"Don't misunderstand me," I insisted. "But it stands to reason that, here on Naapu, she's learned a good many things they don't teach in little red schoolhouses. I have a great respect for her, and, between you and me, I shouldn't wonder if she had sized Schneider up already."
The eyes were appeased. "Maybe, maybe," he grunted. "But lies come easy to him, I guess. Miss Eva wouldn't be the first he'd fooled."
"Do you know anything about him?"
"Not a thing, except what sticks out all over him. For a man's eyes, that is. You never can tell what a woman will see."
I left him poking in the dust with his spanner.
I dined that night at Lockerbie's. There was no Mrs. Lockerbie, and it was a man's party. Follet was there, of course, and Schneider, too, his teeth and his clothes whiter than the rest of ours. I was surprised to see Schneider, for Lockerbie had suspected the Teuton of designs on his very privately and not too authentically owned lagoon. Lockerbie did a fair business in pearls; no great beauties or values among them, but a good marketable cheap product. But no one held out very long against any one on Naapu.
Schneider was drunk before he ever got to Lockerbie's that night. It was part of the Naapu ritual not to drink just before you reached your host's house, and that ritual, it soon became evident, Schneider had not observed. I saw Lockerbie scowl, and Follet wince, and some of the others stare. I could not help being amused, for I knew that no one would object to his being in that condition an hour later. The only point was that he should not have arrived like that. If Schneider had had anything resembling a skin, he would have felt about as comfortable as Mother Eve at a woman's club. Lockerbie's scowl was no joke; and Follet had a way of wriggling his backbone gracefully.—It was up to me to save Schneider, and I did. The honor of Naapu was nothing to me; and by dint of almost embracing him, I made myself a kind of absorbent for his worst breaks. It was not a pleasant hour for me before the rest began to loosen up.
In my eagerness to prevent Lockerbie from insulting his guest, I drank nothing, myself, after the first cocktail. So it came to pass that by the time I could safely leave Schneider to the others, I found myself unwontedly incarnating the spirit of criticism.
They were a motley crowd, coalesced for the moment into a vinous solidarity. Follet spat his words out very sweetly; his poisonous grace grew on him in his cups. Lockerbie, warmed by wine, was as simple—and charming—as a wart-hog. Old Maskell, who had seen wind-jammer days and ways and come very close, I suspected, to piracy, always prayed at least once. Pasquier, the successful merchant who imported finery for the ladies of Naapu, rolled out socialistic platitudes—he was always flanked, at the end of the feast, by two empty chairs. Little Morlot began the endless tale of his conquests in more civilized lands: all patchouli and hair-oil. Anything served as a cue for all of them to dive into the welter of their own preoccupations. Just because they knew each other and Naapu so well, they seemed free to wander at will in the secret recesses of their predilections and their memories. I felt like Circe—or perhaps Ulysses; save that I had none of that wise man's wisdom.
The reward of my abstinence, I found, was to be the seeing home of Schneider. It would have come more naturally to Follet, who also lived at Dubois's, but Follet was fairly snarling at Schneider. French Eva's name had been mentioned. On my word, as I saw Follet curving his spinal column, and Schneider lighting up his face with his perfect teeth, I thought with an immense admiration of the unpolished and loose-hung Stires amid the eternal smell of tar and dust. It was a mere discussion of her hair, incoherent and pointless enough. No scandal, even from Schneider. There had been some sense, of a dirty sort, in his talk to me; but more wine had scattered his wits.