"What is a good man?" Moropulos demanded contemptuously. "He is a lover of ladies, who isn't? He is a cur too. Steppe walks on him. He is scared of Steppe but then everybody is, except you and I." Ambrose smiled.
"Well, perhaps I am—he is such a gorilla. But you are not."
"Why should I be? I am stronger than he."
Moropulos looked at the man's bare arms. "Yes—I suppose it comes down to that. The basis of all fear, is physical. When will the safe be finished?"
"In a week. I am assembling the lock at home. I shall make it work to five letters. The only word I can spell. I shouldn't have known that, but I heard a man spell it once—on the ship that brought me home. He was a steerage passenger and he used to take his little child on the deck when it was fine, and the little one used to read Scripture stories to him. When she came to a hard word, he spelled it. I heard one word and never forgot it."
"I'll be glad when the thing is finished," the Greek meditated. "We have a whole lot of papers that we never want to see the light of day, Steppe and I. We could destroy them, but they may be useful, correspondence that it isn't safe to keep and it isn't wise to burn. You are an ingenious devil!"
In the Paddington directory, against "Moropulos, 49 Junction Terrace," were the words, "mining engineer." It was a courtesy status, for he had neither mined nor engineered. Probably the people of Junction Terrace were too occupied with their own strenuous affairs to read the directory. They knew him as one who at irregular periods was brought home in the middle of the night singing noisily in a strange language. Cicero's oration was Greek to Cassius; the melodious gibberish of Mr. Moropulos was Greek to Junction Terrace, though they were not aware of the fact. No. 49 was a gaunt, damp house with a mottled face, for the stucco had peeled in patches and had never been renewed. Moropulos bought it at a bargain price and made no contingency allowance for delapidations. The windows of the upper floors were dingy and unwashed. The owner argued that as he did not occupy the rooms above, it would be wicked waste of money to clean the windows. Similarly he dispensed with carpets in the hall and on the stairs.
His week-ends he spent in more pleasing surroundings, for he had a cottage on the borders of Hampshire where he kept hens and grew cabbage-roses and on Sundays loafed in his garden, generally in his pajamas, to the scandal of the neighborhood. He had a whimsical turn of mind and named his cottage, "The Parthenon", and supported this conceit by decorating his arcadian groves with plaster reproductions of the great figures of mythology, such figures as Phidias and Polycletus and Praxiteles chiselled. He added to this a wooden pronaos which the local builder misguidedly surmised was intended for the entrance to a new cinema. When they discovered that the erection had no other purpose than to remind Moropulos of departed Hellenic splendors, the grief of the villagers was pathetic.
Here he was kept, reluctantly, tidy. He owned a small American car which supplied him the transportation he required, and made his country home accessible. It was Friday, the day he usually left town, but he had lingered on, hoping to see some tangible progress in the construction of the safe.
"You never seem to get any further," he complained. "You have been fiddling with that noisy lamp for two hours, and, so far as I can see, you've done nothing. How long will it be before anything happens?" and then before Sault could reply he went on: "Why don't you come to my little Athens, Sault? You prefer to stay in town. And you are a man of brains! Have you a girl here, eh?"