"Right. We'll go out in the new car. See you in the morning."
Mr. Dainopoulos found the trolley cars had stopped running and began to walk home past the cafés of the front. On the other side of the road the stern rails of a score of small coasting craft moved up and down gently in the slight swell, and from here and there amid the confused dunnage on deck a figure moved in sleep, or a silhouette of a man bending over a lantern showed up for a moment. At intervals strains of American jazz music came from the haunts of pleasure, and one could get a glimpse now and then of a dreary dance-floor with half a dozen soldiers and sailors slathering clumsily to and fro, embracing women that gave one the horrors merely to look at, women like half-starved harpies or cylinders of oily fat, the sweat running down through the calcareous deposits on their faces and their squat chunky feet slewed sideways in bronze and coppery shoes. Mr. Dainopoulos hurried past these abodes. Mr. Bates, Archy Bates, a great business friend of his, was somewhere inside one of them, fulfilling his destiny as a patron of Aphrodite and Dionysos; but Mr. Dainopoulos had finished business for the day and he wanted to get home. This was not to be without meeting Archy. The cat-like smile on his unfortunate features, his hat on the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets, Mr. Bates emerged from the Odéon Bar just as a carriage appeared in the distance. Mr. Bates did not conceal his gratification. Would his friend come back and have a drink?
"Not to-night," said Mr. Dainopoulos quietly. "Me, I'm going home now. Excuse me, Mister."
"Now, now!" protested Archy, clinging with the adhesiveness of the pickled philanthropist. "Now, now! Lissen. Come-a-me to White Tower. Eh? Laddie? You-n-me, eh? Li'l' fren' o' mine Whi' Tower. She gotta fren', y' know. Here y'are."
The driver, seeing a possible fare, stopped, and Archy, still adhering, dragged Mr. Dainopoulos in after him.
"Stivan," said Mr. Dainopoulos to the driver, whom he knew, "go to the White Tower and when this gentleman has got out, drive me home quick, understand? Leave him behind. And go back to him if he wants you. Now!"
The driver at once set off up the road again and Mr. Bates, who, like Shakespeare, had small Latin and less Greek, sat smiling in the darkness, trying to formulate in his mind and articulate with his tongue something that just eluded him. To meet his old fren' like this—it was a—'strornery thing how he couldn't shay just how he felt. He smiled.
Mr. Dainopoulos sat without smiling. He was not a drinking man at any time, and the professional soak was a mystery to him. Mr. Bates was as much a mystery as the major. His actions had the disconcerting lack of rational sequence that one discerns in pampered carnivora. Absent-minded sensuality is a baffling phenomenon. Mr. Dainopoulos had something of the clear sharp logic of the Latin, and the vinous benevolence of Mr. Bates aroused in him a species of alert incredulity. He sat in silence, listening to the gurgle of his companion's incoherence. This was a phase of his daily existence which he never mentioned to his wife; his dealings with the more dissipated of her countrymen. To his relief the carriage stopped at the entrance of the Tower Gardens. He took Mr. Bates's arm to assist him to alight, but Mr. Bates had forgotten the White Tower. He was trying to sing and not succeeding very well. He sat erect, his hat pushed back until the brim formed a dark halo about his smile, beating time with one hand.
"Here you are, Mister Bates," said Mr. Dainopoulos, trying to move him. Mr. Bates resisted gently, drew back his chin a little more and attacked a lower G: