Command. William McFee

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СКАЧАТЬ upon Mr. Spokesly. "You do not wish, then, to take a chance?"

      "Oh, a chance!" Mr. Spokesly achieved a certain irony as he emphasized the last word. "Your ideas of a chance and mine might be different. S'pose we have another drink."

      The watchful Herakles came near as Mr. Spokesly lifted his hand, and took the order.

      The fact was—and it may be presumed that Mr. Dainopoulos perceived it sufficiently well to make allowance for it—that Mr. Spokesly, as he sat beside Archy Bates and listened to the conversation, had experienced a sudden access of caution. Archy was not drunk, and as far as was humanly known, never would be really drunk; but he was sufficiently saturated to raise a certain distrust in the mind of a perfectly sober man. It may even be said that while Mr. Spokesly had no clear intention of deserting his chum Archy, he was beginning to wish that Archy were not indispensable in any scheme that might be proposed. And the occasional looks that various British and French officers cast in their direction made Mr. Spokesly uneasy. He suddenly realized the other aspect of making money in a shady fashion: that one has to do business with shady people. Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, looked extremely shady. Archy Bates, his long, sharp nose buried in a fresh whiskey and soda, his hat pushed back revealing the oiled graying hair parted in the middle and slicked back above his ears with their purple veins; Archy, picking dreamily among the pieces of fish and beetroot which had been served on little dishes with the drinks, looked extraordinarily like a rat picking at garbage. All very well, Mr. Spokesly reflected, to buy hashish and sell it in Egypt at four or five hundred per cent. profit, so long as the business could be transacted in a gentlemanly manner. But this new development—he did not see his way clear to accepting Mr. Dainopoulos as an employer. He was not fastidious—he had worked for a Chinese ship owner—but the officers at the other tables, in their inconceivably correct uniforms and polished harness, made him uneasy. Mr. Spokesly knew perfectly well that these people did not consider him as one of themselves. Even amid the noise and chaffering of a Saloniki café, rubbing shoulders with the uniforms of French, Greek, Serbian, Russian, and Italian officers, these men of his own race, he knew, never forgot the abyss that separates the seafaring man from themselves, the social crevasse which even Armageddon was powerless to abolish. Nevertheless, he felt he could never abandon for ever the possibility of entering, some day, the magic circle. It is this peculiarity of the English temperament which so often paralyses its victim at the very moment when he needs to be in possession of all his faculties, when the chance, perhaps of a lifetime, suddenly appears at his elbow.

      But Mr. Dainopoulos, as has been said, could size a man up. He was intuitively aware that he had made no great impression upon Mr. Spokesly. And he had a special desire, now that chance had thrown them together, to engage the interest of a skilled navigator. He had received an offer which might result in a very large profit indeed. The business to which he had been referring, a mere matter of running a small cargo of canned goods down to a certain island and transferring it to an Austrian submarine, was a trifle. One could do that every day, right under the noses and beards of a dozen French naval officers. This was a much bigger affair. It involved the sale, at huge profit, of one of his little steamers which he had purchased for a song from the French early in the war, but it also involved the safe conduct of the vessel into an enemy port. His friends in Anatolia might compensate him ultimately for the destruction of his ship by an Allied warship and the crew could look out for themselves; but if the captain lost her by grounding, it would be a disaster of the first magnitude. All this passed through the nimble mind of Mr. Dainopoulos while Mr. Spokesly waited for further light on the nature of the service required. He saw the difficulty and, knowing the English character, he took his measure accordingly. He smiled.

      "You come to my house and have some supper?" he remarked. "My wife would be pleased, I'm sure."

      Mr. Spokesly looked at Archy Bates. That gentleman was no longer paying attention. In his own peculiar fashion he had arrived at some sort of intuitive recognition of the fact that Mr. Dainopoulos had no intention of letting him in on this affair. Well, that was all right, Mr. Bates reflected in one of those appallingly clear and coherent moments which suddenly open in the mentality of dipsomaniacs. That was all right. They were making a lot of money. Big risk for him, by Jove! but he was willing to shoulder it. By Jove! That last time in Port Said, when the police rushed into his cabin not five minutes after the laundryman, who also took his rake-off, had carried the stuff ashore in a boat-load of dirty sheets. It was a near thing. Two hundred quid he had netted over that, paid in Turkish gold. And they had found the bit of burlap in which it had been wrapped. He saw the chief of police now, standing there, in his bright red fez, and white uniform, legs apart, holding the thing to his nose. Hashish, by Jove! A close call! "What's this?" Mr. Bates jumped and made the table shake. Mr. Spokesly was speaking. For a moment he had forgotten where he was. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He smiled with relief.

      "Shall we go?" repeated Mr. Spokesly. Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Bates shook his head. He was still smiling with relief, for that brief moment, during which his consciousness had slipped back a couple of months, as it were, and reënacted the scene in his cabin, had been very real. Five years in an Egyptian penitentiary missed by five minutes and a quick-witted explanation! While he shook his head and smiled into Mr. Spokesly's face he was thinking that he would take twice as much this time, and he knew where to hide it. Moreover, and he smiled more like a cat than ever, the millions of lines round his eyes deepening, he reflected that if Mr. Spokesly went in on this there was practically no risk at all. Nothing easier than to say——Eh, what? No! He was going along to the Amphitryon, to see a little friend of his. See them later. Aw—ri!

      It was a notable feature of Mr. Bates's temperamental failing that it never affected his legs. In earlier years, as a saloon waiter, he had often astounded his shipmates by getting as drunk as a lord before dinner, and yet going down the long dining saloon of a great liner, a plate of soup in each hand, and depositing them in front of passengers in evening dress, without ever an accident. Perhaps his demeanour was a shade more deliberate, his attention a trifle more abstracted, on these occasions; that was all. And now, as he rose and went towards the door of Floka's, after a dignified farewell to Mr. Dainopoulos, although an occasional wandering eye fastened upon him for a moment, Mr. Bates never betrayed himself. He paused courteously at the door while a major with his brigadier in tow passed in, monocles reflecting the light in a blind white glare so that they resembled Cyclops, and then he walked out gently himself, and was immediately lost in the noise and bustle of the Place.

      Mr. Dainopoulos looked at Mr. Spokesly and thrust a thumb into the armhole of his coat.

      "Your friend," he began in a low mutter, "him and me we do big business—you understand?—but all the same he drink too much highball. No good, eh?"

      "Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "he's his own master, and he can please himself about that. To tell the truth, though, if there's anything in—what you were speaking of, I'd just as soon he wasn't in it. You see what I mean?" Mr. Dainopoulos nodded and drew at his narghileh. "He's a friend of mine, and very good friend, too, but we got to draw a line somewhere." Again Mr. Dainopoulos nodded as he leaned across the table.

      "And another thing!" he remarked in his muffled tones, and he held the mouthpiece of the narghileh just in front of his lips as though it were a speaking tube and he was engaged in conversation with someone at the other end. He even cast his eyes down, and seemed to abandon Mr. Spokesly entirely. "And another thing. Mr. Bates, he very fond—you know—very fond of the mademoiselles. That's all right. If you like them, very good. But Mr. Bates, he comes all the time to me. Want me—you understand? Now, I do no business in that line, none at all. I don't like it. Plenty men tell you, 'Oh, yes, you come with me.' You understand? But me, I got my family to think about. Now you understand?"

      "It is not respectable," added Mr. Dainopoulos in a deep tone, and relapsed into silence and the narghileh.

      Mr. Spokesly did not reply. Even when they had left the café and were СКАЧАТЬ