He leaned far over the table, till his very breast-bone was over the edge, as though his eyes had been stilettos and he wanted to drive them home into my brain.It was only much later that Iunderstood how near death I had been at that moment.But the knives on the tablecloth were the usual restaurant knives with rounded ends and about as deadly as pieces of hoop-iron.Perhaps in the very gust of his fury he remembered what a French restaurant knife is like and something sane within him made him give up the sudden project of cutting my heart out where I sat.For it could have been nothing but a sudden impulse.His settled purpose was quite other.It was not my heart that he was after.His fingers indeed were groping amongst the knife handles by the side of his plate but what captivated my attention for a moment were his red lips which were formed into an odd, sly, insinuating smile.Heard!
To be sure he had heard! The chief of the great arms smuggling organization!
"Oh!" I said, "that's giving me too much importance." The person responsible and whom I looked upon as chief of all the business was, as he might have heard, too, a certain noble and loyal lady.
"I am as noble as she is," he snapped peevishly, and I put him down at once as a very offensive beast."And as to being loyal, what is that? It is being truthful! It is being faithful! I know all about her."I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern.He wasn't a fellow to whom one could talk of Dona Rita.
"You are a Basque," I said.
He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then the truth did not dawn upon me.I suppose that with the hidden egoism of a lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation to Dona Rita, not of Dona Rita herself.He, too, obviously.He said: "I am an educated man, but I know her people, all peasants.There is a sister, an uncle, a priest, a peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened.One can't expect much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is really too bad, more like a brute beast.As to all her people, mostly dead now, they never were of any account.There was a little land, but they were always working on other people's farms, a barefooted gang, a starved lot.I ought to know because we are distant relations.
Twentieth cousins or something of the sort.Yes, I am related to that most loyal lady.And what is she, after all, but a Parisian woman with innumerable lovers, as I have been told.""I don't think your information is very correct," I said, affecting to yawn slightly."This is mere gossip of the gutter and I am surprised at you, who really know nothing about it - "But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study.The hair of his very whiskers was perfectly still.I had now given up all idea of the letter to Rita.Suddenly he spoke again:
"Women are the origin of all evil.One should never trust them.
They have no honour.No honour!" he repeated, striking his breast with his closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white.
"I left my village many years ago and of course I am perfectly satisfied with my position and I don't know why I should trouble my head about this loyal lady.I suppose that's the way women get on in the world."I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to headquarters.He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps not quite sane.This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with no visible connection and as if it had been forced from him by some agonizing process: "I was a boy once," and then stopping dead short with a smile.He had a smile that frightened one by its association of malice and anguish.
"Will you have anything more to eat?" I asked.
He declined dully.He had had enough.But he drained the last of a bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered him.
While he was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression that he wasn't such a stranger to me as I had assumed he was; and yet, on the other hand, I was perfectly certain I had never seen him before.Next moment I felt that I could have knocked him down if he hadn't looked so amazingly unhappy, while he came out with the astounding question: "Senor, have you ever been a lover in your young days?""What do you mean?" I asked."How old do you think I am?""That's true," he said, gazing at me in a way in which the damned gaze out of their cauldrons of boiling pitch at some soul walking scot free in the place of torment."It's true, you don't seem to have anything on your mind." He assumed an air of ease, throwing an arm over the back of his chair and blowing the smoke through the gash of his twisted red mouth."Tell me," he said, "between men, you know, has this - wonderful celebrity - what does she call herself? How long has she been your mistress?"I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite complications beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police on night-duty, and ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind; because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most undesirable publicity.He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly mocking air and not even looking at me.
