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Page 10
Holcombe did not speak, but put his arm across the other's shoulder,
and this time Carroll did not shake it off. Holcombe pointed with his
hand to a tall, handsome woman with heavy yellow hair who was coming
toward them, with her hands in the pockets of her reefer. "There is
Mrs. Carroll now," he said. "Won't you present me, and then we can row
out and see the man-of-war?"
II
The officers returned their visit during the day, and the American
Consul-General asked them all to a reception the following afternoon.
The entire colony came to this, and Holcombe met many people, and
drank tea with several ladies in riding-habits, and iced drinks with
all of the men. He found it very amusing, and the situation appealed
strongly to his somewhat latent sense of humor. That evening in
writing to his sister he told of his rapid recovery in health, and of
the possibility of his returning to civilization.
"There was a reception this afternoon at the Consul-General's," he
wrote, "given to the officers of our man-of-war, and I found myself in
some rather remarkable company. The Consul himself has become rich by
selling his protection for two hundred dollars to every wealthy Moor
who wishes to escape the forced loans which the Sultan is in the habit
of imposing on the faithful. For five hundred dollars he will furnish
any one of them with a piece of stamped paper accrediting him as
minister plenipotentiary from the United States to the Sultan's court.
Of course the Sultan never receives them, and whatever object they may
have had in taking the long journey to Fez is never accomplished. Some
day some one of them will find out how he has been tricked, and will
return to have the Consul assassinated. This will be a serious loss to
our diplomatic service. The Consul's wife is a fat German woman who
formerly kept a hotel here. Her brother has it now, and runs it as an
annex to a gambling-house. Pat Meakim, the Police Commissioner that I
indicted, but who jumped his bail, introduced me at the reception to
the men, with apparently great self-satisfaction, as 'the pride of the
New York Bar,' and Mrs. Carroll, for whose husband I obtained a
divorce, showed her gratitude by presenting me to the ladies. It was a
distinctly Gilbertian situation, and the people to whom they
introduced me were quite as picturesquely disreputable as themselves.
So you see--"
Holcombe stopped here and read over what he had written, and then tore
up the letter. The one he sent in its place said he was getting
better, but that the climate was not so mild as he had expected it
would be.
Holcombe engaged the entire first floor of the hotel the next day, and
entertained the officers and the residents at breakfast, and the
Admiral made a speech and said how grateful it was to him and to his
officers to find that wherever they might touch, there were some few
Americans ready to welcome them as the representatives of the flag
they all so unselfishly loved, and of the land they still so proudly
called "home." Carroll, turning his wine-glass slowly between his
fingers, raised his eyes to catch Holcombe's, and winked at him from
behind the curtain of the smoke of his cigar, and Holcombe smiled
grimly, and winked back, with the result that Meakim, who had
intercepted the signalling, choked on his champagne, and had to be
pounded violently on the back. Holcombe's breakfast established him as
a man of means and one who could entertain properly, and after that
his society was counted upon for every hour of the day. He offered
money as prizes for the ship's crew to row and swim after, he gave a
purse for a cross-country pony race, open to members of the Calpe and
Tangier hunts, and organized picnics and riding parties innumerable.
He was forced at last to hire a soldier to drive away the beggars when
he walked abroad. He found it easy to be rich in a place where he was
given over two hundred copper coins for an English shilling, and he
distributed his largesses recklessly and with a lack of discrimination
entirely opposed to the precepts of his organized charities at home.
He found it so much more amusing to throw a handful of coppers to a
crowd of fat naked children than to write a check for the Society for
Suppression of Cruelty to the same beneficiaries.
"You shouldn't give those fellows money," the Consul-General once
remonstrated with him; "the fact that they're blind is only a proof
that they have been thieves. When they catch a man stealing here they
hold his head back, and pass a hot iron in front of his eyes. That's
why the lids are drawn taut that way. You shouldn't encourage them."
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