Читать книгу Marivosa - Baroness Orczy - Страница 17

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There was a café on the confine between the old and modern city called the Café Bom Genio; a promising sign. It was frequented mostly by commercial travellers and dealers of all sorts, men who traded with cattle-drovers and farmers up-country, who were pleasant and loose-tongued, and over a bottle of white rum discussed politics and the incidents of their trade.

The girl, Inez, she who had lived for a time with Dudley Stone and was a dancer at the Conquistador music-hall, took Tim there one evening. ‘There are a lot of foreigners always there,’ she said, ‘who go about all over the country. They may have heard something; one never knows. Their tongues are loose for they drink a lot of rum. They are not like us Brasilheiros, for we are silent people; we only talk to friends, because we are cautious—but they...’ She shrugged her pretty shoulders in very obvious contempt of the foreigner.

The place was gaily enough lighted. There was nothing sinister about it. True, the atmosphere was so rank that it was almost solid; it reeked of spirits and stale food, of garlic and humanity and black tobacco. There were seats all round the room which had once been covered with leather; there were trestle tables and a few benches. The room was crowded and the sounds were deafening. Men were sitting at the tables, drinking and smoking, some were playing cards, others dominoes; there were only a very few women, four or five at most. They all greeted Inez with a cheery ‘Allo!’ as she entered, and eyed Tim with blatant curiosity.

To Tim it seemed as if everyone in the room talked at once, while nobody listened. All the voices appeared jumbled, and that first evening he heard and saw nothing of interest. But he remembered what Inez had said: ‘They go about all over the country and they may have heard something; one never knows’; and he went again and again to the Café Bom Genio. He got to know all its regular customers: rascals, most of them, so he soon found out. Unblushing rogues, too, for one tale capped another of how the vaqueiros up in the Sertao district were induced to sell hides from which the branding mark had been carefully cut out, or cattle which had obviously been stolen.

Nevertheless, Tim made friends with them all, got them to talk to him about their affairs, their business; they were certainly loose-tongued, as Inez had told him, and an extra glass or two of rum would render most men there loquacious. There was a Dutchman who came regularly to the Bom Genio. His name was Van Smeet. He was a large, fat, florid rascal, whose clothes would have been a joy to a caricaturist. He seemed to be dressed just in what he happened to have; breeches or trousers, more or less patched, a khaki shirt which allowed of a generous display of a pink blond chest, a coloured handkerchief loosely knotted below a collar of Byronic amplitude, and a belt which seemed to wage constant warfare on his bulging waistline. Then there was a Portuguese cattle dealer, rather morose and taciturn, with fingers thickly stained with tobacco juice, hair and beard as black and shiny as anthracite coal, and eyes very close together over a beaky nose which gave him the appearance of a condor sitting pondering in his cage at the London Zoo. There were a couple of Germans who dealt in precious stones—illicit diamond buying, most probably—but were careful to avoid conflict with the law; and a few more of doubtful nationality and origin, touched more or less with the tar-brush, some gay, some taciturn, but all apparently engaged in the agreeable business of cheating with equal impartiality the man from whom they bought and the customer to whom they sold.

But it was Van Smeet, the Dutchman, whom Tim liked best. He was so comfortable in his rascality. ‘Why not make use of rogues if they are willing to take risks?’ he would say, beaming at his friends whom he had just treated to real Jamaica all round. ‘I buy my hides cheap, not? ... then what do I care where they come from?’

One of the friends demurred: ‘If you get found out?’

‘Well! I am covered. I buy the hides in good faith, not?’

‘I suppose you know where they come from?’

‘Of course I do—but it’s no business of mine.’

Such was invariably the commencement of a conversation which then, equally invariably, drifted into one of two channels—either politics and a general damning and cursing of the Government, taxes and so on, or the mysterious doings up in the Sertao.

‘There is bound to be a row about it soon,’ the Portuguese would remark sententiously, and this remark made regularly every evening in a gloomy, sepulchral voice would then start the favourite topic of conversation.

‘The Great Unknown!’ one of them would say in the same tone of voice as if he were referring to a terrible and awesome god. After which there would be a silence for a moment or two until someone—a newcomer, like Tim, to these parts—would ask the inevitable question: ‘Who is he, exactly?’

Opinions varied as to that. It seemed that some thirty odd years ago there had arisen in the desert land of the Sertao a prophet, a seer, call him what you will, whom the vaqueiros and their like had named Antonio Conselheiro, and had looked upon as a second John the Baptist; and some would have it that this prophet had now come to life again, and that in the desert he was called the Great Unknown.

