Adams The Unspeakable Perk

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-95864-843-2
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Bored socialite Polly Brewster has cajoled her father into renting a villa in a politically unstable but beautiful Central American nation, Caracuña. Her intent: to get away from three suitors whose persistence she finds annoying. One of the three is so intent on marriage that he follows her South. It is while trying to avoid him that she encounters an American unlike any other man she has ever known. Perkins is a naturalist, a "beetle man," who looks something like a beetle himself in his overlarge, patched clothing and thick dark glasses. A semi-recluse, he avoids the company of his fellow expatriates, searching the forest and beach for specimens during the day and living in a hilltop compound, which may or may not also house a young woman. Intrigued, Polly wonders if it is possible to uncover all the secrets he seems so determined to hide.(Excerpt from Goodreads)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adams, Samuel Hopkins

Leseproben

II. — AT THE KAST
One dines at the Gran Hotel Kast after the fashion of a champignon sous cloche. The top of the cloche is of fluted glass, with a wide aperture between it and the sides, to admit the rain in the wet season and the flies in the dry. Three balconies run up from the dining-room well to this roof, and upon these, as near to the railings as they choose, the rather conglomerate patronage of the place sleeps, takes baths, dresses, gossips, makes love, quarrels, and exchanges prophecies as to next Sunday’s bullfight, while the diners below strive to select from the bill of fare special morsels upon which they will stake their internal peace for the day. No cabaret can hold a candle to it for variety of interest. When the sudden torrential storms sweep down the mountains at meal times, the little human champignons, beneath their insufficient cloche, rush about wildly seeking spots where the drippage will not wash their food away. Commercial travelers of the tropics have a saying: “There are worse hotels in the world than the Kast—but why take the trouble?” And, year upon year, they return there for reasons connected with the other hostelries of Caracuna, which I forbear to specify. To Miss Polly Brewster, the Kast was a place of romance. Five miles away, as the buzzard flies, she could have dined well, even elegantly, on the Brewster yacht. Would she have done it? Not for worlds! Miss Brewster was entranced by the courtly manners of her waiter, who had lost one ear and no small part of the countenance adjacent thereto, only too obviously through the agency of some edged instrument not wielded in the arts of peace. She was further delightedly intrigued by the abrupt appearance of a romantic-hued gentleman, who thrust out over the void from the second balcony an anguished face, one side of which was profusely lathered, and addressed to all the hierarchy of heaven above, and the peoples of the earth beneath, a passionate protest upon the subject of a cherished and vanished shaving brush; what time, below, the head waiter was hastily removing from sight, though not from memory, a soup tureen whose agitated surface bore a creamy froth not of a lacteal origin. One may not with impunity balance personal implements upon the too tremulous rails of the ancient Kast. With an appreciative and glowing eye, Miss Brewster read from her mimeographed bill of fare such legends as “ropa con carne,” “bacalao seco,” “enchiladas,” and meantime devoured chechenaca, which, had it been translated into its just and simple English of “hash,” she would not have given to her cat. Nor did her visual and prandial preoccupations inhibit her from a lively interest in the surrounding Babel of speech in mingled Spanish, Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch, for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice gained any heed in that contest. Even after the bells paused, the habit of effort kept the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table to the right of her. The remark that first fixed her attention was in English, of the super-British patois. “Can’t tell wot the blighter might look like behind those bloomin’ brown glasses.” “But he’s not bothersome to any one,” suggested a second speaker, in a slightly foreign accent. “He regards his own affairs.” “Right you are, bo!” approved a tall, deeply browned man of thirty, all sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested nothing so much as a club with a gnarled knob on the end of it, a tough, reliable, hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in an honest cause. “If he deals in conversation, he must SELL it. I don’t notice him giving any of it away.” “He gave some to Kast the last time he dined here,” observed a languid and rather elegant elderly man, who occupied the fourth side of the table. “Mine host didn’t like it.” “I should suppose Senior Kast would be hardened,” remarked the young Caracunan who