Command Part 14

That's fixed. Now, when we've had something to eat we'll go see the Transport Officer. He's the man."

"I hope you don't want _me_ to go with you," said Captain Rannie, looking down at the floor as though he saw the bottomless pit just on the point of opening under their feet. "I've only seen the man once and then he failed to show the very slightest glimmer of comprehension of what I had to put up with. Might as well talk to a stone wall.

Absolutely. I'm sure _I_ don't want to see your Transport Officer."

"I was going to ask you," said Mr. Spokesly, "if you don't mind, a question. You seem to be in the know all round here."

"What is it?" said Mr. Dainopoulos, regarding Mr. Spokesly with sudden interest. He even left his pen in the air while he listened.

Mr. Spokesly mentioned the incident of the suit of clothes left behind by the indigent Jack Harrowby and the memories of the post-card shop evoked by the interview with Mr. Theotokis.

Mr. Dainopoulos let his pen descend to the doc.u.ment he was auditing and nodded in comprehension.

"Yes, all finished, eh? Wal, what you think?" he went on nonchalantly.

"She little d.a.m.n fool. She tell plenty stories to anybody who get sweet on her, you unnerstand? She hear _Tanganyika_ go south, time so and so.

She talk"--here Mr. Dainopoulos made a gesture with his thumb and fingers indicating violent blabbing--"ba-ba-ba-ba! Now she's in jail.

_Tanganyika_, wal, you know all about _Tanganyika_, Mister. You unnerstand; these peoples, French, English, they play, you know, golf and tennees, and seem half asleep." He shook his head. "No! Not asleep.

Very bad business that. Me; I go all the time like this." And he drew a perfectly straight line with his pen along the edge of his desk. "That crooked business no good."

Captain Rannie was suddenly overtaken by a violent fit of coughing, and buried his nut-cracker features in a large plum-coloured silk handkerchief. His head was bowed, his shoulders heaved horribly, and from him came a sound like an asthmatic horse whinnying. He might have been laughing save that laughter was unknown to him beyond a short sharp yawp, a "Ha!" involving a lift of the diaphragm and an intake of breath.

And since none had ever seen him laugh they would not suspect merriment in this dreadful cacophony, this laryngeal uproar, which had so suddenly a.s.sailed him. Mr. Dainopoulos looked at his captain very sternly and then renewed the proposal to eat. Captain Rannie rose, joint by joint, and stuffed his plum-coloured handkerchief into his breast pocket.

"No," he said, and Mr. Spokesly wondered if the man ever agreed to anything except under protest. "No, I'm a two-meal-a-day man myself. I find I am less bilious on two meals a day. And anyhow, after that, I couldn't possibly eat anything."

And he coughed himself out of the door.

Mr. Dainopoulos stared after him, his features dest.i.tute of any emotion at all. Captain Rannie halted, turned half round, and it almost seemed as though for once in his life he was going to raise his eyes and look somebody square in the face. But he paused at the second b.u.t.ton of his owner's waistcoat and nodded several times, his toothless mouth open, a perfect ventriloquist's dummy.

"I'll have indigestion for a fortnight," he said. "Absolutely." And he started off again, the plum-coloured handkerchief to his face, his shoulders heaving, making a noise like a foundered horse.

"What's the matter with him?" Mr. Spokesly felt justified in asking.

"He's an old b.u.m!" said Mr. Dainopoulos with a gloomy air, but made no further allusion to the bronchial troubles of his captain. The fact was, as Mr. Spokesly became aware in time, that Mr. Dainopoulos, in the course of his many negotiations, was obliged to entrust some of the business to his employees. And a stroke of business entirely correct to him did not make that impression upon Captain Rannie, who was under the illusion that he himself was the soul of honour. So he was, in theory.

When Captain Rannie did a mean and dishonourable action, it bore to him the aspect of an act of singular rect.i.tude. And he promptly forgot all about it. He wiped it out of his mind as off a slate. It was gone; had never existed, in fact. For the exploits of others, however, he not only never left off thinking about them, but he could not be induced to refrain from discussing them, for ever and ever. Anyone who had ever had any dealings with him would find him an embarra.s.sing witness at the Day of Judgment, if we are correct in a.s.suming that witnesses will be called. Mr. Dainopoulos could not afford to quarrel with him, but he sometimes wished he had a more amiable disposition, and could get on better with his crew. And he felt for him also the puzzled contempt which men of affairs feel for the sensualist. An elderly man who, as Mr.

