The Pilot glanced back; his face wearing a look of amusement, as though he thought the clerk’s effusiveness was too good to be true. Then he nodded, gave a little chuckle, and walked out through the swinging, glass doors.
The Jew watched the bulky sailor as he moved slowly, like a ship leaving port in heavy weather, with many a lurch and much tacking against an adverse wind. By the expression on the Semitic face you might have thought that Isaac Zahn was beholding some new and interesting object of natural history, instead of a ponderous and grumpy old sailor, who seemed to doubt somewhat the bona fides of the Kangaroo Bank. But the truth was that the young man was dazzled by the personality of one who might command such wealth; it had suddenly dawned on his calculating mind that a large sum of money was standing in the name of Rose Summerhayes; he realised with the clearness of a revelation that there were other fish than Rachel Varnhagen in the sea of matrimony.
The witching hour of lunch was near at hand. Isaac glanced at the clock, the hands of which pointed to five minutes to twelve. As soon as the clock above the Post Office sounded the hour, he left the counter, which was immediately occupied by another clerk, and going to a little room in the rear of the big building, he titivated his person before a small looking-glass that hung on the wall, and then, putting on his immaculate hat, he turned his back upon the cares of business for one hour.
His steps led him not in the direction of his victuals, but towards the warehouse of Joseph Varnhagen. There was no hurry in his gait; he sauntered down the street, his eyes observing everything, and with a look of patronising good humour on his dark face, as though he would say, “Really, you people are most amusing. Your style’s awful, but I put up with it because you know no better.”
He reached the door of Varnhagen’s store in precisely the same frame of mind. The grimy, match-lined walls of the merchant’s untidy office, the litter of odds and ends upon the floor, the antiquated safe which stood in one corner, all aroused his pity and contempt.
The old Jew came waddling from the back of the store, his body ovoid, his bald head perspiring with the exertion he had put himself to in moving a chest of tea.
“Well, my noble, vat you want to-day?” he asked, as he waddled to his office-table, and placed upon it a packet of tea, intended for a sample.
“I just looked round to see how you were bobbing up.”
“Bobbin’ up, vas it? I don’t bob up much better for seein’ you. Good cracious! I vas almost dead, with Packett ill with fever or sometings from that ship outside, and me doin’ all his vork and mine as well. Don’t stand round in my vay, ven you see I’m pizzy!” Young Isaac leisurely took a seat by the safe, lighted a cigarette, and looked on amusedly at the merchant’s flurry.
“You try to do too much,” he said. “You’re too anxious to save wages. What you want is a partner to keep your books, a young man with energy who will look after your interests—and his own. You’re just wearing yourself to skin and bone; soon you’ll go into a decline, and drop off the hooks.”