Mr. Spokesly had no clear intention of deserting
his chum Archy, he was beginning to wish that Archy were not
indispensable in any scheme that might be proposed. And the occasional
looks that various British and French officers cast in their direction
made Mr. Spokesly uneasy. He suddenly realized the other aspect of
making money in a shady fashion: that one has to do business with shady
people. Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, looked extremely shady. Archy
Bates, his long, sharp nose buried in a fresh whiskey and soda, his hat
pushed back revealing the oiled graying hair parted in the middle and
slicked back above his ears with their purple veins; Archy, picking
dreamily among the pieces of fish and beetroot which had been served on
little dishes with the drinks, looked extraordinarily like a rat picking
at garbage. All very well, Mr. Spokesly reflected, to buy hashish and
sell it in Egypt at four or five hundred per cent. profit, so long as
the business could be transacted in a gentlemanly manner. But this new
development--he did not see his way clear to accepting Mr. Dainopoulos
as an employer. He was not fastidious--he had worked for a Chinese ship
owner--but the officers at the other tables, in their inconceivably
correct uniforms and polished harness, made him uneasy. Mr. Spokesly
knew perfectly well that these people did not consider him as one of
themselves. Even amid the noise and chaffering of a Saloniki cafe,
rubbing shoulders with the uniforms of French, Greek, Serbian, Russian,
and Italian officers, these men of his own race, he knew, never forgot
the abyss that separates the seafaring man from themselves, the social
_crevasse_ which even Armageddon was powerless to abolish. Nevertheless,
he felt he could never abandon for ever the possibility of entering,
some day, the magic circle. It is this peculiarity of the English
temperament which so often paralyses its victim at the very moment when
he needs to be in possession of all his faculties, when the chance,
perhaps of a lifetime, suddenly appears at his elbow.

But Mr. Dainopoulos, as has been said, could size a man up. He was
intuitively aware that he had made no great impression upon Mr.
Spokesly. And he had a special desire, now that chance had thrown them
together, to engage the interest of a skilled navigator. He had received
an offer which might result in a very large profit indeed. The business
to which he had been referring, a mere matter of running a