"What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids,And a nice little home of your own?
"What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids,And a nice little home of your own?
"That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly blow."
"Well, go on," said somebody.
"You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing existed—for them—outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline had been brought up to be refined, reserved, 'not like other girls.' She silently and unconsciously laid down a narrow-gauge line along which she and Jack were to advance through life, and Jack, who was one of those men who are very much what their wives make them, was only too glad to get his orders. And he, with the intuition of despair, knowing her to be besotted with pride in their child almost beyond endurance, gobbled hoarsely in my ear in the night watches that if one died the other would follow, and leave him desolate.
"Well, the child didn't die. I have sometimes wondered whether it was anything more than a sore throat. It doesn't matter. When we came home, Angelina was on the mend, and the cable companies must have noticed a falling off in their receipts. I was relieved. I mean in mind. Jack tore off home for a night to see for himself. He told me afterward 'he nearly cracked Madeline's ribs,' he was so glad to see her. Mind, he'd only been away six weeks! Think of it, in the light of the recent years. Not that I believed him. Women like Mrs. Evans don't get their ribs cracked. No matter. My relief was speedily changed to grave apprehension when he came back to the ship accompanied by wife, child, and a nurse, and announced that he had obtained permission to take them a voyage. It was one of the unusual points of old Gannet's employ—he allowed each skipper and chief to take their wives one voyage per year. I had been through it before, and disliked the prospect. I have sometimes wondered whether old Gannet had a secret and sinister intention, for it is a fact that you can't honestly say you know a woman until you have been to sea with her. No woman looks her best, either physically or mentally, at sea. Oh, of course if you are married to her as well, the case is different. I offer no opinion. But I know of one young man at least who broke it off after enduring a voyage with a hen-pecked captain.
"I misjudged Jack, however. Jack was his wife's slave, but he remained in command of his ship. You see he also had been at sea with skippers' wives in the past. 'One word, Madeline, and home you go,' came up the ventilator as I was sitting on the bridge after tea. I was astounded. It was a new Jack, or rather, the old fiery, original Jack. The next sentence, in reply to some inaudible remark of Madeline's, explained what I had thought was a quarrel. 'Well, we must have an understanding before we sail. I know what I'm talking about, dear. I've been Mate many a year and I never would stand the Skipper's missus interfering with the ship's discipline.'
"I was admiring Jack for this sagacious warning when there came a squawl from his bathroom, where the nurse-girl was washing Angelina. Mrs. Evans rustled across, crying out instructions concerning Babs, as they called the youngster. And then came Jack's voice exploding in amazement. 'What'sthat gel's name, Madeline?What'dyou call her?' And a voice as clear, as soft and as pure as a silver bell answered:
"'Artemisia Macedoine, Captain. That's my name.'"
And though things do happen like that sometimes, as I sat in my chair, quite innocently alongside the Captain's ventilator, and sucked at my cigar, I was taken aback. It was like a voice coming up from the tomb—the tomb of a buried past. In a way it was a relief, for I was becoming so involved in Jack's domestic life that I was losing touch with the outside world altogether. The sound of that name recalled to me my old, unregenerate, wandering self. I had not forgotten him. One never forgets a master of illusion, such as he surely was. But the very existence of so imaginative a man seemed doubtful in the company of matter-of-fact, open-minded, good old honest Jack. Jack's lack of the power of dissembling and allusion was devastating. He had no morenuance, as the French say, than a fog-horn. Think of a man who could say to the wife of his bosom, the goddess before whom he worshipped with preposterous self-abasement—'One word, and home you go!' Jack would have had one word for Macedoine and one only—Faker. But I have found, in the course of my rolling existence, that fakers are often more interesting, intrinsically, than careful, honest men.
"And I had heard, in a round-about way, some years before, that Captain Macedoine had not only been an illustrious faker but a fairly competent swindler as well. We were discharging machinery and stores at Cristobal, when a young chap who'd been Junior Fourth in the old Maracaibo Line came aboard and had a chat. He was one of those who hadn't gone home. Indeed, he was able to take out his final papers—never mind how—as soon as he was paid off, and being a decent young chap, fairly clever and a good mixer, he had soon gotten a billet in the Canal Zone. For some reason or other he had liked me when we were shipmates. I remembered him as having no aptitude for the sea. He had a sweet-heart in England he was always talking about, but he married in the States, of course. Well, young Cotter, with his little waxed moustache and his superior bank clerk's manner, walked aboard, shook me warmly by the hand, and gave me an immense quantity of miscellaneous news. What with the Yucatan ships calling three or four times a week, Cotter was up to date with everything happening from Galveston to Biloxi and from Tampa to Boston. Did I remember So-and-so—chap with a squint, or a mole, or a broken finger, as the case might be. Cotter always emphasized a man's physical defects in alluding to him. And so the talk came round to 'Oh, did I remember that chap with the solemn face and the big stomach? Captain Macedoine we used to call him? Why, didn't you hear? Extradition order. Yes! The cunning old guy had a dozen opium dives off Rampart Street in full swing. Must have been coining money. No, they never got him. He had left England by that time. Nobody knows where he is now, I suppose. Smart, eh?' Such was Captain Macedoine to me as I sat listening to the good Jack sputtering in his cabin:
"'Great Christopher! And who in thunder gave you a name like that. What is it, again?' And then Mrs. Evans interposing with 'That will do, dear. She can't help her name.'
"'A h—l of a name for a servant,' muttered Jack.
