Flames Coming out of the Top (2 page)

“You—er—speak Spanish, of course?” he asked in his clipped, precise way.

“I do all the Spanish correspondence here, sir,” he answered.

“Good,” said Mr. Fryze. “No use sending a man who doesn't speak the language. Can't make himself understood. …”

He checked himself and shaded his eyes with his hand. It was nonsense that he was talking and he knew that it was nonsense just as much as Mr. Govern knew that it was. But there was no help for it; he was tired, very tired.

In the drawing-room of the small flat where she and her mother lived, Kay Barton took Dunnett's news very indifferently.

“Of course,” she said, “if you
want
to go there's nothing I can say to stop you.”

“But do you want to stop me?”

“Oh no, I don't want to stop you. Why should I?”

The reception was strangely unlike what he had expected. He tried to find some way to convey, briefly and without exaggeration, the important fact that instead of being merely
anyone—the sort of person who would spend his entire life travelling backwards and forwards between Walham Green and the City, with a fortnight's holiday sometime in September,—he had suddenly become someone—the kind of man whom large firms send halfway across the world in times of trouble. But after standing for a moment in awkward silence he decided that there was no way.

“I think you're being very difficult,” he said at length.

“I
'm not being difficult,” Miss Barton replied promptly.

“I
'm not the one who wants to go to South America for six months.”

“I never said six months. I said five.”

“Well, five then. It doesn't make any difference. Here I am, I get back from the office after a heavy day and you come walking in here like this and accuse me of being difficult.” She sounded as though at any moment she might begin to cry.

“I'm sorry,” Harold Dunnett apologised. He waited, and added as a brilliant afterthought, “I only thought that perhaps you might have been a bit glad for my sake.”

“Oh, but I am. I am really,” Miss Barton assured him. “Mother will be glad too. Mother! “—she started to call her mother in before Dunnett could stop her.

Mrs. Barton came quickly and obediently. She was a small, wiry woman, with a thin, puckered mouth. Dunnett sensed that, in some protective maternal fashion, she was hostile to him.

“Harold's going out to South America,” Kay told her.

“For good?” Mrs. Barton enquired.

“No, only for five months.”

“What for?”

“The firm's sending him.”

“When's he going?” It was noteworthy that Mrs. Barton did not address any of her remarks directly to Harold Dunnett; she studiously and significantly ignored him. In her opinion her daughter was making a sad mistake in having him about the place at all. Her own husband had been a diminutive,
thin-faced clerk who had never escaped out of the wage rut, and she had hoped for something better for Kay. She could think of two or three young men straight out of her head whom she would rather have seen standing there.

“It's not settled yet,” he told her, trying to get inside her guard. “I expect I shall go in about a month.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy it,” she said. “The change'll do you good.”

Kay went over and put her arm affectionately around her mother. Dunnett looked away. He hated to see her festooning herself about the withered Mrs. Barton in this way. She only did it to be provoking, to show how loving she could be to other people. But for some reason, this time she suddenly changed her mind.

“You go along, mother,” she said. “I shall be coming in a minute.”

As soon as Mrs. Barton had gone—she left them reluctantly as though doubting whether Dunnett were really to be trusted —Kay turned towards him.

“I've been horrid,” she said.

“No you haven't,” he assured her. “Of course it's rotten being sent away like this—just now I mean.” It was the first time she had ever apologised to him and he did not quite know how to take it.

“Don't be cross with me,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. “I know I've been beastly. But it isn't very nice to come home and find that somebody you're fond of is going away for five months.”

“Are you fond of me?” he asked.

“You know I am.”

“Yes, but I don't know how much.”

“You can kiss me if you want to.” She let herself go limp in his arms.

He had never kissed her like this before. The sleek waves of her pale gold hair became ruffled and fell in little tresses over her face, and her smart organdie bow was reduced to a piece of crumpled rubbish.

“Shall we get married straightaway?” he asked stupidly, as though the miracle could happen on the spot.

“When you get back, perhaps,” she answered.

“What do you mean, ‘perhaps'?”

“Perhaps you won't want to. You may see somebody else you like better.”

“I shan't see anybody I like better,” he told her. “I want to marry you and I don't want to marry anyone else, and I never shall.”

“I shouldn't be too sure,” she said faintly. “There are lots of things that might happen.”

“Not to us, there aren't,” he said. “Not if you really love a person.”

When he got to his boarding house he went straight to his room. He had called in at the Public Library on his way back from the office and the Librarian had given him everything about South America that he had. The books lay on the flimsy table beside the bed. He kicked off his shoes and stretched himself out to read up his subject. For a start, he reached out for
The South American Handbook
. But it was Prescott's
History of the Conquest of Peru
that came to his grip. The words were strange and his eye caught something. “… the voyagers were now abreast of some of the most stupendous heights of this magnificent range,” he read; “Chimborazo, with its broad round summit, towering like the dome of the Andes, and Cotopaxi, with its dazzling cone of silvery white, that knows no change except from the action of its own volcanic fires.” With the feeling of unknown excitements just beyond his grasp he turned the page and read on. “The people of Tumbez were gathered along the shore and were gazing with unutterable astonishment on the floating castle, which, now having dropped anchor, rode lazily at its moorings in their bay. …” Somehow the
Handbook
lay neglected; outside his window, the glow of London hung like a dome in the sky and the noise of its inhabitants was a reverberation that would have muffled an explosion. But
Harold Dunnett had been transported away from all that; he was on the other side of the world now, with the Conquistadores. “On landing,” the words ran on enticingly,” Molina was surrounded by the natives, who expressed the greatest astonishment at his dress, his fair complexion and his long beard. The women especially manifested great curiosity in respect to him, and Molina seemed to be entirely won by their charms and captivating manners. … They urged him to stay among them, promising in that case to provide him with a beautiful wife.”

