finger-nails when he shuffled, not least because they were more interested in squinting at the cards than at his finger-nails. Lewis liked this sort of tolerance, and he never made trouble. But then in the course of business he became involved with one of the white sharks, and his parentage began to crop up in the men’s conversations on various verandahs. Whenever he turned up, the men’s silence would be audible all the way to the jungle. He suddenly had to pay more for whisky, and the cards disappeared from his fingers, and his nails caught the eye (they were bluish), and then there was no whisky for him at all. It is difficult in such cases to go back and sit all alone in your shop and eat your savings. And that was what Lewis did.
The interesting thing about his otherwise rather ordinary and common case was that Lewis married, in other words he tried to settle down. He picked up one of those golden-yellow, narrow-hipped natives who are judged variously according to taste, but between ourselves are far preferable to most white women on this side of the globe. Lewis appeared before the priest at the side of his golden-yellow Atua, ordered her to take her pipe out of her mouth and asked to be married in the manner customary in those parts.
Then he dropped out of the colony’s sight, and the next time they heard about him, what they heard was unpleasant.
There was in the colony a trader called Smith, a fat, common fellow who was rather too good-natured for a trader, and was, it might be said, rather a greenhorn in business. That was probably why he displayed such an interest in Papuan women and was always stating loudly in male company that yellow made love better than white, and straight hips were preferable to curved ones. Now it was with this same Smith that Lewis was seen sitting deep in discussion over a glass of whisky. Smith was hardly kept uninformed. Some very plain words were spoken, but he protested that his connection with Lewis had nothing to do with business, and that he had no need of advice about his private affairs.
After that they held their discussions in Lewis’s hut, and soon the whole colony was saying that Smith was having lengthy discussions even when Lewis wasn’t there. He was there quite a lot.
Lewis himself could be seen regularly at this time wandering around drunk. He went on long excursions into the interior of the island. Walking is the best medicine for steadying your nerves. And yesterday, three weeks after Lewis had first been seen together with Smith, in the early hours of the morning, Lewis clubbed Fatty Smith to death with a bamboo club and while he was at it did in his golden-yellow Atua too.
So far so good. The story was an open book even without the trial. The motive was there, it was a case of adultery on the part of Fatty Smith and of murder committed out of jealousy on the part of Lewis. But Lewis’s behaviour in court put paid to all that and effectively turned the tale into something much less ordinary. Lewis denied any feeling of jealousy. He admitted that he had left Mrs. Lewis alone with Smith, and not so that they could play poker either. He had also taken money from Smith, and the court was absolutely astounded when Lewis blandly declared that Smith’s death had just been an unfortunate accident.
‘What,’ asked Lewis, ‘could I have had against Smith? He gave me some money and I repaid him in a way that suited him. Between the two of us everything was in order. I believe we were fully satisfied with each other. I am really very sorry that Smith fell victim to this accident.
But Smith was dead, and Lewis had clubbed him, and with a bamboo club as thick as your arm at that.
But Lewis had not intended to kill Smith, according to Lewis; only his own wife. It was just that Mrs. Atua Lewis and Smith (speak no evil of him, for God’s sake!) had been lying in such an awkward position in their sleep that Lewis had to hit Smith to get at his wife. If Lewis had had more time at his disposal he would naturally have asked Smith politely to make way so he could get in a hefty belt with his bamboo club. But Lewis had no time, because he was very angry and bent on an immediate reckoning with Mrs. Lewis, not one preceded by an exchange of more or less elaborate civilities with Smith. And the cause of his anger had not been jealousy. He would not have had to sit as he did out
side his hut for an hour for that. The reason, and the only reason, as Lewis repeatedly stressed, was Mrs. Lewis’s bad housekeeping, a piece of negligence on her part which had been the last straw.
To tell the whole story, it had been like this:
Smith had been in bed with Lewis’s wife in the hut, and Lewis, who had come back early from an excursion into the interior, had sat down outside. In the pale light of the moon Lewis had a few cups of rice-brandy to help him sleep. He was, he admitted, annoyed that Smith had not yet gone, because Lewis was tired, and the more rice-brandy he drank the more tired he became. And it was mainly to clear the sleep out of his head – this is the contentious point, because Lewis based his entire defence on this assertion – that he wanted a drink of water to sort himself out and fight off his fatigue.
The prosecution, however, maintained he only wanted to plunge his head into water to sober himself; if indeed he bothered with the water at all.
You don’t, they said, drink water out of buckets that have been standing around for a long time and are infected.
But Lewis maintained that he had indeed drunk water, or rather had meant to drink water. The whole point was that he had found filth in the bucket. The bucket had not been rinsed, and the person who had failed to rinse out the bucket was Mrs. Lewis. It was part of the housework. It was her job to fetch water; she was expected to do at least that much, whatever else she might regularly neglect. But a duty is a duty, and it happened that Lewis found dirty water in his unwashed bucket, and he was not the man to take that kind of thing from Mrs. Lewis. So he strode straight in and took his bamboo club with him and killed his wife, and unfortunately Mr. Smith too, since he chanced to be there and found himself in the midst of a domestic conflict.
Lewis could not be expected to drink dirty water. That was what he was trying to say, and that was why he based his case on the fact that he had wanted a drink and not just a wash. Because his anger seemed more justifiable if he was faced with dirty drinking water than just with dirty washing water. They had argued this point (washing water or drinking water?) at length in court, but then the judge had ruled that the distinction was immaterial, since Lewis was going to be hanged anyway, something which Lewis for his part could not comprehend.
This was MacBride’s story and he had barely finished it when the shouting which MacBride had previously called the voice of justice approached, and a disorderly mob appeared among the mimosa trees. They were bringing the murderer.
He was walking amid howling natives, and rather fast at that, probably to prevent them from dragging him. He had a round, open face, and as he passed he cast a quick, cool glance at us, which, since I was new to those parts, sent the shivers through my bones.
A Little Tale of Insurance
A financier by the name of Kückelmann who had been on the verge of bankruptcy for years was eventually forced by the wolves baying at his heels to take a week off and try his damnedest to boost his sagging morale and come up with a money-making idea. By the end of the said week he had put the bar at the Adlon Hotel, the Bristol Bar and a number of other establishments behind him for ever, without having the slightest result to show for his efforts. He had stimulated the old brain with stiff American drinks here and soothed it with incomparable coffee there, he had whipped up his flagging vitality with all kinds of jazz, he had rushed to the Kabarett der Komiker, he had sought mental fecundation in every musical in town, and from morn to midnight twixt heaven and earth had come up with nothing that would yield the slightest profit unless you owned it before you started. He ended up in Aschinger’s beer bar.
Here he had an obscure urge to tap vital springs among the common folk whose struggle for existence still took the form of actual work, to draw strength, so to speak, like Antaeus from contact with mother earth. After two exhausting hours of just sitting around, his eye lit on a beggar with a glass of beer at the next table, nothing else seemed worthy of note.
The look of this beggar was quite horrifying. Kückelmann, whose sensitivity to pictures of misery was particularly acute at that time, distinctly felt a shiver go through his bones. The man bore the mark of death. His thinness was absurd. He seemed to have been fed from childhood on no more than two water biscuits a day. Overcome by a heroic desire to confront utter poverty eyeball to eyeball, Kückelmann sat down in desperation at this fellow’s table. From a safe distance behind his newspaper he examined this walking, beer-swilling skeleton with growing dismay, ordered pease pudding for him as if in a dream, and then, while the man’s strength revived with surprising alacrity, engaged him in conversation. And what can one say? Kückelmann ended up taking the beggar Joseph Kleiderer to his hotel for the night.
The beggar had told him that he was in the best of health, though just a little starved; and between a greasy waiter and a silver cash-register Kückelmann saw a sudden vision in the air.
From now on he had his meals sent up to his room and shared them with Joseph Kleiderer, who, preserved for the world in all his filth, was completely restored at the end of three weeks and indeed presented an appearance of blooming health. People who had known the old Kleiderer now said they could not recognize him; that he was so fat that you were bound to drink a schnaps to his health. Kückelmann wanted nothing from him in return for all this, only a chance to take him to an insurance office since his, Kleiderer’s, life was so dear to him, Kückelmann, that he wanted it to be covered for all eventualities – and Kleiderer saw the point. So Kückelmann insured Kleiderer for 100,000 marks and paid the first premium with most of the ready cash he had left. On the way home he told Kleiderer he had to buy some cigars and disappeared into a tobacconist’s from which he never re-emerged. Understandably deep in the dumps, Kleiderer went to the hotel, and there, and later at the beer bar, he waited in vain.
