They left the car and passed through the gates of the dock, along roadways almost incredibly muddy, to where transports worked in the cautious twilight of blue electrics and picket-boats moved up and down gently where they were made fast to the steps, their red and green side-lights giving the quiet stealthy hustle of the quays an air of brisk alertness. Tall negroes, in blue-gray uniforms and red fezzes, moved in slow lines loaded with sections of narrow-gauge track and balks of timber, or pushed trucks of covered material. At a desk in a wooden office sat a French ajutant, a blinding tungsten globe illuminating the short black hairs rucked up over his stiff braided collar and reflecting from an ivory-bald spot on his head as he spoke into a telephone. Mr. Dainopoulos slid sideways into the room and sat down on a bench by the door. The officer's eye flickered towards his visitor and he lifted a hand slightly to indicate recognition. Mr. Spokesly stepped in and sat down. On the wall was a drawing cut from the Vie Parisienne, a nude, with exaggerated limbs and an enormous picture-hat, riding on a motorcycle. The shriek, as of a soul in torment, of a French locomotive, brought a scowl to the officer's face as he conversed with his friends at the Cercle Militaire. Ringing off with a fat chuckle he demanded in rapid French how his old one was making it. The old one, who was Mr. Dainopoulos, made no definite complaint, but commented on the fact that a man could not sit in Floka's and take a little drink with a friend without a certain person, with a luxuriant beard, taking especial note of it. The ajutant threw himself back in his chair, tipped it, his heels grinding the boards, and grunted. That, he mumbled, was only to be expected of Père Lefrote. Well, what was it now? Mr. Dainopoulos indicated his companion, an officer from the English ship arrived to-day, now anchored in the rade. "What ship?" muttered the officer, looking Mr. Spokesly over as though he were some unsavoury mongrel. From Alexandria, said Mr. Dainopoulos, skilfully evading such an impossible word as Tanganyika. "Ah-ha!" crowed the officer, transferring his cold regard to his old one. So the old one was on that game again. By the sacred blue, he was a great old cock. And the officer, getting up, expressed his conviction very fast that if the truth were only revealed, the old one could do a neat business in poulets de luxe as well. What? The truculent officer, halting at the door, his thumb and finger busy with his moustache, looked back over his shoulder at his old one. No, said the latter, he merely repeated what he had said so many times. He knew none of those creatures, though he admitted three had arrived on the transport Jumièges that morning. Was that so? Where were they, then? At the Omphale or the Tour Blanche? Come now! Mr. Dainopoulos lit a cigarette and as he trod carefully on the smoking match murmured his conviction that the ladies, whom a friend of his had seen land at Venizelos Steps, entered automobiles, and might not be found at the Omphale for some time. The officer drummed at the door and nodded. True, but the old one knew of some ravishing creature surely who would respond to the delicate attentions of a lonely exile. A marraine, in fact. But the old one had no such clients. He was a man of business purely. And if it could be arranged his friend here would like to be put on board.
The officer, a frustrated and disappointed sensualist, whose imagination was tantalized but never fed by the fact that he was in the fabled Orient, the abode of lovely Circassians and other houris, nodded agreement. He owed Mr. Dainopoulos a few hundred francs and would have been at a loss even if that gentleman had suddenly produced a beautiful and expensive woman for his amusement. He was ever dreaming of a tremendous affaire, but he was too close-fisted a Norman from Darnetal to spend much on a sweetheart.
"True," he remarked and then called out into the darkness. "Yes," he said, turning his head into the light, "the chaloupe is going off now. Let your friend tell the patron the ship he wants." And he returned to this desk, yawned, and took up a copy of Excelsior. What a life, eh, my old one!
Mr. Spokesly pointed out the black bulk of the Tanganyika, and as the launch slid along the grating, stepped up and reached his room. The night-watchman said, "Chief steward he no back yet." Mr. Spokesly turned in. He switched out his light and lay for a while thinking with more precision and penetration than even the London School of Mnemonics would have ventured to guarantee. He had some difficulty in identifying himself with the man who had gone ashore with Archy Bates that evening. And he slid away into the deep sleep of the healthy seafarer with a novel notion forming at the back of his mind. Suppose he was ashore in Saloniki, what would happen then? If by some turn of the wheel he found himself there? He might be sick, for instance, and go to the hospital and be left behind. There was no dream, but he saw it—a storm and great toil and anxiety, and in the midst of it a girl awaiting the outcome of his exertions with enigmatic amber eyes.
