“Let me tell you. It’s all about that girl. I don’t know what Captain Hermann expects, but if he asked me I could tell him something about Falk. He’s a miserable fellow. That man is a perfect slave. That’s what I call him. A slave. Last year I started this table d’hote, and sent cards out--you know. You think he had one meal in the house? Give the thing a trial? Not once. He has got hold now of a Madras cook--a blamed fraud that I hunted out of my cookhouse with a rattan. He was not fit to cook for white men. No, not for the white men’s dogs either; but, see, any damned native that can boil a pot of rice is good enough for Mr. Falk. Rice and a little fish he buys for a few cents from the fishing boats outside is what he lives on. You would hardly credit it--eh? A white man, too....” He wiped his lips, using the napkin with indignation, and looking at me. It flashed through my mind in the midst of my depression that if all the meat in the town was like these table d’hote chops, Falk wasn’t so far wrong. I was on the point of saying this, but Schomberg’s stare was intimidating. “He’s a vegetarian, perhaps,” I murmured instead. “He’s a miser. A miserable miser,” affirmed the hotel-keeper with great force. “The meat here is not so good as at home--of course. And dear too. But look at me. I only charge a dollar for the tiffin, and one dollar and fifty cents for the dinner. Show me anything cheaper. Why am I doing it? There’s little profit in this game. Falk wouldn’t look at it. I do it for the sake of a lot of young white fellows here that hadn’t a place where they could get a decent meal and eat it decently in good company. There’s first-rate company always at my table.” The convinced way he surveyed the empty chairs made me feel as if I had intruded upon a tiffin of ghostly Presences. “A white man should eat like a white man, dash it all,” he burst out impetuously. “Ought to eat meat, must eat meat. I manage to get meat for my patrons all the year round. Don’t I? I am not catering for a dam’ lot of coolies: Have another chop captain.... No? You, boy--take away!” He threw himself back and waited grimly for the curry. The half-closed jalousies darkened the room pervaded by the smell of fresh whitewash: a swarm of flies buzzed and settled in turns, and poor Mrs. Schomberg’s smile seemed to express the quintessence of all the imbecility that had ever spoken, had ever breathed, had ever been fed on infamous buffalo meat within these bare walls. Schomberg did not open his lips till he was ready to thrust therein a spoonful of greasy rice. He rolled his eyes ridiculously before he swallowed the hot stuff, and only then broke out afresh.