Dunnett lay still on his back for a moment staring at the ceiling—” … urged him to stay by promising to provide him with a beautiful wife”: he said the words over to himself slowly. Then he remembered Kay and hastily put such thoughts from his mind. He laid Prescott down on the chair beside him and opened the
Handbook
at the comparative table of Bolivian imports.

Back In the office the difference in his status was discernible already: it was impossible any longer to rank him with the clerks—even with the most senior of them, some of whom had been with Govern and Fryze since they were boys and by now looked in imminent danger of dying in it. Every time he was called into Mr. Govern's office the schism which divided him from his associates grew wider.

For the first time in his life he began taking papers home with him, packing his attaché case with the thin sheets of tropical notepaper covered with the violet ink hair-strokes and spider markings of Señor Muras's ingenious clerk. They were documents that could be appreciated to their fullest only in the isolation of a private study. An imaginative and resourceful mind had conceived them, and it required a cold and analytic intelligence for their unravelment. In the quiet of his back room in Fairfax Gardens, Dunnett discovered many things. He learned, for instance, of one case of assorted tinned fruits which the Compañia Muras had bought in at Amricante which appeared seven times on one statement. It was entered as Fruits (Various); it was shown again as Canned Goods (Fruits); it came up once more under the maker's name, Dimont's Fruits, and last of all sprang to new and astonishing life under the various species as Tinned Prunes, Tinned Apricots, Tinned Peaches, Tinned Pears. By the time it had been thus expansively inscribed its value on paper had mounted up from a mere one pound three shillings and sixpence to a substantial sum that was over nine pounds; and the miracle that a firm founded by a Scotsman in the East End of London could sell tinned fruits to savages in Eden was passed over unnoticed.

Those redundant entries worried Dunnett: admittedly no one who has worked in a counting house is ever surprised at anything that happens there, from the accidental adding in of the date to not carrying forward the total to the next page. But with Señor Muras there seemed to be more to it than simply that. That particular case of assorted tinned fruits, which apparently haunted the entire stock sheet, must have been accompanied by only one invoice; the counterpart of it had reached the London office. It was under the loving hands of some little Dago clerk working assiduously and to a purpose of his own that it had spawned and flourished. Dunnett looked forward to meeting that clerk.

And the letters of Señor Muras! They all seemed to decorate the same illusion of prosperity by emphasising the remarkable value of the stock. They hinted obscurely and with grandeur that if it were wanted, he could convert all those valuables into gold to-morrow; but he managed also to convey delicately that it would not be his idea of business to do so. And so it was that his regular quarterly payments had stopped quite suddenly, broken off with the abruptness of a rift in a love affair. There had been nothing offensive or threatening in his manner: it was simply that he no longer paid. Meanwhile Govern and Fryze had continued to pour their riches into that land of war and famine; it was only latterly that they had eased up a little, striking off from Señor Muras's indents the more expensive and lavish items. By now his stock-in-hand figure held on Govern and Fryze's account was something over eleven thousand pounds. It was unheard of in their line of business; Mr. Li, in Hong Kong, the biggest of their agencies, maintained a steady eight thousand, and Mr. Ras, who represented the firm in Burma, had double the turnover of the whole South American business and never exceeded a modest stock figure of four thousand.

To all appearances, indeed, Señor Muras was spending his time desperately importing goods from England only to hoard the stuff when it got there in his own strange store rooms in Amricante. On the face of it it seemed a fanciful and extravagant
pastime; but Dunnett wondered whether it really should be considered on its face value at all. He had his own shrewd and unrevealed suspicion that the store rooms of the Compañia Muras might be quite bare and the pockets of Señor Muras exceedingly well lined.

Mr. Govern evidently shared the suspicion. “You may find the whole thing's a swindle,” he said. “In which case, cable me before you do anything.”

“What sort of swindle?” Dunnett asked cautiously.

“Oh, just the ordinary sort,” Mr. Govern replied. “False stock accounts. You can't trust these South American audits.”

“And if it isn't that?”

“You've got to stop there till you've found out what it is. It must be something, you know: a house doesn't suddenly stop paying its bills without a reason.”

“I'll find out all right,” Dunnett answered him.

“And cable me before you do anything,” Mr. Govern repeated. “I want to know what's happening step by step. I'd rather send no one there than have things happening I haven't been consulted about.”

Mr. Govern was an active man and wanted to do everything himself. With his gift for organization he was convinced that no one else single-handed could perform even the simplest operation; and in the result no one else could.

“Go along to Mr. Verking and get him to go through the stock sheets with you and mark it down to what it ought to be,” he said. “Only don't actually post anything without showing it to me first. I want to know what you're putting down.” Mr. Govern turned away and placed his finger on the bell for his secretary: it was his way of intimating that the interview was at an end.

Mr. Verking was almost embarrassingly helpful. He derived a vicarious excitement from the trip which Dunnett was making. Like most really hard-boiled men he was extremely sentimental at heart. He looked at the young man about to embark on his first real adventure and his heart overflowed
towards him. “Beware of the tropics,” he warned him. “Once they get hold of you they won't let you go again.”

But it was in his advice on the manner of handling foreign personnel that Mr. Verking was most helpful. He was not handicapped by any neurotic weaknesses towards those races not fortunate enough to have been born English. He grouped together all those nationalities with whom he had been brought closely into contact—the Chinese, the Malays, the Argentinians—under one comprehensive and unflattering heading of unreliability, though he made a mental reservation in the case of the Chinese who were, he admitted, able to sit on the top of a stool and add up figures as well as the next man. But it had been a guiding principle with him that if any foreigner really showed himself at home with figures it is just as well to alter one's signature at the bank and change the combination on the counting house safe.