"Well, poor Jack found that taking his family to sea was a more formidable affair than he had imagined. The fact was, Jack, although he had been married six years, knew no more about married life than a bachelor. He hadn't spent more than a week at one time alongside of his wife. Many sea-faring men are like this. The very routine of ordinary household existence is novel to them. They live voyage after voyage at sea, dreaming of an impossibly perfect existence ashore, and their brief holidays, in their wives' houses only confirm them in the delusion that shore life is heaven, and life on board ship hell. Whereas, you know, it is really the other way round."
"Oh, I say!" said Inness, who, in spite of Oxford, retained his illusions.
"What rot, Spenlove!" said the First Lieutenant, a gentleman still unmarried, but rigidly engaged.
"Ah, but you forget," retorted Mr. Spenlove, laughing softly as he gazed up at the moon now high over the cliff. He looked very like a benevolent satyr as he sat leaning forward in his chair, his chin on his hands, his trim gray beard pushed out, and his curiously slanted black eyebrows raised—"You forget that I am dealing with basic realities. You forget that ninety-nine sailor-men out of each hundred feed themselves exclusively on dreams. You are like the donkey who imagines he sees a resplendent carrot hung in front of him. It is not only that he never gets the carrot. There never was any carrot for him to get. I repeat—dear old Jack Evans was not a bit singular in his illusions, any more than Captain Macedoine was in his. They believed in them a bit longer than you young fellows do nowadays, that's all."
"Well, go on," suggested the Doctor, and moved out of the moonlight into the shadow, so that Mr. Spenlove remained alone and appeared to be talking to himself.
"Of course, so far, I hadn't seen any of the party save Jack. I'd been ashore when they arrived—did I say we were in Middlesborough-on-Tees?—for I had friends at Stockton. I was really concerned, for knowing what a headlong, forthright fool Jack was, I expected to do or say something that might spoil his life's happiness. And here he was complicating matters ten-fold by bringing a nurse-girl, a 'governess.' And while I sat there pondering upon the possibilities, the Mate came up with an expression of immense cunning on his face, his hand funnelled round his mouth, and whispered 'Seen 'em, Mister?'
"I shook my head. Mr. Bloom, Basil Bloom, had been only a couple of trips with us, and I knew Jack had very little use for him. Mr. Bloom, indeed, was one of those extraordinary men who go to sea year after year, and not only do they never seem to attain to any decent mastery of their profession, but in their speech and manner and appearance they resemble piano-tuners or billiard-markers more than sailors. Bloom had a moustache like an Italian hair-dresser's, immense, fine, full, and silky, with moist red lips eternally parting and showing a set of perfect false teeth. His papers were miracles of eulogy, his discharges, save that he had been in a good many ships, without blemish. And yet from the moment he had come jauntily on board the previous voyage, Jack had been straining like a terrier on the leash. Mr. Bloom seemed to do nothing right. It had been my lot to hear both sides of the question. Jack, over a whiskey-and-soda in my room, would bewail his fate at having an agricultural labourer sent him as chief officer; and next day, Mr. Bloom, bringing me the position and distance run, would twirl his moustache and allude to the amazingly incompetent persons who secured commands nowadays. Of course I sided with Jack. Mr. Bloom was nothing to me. He was the sort of man I would much rather hit in the face than shake hands with. The man didn'tlooklike a sailor. He had no sea-going gear. Jack nearly had a seizure on my settee when he told me the new Mate was patrolling the bridge in red silk socks, patent-leather dress-pumps, and an old Norfolk jacket. When we began to roll off Ushant and ship a few seas, it appeared Mr. Bloom had neither oilskins nor sea-boots. To see him skipping along through green sea water in his dress-pumps, to look at the patent log, was a revelation of human improvidence. Here was a man the wrong side of forty, and he hadn't the sense to bring suitable clothing to sea with him! At the table he bewildered, angered, and contradicted poor old Jack with political argument. Once, after getting his anchors fouled, and firing his clutch-blocks, and otherwise making a mess of things on the forecastle-head, he had the temerity to tell Jack that 'every ship-master ought to have tariff-reform at his finger-ends.' Jack nearly had apoplexy. He managed to sputter out that 'every mate ought to have his job at his finger-ends, or else go home and buy a farm.' Mr. Bloom, holding his fine military figure erect and delicately preening his moustache, told me afterward 'That's the worst of these young ship-masters—they think insults are arguments.'
"Now I saw trouble ahead for Jack with Mr. Bloom on board. I don't pretend to have a very profound insight into human character, but I had an indefinable conviction that Mrs. Evans would look favourably upon Mr. Basil Bloom. Oh, no, I don't mean that my prurient mind was gloating over the destruction of Jack's marital bliss. Not at all. I never liked Madeline, but I do her the justice of proclaiming her inviolable chastity. What I mean is, I felt that she had more in common intellectually with Mr. Bloom than with us. He had a good deal of the fussiness of middle-aged shore-people, clearing his throat, coughing behind his hand, saying 'excuse me,' smoothing his hair with his palm, and referring to things he had seen 'in the papers.' And in spite of his inadequate sea-going gear, he invariably appeared in a more or less clean stiff collar. A woman, I mean a genteel woman, will never utterly condemn any man so long as he wears a collar. This would not have mattered save that Jack and I invariably abandoned collars as soon as the pilot had left.
"So, when Mr. Basil Bloom, in a dirty gray lounge suit, brown Oxford shoes, a grimy collar, and a deer-stalker hat, bent over me and enquired if I had seen the arrivals, I shook my head and got up to walk away. But Mr. Bloom detained me. Had I not seen the nurse? Nice little piece of goods. And the baby was a little angel. Between me and him, he was good enough to say, we ought to have a very pleasant trip, what with ladies on board, what? And Mr. Bloom, settling his dirty collar and concealing a brilliant smile behind a hairy, ringed hand, walked off to superintend his neglected work.