Thereafter Kleiderer waited often in the beer bar for his benefactor who had gone to ground, and now that he had no funds his physical decline was rapid. His robust bloom lasted a few days, then he lost weight, and before five weeks had passed he was once again the same walking, beer-swilling skeleton, sitting in the beer bar, when Kückelmann appeared behind a newspaper just as he had done the last time.
Kückelmann still showed a great interest in Kleiderer, immediately ordered him something to eat, and even asked him to go along to his bank with him – wherewith Kleiderer complied.
In his banker’s office Kückelmann produced Kleiderer’s insurance policy, introduced Kleiderer as his brother-in-law, and asked the banker to buy the policy from him, Kückelmann. Since he was momentarily in financial straits he couldn’t pay the premiums, though it could be seen at a glance that Joseph Kleiderer would not live a week, being all skin and bones, and the sum for which he was insured, 100,000 marks, would then be paid to the policy holder.
Kückelmann, looking ostentatiously downcast, sighed as he put the banknotes into a morocco leather case, steered his ‘dying’ brother-in-law carefully out of the door, helped him into a hansom and invited him to dine at Lauer’s. In the next few days they dined either at Lauer’s or at Kempinski’s or at the Bristol Bar.
Kückelmann took a childish delight in Kleiderer’s second blooming, and among other things proved conclusively to him that listening to classical music over coffee and imported cigars leads one to put on weight.
At the end of two amply filled weeks Kleiderer, on whom Kückelmann could now afford to lavish more than on the first occasion, was fully restored, and one day Kückelmann went along with him to his banker.
The man was aghast. Later on Kückelmann assured his business friends that no one else would have recognised the ‘skeleton’ in the fat, smiling Joseph Kleiderer, but the banker took in the situation at a glance. He had the keen eye of a man who has laid out 40,000 marks.
Kückelmann said excitedly that his brother-in-law had pulled through better than anyone had expected, and that a remarkable vitality seemed to run in the family. As things now stood, he could of course not expect anybody to pay premiums for thi
rty to forty years – for a man’s life is three score years and ten, or at best four score. He fully wished to do the decent thing and, at a reasonable price, would buy back the policy, whose value had been drastically reduced by such a happy turn of events. The price which he felt he could reasonably offer was 2500 marks. The banker totted up in his mind the legal costs he would face if he yielded to his urge to smash Kückelmann in the teeth, but decided to forget it, since his birthday only came round once a year. He accepted the 2500 marks for the insurance policy and contented himself with reviewing his estimate of his own fitness for this life.
Kückelmann put the insurance policy in his morocco leather brief case and walked through the glass door in front of Joseph Kleiderer, then tilted his Borsalino slightly forward and, before Joseph Kleiderer’s eyes, vanished into a taxi as into a cloud.
Kleiderer, whose second bloom was therewith at an end, did not even look for him again. A sullen uneasiness took possession of the simple soul, who failed to understand the surprising but seemingly lucrative behaviour of his quarterly benefactor. He declined speedily, and when Kückelmann quite predictably turned up, asked him to dinner again, took him to see a banker where he again sold the same insurance policy, stowed the money in his morocco leather brief case and proceeded yet again to eat with him, a mad rebellion rose within him. As he was hungry, he could not turn the food down, but he ate only enough to stave off the pangs. He ate, as it were, absently, even with a slight disgust. He listened to Kückelmann’s praise of his improved appearance (for food is food and makes you fat) with a sidelong glance from beneath his eyebrows, and walked past mirrors quickly, averting his gaze. And one day when he was still far from fat he started, to Kückelmann’s complete astonishment, making the rounds of the newspaper offices looking for a job. He picked the profession of newsvendor. The job was meagrely paid but it enabled him to climb countless stairs. However, before the exercise stopped him gaining weight, Kückelmann cunningly showed him the insurance policy in the course of a meal to which he had allowed himself to be seduced, and Joseph Kleiderer with eyes betraying an ocean of slimy vengeful notions, watched Kückelmann, with a look of disappointment, make a mental estimate of his, Kleiderer’s, girth and then take out his leather case again.