“On top of everything else, we’re now in the funeral-undertaking business. Life, First, can hold no more.”
“You are accepting this — ah — cargo, sir?”
“But of course, but of course,” the little man interrupted again.
“One of them is a cousin of senor Carreras, who sails with you. Senor Miguel Carreras. Senor Carreras, he is what you say, heartbroken. Senor Carreras is the most important man”
“Be quiet,” Captain Bullen said wearily. He made a gesture with the papers. “Yes, I’m accepting. Note from the ambassador. More pressure. I’ve had enough of cables flying across the Atlantic. Too much grief. Just an old beaten man, First, just an old beaten man.” He stood there for a moment, hands outspread on the guardrail, doing his best to look like an old beaten man and making a singularly unsuccessful job of it, then straightened abruptly as a procession of vehicles turned in through the dock gates and made for the Campari. “A pound to a penny, Mister, here comes still more grief.”
“Praise be to God,” the little agent murmured. The tone, no less than the words, was a prayer of thanksgiving. “Senor Carreras himself! Your passengers at last, captain.”
“That’s what I said,” Bullen growled. “More grief.” The little man looked at him in puzzlement, as well as might anyone who didn’t understand Bullen’s attitude towards the passengers, then turned and hurried off towards the gangway. My attention was diverted for a few moments by another crate swinging aboard, then I heard Captain Bullen saying softly and feelingly, “Like I said, Mister, more grief.”
The procession, two big, chauffeur-driven pre-war Packards, one towed by a jeep, had just pulled up by the gangway and the passengers were climbing out. Those who could, that was — or very obviously there was one who could not. One of the chauffeurs, dressed in green tropical drills and a bush hat, had opened the boot of his car, pulled out a collapsible hand-propelled wheel chair, and, with the smooth efficiency of experience, had it assembled in ten seconds flat, while the other chauffeur, with the aid of a tall, thin nurse clad in over-all white from her smartly starched cap to the skirt that reached close down to her ankles, tenderly lifted a bent old man from the back seat of the second Packard and set him gently in the wheel chair. The old boy — even at that distance I could see the face creased and trenched with the lines of age, the snowy whiteness of the still plentiful hair did his best to help them, but his best wasn’t very much.
Captain Bullen looked at me. I looked at Captain Bullen. There didn’t seem to be any reason to say anything. Nobody in a crew likes having permanent invalids aboard ship: they cause trouble to the ship’s doctor who has to look after their health, to the cabin stewards who have to clean their quarters, to the dining-room stewards who have to feed them, and to those members of the deck crew detailed for the duty of moving them around. And when the invalids are elderly and very infirm and if this one wasn’t — I sadly missed my guess — there was always the chance of a death at sea, the one thing sailors hate above all else. It was also very bad for the passenger trade. But as long as the illness was of neither a contagious nor infectious nature and that a certificate could be produced from the invalid’s own doctor to the effect that the invalid was fit for the proposed voyage, there was nothing that could be done about it.
“Well,” Captain Bullen said heavily, “I suppose I’d better go and welcome our latest guests aboard. Finish it off as quickly as possible, Mister.”
“I’ll do that, sir.” Bullen nodded and left. I watched the two chauffeurs slide a couple of poles under the seat of the invalid chair, straighten and carry the chair easily up the sparred foot planks of the gangway. They were followed by the tall angular nurse and she in turn by another nurse, dressed exactly like the First, but shorter and stockier. The old boy was bringing his own medical corps along with him, which meant that he had more money than was good for him or was a hypochondriac or very far through indeed or a combination of any or all of those; on the credit side was the fact that both had that indefinable competent no-nonsense look of the professional nurse which would make the lot of our ship’s surgeon, old Dr. Marston, who sometimes had to work a whole hour in one day, all that much easier. But I was more interested in the last two people to climb out of the Packards. The First was a man of about my own age and size, but the resemblance stopped there. He looked like a cross between Ramon Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, only handsomer. Tall, broad-shouldered, with deeply tanned, perfectly sculpted Latin features, he had the classical long, thin moustache, strong, even teeth with that in-built neon phosphorescence that seems to shine in any light from high noon till dark, and a darkly gleaming froth of tight black curls on his head; he would have been a lost man if you’d let him loose on the campus of any girls’ university.
For all that, he looked as far from being a sissy as any man I’d ever met: he had the strong chin, the balanced carriage, the light, springy boxer’s step of a man well aware that he can get through this world without any help from a nursemaid. If nothing else, I thought sourly, he would at least take Miss Beresford out of my hair. The other man was a slightly smaller edition of the First, same features, same teeth, same moustache and hair, only those were greying. He would be about fifty-five. He had about him that indefinable look of authority and assurance which can come from power, money, or a carefully cultivated phoneyness. This, I guessed, would be the Senor Miguel Carreras who inspired such fear in our local Carracio agent. I wondered why.
Ten minutes later the last of our cargo was aboard and all that remained were the three boxed coffins on the back of the old truck. I was watching the bo’sun readying a sling round the first of those when a well-detested voice said behind me: “This is Mr. Carreras, sir. Captain Bullen sent me.”
I turned round and gave Fourth Officer Dexter the look I specially reserved for Fourth Officer Dexter. Dexter was the exception to the rule that the Fleet Commodore always got the best available in the company as far as officers and men were concerned, but that was hardly the old man’s fault: there were some men that even a fleet commodore has to accept and Dexter was one of them. A personable enough youngster of twenty-one, with fair hair, slightly prominent blue eyes, an excruciatingly genuine public-school accent, and limited intelligence, Dexter was the son — and, unfortunately, heir of Lord Dexter, Chairman and Managing Director of the Blue Mail. Lord Dexter, who had inherited about ten millions at the age of fifteen and, understandably enough, had never looked back, had the quaint idea that his own son should start from the bottom up and had sent him to sea as a cadet some five years previously. Dexter took a poor view of this arrangement: every man in the ship, from Bullen downwards, took a poor view both of the arrangement and Dexter, but there was nothing we could do about it.
“How do you do, sir?” I accepted Carreras’ outstretched hand and took a good look at him. The steady dark eyes, the courteous smile couldn’t obscure the fact that there were many more lines about his eyes and mouth at two feet than at fifty; but it also couldn’t obscure the compensatory fact that the air of authority and command was now redoubled in force, and I put out of my mind any idea that this air originated in phoneyness; it was the genuine article, and that was that.
“Mr. Carter? My pleasure.” The hand was firm, the bow more than a perfunctory nod, the cultured English the product of some stateside Ivy League college. “I have some interest in the cargo being loaded, and if you would permit…” “But certainly, Senor Carreras.” Carter, that rough-hewn Anglo-Saxon diamond, not to be outdone in Latin courtesy. I waved towards the hatch. “If you would be so kind as to keep to the starboard — the right hand of the hatch.”