"I was not such a fool as to assume that I could any longer stroll into Jack's room and have a chat. I am not afraid of women, but I regard their lairs with considerable trepidation. On board an old tramp steamer a woman is nothing less than a scourge. There is no place for her, and consequently you never know where you may find her. If you walk to and fro on the deck, you are probably keeping her awake. If you go out on deck in your shirt-sleeves, or come from a bath with a towel round you, you are outraging her modesty. If you use the ordinary jargon of the sea, she writes home that the engineers are awfully coarse on her husband's ship. You moon about in a furtive fashion, closing doors and ventilators when you converse with one another, and pray for the day when she will quit the ship and return to the semi-detached mansion in the suburbs where she reigns as queen, Captain So-and-So's wife. I felt sadly, as I sat in my room, that my friendship with Jack would remain for a few weeks in a state of suspended animation. I got up several times, unconsciously, to go along, and had to sit down again. And as I sat there, the alleyway was darkened and the familiar stout figure and short red neck appeared. I had a little table in my room and as a rule sat behind it on the settee, while Jack sprawled in an old easy chair I had bought in Savannah, a chair out of an old plantation mansion. Jack sank into it and remained silent while I poured out two pegs and squirted some soda-water into them. I knew perfectly well, or thought I did, that he needed some restorative after his recent adventures. He drank it thirstily and set the glass on the table.
"'Fred,' he said, in the cautious whisper which, as I have said, becomes second nature when there is a woman on board, 'Fred, I've made an infernal fool of meself. They've let me in at the office.'
"'Why,' I said, 'I thought they did you rather well, giving you permission to take Mrs. Evansandthe youngster. You know how they wired Tompkins once: 'No children'?'
"'You don't know nothing about it,' says Jack, who was invariably hard on English when he was moved. 'It's a case of wheels within wheels. They only did that to get this gel out for nothing. She's going out to her father in the Grecian Arches, and some clever fool in the office thought of sending her down to Mrs. Evans to see if she'd do to look after the kid.'
"'Well, it's only her grub for a fortnight or so,' I remarked.
"Jack looked solemnly at me and shook his head.
"'Have you seen her?'
"'No,' I said, 'Mr. Bloom told me she was a nice little piece of goods.' Jack snorted.
"'He's down in the cabin now talking about what's on at the theatres. Fred, I'm in for trouble, and you'll have to stand by me.'
"And he was, for you must bear in mind that there were others on board besides Mr. Bloom. There was the Second Mate, a young man whose prospects were tarnished by a weakness for secret drinking. And there was young Siddons, a stripling just out of his apprenticeship and uncertificated, the son of a well-to-do merchant in a country town. Jack used to say there was too much of the lah-di-dah about him, and was down on him time and again. All the same he liked the boy, as I did, too, for Siddons was a gentleman—the only one on board, I used to think. He got the D. S. O. the other day for bombing something or other in Germany. He was what modern, educated smart women call 'a charming boy' or 'a pretty little boy.' Not that he was effeminate, by any means. He was simply one of those to whom virtuous sentiment is a passionate necessity. Instead of playing in the gutters of life, as so many of us do, his young body and soul were on tip-toe for the coming of love. You can see it when they are like that. There is a thirsty look about the lips, a turn for moodiness, a sudden dilation of the pupils as they catch your glance, and a quick flush, very pretty to see. And sometimes, I am informed, they find a woman worthy of the gifts they bear....
"We had a couple of engineers, too, but they were scarcely to be classed with young Siddons. They were like a good many of us, useful, shop-soiled articles with plenty of the meretricious conventional sexuality which passes for passion when stimulated. But neither of them would have got a look from a modern, educated smart woman. The Third I didn't know very much about. He came and went, and the principal impression I have of him now is that he was married. The Second had what I should call an oppressively incondite mind. He had a cold avidity for facts. Unlike most seamen he never read fiction unless it was some book which had achieved notoriety for what is called frankness. He had a bookshelf in his cabin containing his shore-going boots and a derby hat, a Whittaker's Almanac, a Who's Who, several year-books, and a shilling encyclopedia. It was astonishing, the comfort he seemed to derive from knowing the census-returns of Bolivia, or the Republican majority in Oregon, or the number of microbes in a pint of milk. But it did no one any harm. I only mention it because he, too, in his way, fell in love with Artemisia and for a time neglected his familiar preoccupations.
"For that is what it amounted to—that we all fell in love. Each of us had to measure ourselves by this standard. At certain times in our lives we all have to drop what we are doing and submit ourselves to the test. I'm afraid most of us don't cut a very brilliant figure. It is fortunate for us that one can achieve success in a lower class, and can pass muster as human beings because we are honest or sober or clever, and not simply because we are worthy of love. All the same, I fancy the contempt which some of us pour upon the lucky ones is born of envy. We wish to be like them in our heart of hearts. I used to have the most preposterous dreams of being the lover of some proud, beautiful girl I had read about or seen in the street.
"Artemisia was like that. She was one of those beings who inspire love, who are the living embodiments of that tender philosophy which makes every adjustment of our lives by sentiment alone, and who convince us, by a gesture, a glance, a timbre in their voices, that our lightest fancy is a grave resolution of the soul.
"It would be easy, of course, to jeer at a crowd of simple, half-educated shell-backs losing their hearts to a lady-passenger's maid, but that would not be a fair account of it. We were not simple in that sense. My experience is that contact with the great elemental realities does not breed simplicity so much as a sort of cunning. We live deprived of so many of the amenities of culture and wealth that we cannot credit our good fortune when anything really fine comes in our way. We are not to be had. We are cautious. These good things are for shore people. And we get into the habit of good-humoured humility, discounting ourselves and our shipmates beyond recall. We say, 'only fools and drunkards go to sea,' and that indicates pretty accurately the value we place upon our hopes and aspirations.
