Command Part 3

"But Dainopoulos may use them, eh?"

"Impossible, my commandant. You do not know them. I do. As you are aware, I was in the Credit Lyonnais in Lombard Street. If Mr.

Dainopoulos attempted to enlist their services they would batter his head in with his own _narghileh_. They have no compunction about robbing their government by peculation, but treachery is not their _metier_. And our friend knows it quite well."

"Business," observed Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly, "is very bad."

Mr. Bates seemed very amused at this and leaned over the dirty marble-topped table.

"Count us both in, my friend here and me, for the same as last time. How about it, eh?"

"Oh!" Mr. Dainopoulos pulled his extended frame up and put his elbows on the table, his eyes blinking quickly. "Oh, that's all right. Yes, certainly. But I mean to say business is very bad. You would not believe me, Mister, but the chances that are going, and all for a little management, are lost! Incredible! Only this week"--here he lowered his voice so that Mr. Spokesly, who was listening with undivided attention, scarcely gathered the words--"only this week, I could have made--ah, much money--if I had with me an Englishman who knows the business. Ten thousand drachma, easy as that!" Mr. Dainopoulos snapped his fingers without a sound and looked depressed.

Mr. Bates did not look depressed. His smile evaporated and he looked down his nose into his moustache with an expression of ruffled propriety.

"I must say----" he began, and added, after a pause, "'Course we hadn't arrived, but I should 'ave thought, seein' we was due here, you might have counted on me."

Mr. Dainopoulos regarded Mr. Bates as though he were sizing him up for the first time and found him to amount to an almost negligible quant.i.ty.

And then he shook his head.

"No," he murmured in a m.u.f.fled tone. "That's not what I meant. What I wanted--too late now, of course--was a Kapitan."

Mr. Bates, touching Mr. Spokesly's foot with his own, emitted a sn.i.g.g.e.r right in the face of Mr. Dainopoulos.

"And what about it?" he queried, impudently. "My friend here's got a master's ticket. What's the matter with him? I'm surprised----"

He was. To Mr. Bates it was unpleasant to discover that Mr. Dainopoulos should doubt his ability to cope with any situation which involved a financial reward. That gentleman, however, was not exclusively preoccupied with Mr. Bates and his emotions. He turned immediately to Mr. Spokesly who sat quietly twisting his gla.s.s of whiskey on the marble table. The pale, prominent, and bloodshot brown eyes examined Mr.

Spokesly with pa.s.sionless attention. Mr. Dainopoulos had filled many posts in his career. Quite apart from his partic.i.p.ation in what he discreetly alluded to as "the wars," he had rendered some slight a.s.sistance to the builders of the Panama Ca.n.a.l as stoker on an excavator, he had worked in a felt-hat factory in Newark, New Jersey; he had been a waiter in a Greek cafe near Franklin Square, New York; he had held the position of clerk in the warehouse of a Turkish tobacco importer in London; and he had also been an a.s.sistant purser in one of the Roumanian Lloyd mail steamers which used to run from Costanza to Alexandria. He was one of those people who, as the saying is, "could write a book," which means they can do or have done almost everything except write a book. Such people are rarely of a literary turn. Mr.

Dainopoulos certainly was not. But he had one faculty which, if literary people only knew it, is of use even in literature. He could size a man up. By a natural turn of judgment, so necessary to success in his business as a "general merchant and exporter" coupled with ceaseless practice, he had acquired a skill in sizing up which seemed as effortless and intuitive as the driving of a fine golfer or the wrist-work of a professional billiard player. The London School of Mnemonics could teach Mr. Dainopoulos nothing about practical psychology. He might even have given them some useful hints. In the present instance he was not at a loss. He waited, however, for Mr.

Spokesly to make some comment.

"That's right enough," said the latter, leaning forward and smiling.

"But I'd have to know a little more of the game, you understand? There's a war on, you know. Can't be too careful."

"True," a.s.sented Mr. Dainopoulos reflectively and keeping his prominent eyes fixed 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 cafe, 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 _creva.s.se_ 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 pa.s.sed 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 ash.o.r.e 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 reenacted 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sed 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 m.u.f.fled 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 cafe and were being driven along the _quai_ in the direction of the White Tower, on their left the dazzle and noise of _cafes-chantant_ and cinemas, on their right the intense darkness of the Gulf, he did no more than acquiesce in what Mr. Dainopoulos was saying. For to tell the truth, Mr.

