Part 4 (1/2)
As soon as these words were out of my mouth I fancied I had said something immoral. He shook his head negatively. It had to be told.
He considered it proper that the relations of the lady should know. No doubt--I thought to myself--had Miss Vanlo not been thirty and damaged by the climate he would have found it possible to entrust Fred Vanlo with this confidence. And then the figure of Hermann's niece appeared before my mind's eye, with the wealth of her opulent form, her rich youth, her lavish strength. With that powerful and immaculate vitality, her girlish form must have shouted aloud of life to that man, whereas poor Miss Vanlo could only sing sentimental songs to the strumming of a piano.
”And that Hermann hates me, I know it!” he cried in his undertone, with a sudden recrudescence of anxiety. ”I must tell them. It is proper that they should know. You would say so yourself.”
He then murmured an utterly mysterious allusion to the necessity for peculiar domestic arrangements. Though my curiosity was excited I did not want to hear any of his confidences. I feared he might give me a piece of information that would make my a.s.sumed role of match-maker odious--however unreal it was. I was aware that he could have the girl for the asking; and keeping down a desire to laugh in his face, I expressed a confident belief in my ability to argue away Hermann's dislike for him. ”I am sure I can make it all right,” I said. He looked very pleased.
And when we rose not a word had been said about towage! Not a word! The game was won and the honour was safe. Oh! blessed white cotton umbrella!
We shook hands, and I was holding myself with difficulty from breaking into a step dance of joy when he came back, striding all the length of the verandah, and said doubtfully:
”I say, captain, I have your word? You--you--won't turn round?”
Heavens! The fright he gave me. Behind his tone of doubt there was something desperate and menacing. The infatuated a.s.s. But I was equal to the situation.
”My dear Falk,” I said, beginning to lie with a glibness and effrontery that amazed me even at the time--”confidence for confidence.” (He had made no confidences.) ”I will tell you that I am already engaged to an extremely charming girl at home, and so you understand....”
He caught my hand and wrung it in a crus.h.i.+ng grip.
”Pardon me. I feel it every day more difficult to live alone...”
”On rice and fish,” I interrupted smartly, giggling with the sheer nervousness of a danger escaped.
He dropped my hand as if it had become suddenly red hot. A moment of profound silence ensued, as though something extraordinary had happened.
”I promise you to obtain Hermann's consent,” I faltered out at last, and it seemed to me that he could not help seeing through that humbugging promise. ”If there's anything else to get over I shall endeavour to stand by you,” I conceded further, feeling somehow defeated and over-borne; ”but you must do your best yourself.”
”I have been unfortunate once,” he muttered unemotionally, and turning his back on me he went away, thumping slowly the plank floor as if his feet had been shod with iron.
Next morning, however, he was lively enough as man-boat, a combination of splas.h.i.+ng and shouting; of the insolent commotion below with the steady overbearing glare of the silent head-piece above. He turned us out most unnecessarily at an unG.o.dly hour, but it was nearly eleven in the morning before he brought me up a cable's length from Hermann's s.h.i.+p. And he did it very badly too, in a hurry, and nearly contriving to miss altogether the patch of good holding ground, because, forsooth, he had caught sight of Hermann's niece on the p.o.o.p. And so did I; and probably as soon as he had seen her himself. I saw the modest, sleek glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of unfaltering curves--a very nymph of Diana the Huntress. And Diana the s.h.i.+p sat, high-walled and as solid as an inst.i.tution, on the smooth level of the water, the most uninspiring and respectable craft upon the seas, useful and ugly, devoted to the support of domestic virtues like any grocer's shop on sh.o.r.e. At once Falk steamed away; for there was some work for him to do. He would return in the evening.
He ranged close by us, pa.s.sing out dead slow, without a hail. The beat of the paddle-wheels reverberating amongst the stony islets, as if from the ruined walls of a vast arena, filled the anchorage confusedly with the clapping sounds of a mighty and leisurely applause. Abreast of Hermann's s.h.i.+p he stopped the engines; and a profound silence reigned over the rocks, the sh.o.r.e and the sea, for the time it took him to raise his hat aloft before the nymph of the grey print frock. I had s.n.a.t.c.hed up my binoculars, and I can answer for it she didn't stir a limb, standing by the rail shapely and erect, with one of her hands grasping a rope at the height of her head, while the way of the tug carried slowly past her the lingering and profound homage of the man. There was for me an enormous significance in the scene, the sense of having witnessed a solemn declaration. The die was cast. After such a manifestation he couldn't back out. And I reflected that it was nothing whatever to me now. With a rush of black smoke belching suddenly out of the funnel, and a mad swirl of paddle-wheels provoking a burst of weird and precipitated clapping, the tug shot out of the desolate arena. The rocky islets lay on the sea like the heaps of a cyclopean ruin on a plain; the centipedes and scorpions lurked under the stones; there was not a single blade of gra.s.s in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning himself on a boulder by the sh.o.r.e. When I looked again at Hermann's s.h.i.+p the girl had disappeared. I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued the flatness of the sea to the naked line of the horizon.
This is the setting now inseparably connected with my knowledge of Falk's misfortune. My diplomacy had brought me there, and now I had only to wait the time for taking up the role of an amba.s.sador. My diplomacy was a success; my s.h.i.+p was safe; old Gambril would probably live; a feeble sound of a tapping hammer came intermittently from the Diana.