"And so you must not expect me to give you vivid accounts of passionate declarations of love under the Mediterranean moon, or of desperate knife-work in the dark with Artemisia bending over the dying man and kissing his death-dewed forehead in a last farewell. The voyage went on much as usual outwardly. The days are gone, if they ever existed, when love ruled the camp or the quarter deck. Yet there was a subtle change. Men went about their various tasks with an air of charged expectancy. Now and again a couple could be seen talking earnestly together. The weather, until we passed Gibraltar, was against any dramatic developments. Mrs. Evans and Angelina kept below. Only once, at dusk, while we were passing the Burlings, off Portugal, I looked over the rail of the bridge-deck and saw young Siddons leaning on the bulwarks below, his head turned toward someone I could not see. He was laughing as happily as a child. Leaning over a little further I saw a girl's finely articulated hand and a corner of a white apron.
"But most of us had no chance. It sounds a strange thing to say, but it was almost as if Mrs. Evans herself regarded me as married to her. As though because I had been the means of their meeting, I was entitled to a sort of founder's share in Angelina! I was in the way to becoming an expert in infant's complaints. And Jack seemed to think that when I came into the cabin to talk, he had the right of going off duty, so to speak, and would go up to the chart room to have a smoke. No, I didn't go simply to catch a glimpse of Artemisia, though she was worth glimpsing. I went from a sense of social duty. I felt I owed it to Jack to be sociable with his wife. And perhaps, too, there was an idea at the back of my head that contact with Mrs. Evans was a corrective to any tendency I might have to make a fool of myself over any young woman. That was Mrs. Evans' specialty, you might say. She didn't mean it, but unconsciously she shrivelled at the least breath of desire. I used to watch apprehensively for the blank look in the eyes, the tightening of the lips, the infinitesimal drawing back of the head, as of a snake about to strike. There was something sharply astringent about her then, like biting inadvertently into a green banana. And yet she had her gusts of enthusiasm over 'darling Babs.' The child was a monster of egoism, as may be imagined. She was very like her father physically—full-blooded, plump, bold-eyed, and with a perfectly devilish temper. Without warning she would explode, scream, scratch, bite, and kick, until she got what she wanted, when she would subside as suddenly into a self-centred silence broken by hiccoughs and chokes. She wanted everything—the watch and money out of your pocket and heart and liver out of your body. 'Angel child!' her mother would call her, and hang fondly over the odious little brat. For the angel child was still supposed to be 'delicate.' Mrs. Evans had a case of champagne and a stock of Bovril, and I dare say some of the displays I witnessed were due in part to intoxication. The carpenter was busy all day making gates and fences round the companion and bridge deck to prevent the delicate child from crawling out and getting slung overboard. I used to sit in the cabin with the angelic Babs on my knee, from which she was always slipping, listening to Mrs. Evans' account of the diphtheria, and watching Artemisia moving noiselessly to and fro in the bedroom or sitting just inside the spare stateroom door sewing. I never enjoyed looking at a girl so much in my life. She was not pretty in the ordinary sense of the word. Her skin was not the buttery yellow you associate with half-breeds. It was more the russet brown of a sunburned blonde. Her cheeks had a soft peachy glow under the brown bloom that was beautiful. And yet she did not give one the impression of sheer innocence and youth which was implied in her unique complexion. Her eyes were perfectly steady and unabashed, her figure was more mature and matronly than Mrs. Evans', and she had a gravity of poise and deliberate movement that one associates with the reflection born of experience. She gave me the impression, I may say, of a young person who had chanced upon some astounding revelation, and who was preoccupied with both past and future more than the immediate present. It made her more attractive than less, I think. She established a certain careless fondness for talking to Mr. Chief, as she called me. I dare say I was in love with her even then. She had a personality. I think Jack, who for all his crude psychology was a pretty shrewd judge of humanity, saw something beyond a mere desirable young girl in this nurse. He used to follow her round with his eyes as though he couldn't make her out. He couldn't recover from the shock of her name. He would sit in the saloon watching her with the child, and mutter 'Artemisia! Humph!' She would glance up from her occupation and regard him with steady, meditative eyes. I was fascinated by the name myself. It recalled Captain Macedoine to me. It was like him. Imagine that name reverberating down through the ages from ancient Attica to classical France, taken out across the Western Ocean by forlornémigrés, who clung to their pretty trashy artificialities in spite of, or perhaps because of, the frightfulness of the wilderness, handed on by sentimental and aristocratic Creoles, filched by German Jews and prosperous mulattos, picked up right in the gutter by a supreme illusionist and given to a young person who seemed half school-girl and half adventuress.
"For it was perfectly obvious to me that whether I had diagnosed her character truly or not, she was not at all a suitable temperament to have about a child. There was, for instance, something ominous in the sudden quiet with which she would regard the angelic Babs when that odious little being began to pull her hair or jump on her feet or thump her across the back with the heavy cabin ruler. These things happened to me, too; but I could scarcely expect to escape. I was Jack's chum. I was a bachelor and therefore credited with a deep and passionate love of children. Artemisia, however, was a stranger. When something particularly outrageous occurred, Mrs. Evans, glancing up, would murmur, 'Oh, Babs, dear!' and then, to my considerable embarrassment, I would find Artemisia's eyes fixed inscrutably upon mine as she fended off the attentions of her charge. And so, when I rose one fine evening as we sailed along the Spanish coast, and she followed me up on deck, I felt that she was about to take me into her confidence. I looked round as she slammed the wicket which the carpenter had made to keep Babs from tumbling down and breaking her neck, and the girl's face was close to mine. We laughed quietly in the faint light that came up from the cabin. After all, there was not such a frightful disparity in our ages. As we walked aft along the bridge deck, and stood between the funnel casing and the life boats—a matter of seconds—I might have given a swerve to both our destinies. There are moments, you know, when one can spring over the most frightful chasms in one's journey through life, and land with both feet on mossy banks and enamelled meads. It was possibly such a moment, only I didn't take the chance. As I said, I prefer the part of super in the play—one sees so much more than either spectator or hero. And I think she saw, too, in the same flash of intelligence. And so, nothing happened. When she spoke she merely asked in a low tone what the punishment was for infanticide.
