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STARING AT STONES
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255
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He
opened a door and disclosed his office, a room that like most of the
London company's was irregularly shaped, but spacious and well supplied
with windows. Venetian blinds were drawn against the bright sunlight,
and near one of these shrouded windows, drawn up close to a crack, sat
a big man crouched over a very small table. He held something between
thumb and forefinger which he was studying through a loupe, and on the
table close to his propped elbows was a rough pasteboard box of the
shape used for filing cards. Instead of cards it was filled with white
packets like unsealed envelopes. A piece of the white covering lay
unfolded on the table; this was the thick sort of paper in which
diamonds are customarily wrapped in the trade, lined with a smaller
sheet of waxed paper.
At
the sight of the stooping back Mr. Bentinck cried out in pretended
dismay, "How do you expect to see diamonds in this kind of light?"
He
stalked past the man at the table and jerked up the blind so that the
sun streamed in over the box and the hands holding the loupe. "Sitting
there in the dark!" he scolded. He turned to me and said, "Here's the
greatest expert in America. He comes here to buy our diamonds, comes
into my office for a little peace and quiet, and then he tries to pick
them out in the dark. That's how expert he is."
The
buyer looked up mildly and said, "It shows how I trust you, doesn't
it?" He spoke with an American accent superimposed on another accent,
probably from somewhere in Central Europe. "I trust him, all right," he
added to me, and said to Mr. Bentinck, "I can't make up my mind about
this one. Nice size but the color's against it." He was handling an
enormous crystal so regular in shape that it could have been a model
for a
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