ocent as she looked in the distance. He knew that the delicate and
precarious position of the Allies in Saloniki rendered it necessary to
wink at a good deal of adventurous trading in which the local Levantine
merchants were past-masters. It could not be helped. But he was puzzled
to account for Captain Rannie. How had he come to be in the employ of
Mr. Dainopoulos? And what was the lure which held him to a sort of
snarling fidelity? Perhaps he also had a tremendous love affair, like
Jack Harrowby. Mr. Dainopoulos had hinted at shabby intrigues. Even Mr.
Dainopoulos, however, was not quite on safe ground here. Captain Rannie
had his own way of enjoying himself, and an essential part of that
enjoyment was its secrecy. He couldn't bear anybody to know anything
about him. He was averse, in fact, to admitting that he ever did enjoy
himself. It was too much like letting his opponents score against him.
And so people like Mr. Dainopoulos, familiar with evil, imagined the
captain to be much more wicked than he ever ventured to be. The drug
whose aid he invoked made him look not only aged but sinful as a
compensation for the glimpses into the paradise of perpetual youth which
it afforded him while he was lying amid huge puffy pillows, in a house
near the Bazaar. It gave him genuine pleasure to escape every familiar
human eye, and arrive by devious ways at a secret door in a foul alley,
which gave on to the back of the house where a quiet, elderly woman and
her thirteen-year-old daughter received him and wafted him gently away
into elysium. He was a sensualist no doubt, yet it would puzzle a jury
of angels to find him more guilty than many men of more amiable repute.
When he sank into one of his torpors, the quiet woman holding his pulse,
he felt he was getting even with the wife and daughter who had made him
so unhappy in past days. Captain Rannie never did anything without what
he called "full warrant." He considered he had full warrant for killing
himself with drugs if he wished. He merely refrained out of
consideration for the world. Away back in the womb of Time, some
forgotten but eternal principle of justice had decreed to him the right
to do as he pleased, provided, always provided, he did his duty in his
public station. This is a common enough doctrine in Europe and a
difficult one to abrogate. Mr. Spokesly, driving along the _quai_ toward
the White Tower, would have been the last to deny what Captain Rannie
called "a com