"'You know, Mr. Chief,' she went on, putting up her arms and swinging gently on the life-lines of the boats, 'It isn't fair. I'd never have taken it on if I'd known what I was in for. I have a devil of a temper. I'm sure I shall do something to that child.'
"'To keep it quiet?' I suggested. She nodded rapidly.
"'For good!' she replied, and added: 'They never used to let me have anything to do with the kids at school.'
"'Because of the temper?' She nodded again.
"'I nearly killed a girl once,' she remarked, calmly.
"'Oh, tut-tut!' I said, but she insisted, and her eyes gleamed with a sudden vixenish anger. 'Yes, Mr. Chief. She was a tall, fair girl with yellow hair and a lovely complexion, like an advertisement for soap. She hated me, and told the girls I would only be a nigger where she came from. Her father was in the Civil Service somewhere. And she kept on calling me nigger, and the other girls followed her lead until I was nearlycrazy. And one night I went into the lavatory and put a piece of caustic soda into her sponge as it lay on the rack. And the next morning when she was washing there was a horrible row, and she ran up and down the bedroom screaming, and her face was all one smear of crimson and purple. She had to go to hospital and it took months to heal. The sponge was left in the water and there was nothing to show, but the girls knew I'd done it because I didn't run and see what was the matter. They didn't call me nigger any more, Mr. Chief.'
"I said I supposed not, and enquired if Mrs. Evans knew this story. Artemisia shrugged her shoulders and showed the tip of her tongue. 'I wouldn't tellhermuch,' she replied.
"'And you are going out to see your father?' she nodded. 'He wants me to help him in his business.'
"'He's not a captain now, I suppose?' I asked her, to see how much she knew. She was unconcerned. 'No, he retired from the sea when I was a little girl. We came home from the States. We lived near Saxhambury then. Do you know it? Father was very unfortunate. He lost on some of his investments and had to go abroad again. He was in Egypt a long while.'
"'And you haven't seen him since when?' I hazarded.
"'Oh, I met him when he came to Paris on business. You see, the company he's in now is French, and he is in a very important position out there.'
"It was clear she knew nothing. She had been brought up upon the customary vague references to 'position,' and so on, with which young people in the middle classes are inducted into the real world. One could imagine her telling her school-chums how her father had 'an important position out there,' and their subsequent awe and envy. I can remember a boy at school saying his dad was 'on the Continent,' when his fond parent had gone for a week-end at Boulogne. We were impressed. And I wondered what old Macedoine's job might happen to be. So I said that I had once been shipmates with a Captain Macedoine out in New Orleans. She exclaimed: 'Were you really! How funny!' and suddenly dropped her voice to a whisper. 'Were you friends, as you are with Captain Evans?' I said no, not exactly, and looked up at the figure of young Siddons on the bridge. He was looking at us, and paused in his walk to and fro trying to make out who I might be. I was thinking of him and wondering, when I heard her say that her father did not like America; he was never happy there. He was misunderstood. Well, many a man has been unhappy and misunderstood in America. Some men are so exacting in their ideals that no country can hope to win their approbation. Captain Macedoine was evidently still on a pilgrimage seeking a home for his wounded spirit. I asked his daughter if he were happy and understood in Ipsilon. She regarded me with attention for a moment, as though she suspected me of irony. Then she said, in the grave tones that middle-class people reserve for the vital themes of life, that he had a good position and excellent prospects. And then she left me with a murmur about 'the kid' and I began to walk to and fro. I was amused. I tried to figure out the salient features of a 'position' which would meet with the approval of a man with Macedoine's record. And the prospects! For mind you, he must have experienced a severe blow when those Federal secret service men had ferreted out his dealings in the opium traffic and his plan for establishing himself in England had gone to smash. And in what way could this young person assist him in his business? I was intrigued, as they say, but I could form no theory which would adequately account for so many disparate premises. After all, such musings are their own reward. The event robs them of their early glamour. I did not even confide in any one else on the ship. There is a pleasure in an unshared scandal which many men and all women seem to overlook. It added, I may say, to the joys of being a super in the play. And when Mr. Basil Bloom, our effulgent chief mate, informed me one evening that I seemed to be very chummy with Miss Macedoine, I only smiled and asked him if he had designs on her himself. He twisted his moustache, looked scornfully at the horizon, and was evidently perturbed. He had referred grandiloquently, during the previous voyages, to a peerless female whom he called 'the future Mrs. Bloom.' This lady lived at Greenwich, and we had reason to believe that Mr. Bloom, on the strength of his genteel manners, formidable moustache, and optimistic temperament, had been sponging on her family for some months before he joined theManola. 'I'll tell the young lady,' I said, 'and perhaps you'll get some encouragement.' He assured me first that I needn't trouble, and then added that he knew I was the last person in the world to think less of a man if he changed his mind. This was so infernally unfair to the lady at Greenwich that I laughed in his face and walked away.
