He pushed open a couple of swing doors and they entered a large, barn-like room filled with tables and chairs. At the back a small stage was erected and beside it stood a piano. The flags of the Allies, wrongly drawn, and a portrait of Venizelos looking like a Presbyterian minister in shell-rim glasses, were the only decorations of the dirty walls. A number of men in uniform were lounging about, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The elderly lieutenant led the way to a table near the piano. Immediately a waiter, who looked like a New York gun-man, signalled to two women who were seated in different parts of the room, and went forward to take the order. This was for beer, and while they drank, one of the women, a fat middle-aged person without neck or ankles, after the manner of middle-aged Greek women, clambered on to the stage. The other, a girl with black spiral curls on each side of her face, curls like the springs on screen doors, and with a short skirt that showed quite abnormally thin legs, sat down at the piano and drove with an incredible lack of skill through the accompaniment of a song. It seemed to be a race between the two of them. The fat woman was already stepping down from the stage as she gabbled the final bars of her supposedly risky French song. An intoxicated ambulance driver hammered on the table with his glass and then roared with laughter. The two women came swiftly to the table and sat down by the lieutenant and Mr. Spokesly.
"This is my little friend," said the lieutenant, chucking the fat middle-aged creature under a number of chins. The sinister waiter appeared, swept away the beer-glasses, and stood poised for instant flight. The fat woman muttered something in reply to the lieutenant's request to name her poison and the waiter almost instantly produced two bottles of Greek champagne, a notable blend of bad cider and worse ginger-ale.
"Let me pay," suggested Mr. Spokesly, but his friend put up his hand, smiling.
"I always treat my little friend," he said, and patted her short, pointed fingers.
"Feefty francs," said the waiter, and his eyes glared into the lieutenant's wallet with almost insane ferocity.
Mr. Spokesly was glad he had not been permitted to pay for the two bottles with their shoddy tinfoil and lying labels. The eyes of the women never left the polished pigskin note-case while it was in sight. It was almost provocative of physical pain, the dreadful look on their faces in the presence of money. Their features were contorted to a set, silent snarl and their eyes had the black globular lustre of a rat's. The girl with the ringlets snuggled near Mr. Spokesly and began to project one of those appalling intimacies which are based on the insignificance of personality. To him, at that moment almost entirely dominated by a vivid and delicious character, the bizarre efforts of this unwashed painted gamine to assume the pose of sweetheart was almost terrifying, and he avoided her rolling eyes and predatory claws with a sense of profound shame. His elderly friend, however, was thoroughly enjoying himself. He had reached that period of life, perhaps the best of all for a seafaring man, when he is happily married and comfortably situated, and he can now give his mind to those sentimental fancies which he had to pass up earlier in life owing to economic stress. A seaman's mind is an involved affair in which thoughts and emotions and desires are stowed entirely without reference to academic order. So the old lieutenant, who had had a son killed at Mons and who truly loved his wife, and who was looking forward to loving his grandchildren, was now having a little time off from his elderly duties, and enjoying the unaccustomed pleasure of being a bit of a dog. This was his little friend, this oleaginous vampire who received a percentage of the price of the drinks ordered and all she could wheedle out of drunken customers. There is nothing incomprehensible in this. One is permitted to marvel at these modern Circes, however, who turn men into swine by transforming themselves.
"If you don't mind," said Mr. Spokesly after trying the champagne, "I think I'll have some more beer."
His friend smiled happily and pinched the cheek of his little friend who was now on his knee with a fat arm over his shoulder.
"This is something like, eh!" A young man was playing the piano noisily.
"How's things at the office?" said Mr. Spokesly.