Flames Coming out of the Top Read Online Free Page A

loaded.” Dunnett tried to protest, but the thing had happened. The gun was there. It weighed down his pocket like a flat iron.
    â€œDon’t worry,” said Mr. Verking. “It can’t go off so long as the safety-catch is down.”
    The door opened and old Mr. Fryze stood there, fussy, white-haired, formal.
    â€œAh, Mr. Verking, been giving Mr. Dunnett some advice about foreign parts?” Mr. Fryze enquired, blandly. “Words of warning from an older man, Mr. Dunnett, remember.”
    The last day at the office was not at all what Dunnett had looked forward to. For some reason he suddenly felt an overpowering affection for everything around him; even Mr. Plymme, who had continued to the end to put every obstacle in the way of his going, now appeared an almost welcome and congenial figure, a piece of the cosy, familiar world that he was leaving so abruptly. And as the morning proceeded he grew more and more depressed. He just sat at his desk pretendingto work and thinking all the time of Kay. Five months was nothing really, he kept telling himself; other men had spent five years abroad, cut off from their wives and families. It was the sort of thing that was supposed to make a man. But there was no disguising that somehow the fun seemed to have gone out of it all. Overnight the whole adventure of his going had come to look different: he now saw it in the light of a bitter, if temporary, exile, as something inflicted on him by an unimaginative world that was run on a strictly cash basis for their own profit by men like Mr. Govern. If he could have slipped out of the whole affair and still have saved his face he would have done so.
    He was glad of the fact that he had something definite to do at lunch time. Mr. Verking had given him the address of the one firm of tropical outfitters who really understood how a ventilated shirt should be made, and Dunnett was going to collect his order. In the ordinary way he joined a little group of men in an A.B.C. tea-shop. It was pleasant enough to sit in the long, noisy room, where the cigarette-smoke was hot enough in winter to steam over the windows, playing dominoes on a marble slab around a litter of cups and plates and thick china sugar basins. But to-day he was relieved that he was not going. He did not feel in the least like exchanging stories with the rest of them and keeping up a cheerful, silly, banter with the waitress. He turned instead and walked in the other direction, a gloomy, discontented figure, this man whose lot was the envy of the whole office, the special representative who, in his way, was to become another of the legends in the long history of the House.
    The tropical outfitter’s was in Signet Court, by the river. A little flight of steps that no one ever used nowadays— Spaniards’ Steps they were still called—ran down beside it. For no special reason Dunnett went down the steps. The noise of traffic was blotted out step by step as he descended. And then he stood there and the river stretched out in front of him, sliding away from the stone beneath his feet. He had come quite casually without any real purpose in his mind, but nowthat he was beside it, he was surprised how completely the river answered to his mood. There it was, in the midst of the muddle and meanness of London, a great, fantastic highway, a tidal by-pass pouring right through the centre of the metropolis. Just looking at it made everything else—the high standing of Govern and Fryze, Mr. Plymme’s petty jealousies, the singular defalcations of Señor Muras and even, in a way, the broken happiness of Kay Barton—fall into place in a longer scheme of things. It was a part of another and less hastily changing world. For all its strings of barges and floating orange boxes and overhanging cranes and river police boats, that river came right out of the past, slapping and gurgling at the foot of the present where he stood. When he called in at Pettitt