"The Second Mate took a different line. He was a quiet, inoffensive creature, and usually preoccupied with a feeble struggle which he maintained against whiskey. He had a delicately coloured, spiritual, refined face, with the salient points slightly sharpened, and he seemed to have neither thoughts, hopes, nor aspirations. However, his finely chiselled features appeared one day while we were in Alexandria with the addition of a greenish-yellow puff below the left eye, and the mess-room boy informed us that the Second Mate was having his meals in his room in future. There was a laugh from the Third Engineer, and I said nothing, for I had a notion he and the Second Mate had been ashore together. But the mess-room boy, whose slant eyes and long nose worried into all the scandal of the ship, added that young Mr. Siddons had blacked the Second Mate's eye for him, over the nurse. I told him to dry up. To tell the truth I was getting tired of the episode. I felt the whole thing was becoming tawdry and dropping to a rather low plane. I wasn't willing to admit this to myself, mind you, because it involved my old friend Jack. I mean it would be the Commander's fault if we all slumped into the mire together over this young woman. That's what commanders are for—to raise the tone. That's what a good many of them lack the character to do. Personal courage, professional skill, long experience, will carry a man through among men. When there are women in the case, a man needs something else. What? Well, it may sound strange to you, but I should call it simplicity of heart. It is almost the only thing women instinctively respect and fear. Good old Jack was simple in his way, but I doubted his ability to handle a crisis. I was thankful when we were through with Alexandria and were heading north for Ipsilon.
"For just as we were entering this sea cluttered with islands so thick you can always see four or five and sometimes a dozen at once, so we were in the midst of a score of dubious possibilities. Here was Jack avoiding me in an apologetic fashion. Here was the Chief Mate whispering to Mrs. Evans. Here was the Second Mate sitting in remote and solitary grandeur in his little cubby-hole, comforting himself with a bottle of Turkish gin. Here was young Siddons, very youthful-looking and shy, miserable because the Captain was looking black about something. Only the angel child and her mother seemed untouched by the horrible paralysis which was creeping upon us and for which they were primarily responsible. At all hours you could hear the roars of rage from the cabin when it wanted something—the roar, the squeals, the kicks, the hiccoughs, and the final sullen silence of satiety. I tell you, that woman and her baby were driving us all, including her husband, crazy, and she sat there oblivious. She wasn't even aware that Artemisia hated her.
"I don't know exactly what Jack had expected me to do to help him. No doubt if I had proposed to Artemisia during the voyage, married her in Alexandria, and left her ashore in a flat out at Mex or Gabbari he would have been satisfied. I should have got him out of a hole and got myself into one, which appeals to most of us. Or I might have acted like a man without any emotions at all, and repelled Artemisia's confidences with chilling disdain. This would have set a good example to the others, he may have thought. I have never gone in for setting a good example, however. I have found that even those who follow the example hate the man who sets it. And in addition, with the curious intuition of the illiterate, Jack suspected I had not been perfectly frank with him as to my intimacy with her. And so we were all on the watch, alert, uneasy, silent, and unhappy.
"I still went in to see Mrs. Evans of an evening. To tell the truth she fascinated me. I had always held the theory that no married woman could be an absolute fool. It had seemed to me that such contact with the realities of life as marriage involved must leave some austere mark of intelligence, some tinge of altruism, upon the most superficial. She seemed to disprove this. For her the world did not exist save for the 'angel child.' Even her husband was now only the nearly indispensable producer of income. She talked, not of him, or of her family, not of Art or Life or Death or the world to come, not even of Home or the things she had seen in Alexandria. She had seen nothing in Alexandria. She had declined to let Jack take her to Cairo 'because of the expense.' She read no books nor papers. She dressed in perfect propriety. And all the time she talked about the child, one hand near the child, her eyes fixed on the child's movements or repose. I think the voyage was a revelation to Jack. He was finding his place in the world. He was thinking in his honest, clumsy way. He never took his wife for a trip again. He loved his child as much as any man could, but this ingrowing infatuation, to the exclusion of every other desirable thing in the world, was fatiguing.
"And Artemisia! She sat in her little spare cabin opening on the saloon, and now and again she would raise her shoulders, draw a deep breath, let them drop again as though in despair, and go on with her sewing. She would laugh at me when I tried to amuse the child and distract it from some preposterous desire. It was not easy. Her tenacity of purpose was appalling. She was yelling one evening for someone to open the great medicine chest that stood by the brass fireplace. I tried the time-honoured ruses for placating the young. I said there was a lion inside who would jump out and eat Babs. I pretended to go and find the key and came back with the news that naughty Mr. Siddons had dropped it into the sea. The brat stopped to breathe for a moment and a faintly human expression came over the stupendously smug little face. I followed this up by a story of how Mr. Siddons had shown me how to make a pin float on the water. I hastily poured some water into a glass, got a piece of blotting paper, laid my pin on it, and waited for the homely trick to succeed. I had no luck somehow. The pin went to the bottom and Babs' opinion of me went with it. She suddenly remembered about the medicine chest and gave a preliminary yell. Mrs. Evans said, 'Oh, Babbsy, darling!' I got up and went out on deck. We were running among the islands. Away to the east-ward I could see the lights of the Roumania Lloyd mail-boat going south. Suddenly two hands grabbed the lappets of my patrol-coat, a dark, fluffy head leaned for a delicious moment against my chest, and Artemisia gurgled, 'Oh, Mister Chief, isn't she just a little fiend?' She had been listening to my blandishments and had witnessed the final destruction of my hopes. She put her hands behind her back, threw up her head, and regarded me with amusement. 'Why,' she whispered, 'why didn't you open the medicine chest, and give her the prussic-acid to play with?' And then, without waiting for an answer, she turned and looked across at the islands we were passing. She sighed. 'Just look at them! How do they know which is Ipsilon? Mister Chief, Mister Chief, I am afraid.'
"'What of?' I asked. She sighed again.
