But he remembered nothing. He did not know. He never knew....
2.
The chief recommendation of the Pension Paoli was its cheapness. For twenty francs a day Hugh had his board and a chamber that overlooked the red roofs and the blue sea beyond. He had a tiny balcony, too, and in the lazy, limpid days he cultivated a cheerful lethargy.
It was one of those Bohemian establishments peculiar to the Principality. People came and went without exciting interest. The clientele was imperturbably cosmopolitan, the cuisine piquantly Italian. At the table d’hôte one heard half a dozen tongues and no one was concerned about the respectability of his neighbour. Every one seemed to gamble, and to think of little but the Casino.
Hugh’s first evening was typical. He was trying to go to sleep, when about midnight some one entered the next room. He heard the sound of money being emptied on the table, counted, then a sigh of satisfaction. Every night this happened, only some nights there was no money and curses took the place of content. On such nights he would say to himself, “The Twitcher’s been loosing.”
The Twitcher was a tall weedy man, who, owing to some nervous malady, had a trick of raising and lowering his eyebrows. He had a friend whom Hugh called the Sword-Swallower, on account of his way of eating ravioli. The S. S. was small and brisk, with tiny, cropped head, and a large but carefully groomed moustache. His trousers were striped and of the same width all the way down.
The S. S. and the Twitcher were allies and united in a dislike for a third man, whom Hugh dubbed the Rat. This was a sturdy, bandy-legged fellow with a bulging jaw, a broken nose and close-set, beady eyes. His skin had a curious pallor, a prison pallor, Hugh thought. He decided that the Rat had just finished doing time and was now spending the swag.
One day he overheard a conversation between the Twitcher and the Sword-Swallower which referred to the Rat.
“Yes,” said the Twitcher, “the fellow’s as crooked as a ram’s horn. I saw him do it again.”
“Do what?”