The Little Lady of the Big House. Джек Лондон

met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He had dinner with us.”

      “Oh, one of those naval officers?”

      Dick shook his head.

      “The civilian. Don’t you remember that big blond fellow – you talked music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with the mailed fist.”

      “Oh, to be sure,” Paula vaguely recollected. “He’d met you somewhere before… South Africa, wasn’t it? Or the Philippines?”

      “That’s the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on the Times dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Café Venus.

      “Heavens – he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka – I was sailing the Wild Duck then. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Café Venus two years ago.”

      “But who about him, and what about him?” Paula queried. “And what’s the book?”