"'Of the future,' she said. 'This is a change for me. I don't know what's coming. I haven't had any luck yet.'
"I asked her in what way.
"'You know, Mister Chief, I have been in several situations. I was a typist....' she shrugged her shoulders.
"'Your father will be here,' I suggested, but she paid no attention, merely looking at the dark blots on the sea that were islands. And then she remarked in a perfectly level and unconcerned voice that sometimes she wished she was dead. I patted her on the shoulder.
"'Go to bed, my child,' I remarked, coldly, 'you'll feel better in the morning. You won't wish you were dead when Captain Macedoine comes aboard to fetch you.'
"She walked away in silence and went down to the cabin. I have often wondered if she had not intended to make some sort of confession. Perhaps it was a moment in her life when she became suddenly aware of her insecurity, of her lack of the kindly props and supports which hold most of us up and give us a good opinion of ourselves. For really she lacked everything. As I found out later, as she stood talking to me that evening and trying to find some easy yet adequate method of taking me into her confidence without losing my esteem, she lacked everything that most girls have. She was one of those tragic figures who even lack innocence without having gained any corresponding experience. And perhaps she felt for a moment the shadow of her destiny upon her, and seeing the dark path among the islands she was to tread, shrank back, doubtful even of the power of her father to carry her through."
Mr. Spenlove, sitting forward in his deck chair, felt in his pocket for his cigarette-case and looked round satirically into the profound shadow of the awning. He still preserved the appearance of a man talking to himself, but the fancy crossed his mind, as he glanced at the long horizontal forms in the deck chairs, that he was addressing a company of laid-out corpses. The air was very still, but a light breeze on the open water beyond the nets, and the full splendour of a circular moon, reminded him of an immense sheet of hammered silver. But Mr. Spenlove did not look long at the Ægean. He swivelled round a little and pointed with the burnt-out match at the large plain building he had indicated at the beginning of his story. It was not a beautiful building. It had the rectangular austerity of a continental customs house or English provincial "Athenæum." It was built close to the cliff and the outer wall was provided with a flight of stairs which ascended, in a mysterious and disconcerting manner, to the second floor. All this was clearly visible in the brilliant moonlight, and even the long valley behind, with its dim vineyards and clumps of almond, olive, and fig trees half concealing the square white houses that dotted the perspective, were subtly indicated against the enormous background of the tunnelled uplands and bare limestone peaks. Mr. Spenlove held the match out for a moment and then flicked it away.
"Romantic, isn't it? This was how it looked the night we anchored, and Artemisia came up to me as I stood by the engine-room skylights with my binoculars. It was she who pointed out to me how romantic it was. I asked her why. I said: 'This place is simply an iron mine. To-morrow they'll put us under those tips you see sticking out of the cliff there and a lot of frowsy Greeks will run little wooden trucks full of red dust and boulders and empty them with a crash into the ship. And there'll be red dust in the tea and the soup and in your hair and eyes and nose and mouth. And there'll be nothing but trouble all the time. Very romantic!' So I sneered, but she wasn't taken in by it a bit. She looked through the glasses, and laughed. 'Oh, it's beautiful!' she murmured, 'beautiful, beautiful.'
"I said, 'How do beautiful things make you feel?' and she turned on me for a moment. 'You know,' she said, and was silent. And I did know. It was the bond between us. We had become aware of it unconsciously. It had nothing to do with our age or our sex or our position in life. It was the common ground of our intense anger with the other people on the ship. Do you know, I have often thought that Circe has been misjudged. Men become swinish before women who are unconscious of their unlovely transformation. Circe should be painted with her eyes fixed in severe meditation, oblivious of the grunting, squeaking beasts around her. Artemisia was like that. She really cared nothing for the ridiculous performances of the various animals on the ship. Nothing for the magniloquent Mr. Basil Bloom, clearing his throat behind his dirty hand; nothing for the Second Mate, with his perpetual expression of knowing something about her and being mightily amused by it. Nothing even for poor young Siddons, badly hit, moping out of sight, heaving prodigious sighs and getting wiggings for being absent-minded. As for the Second and Third, my particular henchmen, she didn't know they existed. Honourable! Why of course, they were all honourable in their intentions. Didn't Mr. Bloom express his willingness to throw over the young lady at Greenwich, although he owed her father fifty pounds? Didn't the Second Engineer drop a note down her ventilator saying he had a hundred in the Savings Bank and she had only to say the word? (And didn't Mrs. Evans pick it up and take it, speechless with annoyance, to Jack, who roared with laughter?) Honourable? Of course they all wanted to marry her. Swine are domestic animals."
The Surgeon, who had caused this digression, made a vague murmur of protest. Mr. Spenlove drummed on the chair between his legs and shrugged his shoulders, but he didn't turn round.
"I didn't offer to tell you a love-story. Captain Macedoine's daughter, if she means anything, means just this: that love means nothing. She passed through all the dirty little gum-shoe emotions which she inspired on theManolalike a moonbeam through a foul alley. For it is foul, this eternal preoccupation with sex, like a lot of flies over a stagnant, fecundating pool. Beauty! You all talk largely of appreciating beauty, and you don't know, the most educated and cultured of you, the first thing about it. Your idea of beauty is a healthy young female without too many clothes. I tell you, I have seen ships so perfect and just in modelling that I have marvelled at the handiwork of my fellowmen. I have seen cities at sunrise so beautiful I have gone down to my room and shed tears of ridiculous sorrow. And I have seen the patrons of female beauty, too, coming back from the cities to the ships with dry palates, and their neckties under their ears....
