and incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised counter, facing the door, with a
mirror and rows of bottles at her back. Her hair was very elaborately done with two
ringlets on the left side of her scraggy neck; her dress was of silk, and she had
come on duty for the afternoon. For some reason or other Schomberg exacted this
from her, though she added nothing to the fascinations of the place. She sat there in
the smoke and noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling stupidly over the billiards from
time to time, speaking to no one, and no one speaking to her. Schomberg himself
took no more interest in her than may be implied in a sudden and totally unmotived
scowl. Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her existence.
She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections. Being alone with her, her silence
and open-mouthed immobility made him uncomfortable. He was easily sorry for
people. It seemed rude not to take any notice of her. He said, in allusion to the
poster:
"Are you having these people in the house?"
She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound of his voice
she jumped in her seat. Davidson was telling us afterwards that she jumped exactly
like a figure made of wood, without losing her rigid immobility. She did not even
move her eyes; but she answered him freely, though her very lips seemed made of
wood.
"They stayed here over a month. They are gone now. They played every
evening."
"Pretty good, were they?"
To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in front of her, her
silence disconcerted Davidson. It looked as if she had not heard him—which was
impossible. Perhaps she drew the line of speech at the expression of opinions.
Schomberg might have trained her, for domestic reasons, to keep them to herself.
But Davidson felt in honour obliged to converse; so he said, putting his own
interpretation on this surprising silence:
"I see—not much account. Such bands hardly ever are. An Italian lot, Mrs.
Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?"
She shook her head negatively.
"No. He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and beard black for business.
Zangiacomo is his business name."
"That's a curious fact," said Davidson. His head being full of Heyst, it occurred
to him that she might be aware of other facts. This was a very amazing discovery to
anyone who looked at Mrs. Schomberg. Nobody had ever suspected her of having a
mind. I mean even a little of it, I mean any at all. One was inclined to think of her
as an It—an automaton, a very plain dummy, with an arrangement for bowing the
head at times and smiling stupidly now and then. Davidson viewed her profile with
a flattened nose, a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye. He asked
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himself: Did that speak just now? Will it speak again? It was as exciting, for the
mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a mechanism. A smile played about
the fat features of Davidson; the smile of a man making an amusing experiment. He
spoke again to her:
"But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were they not?"
Of course, he didn't care. He wanted to see whether the mechanism would work
again. It did. It said they were not. They were of all sorts, apparently. It paused,
with the one goggle eye immovably gazing down the whole length of the room and
through the door opening on to the "piazza." It paused, then went on in the same
low pitch:
"There was even one English girl."
"Poor devil!"—said Davidson, "I suppose these women are not much better than
slaves really. Was that fellow with the dyed beard decent in his way?"
The mechanism remained silent. The sympathetic soul of Davidson drew its own
conclusions.
"Beastly life for these women!" he said. "When you say an English girl, Mrs.
Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl? Some of these orchestra girls are no
chicks."
"Young enough," came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg's unmoved
physiognomy.
Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her. He was easily sorry
for people.
"Where did they go to from here?" he asked.
"She did not go with them. She ran away."
This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next. It introduced a new sort of
interest.
"Well! Well!" he exclaimed placidly; and then, with the air of a man who knows
life: "Who with?" he inquired with assurance.
Mrs. Schomberg's immobility gave her an appearance of listening intently.
Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must have been finishing his sleep
in some distant part of the house. The silence was profound, and lasted long enough
to become startling. Then, enthroned above Davidson, she whispered at last:
"That friend of yours."
"Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend," said Davidson hopefully. "Won't
you tell me—"
"I've told you"
"Eh?"
A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson's eyes, disclosing something
he could not believe.
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"You can't mean it!" he cried. "He's not the man for it." But the last words came
out in a faint voice. Mrs. Schomberg never moved her head the least bit. Davidson,
after the shock which made him sit up, went slack all over.
"Heyst! Such a perfect gentleman!" he exclaimed weakly.
Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him. This startling fact did not tally
somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst. He never talked of women, he
never seemed to think of them, or to remember that they existed; and then all at
once—like this! Running off with a casual orchestra girl!
"You might have knocked me down with a feather," Davidson told us some time
afterwards.
By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that amazing
transaction. First of all, on reflection, he was by no means certain that it prevented
Heyst from being a perfect gentleman, as before. He confronted our open grins or
quiet smiles with a serious round face. Heyst had taken the girl away to Samburan;
and that was no joking matter. The loneliness, the ruins of the spot, had impressed
Davidson's simple soul. They were incompatible with the frivolous comments of
people who had not seen it. That black jetty, sticking out of the jungle into the
empty sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses peeping dismally above the long
grass! Ough! The gigantic and funeral blackboard sign of the Tropical Belt Coal
Company, still emerging from a wild growth of bushes like an inscription stuck
above a grave figured by the tall heap of unsold coal at the shore end of the wharf,
added to the general desolation.
Thus the sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable indeed to follow
such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no doubt, told her the truth. He was a
/> gentleman. But no words could do justice to the conditions of life on Samburan. A
desert island was nothing to it. Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert
island—why, you could not help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of
an ambulant ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day,
was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of it. She would
scream.
The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men! Davidson was stirred to
the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about Heyst that he was concerned.
We asked him if he had passed that way lately.
"Oh, yes. I always do—about half a mile off."