Dainopoulos had heard, had a wife somewhere and a married daughter somewhere else, and who was continually engaged in some shabby unmentionable intrigue, made one feel a little uncomfortable and slightly ashamed of one's species. Captain Rannie's view of his own conduct was not available, for he never by any chance recognized the existence of such affairs in his intercourse with other men. His sentiments about women were unknown save what might be gathered from his short sharp yawp--"Ha!"--whenever they were mentioned, the laugh of a n.o.ble nature embittered by base ingrat.i.tude. So he visualized himself.

No one had ever betrayed the slightest grat.i.tude for anything he had ever done. So he would be revenged on the whole pack of them--Ha!

It was Mr. Spokesly's chance question, whether the Captain was a visitor at the house, which let him fully into the mind and temper of his new employer.

"He's not that sort of man," said Mr. Dainopoulos, shovelling beans into his mouth with a knife. "My wife, she wouldn't like him, I guess. He's got something of his own, y'unnerstand. Like your friend Mr. Bates, only he don't drink. He take the pipe a leetle. You savvy?"

Mr. Spokesly remembered this conversation later on, when events had suddenly carried him beyond the range of Mr. Dainopoulos and his intense respectability. He remembered it because he realized that Mr.

Dainopoulos at that time, and behind his mask of bourgeois probity, which had been so enigmatically received by Captain Rannie, was devising a daring and astute stroke of business based on his exact knowledge of the aegean and his relations with the late consuls of enemy powers. And Captain Rannie, of course, had been aware of this. But at the moment Mr.

Spokesly easily abandoned the morals of his new commander and listened to what might be called the wisdom of the Near East. He thought there was no harm in asking Mr. Dainopoulos what he thought of the emerald ring. That gentleman evidently thought a great deal of it. He offered to buy it, spot cash, for a thousand drachma, about one sixth of its actual value. He merely shrugged his shoulders when he heard the tale of a woman giving it to Archy. According to his own experience that sort of woman did not give such things away to anybody. He thoroughly understood precious stones, as he understood drugs, carpets, currency, bric-a-brac, dry goods, wet goods, and the law of average. He noted a minute flaw in the stone, and finally handed it back hurriedly, telling Mr. Spokesly to give it away to some lady.

"Or throw it into the sea," he added, drinking a gla.s.s of wine in a gulp.

"What for?" demanded Mr. Spokesly, mystified by this sudden fancy.

"Bad luck," said Mr. Dainopoulos laconically. "It belong to a drowned man, you unnerstand! Better give it away."

"I'll give it to Miss Solaris."

Mr. Dainopoulos eyed Mr. Spokesly over his shoulder as he sat with his elbows on the table holding up his gla.s.s. Mr. Spokesly put the ring in his pocket.

"She'll take it, all right," said his friend at length, and drank.

"What makes you so sure?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

Mr. Dainopoulos was not prepared to answer that question in English. He found that English, as he knew it, was an extraordinarily wooden and c.u.mbersome vehicle in which to convey those lightning flashes and glares and sparkles of thought in which most Latin intelligences communicate with each other. You could say very little in English, Mr. Dainopoulos thought. He could have got off some extremely good things about Evanthia Solaris in the original Greek, but Mr. Spokesly would not have understood him. If he were to take a long chance, however, by saying that the vulture up in the sky sees the dead mouse in the ravine, he was not at all sure of the result.

"Aw," he said in apology for his difficulty, "the ladies, they like the pretty rings."

"I can see you don't like her," said Mr. Spokesly, smiling a little.

"My friend," said Mr. Dainopoulos, and he turned his black, bloodshot eyes, with their baggy pouches of skin forming purplish crescents below them, on his companion. "My friend, I'm married. Women, I got no use for them, you unnerstand? You no unnerstand. By and by, you know what I mean. My wife, all the time she sick, all the time. She like Miss Solaris. All right. For my wife anything in the world. But me, I got my business. By and by, ah!"

