Flames Coming out of the Top (3 page)

“Don't spare 'em,” he advised. “Go slap in and see everything. If you give 'em time to clear up you won't learn a thing. Walk straight in and lock the door on them. Don't let them out again till you're satisfied.”

“I see,” said Harold Dunnett dubiously.

“Bully 'em.” Mr. Verking insisted. “That's what it comes to. It's their country and you mustn't let 'em remember it. The only thing they understand is strength. They'd put a knife in your back as soon as look at you if they thought they could get away with it.”

Dunnett smiled faintly. It was obvious that Mr. Verking was letting his memory and imagination run away with him. He was forgetting that things had changed even in the far away corners of the earth since young Mr. Reginald Verking, in a very new suit of white ducks, had stepped off the P. & O. mail-boat at Hong Kong some time back in the 'nineties.

But Mr. Verking took a cynical view of progress. “You can laugh,” he said ominously. “But I've met these gentry. They're nothing more that a lot of bloodthirsty animals, the whole crowd of 'em. Look at their Presidents—just one big assassin ruling over a lot of little ones.”

“I'll watch my step,” Dunnett told him.

Mr. Verking nodded. “That's the spirit,” he said. “You watch your step and you'll be all right. Don't let 'em come up behind you. They're nothing but a lot of human sharks.” He crossed over and stood beside Dunnett. “They've got their funny little ways,” he added. “Did I ever show you that?” He broke off and began rolling up his sleeve. Dunnett looked in surprise at the arm which Mr. Verking was holding out before him: it was tattooed all over. A woman and a snake entwined in a mazy pattern of purple filigree.

“It's … it's very clever,” Dunnett remarked.

“Not that,” Mr. Verking replied. “
That”
he pointed to a broad white weal that ran through the centre of the design, cutting off one of the lady's legs from the rest of her body. “Do you know how I got that?”

Dunnett shook his head.

“Debt collecting,” Mr. Verking answered. “A Malay did it. Came out with his knife while I was still fumbling with the receipt book.”

“Well, you survived it, at any rate,” Harold Dunnett reminded him.

The remark seemed to rouse Mr. Verking. “Would you like to know how?” he asked sharply.

Dunnett told him he would.

“I'll show you.” Mr. Verking walked over to his desk and unlocked the bottom drawer. There was something heavy inside wrapped in a wash-leather duster. He laid it on the writing-pad and undid it carefully. It was a large Colt revolver. “That's how,” he said triumphantly. “That's something that all of 'em understand.”

“I … I see,” Dunnett repeated doubtfully.

“Come to think of it, you'd better take it with you,” Mr. Verking went on. “You never know when you may want it.”

“But I shouldn't know how to use it,” Harold Dunnett replied.

“You'd find out soon enough if you had to,” Mr. Verking
assured him. “It's a sort of second sense in an emergency.” He picked it up and handed it to Harold by the butt.

Dunnett stepped back a pace. “No really, thank you,” he said. “This isn't my line at all.”

Mr. Verking seemed hurt. “You needn't turn up your nose at it,” he said. “They make 'em smaller nowadays, but they don't make 'em any better. You could knock a horse over with this one.”

Dunnet started to excuse himself, but Mr. Verking was clearly in no mood for listening to him. “You're a fool if you don't,” he said. “If more men went about armed there wouldn't be so many murders.”

“But I haven't got a licence,” Harold Dunnett reminded him.

“Soon see about that,” Mr. Verking began, but stopped himself. The door up the corridor opened and there was the sound of someone's coming. Mr. Verking took two quick paces forward and thrust the gun into Dunnett's pocket. “Careful,” he said, “it's loaded.” Dunnett tried to protest, but the thing had happened. The gun was there. It weighed down his pocket like a flat iron.

“Don't worry,” said Mr. Verking. “It can't go off so long as the safety-catch is down.”

The door opened and old Mr. Fryze stood there, fussy, white-haired, formal.

“Ah, Mr. Verking, been giving Mr. Dunnett some advice about foreign parts?” Mr. Fryze enquired, blandly. “Words of warning from an older man, Mr. Dunnett, remember.”

The last day at the office was not at all what Dunnett had looked forward to. For some reason he suddenly felt an overpowering affection for everything around him; even Mr. Plymme, who had continued to the end to put every obstacle in the way of his going, now appeared an almost welcome and congenial figure, a piece of the cosy, familiar world that he was leaving so abruptly. And as the morning proceeded he grew more and more depressed. He just sat at his desk pretending
to work and thinking all the time of Kay. Five months was nothing really, he kept telling himself; other men had spent five years abroad, cut off from their wives and families. It was the sort of thing that was supposed to make a man. But there was no disguising that somehow the fun seemed to have gone out of it all. Overnight the whole adventure of his going had come to look different: he now saw it in the light of a bitter, if temporary, exile, as something inflicted on him by an unimaginative world that was run on a strictly cash basis for their own profit by men like Mr. Govern. If he could have slipped out of the whole affair and still have saved his face he would have done so.

He was glad of the fact that he had something definite to do at lunch time. Mr. Verking had given him the address of the one firm of tropical outfitters who really understood how a ventilated shirt should be made, and Dunnett was going to collect his order. In the ordinary way he joined a little group of men in an A.B.C. tea-shop. It was pleasant enough to sit in the long, noisy room, where the cigarette-smoke was hot enough in winter to steam over the windows, playing dominoes on a marble slab around a litter of cups and plates and thick china sugar basins. But to-day he was relieved that he was not going. He did not feel in the least like exchanging stories with the rest of them and keeping up a cheerful, silly, banter with the waitress. He turned instead and walked in the other direction, a gloomy, discontented figure, this man whose lot was the envy of the whole office, the special representative who, in his way, was to become another of the legends in the long history of the House.

The tropical outfitter's was in Signet Court, by the river. A little flight of steps that no one ever used nowadays— Spaniards' Steps they were still called—ran down beside it. For no special reason Dunnett went down the steps. The noise of traffic was blotted out step by step as he descended. And then he stood there and the river stretched out in front of him, sliding away from the stone beneath his feet. He had come quite casually without any real purpose in his mind, but now
that he was beside it, he was surprised how completely the river answered to his mood. There it was, in the midst of the muddle and meanness of London, a great, fantastic highway, a tidal by-pass pouring right through the centre of the metropolis. Just looking at it made everything else—the high standing of Govern and Fryze, Mr. Plymme's petty jealousies, the singular defalcations of Señor Muras and even, in a way, the broken happiness of Kay Barton—fall into place in a longer scheme of things. It was a part of another and less hastily changing world. For all its strings of barges and floating orange boxes and overhanging cranes and river police boats, that river came right out of the past, slapping and gurgling at the foot of the present where he stood. When he called in at Pettitt and Nash's ten minutes later to pick up his parcel of shirts, with the neat array of little eylet holes under the arms and the stand-away sweat-proof collars, he was a normal and collected man again.

The afternoon was naturally a busy one, far too busy for any misgivings or regrets. Mr. Govern emerged at ten-minute intervals from the glass-domed inner room, his office coat rucked across his shoulders, to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. “I don't want to find that anything's been left in the air when I get in on Monday,” he kept saying. “Go over everything just as though you weren't ever coming back again.” All the same, it was Mr. Govern who glanced at his watch shortly after five and told Dunnett that if there were any private matters that he wanted to attend to he might as well get along now. And so the handshaking began.

Mr. Fryze was very dignified about it. He left the fireplace, in front of which he was accustomed to stand, and came half-way towards the door. At that point he stopped and Dunnett wondered if that were to be all. But just at that moment a pale, bony hand came out from the starched shirt cuff and offered itself to be shaken. Harold took it with some misgivings : it was an old, withered hand, cold and lifeless. And there was a ceremonial flavour to it all: he made it evident that he did not go around offering his hand to everyone.