"Seen anybody about?"
"No, not a soul. Not a shadow."
"Did you blow your whistle?"
"Blow the whistle? You think I would do such a thing?"
He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion. Wonderfully
delicate fellow, Davidson!
"Well, but how do you know that they are there?" he was naturally asked.
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Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson—a few lines
in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper. It was to the effect: that an unforeseen
necessity was driving him away before the appointed time. He begged Davidson's
indulgence for the apparent discourtesy. The woman of the house—meaning Mrs.
Schomberg—would give him the facts, though unable to explain them, of course.
"What was there to explain?" wondered Davidson dubiously.
"He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and—"
"And she to him, apparently," I suggested.
"Wonderfully quick work," reflected Davidson. "What do you think will come of
it?"
"Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has been selected
for a confidante?"
For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that woman
whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two billiard-
tables—without expression, without movement, without voice, without sight.
"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his innocent
eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which this affair had left him,
like those shocks of terror or sorrow which sometimes leave their victim afflicted
by nervous trembling. It looked as though he would never get over it.
"Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my lap while
I sat there unsuspecting," Davidson went on. "Directly I had recovered my senses, I
asked her what on earth she had to do with it that Heyst should leave it with her.
And then, behaving like a painted image rather than a live woman, she whispered,
just loud enough for me to hear:
"I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl, and
threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it."
"That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little finger!"
marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. "What do you think of
that?"
I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She was too
lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible to think that
Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had not the means to do that. Or
could it be that she was moved by that disinterested passion for delivering a woman
to a man which in respectable spheres is called matchmaking?—a highly irregular
example of it!
"It must have been a very small bundle," remarked Davidson further.
"I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive," I said.
"I don't know. She was miserable. I don't suppose it was more than a little linen
and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the platform."
Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a thing had
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never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For where could you find
anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No doubt fellows here and there took a
fancy to some pretty one—but it was not for running away with her. Oh dear no! It
needed a lunatic like Heyst.
"Only think what it means," wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his invincible
placidity. "Just only try to think! Brooding alone on Samburan has upset his brain.
He never stopped to consider, or he couldn't have done it. No sane man . . . How is
a thing like that to go on? What's he going to do with her in the end? It's madness."
"You say that he's mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving on his
island; so he may end yet by eating her," I suggested.
Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told us. Indeed,
the wonder was that they had been left alone so long. The drowsy afternoon was
slipping by. Footsteps and voices resounded on the veranda—I beg pardon, the
piazza; the scraping of chairs, the ping of a smitten bell. Customers were turning
up. Mrs. Schomberg was begging Davidson hurriedly, but without looking at him,
to say nothing to anyone, when on a half-uttered word her nervous whisper was cut
short. Through a small inner door Schomberg came in, his hair brushed, his beard
combed neatly, but his eyelids still heavy from his nap. He looked with suspicion at
Davidson, and even glanced at his wife; but he was baffled by the natural placidity
of the one and the acquired habit of immobility in the other.
"Have you sent out the drinks?" he asked surlily.
She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared with a loaded
tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and greeted the customers
outside, but did not join them. He remained blocking half the doorway, with his
back to the room, and was still there when Davidson, after sitting still for a while,
rose to go. At the noise he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his
hat to Mrs. Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid grin,
and then looked away. He was loftily dignified. Davidson stopped at the door, deep
in his simplicity.
"I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence," he said. "My
friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for me now is to make inquiries
down at the port. I shall hear something there, I don't doubt."
"Make inquiries of the devil!" replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.
Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to make Mrs.
Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have heard something more of
Heyst's exploit from another point of view. It was a shrewd try. It was successful in
a rather startling way, because the hotel-keeper's point of view was horribly
abusive. All of a sudden, in the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call
Heyst many names, of which "pig-dog" was not the worst, with such vehemence
that he actually choked himself. Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose
temperament could withstand worse shock
s, remonstrated in an undertone:
"It's unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off with your cash-
box—"
The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to Davidson's.
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"My cash-box! My—he—look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off with a girl.
What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me."
He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That's what the girl
was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing to him. What he was
concerned for was the good name of his house. Wherever he had been established,
he had always had "artist parties" staying in his house. One recommended him to
the others; but what would happen now, when it got about that leaders ran the risk
in his house—his house—of losing members of their troupe? And just now, when
he had spent seven hundred and thirty-four guilders in building a concert-hall in his
compound. Was that a thing to do in a respectable hotel? The cheek, the indecency,
the impudence, the atrocity! Vagabond, impostor, swindler, ruffian, schwein-hund!
He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in the doorway,
and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg's stony gaze. Davidson stole a glance in
that direction and thought of making some sort of reassuring sign to her, but she
looked so bereft of senses, and almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not
worth while. He disengaged his button with firm placidity. Thereupon, with a last
stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to try and compose his spirits
in solitude. Davidson stepped out on the veranda. The party of customers there had
become aware of the explosive interlude in the doorway. Davidson knew one of
these men, and nodded to him in passing; but his acquaintance called out:
"Isn't he in a filthy temper? He's been like that ever since."
The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling. Davidson stopped.
"Yes, rather." His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered resignation; but
of course that was no more visible to the others than the emotions of a turtle when
it withdraws into its shell.
"It seems unreasonable," he murmured thoughtfully.