"I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place
isn't good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else
to show off his superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts
for you gentlemen, just to make things a little brighter generally; and
do you think he'll condescend to step in and listen to a piece or two of
an evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits at the dark end of
the piazza, all the evening long--planning some new swindle, no doubt.
For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere
else; only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the
tropics. I don't know how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet
a trifle that he'll never work himself up to the point of spending the
fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of a little good music."

Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening
Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped
snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress
as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among
the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of
their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness
under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of cylindrical
concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated the doorway
of what Schomberg called grandiloquently "my concert-hall." In his
desperate mood Heyst ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and
went in.

The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An
instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping,
squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon