"Well, of course we can't put everybody at the pier, you know," said the
young writer genially, quite forgetting that Mr. Dainopoulos had deftly
inserted an item in the _charte partie_ which gave him a generous
allowance for lighterage.
"All right," said he, as though making a decent concession. "You know
they tell me they want this stuff in a hurry, eh?"
The young writer did not know but he pretended he did, and said he would
attend to it. So they bade him good day and took their way back to the
Bureau de Change. Mr. Dainopoulos had left it in charge of a young Jew,
a youth so desperately poor and so fanatically honest that he seemed a
living caricature of all moral codes. Neither his poverty nor his
probity seemed remarkable enough to keep him in employment, doubtless
because, like millions of other people in southeastern Europe, he had
neither craft of mind nor hand. Mr. Dainopoulos got him small situations
from time to time, and in between these he hung about, running errands,
and keeping shop, a pale, dwarfed, ragged creature, with emaciated
features and brilliant pathetic eyes. He was wearing a pair of woman's
boots, much too large for him, burst at the sides and with heels
dreadfully run over, so that he kept twitching himself erect. Mr.
Dainopoulos waved a hand towards this young paragon.
"See if you can find him a job on the _Kalkis_," he said. "Very honest
young feller." They spoke rapidly to each other and Mr. Dainopoulos gave
an amused grunt.
"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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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