‘Funny for a resurrected prophet to become the greatest cattle thief in Brazil,’ the Dutchman then remarked dryly, but with a humorous twinkle in his eye and a wink at his friend Tim.

But this did not upset the faith of those who chose to look on the Great Unknown with awe. Tim soon noticed that the foreigners and even the Brasilheiros were inclined to treat the story of the risen prophet with contempt, but that those of mixed blood—and there were many of those among the frequenters of the Bom Genio—appeared seized with a kind of religious fervour whenever there was mention of the Great Unknown.

The Portuguese dealer put in a sententious word or two as a rebuke to the Dutchman’s flippancy.

‘He is no cattle thief. It is his army who scour the country—and they do it, too. Why, the other week...’

Whereupon would follow endless stories of the depredations carried on by this army of bandits, who owned no allegiance save to the mysterious prophet, and in his name descended on the villages around, robbed, stole anything they could lay their hands on. And latterly, it seemed they had become insolent in their daring and their defiance of the law. Ranch owners on the fringe of the Sertao were no longer safe, their cattle and their horses were driven off; their stores stolen, their tills robbed. And with it all the army grew in numbers week by week—almost day by day. The mysticism which surrounded the personality of the Great Unknown, as well as the free life of looting and pirating, appealed to these semi-savage dwellers of the Sertao, and the fair-haired Sertanejos, the dark Mesticos, the coffee-coloured Mamalucos, the innumerable mixtures of Indian, Negro and white blood in the desert all went to swell this horde who knew no law, save its desires and the word of the Great Unknown.

‘It is his army—not himself....’

‘Well,’ the Dutchman would argue, ‘he benefits, doesn’t he?’

‘Of course he does,’ remarked one of the Germans; ‘they say he is richer than any New York millionaire.’

‘But what is he going to do with all that money? He can’t spend it out there in the desert....’

‘Overthrow this d—d Government. He has an army of ten thousand men, armed and equipped....’

‘Bah! A lot of half-breeds....’

‘Determined men ... I remember thirty years ago that Antonio Conselheiro held out in the desert against four military expeditions sent out by the Government....’

‘What became of him?’

‘Killed. And every man in his army with him.’

‘But then this new man...’

The conversation would then become general. All the same ground gone over every night. Some had one theory, some another; and while the foreigners jeered and made fun of the resurrected prophet, there were those who put their heads together and whispered. Tim caught snatches. A word here and there. It seems that this story of the mysterious Great Unknown had a good deal of political significance. The Portuguese trader who had business dealings direct with the vaqueiros on the Sertao insisted on the fact that the Great Unknown was a direct descendant of the last Emperor of Brazil, and that he was collecting all the money he could, and having his army trained by European officers with a view to marching presently on Pernambuco and there proclaiming the re-establishment of the Empire with himself as Emperor.

And this turned the conversation at once into its political channel.

‘Good luck to him, I say!’

‘What has this d—d Government ever done...?’

‘Except taxes—and more taxes—and nothing but taxes.’

‘And officials poking their noses in everybody’s business.’

Everyone had a grievance, and there were always the secret foreign agents ready to stir up trouble. Tim ceased to be interested. His thoughts had gone roaming to the unknown desert land of the Sertao; he fell to wondering whether by any chance Dudley Stone, the adventurer, had drifted into the army of the Great Unknown. It would be just like him to embark on a career of instructor to a lot of vaqueiros and half-breeds, who were destined to upset the existing Government of the country and to restore the Empire of Brazil on the ashes of its young Republic. He had played that sort of rôle in Bulgaria, where he had commanded a troupe of comitadjis during the Balkan War—so why not here and now? It was just the sort of adventure that would commend itself to Dudley Stone.

The fact that his new friend Van Smeet let fall the remark once that he had some business dealings with Dom Manoël da Lisbao, seemed like a link in a new chain of evidence which Tim had begun to forge. ‘I take off my hat to Dom Manoël,’ the Dutchman had said, with a thick laugh and a jovial smacking of the lips. ‘I am only a babe in business compared with him.’

And when Tim asked him how and where this business was transacted, he replied: ‘Oh! Up in that God-forsaken district, the Sertao—Dom Manoël has his ranch there—you didn’t know? Oh! A magnificent ranch. I buy cattle and hides from him—hides that have no branding mark sometimes—and diamonds which ... But we won’t talk about that. Our friend Dom Manoël has very long ears....’