Spokesly was making certain readjustments within himself. Neither Mr.

Bates nor Mr. Dainopoulos was of vital importance to the growth of his soul, yet they come in here. They were backgrounds on which were silhouetted combinations novel to him. He had to find room in his mind for the conception of a shady person who cultivated the domestic virtues. Mr. Spokesly might be a man of inferior calibre, easily swayed by the prospect of easy money, but his mind swung naturally to the equilibriums of respectability. "All that," as he called it, "was a thing o' the past." He was tired of the shabby and meretricious byways he had frequented, in moderation, for so long. With more knowledge of introspection he would have known this as one of the signs of coming change. Coming events are very often a glorified reincarnation of dead desires. Dreams come true. Fortunate men recognize them in time.

"Your family?" said Mr. Spokesly, and the man beside him turned towards him and said:

"When I say 'family' I mean 'my wife.'"

Mr. Spokesly had no definite image in his mind of the domestic arrangements of a man like Mr. Dainopoulos. The scarlet tarboosh on that gentleman's head leaned the Englishman's fancy to a harem. In any case, the Island Race imagine that every Levantine who wears a fez is a Turk, that every Turk is a polygamist, and finally that polygamy implies a score or two of wives locked up in cupboards. But the tone in which Mr.

Dainopoulos uttered the word "wife" precluded anything of this sort. It was a tone which Mr. Spokesly immediately comprehended. It was the tone in which Englishmen refer to their most valued possession and their embodied ideals. There is no mistaking it. There is nothing like it in the world. It is a tone implying an authorized and expurgated edition of the speaker's emotional odyssey.

"And so," he went on, "you can see how I don't want to get mixed up in any of these here places." And he opened his hand towards the subdued glare of the cafes and dance halls. Mr. Spokesly saw. He saw also, in imagination, Archy Bates sitting, hand to moustache, amid the chalk-faced hetairai of Saloniki, second-rate harpies who had had their day on the Parisian _trottoirs_, and who had been shipped by a benevolent government to a.s.suage the ennui of the _Armee d'Orient_. He saw them from time to time with his physical eyes, too, as they came to the doors of their refuges and, setting off to visit confederates, flung a glance of shrewd appraisal towards the pa.s.sing vehicle.

"Yes," he muttered. "I see, Mr.--Mr.----"

"Dainopoulos," said that gentleman.

"Mr. Dainopoulos, I'm no saint, y'understand, but all the same--well, a man wants something, y'understand? Besides," added Mr. Spokesly, "'twixt you an' me an' the stern-post, I'm engaged."

"You don't tell me!" exclaimed Mr. Dainopoulos in that peculiarly gratifying fashion which seemed to imply that this was the first betrothal announced since the Fall of Constantinople. "You don't tell--and I bet you what you like she's English, eh?"

"Yes, she's English all right," said Mr. Spokesly, feeling somewhat embarra.s.sed by his friend's triumphant cordiality. "Pretty safe bet, that," he added as the carriage stopped in front of a black, solid wooden gate in a high yellow wall.

"Safe enough?" laughed Mr. Dainopoulos, not quite seizing the point intended. "Why, sure! Englishwomen are the best of all. I ought to know.

Ha-ha!" and he slapped Mr. Spokesly's knee while his other hand sought the price of the ride. Mr. Spokesly failed to appreciate this approval of Englishwomen. A suspicion shot through his mind. He looked at the dark gate in the yellow wall. What, precisely, did this man mean by that last remark? Was all this talk of family and so forth a blind? Was he, Mr. Spokesly, on the brink of an adventure? It must be confessed that he would not have objected to that; but his gorge rose in spite of him at the reference to Englishwomen.

"I don't quite understand," he remarked in a low tone. "How do you happen to know so much about 'em?"

Mr. Dainopoulos laughed again and handed the fare to the driver. He stepped out, held a bunch of keys to the light of the carriage lamp, and selected one. Then he beckoned to Mr. Spokesly to alight.