Tales of Adventurers (1952) SSC by Geoffrey Household

Author:Geoffrey Household [Household, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504010481
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

First Blood

SHE WAS a treaty cruiser, built for speed. Urgency was in her lines, urgency in the deep hum of the engines. Urgent were even the seemingly casual attitudes of the men in open shirts and gray flannel trousers who crowded her decks. She was jammed full as a refugee ship; yet this was no ragged cargo hysterical with relief and embarrassing the ship’s company by their gratitude and misery. The men on deck were lean well-fed army officers returning hastily to the Middle East from their canceled leave. They were not yet in uniform. War had not been declared.

Mr. Avellion sat on a locker, watching the two huge curves of Mediterranean that raced towards the horizon from the cruiser’s bows. There was no other movement on the water and no cloud but a dark patch of haze astern hanging over Marseilles. Ships, more sensitive to threat of war than of weather, were in port. The sea was an empty blue pool.

He was a civilian. In that eager warship, racing to deliver her packed human freight at Alexandria, there was a small group of businessmen, all specialists in shipping, oil and cables, or obscurer but imperial trades. None of them was important enough to command an unpurchasable air passage, but all were badly needed at their stations before Mussolini, if he meant to move, could delay their arrival.

There was peace in Avellion’s heart; quivering and uncertain, but peace. He drew a deep breath as if to float this unaccustomed ardor of well-being more securely in an expanded soul, and coughed.

He was of use; he was wanted. What was it that the Board of Trade chap had said to him? Mr. Avellion, your local knowledge will be invaluable. To ask him to leave in twenty-four hours was a bit stiff. Still, chaps like himself were important in times of war. Nobody could tell what value they mightn’t find in his little business at Suez. He was sometimes hazy about the details of what he did there, especially in the morning with always a gaggle of silly Arabs shouting at him; but objectives became beautifully clear at sundown when his boy brought in more ice and the second bottle. Whatever he might feel for the rest of the day, there were two hours every evening when his life was full of interest. The dreams of those hours had, after all, been true. Invaluable – that was what the Board of Trade chap had called him.

He became aware of a voice.

“Eh? What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Not much chance if they catch us.’”

The speaker, by profession a cable manager, was as obvious a businessman as Mr. Avellion, but his fat was more neatly distributed throughout his person. Avellion was pear-shaped, with much of his weight far to the south of his belt; he cultivated a small white military mustache, above which was a powerful nose sprouting blue-gray buds like a tree in winter; his appearance was raffish and faintly disreputable, at any rate

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