"He say he don't want to go in a ship. Scared she go down," he remarked.
The boy looked down the street with an expression of suppressed grief on his face. He rolled his eyes towards his benefactor, imploring mercy. Mr. Dainopoulos spoke to him again.
"He'll go," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "Fix him to help the cook. And if you want anybody to take a letter, he's a very honest young feller."
The very honest young feller shrank away to one side, evidently feeling no irresistible vocation for the sea. Indeed, he resembled one condemned to die. He and his kind swarm in the ports of the Levant, the Semitic parasites of sea-borne commerce, yet rarely setting foot upon a ship. He drooped, as though his limbs had liquefied and he was about to collapse. Mr. Dainopoulos, however, to whom ethnic distinctions of such refinement were of no interest, ignored him and permitted him to revel in his agony at a near-by café table.
"You come to my house to-night," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "I got one or two little things to fix."
"Me too," said his new chief officer, who suddenly felt he needed urgently to meet his own kind again. Mr. Dainopoulos was all right of course, but Mr. Spokesly still retained the illusion that Anglo-Saxon superiority was accepted by the world like gravity and the other laws of nature. It would not do to make himself too cheap, he reflected. He had an unpleasant feeling that his late captain on the _Tanganyika_ would have stared if he had seen his chief officer hobnobbing with a money-changer and a Jewish youth of almost inconceivable honesty and destitution. Mr. Spokesly's wit, however, was nimble enough now to see that Captain Meredith himself had not always been a quiet, refined, and competent commander; and moreover, Captain Meredith might quite conceivably have seen and taken a chance like this himself, had he been in the way of it. But just now what was wanted was a chat and a drink with a friend. He would go down to the hotel and find the lieutenant.
But this was not to be. As he entered the foyer of the hotel, a major and a round-faced person in civilian clothes regarded him with exaggerated attention. Their protracted examination of him made him feel somewhat self-conscious, and to ease the situation he spoke to them.