had defended the absent. “Our eyeglassed friend scored for once, though. They had just served him the usual table-d’hote salad—you know, two leaves of lettuce with a caterpillar on one. Kast happened to be passing. Our friend beckoned him over. ‘A little less of the fauna and more of the flora, Senior Kast,’ said he in that gritty, scientific voice of his. I really thought Kast was going to forget his Swiss blood, and chase a whole peso of custom right out of the place.” “If you ask me, I think the blighter is barmy,” asserted the Briton. “Well, I’ll ask you,” proffered the elegant one kindly. “Why do you consider him ‘barmy,’ as you put it?” “When I first saw him here and heard him speak to the waiter, I knew him for an American Johnny at once, and I went, directly I’d finished my soup, and sat down at his table. The friendly touch, y’ know. ‘I say,’ I said to him, ‘I don’t know you, but I heard you speak, and I knew at once you were one of these Americans—tell you at once by the beastly queer accent, you know. You are an American, ay—wot?’ Wot d’ you suppose the blighter said? He said, ‘No, I’m an ichthyo’—somethin’ or other—” “Ichthyosaurus, perhaps,” supplied the Caracunuan, smiling. “That’s it, whatever it may be. ‘I’m an ichthyosaurus,’ he says. ‘It’s a very old family, but most of the buttons are off. Were you ever bitten by one in the fossil state? Very exhilaratin’, but poisonous,’ he says. ‘So don’t let me keep you any longer from your dinner.’ Of course, I saw then that he was a wrong un, so I cut him dead, and walked away.” “Served him right,” declared the elderly American, with a solemn twinkle directed at the tall brown man, who, having opened his mouth, now thought better of it, and closed it again, with a grin. “But he is very kind,” said the native. “When my brother fell and broke his arm on the mountain, this gentleman found him, took care of him, and brought him in on muleback.” “Lives up there somewhere, doesn’t he, Mr. Raimonda?” asked the big man. “In the quinta of a deserted plantation,” replied the Caracunan. “Wot’s he do?” asked the Englishman. “Ah, THAT one does not know, unless Senor Sherwen can tell us.” “Not I,” said the elderly man. “Some sort of scientific investigation, according to the guess of the men at the club.” “You never can tell down here,” observed the Englishman darkly. “Might be a blind, you know. Calls himself Perkins. Dare say it isn’t his name at all.” “Daughter,” said Mr. Thatcher Brewster at this juncture, in a patient and plaintive voice, “for the fifth and last time, I implore you to pass me the butter, or that which purports to be butter, in the dish at your elbow.” “Oh, poor dad! Forgive me! But I was overhearing some news of an—an acquaintance.” “Do you know any of the gentlemen upon whose conversation you are eavesdropping?” In financial circles, Mr. Brewster was credited with the possession of a cold blue eye and a denatured voice of interrogation, but he seldom succeeded in keeping a twinkle out of the one and a chuckle out of the other when conversing with his daughter. “Not yet,” observed that damsel calmly. “Meaning, I suppose I am to understand—” “Precisely. Haven’t you noticed them looking this way? Presently they’ll be employing all their strategy to meet me. They’ll employ it on you.” Mr. Brewster surveyed the group dubiously. “In a country such as this, one can’t be too—too cau—” “Too particular, as you were saying,” cut in his daughter cheerfully. “Men are scarce—except Fitzhugh, who is rather less scarce than I wish he were lately. You know,” she added, with a covert glance at the adjoining table, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself an extremely popular papa immediately after dinner. It might even go so far as cigars. Do you suppose that lovely young Caracunan is a bullfighter?” “No; I believe he’s a coffee exporter. Less romantic, but more respectable. Quite one of the gilded youth of Caracuna. His name is Raimonda. Fitzhugh knows him. By the way, where on earth is Fitzhugh?” “Trying to fit a kind and gentlemanly expression over a swollen sense of injury, for a guess,” replied the girl carelessly. “I left him in sweet and lone communion with nature three hours ago.” “Polly, I wish—” “Oh, dad, dear, don’t! You’ll get your wish, I suppose, and Fitz, too. Only I don’t want to be hurried. Here he is, now. Look at that smile! A sculptor couldn’t have done any better. Now, as soon as he comes, I’m going to be quite nice and kind.” But Mr. Fairfax Preston Fitzhugh Carroll did not come direct to the Brewster table. Instead, he stopped to greet the elderly man in the near-by group, and presently drew up a chair. At first, their conversation was low-toned, but presently the young native added his more vivacious accents. “Who can tell?” the Brewsters heard him say, and marked the fatalistic gesture of the upturned hands. “They disappear. One does not ask questions too much.” “Not here,” confirmed the big man. “Always room for a few more in the undersea jails, eh?” “Always. But I think it was not that with...