CHAPTER VI
Mr. Dainopoulos afterwards developed into an excellent diplomatist, his principal virtue being a knack of gauging personal values and extracting usefulness from apparently dry husks. He withdrew from the imaginative sensualist who sat during the night in a highly varnished pine shack brooding upon the exasperating proximity of inaccessible seraglios. A useful instrument in many schemes, he did not merit a whole evening. Like most sensualists of the grosser kind he was a bore, and Mr. Dainopoulos had other clients. He picked his way out of the incredible mire of the docks, and crossed over to the cleaner side of the road which extended from Venizelos Street past the Custom House, and which was being extensively remodelled by the army of occupation. Even as Mr. Dainopoulos crossed he could see a number of industrious beings mounted on newly erected telegraph poles, their movements illuminated by small bright lights so that they resembled a row of burning martyrs elevated by some Macedonian tyrant, their cries and contortions as they reached down into the darkness for material and tools recalling the agonies of shrivelling victims. The hotel was in blank darkness. The squirming, writhing exfoliations which constituted the Berlin architect's conception of loveliness showed not a glint of light. One could not believe that it had inhabitants, or that they were alive. Nevertheless, Mr. Dainopoulos halted before the massive double doors and rang the bell, a tall, high-shouldered shade demanding admission to a familiar vault. It was some time after he had relapsed into a motionless silence and an observer might have imagined him to have forgotten his errand, when one of the leaves of the door opened a few inches, and he raised his head. At the sound of his voice the door opened a little more so that he could slide his body sideways through the aperture. Then the door closed behind him and the hotel resumed its appearance of a monstrous Renaissance tomb.
Inside, the night-porter, a person in a slovenly undress of dirty shirt, riding-breeches open like funnels at the knee, and Turkish slippers, yawned and motioned his visitor to a chair while he slowly ascended the stairs, which were lit by a single invisible lamp on the landing. Mr. Dainopoulos remained sunk in thought. It was, in a way, a perfectly honest and rational proposition he had to make, but he found himself involved in some doubt as to the way the person above, an Englishman, would take it. He knew something of the English, being married to one of that race, and he sometimes reflected upon the unexpected workings of their minds. They were oppressively practical and drove wonderful bargains; and then suddenly they would flare into inexplicable passion over something which he for the life of him could not comprehend. If this person upstairs did that, what would it be? Mr. Dainopoulos shook his head. He could not say. He would have to take a chance. He might be tolerated, or sworn at, or laughed at, or arrested, or thrown down the stairs. All these things happened to honest merchandisers, he was well aware. He sometimes watched these English under lowered lids and marvelled. Personally he preferred German or American men. He felt nearer to them, less conscious of a certain incomprehensible reticence of soul which is peculiar to the English, a sort of polite and poignant regret that he should see fit to cumber the earth, which had happened, by a singular and unexplained destiny, to be their heritage. Association with them, under such circumstances as he encountered, was provocative of considerable thought. To men like him, the confused product of a hundred diverging stocks, from Illyrian to Copt, the phenomenon of these blond and disdainful beings, who came always in ships and were apologetic even in their invasions, bore the mark of something supernatural, since the contemplation of them in their own land filled a normal Latin with inarticulate contempt. Mr. Dainopoulos had no pride. He would have found it an embarrassing impediment in his business. But he did devote an occasional moment of leisure to wondering how men could so impose their eccentric habit of thought upon the nations, and why he, for example, should be directed to obtain his personal ideals from a distant island in the northern seas.
The servant appeared on the landing, and Mr. Dainopoulos immediately went up.
The Berlin architect, no doubt in anticipation of invading armies, had exhausted his ingenuity in the façade and the reception rooms, and the chambers above were left in a state of disturbing starkness. Mr. Dainopoulos was led along corridors that chilled the heart with their bare rectangular perspectives, and was halted at length before a door behind which the voices of men could be heard in conversation. And in reply to a knock a slightly querulous voice intoned, "Come in, come in!" as though in infinite but weary patience with elementary intelligences. Mr. Dainopoulos stepped in.