“Hullo, Aggett! Come in.”
Aggett smiled, exposing the gaps in his teeth, and entered awkwardly. He was an Engineer-Lieutenant of the older, rougher school. Round his neck, instead of a collar, he wore a white scarf that was not clean. The creases in his fingers and the thick cuticles which grew high on his nails were stained with oil and dirt. But that scarred forehead and those strange eyes which had the extraordinary opaque appearance of great age—almost as if they had done service once before to some other being now dead—proclaimed their owner’s intelligence. A flabby vicious little man, but no fool, this Aggett appeared. And, to one who cared to seek further, to contrast the darting movements of his hands with the cumbrousness of his feet, or to remark how strong and decided a voice proceeded from that poor body, Aggett seemed more than intelligent. He possessed force and wariness, a rare power to stake all at need, combined with a distrust of his fellows, which was valuable because it was discriminating. He was a man whom it was impossible to imagine as a child. No lasting affection of wife or mother could be easily thought of as connected with him. He could have no home, no ties. He passed, surely, from ship to hotel, from hotel to ship, making hundreds of acquaintances but not a friend, despising and using all he met, never introspective or lonely, sufficient unto himself.
He threw over the cabin a quick glance of disapproval. It irritated him that anyone should take trouble to decorate his habitation; and he was the more irritated in this instance because Hartington’s taste, unlike that of many officers who tried to make their cabins “tiddley,” could not be easily scorned as effeminate. The few photographs, in the simplest of wooden or silver frames; the books, with their appearance of dignity and quietness; the pictures—here a Medici reproduction of a Dürer drawing, there a water-colour landscape of the hills about Fiesole—were such as no woman was likely to have chosen. Aggett wanted to say what he said usually to officers whose walls were not so bare as his own, “This place is like a whore’s boudoir;” but his sense of the appropriate overcame him, and he said:
“Well, Hartington-me-lad, sittin’ in your country residence, eh? Let’s ring for the family butler.”
“Which means you want a cocktail? Put your head out and ask one of the snotties in the casemate to send for Ah Foo.”
Aggett did as he was bid, sat down on the edge of a chair, and took a cigarette from a paper packet concealed in his breast-pocket.
“Ordith wants you to come in to supper to-night in the Wardroom. Can do?”
“Yes. I shall have to leave you early, though. I’ve got the Middle. I shall want some sleep first.”
“Right.... Ordith asked me to come with the invite. He’s workin’—always workin’.”