"What about by and by?" asked Mr. Spokesly, curious in spite of himself.

He began to think Mr. Dainopoulos was a rather interesting human being, a remarkable concession from an Englishman.

Mr. Dainopoulos did not reply immediately. He had a vision splendid in his mind, but it was hazy and vague in details. His somewhat oriental conception of happiness was tempered by an austere idealism inspired by his wife. He could never have achieved his ambition, let us say, in Haverstock Hill, London N., or Newark, N. J. He demanded a background of natural features as a setting for his grandiose plans for the future. No westerner could understand his dreams, for example, of a black automobile with solid silver fittings and upholstery of orange corded silk, in which his wife could take the air along a magnificent corniche road flanked by lemon-coloured rocks and an azure sea. Other refinements, such as silken window-blinds, striped green and white, keeping the blinding sparkle of that sea from invading the cool recesses of voluptuous chambers, came to him from time to time. But he could not talk about it. He did not even speak to his wife of his dream. He believed she knew without his telling her. She knew nothing about it, imagining that he was merely concocting some little surprise such as buying a cottage in the country down in Warwicks.h.i.+re, where she believed her people came from in the days of William the Fourth. Buying cottages was not her husband's idea of solidifying a position, however. For him, living in a hovel while making money was justified by frugality and convenience, but retiring to a cottage would be a confession of defeat.

So he did not enlighten Mr. Spokesly. He paused awhile and then remarked that he hoped to get finished with business some day. No one could possibly take exception to this.

They did not see the officer who had been so anxious for Mr. Spokesly to visit the Persian Gulf during the coming summer. That gentleman had gone to see a dentist, it appeared, and a young writer informed them that it would be all right so long as the captain of the vessel was British.

"Yes, he's British all right--Captain Rannie--he's got a pa.s.sport," said Mr. Dainopoulos. And when he was asked when he would be ready to load, he said as soon as the Captain gave him a berth.

"He put us three mile away, and it takes a tug an hour and a half to get to the s.h.i.+p," he remarked, "with coal like what it is now."

"Well, of course we can't put everybody at the pier, you know," said the young writer genially, quite forgetting that Mr. Dainopoulos had deftly inserted an item in the _charte partie_ which gave him a generous allowance for lighterage.

"All right," said he, as though making a decent concession. "You know they tell me they want this stuff in a hurry, eh?"

The young writer did not know but he pretended he did, and said he would attend to it. So they bade him good day and took their way back to the Bureau de Change. Mr. Dainopoulos had left it in charge of a young Jew, a youth so desperately poor and so fanatically honest that he seemed a living caricature of all moral codes. Neither his poverty nor his probity seemed remarkable enough to keep him in employment, doubtless because, like millions of other people in southeastern Europe, he had neither craft of mind nor hand. Mr. Dainopoulos got him small situations from time to time, and in between these he hung about, running errands, and keeping shop, a pale, dwarfed, ragged creature, with emaciated features and brilliant pathetic eyes. He was wearing a pair of woman's boots, much too large for him, burst at the sides and with heels dreadfully run over, so that he kept twitching himself erect. Mr.

Dainopoulos waved a hand towards this young paragon.

"See if you can find him a job on the _Kalkis_," he said. "Very honest young feller." They spoke rapidly to each other and Mr. Dainopoulos gave an amused grunt.

"He say he don't want to go in a s.h.i.+p. Scared she go down," he remarked.

The boy looked down the street with an expression of suppressed grief on his face. He rolled his eyes towards his benefactor, imploring mercy.

Mr. Dainopoulos spoke to him again.

"He'll go," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "Fix him to help the cook. And if you want anybody to take a letter, he's a very honest young feller."

The very honest young feller shrank away to one side, evidently feeling no irresistible vocation for the sea. Indeed, he resembled one condemned to die. He and his kind swarm in the ports of the Levant, the Semitic parasites of sea-borne commerce, yet rarely setting foot upon a s.h.i.+p. He drooped, as though his limbs had liquefied and he was about to collapse.

Mr. Dainopoulos, however, to whom ethnic distinctions of such refinement were of no interest, ignored him and permitted him to revel in his agony at a near-by cafe table.

"You come to my house to-night," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "I got one or two little things to fix."