With Mr. Govern it was different, it was the firm hand-shake that exists between men of the world. He handed over the advance expenses, £50 in sterling and £50 in bolivianos, and came over to the door and almost out into the corridor to say good-bye. His last words, “Good luck, and remember to cable before you actually do anything,” were to recur to Harold Dunnett with varying emphasis and significance many times during the coming months.

He said good-bye to the others in turn. Mr. Plymme was perfunctory and unenthusiastic: he drew his hand away as soon as he had given it. Mr. Verking kept clapping him heavily on the back and reminding him of their last conversation together; he did not actually refer to the revolver, but he made it quite clear where, in his opinion, safety lay. And Mr. Frampton was almost overcome. He regarded it as an honour for the whole department that Mr. Dunnett should have been chosen; in a way it was a tribute to his training. He clasped Harold's hand several times very firmly as though he were saying good-bye to a favourite son, and appeared almost ready to break down over it all. Dunnett was surprised and rather embarrassed to find there was so much human feeling in an office.

At ten minutes to six he went down the front steps for the last time; it would be nearly half a year before he would feel their worn, familiar tread under his feet again. Even the porter knew where he was going and called out something after him. Dunnett felt sorry for the men he was leaving: they were all so securely trapped. A fortnight ago he had been one of them, a dreary shiny-trousered clerk. And now the
Isabella Flores
was waiting down the river—his river—to carry him off to the New World and promotion.

He was the one man among them with a future.

When he left the office he hadn't really thought about buying Kay a present; most of all a ring. The impulse had come quite suddenly and he had surrendered to it. He was passing a jeweller's, and with a happy, reckless feeling he had
gone inside. But he had been awkward and self-conscious about it, as though the whole shop had been looking at him. “I want a ring,” he had said, lamely. “Something for a girl.”

It was a single sapphire that he bought, a little tablet of blue that glittered with a convincing and fashionable fury. Now that it was his and he could feel the small, hard package in his pocket, he felt very excited. It was the most extravagant thing he had ever done. And there was something symbolic and beautiful about it. It was as though by giving Kay this shining talisman he could keep her his for ever. The jeweller had been very polite about it: the stone, he said, would fetch its own price any day.

He was quite out of breath when he reached the Bartons'. They were all ready for him. Kay had changed her dress into something that he had never seen before, and Mrs. Barton had put on something black. He often wondered how many dresses Kay really had, and speculated anxiously as to whether he would be able to afford that number when she was married to him. Like so many other girls earning two pounds ten a week, she appeared, under the influence of love, to spend several hundreds a year on clothes.

Mrs. Barton was really quite cordial now that he was going. She shook hands with him as though he were an ordinary human being and not an intruder who was planning to run away with her daughter, and then had the decency to leave them alone together.

“I've got you a little present …” Dunnett began.

“Show me.”

He removed the tiny box and handed it to her.

“How heavenly,” she exclaimed. “What is it?”

“It's nothing really,” he said. “It's … it's something that I picked up before I came along here.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed. “How lovely! It's heavenly!” She held the ring out in front of her and turned it backwards and forwards so that it caught the light.

“Won't you wear it?” he asked at length.

She put it cautiously on her middle finger and looked at it. But he saw that she had suddenly grown very serious.

“Don't … don't you like it?” he asked.

“Oh, it's not that,” she answered at once. “I think it's lovely. I do really.”

“Then what's the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter.”

“But you've come over all quiet.”

“Don't you know that it's terribly unlucky to give a girl a ring when you're not engaged to her?”

“Then why not be engaged—secretly?” he asked.

Her face lit up. “Shall we?” she said. “And not tell anyone?”

He put his arms around her and kissed her. “I love you,” he said.

She closed her eyes and held her face up towards him. “I shouldn't know what to do if I hadn't got you,” she said almost in a whisper. “I never knew I could love anybody like this.”

“You think that you could wait for me until I get back?”

“Oh, my darling, I could wait for ever. If anything happened to you I should go on waiting always.”