During the afternoon I looked at times at the old homely s.h.i.+p, the faithful nurse of Hermann's progeny, or yawned towards the distant temple of Buddha, like a lonely hillock on the plain, where shaven priests cherish the thoughts of that Annihilation which is the worthy reward of us all. Unfortunate! He had been unfortunate once. Well, that was not so bad as life goes. And what the devil could be the nature of that misfortune? I remembered that I had known a man before who had declared himself to have fallen, years ago, a victim to misfortune; but this misfortune, whose effects appeared permanent (he looked desperately hard up) when considered dispa.s.sionately, seemed indistinguishable from a breach of trust. Could it be something of that nature? Apart, however, from the utter improbability that he would offer to talk of it even to his future uncle-in-law, I had a strange feeling that Falk's physique unfitted him for that sort of delinquency. As the person of Hermann's niece exhaled the profound physical charm of feminine form, so her adorer's big frame embodied to my senses the hard, straight masculinity that would conceivably kill but would not condescend to cheat. The thing was obvious. I might just as well have suspected the girl of a curvature of the spine. And I perceived that the sun was about to set.
The smoke of Falk's tug hove in sight, far away at the mouth of the river. It was time for me to a.s.sume the character of an amba.s.sador, and the negotiation would not be difficult except in the matter of keeping my countenance. It was all too extravagantly nonsensical, and I conceived that it would be best to compose for myself a grave demeanour.
I practised this in my boat as I went along, but the bashfulness that came secretly upon me the moment I stepped on the deck of the Diana is inexplicable. As soon as we had exchanged greetings Hermann asked me eagerly if I knew whether Falk had found his white parasol.
”He's going to bring it to you himself directly,” I said with great solemnity. ”Meantime I am charged with an important message for which he begs your favourable consideration. He is in love with your niece....”
”Ach So!” he hissed with an animosity that made my a.s.sumed gravity change into the most genuine concern. What meant this tone? And I hurried on.
”He wishes, with your consent of course, to ask her to marry him at once--before you leave here, that is. He would speak to the Consul.”
Hermann sat down and smoked violently. Five minutes pa.s.sed in that furious meditation, and then, taking the long pipe out of his mouth, he burst into a hot diatribe against Falk--against his cupidity, his stupidity (a fellow that can hardly be got to say ”yes” or ”no” to the simplest question)--against his outrageous treatment of the s.h.i.+pping in port (because he saw they were at his mercy)--and against his manner of walking, which to his (Hermann's) mind showed a conceit positively unbearable. The damage to the old Diana was not forgotten, of course, and there was nothing of any nature said or done by Falk (even to the last offer of refreshment in the hotel) that did not seem to have been a cause of offence. ”Had the cheek” to drag him (Hermann) into that coffee-room; as though a drink from him could make up for forty-seven dollars and fifty cents of damage in the cost of wood alone--not counting two days' work for the carpenter. Of course he would not stand in the girl's way. He was going home to Germany. There were plenty of poor girls walking about in Germany.
”He's very much in love,” was all I found to say.
”Yes,” he cried. ”And it is time too after making himself and me talked about ash.o.r.e the last voyage I was here, and then now again; coming on board every evening unsettling the girl's mind, and saying nothing. What sort of conduct is that?”
The seven thousand dollars the fellow was always talking about did not, in his opinion, justify such behaviour. Moreover, n.o.body had seen them.
He (Hermann) seriously doubted if there were seven thousand cents, and the tug, no doubt, was mortgaged up to the top of the funnel to the firm of Siegers. But let that pa.s.s. He wouldn't stand in the girl's way. Her head was so turned that she had become no good to them of late. Quite unable even to put the children to bed without her aunt. It was bad for the children; they got unruly; and yesterday he actually had to give Gustav a thras.h.i.+ng.
For that, too, Falk was made responsible apparently. And looking at my Hermann's heavy, puffy, good-natured face, I knew he would not exert himself till greatly exasperated, and, therefore, would thrash very hard, and being fat would resent the necessity. How Falk had managed to turn the girl's head was more difficult to understand. I supposed Hermann would know. And then hadn't there been Miss Vanlo? It could not be his silvery tongue, or the subtle seduction of his manner; he had no more of what is called ”manner” than an animal--which, however, on the other hand, is never, and can never be called vulgar. Therefore it must have been his bodily appearance, exhibiting a virility of nature as exaggerated as his beard, and resembling a sort of constant ruthlessness. It was seen in the very manner he lolled in the chair. He meant no offence, but his intercourse was characterised by that sort of frank disregard of susceptibilities a man of seven foot six, living in a world of dwarfs, would naturally a.s.sume, without in the least wis.h.i.+ng to be unkind. But amongst men of his own stature, or nearly, this frank use of his advantages, in such matters as the awful towage bills for instance, caused much impotent gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth. When attentively considered it seemed appalling at times. He was a strange beast. But maybe women liked it. Seen in that light he was well worth taming, and I suppose every woman at the bottom of her heart considers herself as a tamer of strange beasts. But Hermann arose with precipitation to carry the news to his wife. I had barely the time, as he made for the cabin door, to grab him by the seat of his inexpressibles. I begged him to wait till Falk in person had spoken with him. There remained some small matter to talk over, as I understood.