Flames Coming out of the Top Read Free Page A

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.

Chapter II
    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.