"Well! We stood there, and to ease the pressure of the moment she put up the binoculars and swept the little beach, finally coming to rest at the big house—Grünbaum's house. While we had been talking a light had come out on the balcony, and figures began to move about with the precise and enigmatic motions of marionettes. Without glasses I could see Grünbaum seated at a table with a big lamp over his head. Another figure moved to the open side and stood still. I was wondering what this portended when Grünbaum half rose and waved his arms, and the other figure turned and dwindled rapidly into obscurity, suddenly coming into the light again at the other side of the table. And Artemisia said quietly, 'There's father!' and handed me the binoculars.
"To say that I was interested would not put the matter in its true light. I was more than that. There was a fantastic quality in the whole business which was almost supernatural. It is strange enough to meet a person after many years; stranger still to meet one who has made a powerful yet unsympathetic impression upon you—to meet him with all your old dislikes and prejudices washed to a clear and colourless curiosity. But to see such a man as I saw Captain Macedoine, afar off, through an atmosphere charged with the electric blue radiance of moonlight, moving in an alien orbit, animated by unknown emotions—why, it was like seeing a man who was dead and gone to another world! I raised the glasses and focussed them. Captain Macedoine stood leaning heavily on his hands as they grasped the edge of the table, and he was staring straight out at me. Of course he could see nothing beyond the balcony, but the impression was exactly that of a man striving to win back across the gulf to his former existence. And his strained immobility was accentuated by the figure of Grünbaum with his jerkily moving arms, his polished forehead gleaming in the lamplight, the gyrations of his chin as he turned every moment or so and looked up sideways at the other. Grünbaum flourished papers, reaching out and rearranging them, throwing himself back in his chair and beating the table with a folded document to emphasize his words. And every now and again the whole scene grew dim as though it were a phantasmagoria, and about to dissolve, when the smoke from Grünbaum's cigar floated and hung in the still air.
"And I discovered, too, that I had no words in which to formulate the peculiar impressions this scene made upon me. I could find no adequate remark! The girl at my side, reaching out absently for the glasses, made no sign that this scene going on half a mile away was at all strange to her. For all one could gather, Captain Macedoine's daughter was accustomed to see her father submitting passively to the onslaughts of foreign concessionaires every day in the week. I gazed at her as she stood there by the awning-stanchion looking at her magnificent parent, and it was suddenly borne in upon me that it is a miracle we ever learn anything about each other at all in this world. There is nothing so inscrutable as an ordinary human being, I am convinced, and I have been watching them for thirty years. What we know and can tell, even the acutest of us, is no more than the postmark on a letter. What's inside—ah, if we only knew. What? Absurd? By no means. I believe married people do occasionally accomplish it in a small way. I mean I believe they attain to a fairly complete comprehension of each other's souls. But as to whether the game is worth the candle they never divulge....
"Certainly Artemisia did not at that moment. She left me, as every woman I have ever met has left me, groping. She sighed softly and returned the glasses, remarking again, 'Yes, there's Father,' and bade me good-night without a word of explanation. Mind, I don't say I had any right to such a word. I don't even feel sure she understood anything at all about her father's position on that island. The bare fact remains that I expected some explanation simply because I credited her with a character light yet strong, and capable of supporting the weight of her father's confidence.
"For observe; if this girl was ignorant of everything, if she came out here a mere child agape with curiosity, then Macedoine must have been that extremely rare phenomenon, a completely lonely man. And I was not prepared to admit the possibility of such an existence for him. He was one of those men who can live, no doubt, without friendship, but who must have their audience. So much at least I knew of him in the old days in the Maracaibo Line, when he would sit near us in Fabacher's on Royal Street, ostentatiously reading a month-old copy of the LondonFinancial News. It was this incessant urge to inspire wonder which led him to hint, indirectly, that he had been at school at the Charterhouse. Risky? Of course it was risky; and I should never have plumbed the mystery but for a most unimpressionable London purser who informed me there was a ragged school for slum children in the Charterhouse district in the city. Not that it mattered. We were not Macedoine's game. It was the bishops and colonels and eminent surgeons who made the round trip of the West Indies with us whom he wished to impress. Whether he was a fraud or not, he certainly had acquired a way of ignoring common people such as we who go to sea. I knew he would regard good old Jack from such a lofty pinnacle that Jack would appear to him no more than one of the Greek labourers who shoved the little wooden cars along and tumbled their contents into the ship with a terrific clang of ironstone on iron, and clouds of red dust. I followed up this digression in my mind and arrived at the fascinating conclusion that if my recollection served me sufficiently well, he would not recognize me. He never had recognized me. I once had the pleasure of telling him that if his men didn't keep my room clean and tidy I would knock his head off. He never looked up from his desk until my grip on his collar tightened and his body began to rock to and fro. He complained to the Commander, who had been told of the incident by the Chief. 'Is this the engineer who assaulted you, Mr. Macedoine?' says the Captain. Macedoine examined me with a distant, preoccupied air, pressing his lips together and his eyebrows raised. He shrugged his shoulders, opened his lips with a slight smacking noise, and after quite a pause, a most imposing pause, he said he 'really couldn't say; these workmen were all so much alike when they were dirty....' Old Pomeroy—he was the first decent skipper the Maracaibo Line ever had—swung round on his chief steward and retorted: 'Then what the devil are you wasting all our time for?' He swung back to his desk again, muttering and slapping papers here and there. 'Preposterous—doesn't know who assaulted him.... Never heard....' I was standing as stiff as a stanchion waiting for the Old Man to say I could go, when he saw Macedoine pussy-footing it to the door. 'Oh, and Macedoine,' called the Old Man. Macedoine stopped but did not look round. 'I expect the engineers on my ship to be referred to as engineers, not 'workmen.'' Silence, Macedoine looking at the back of his hand and smiling with the corner of his mouth pulled down. 'Understand!' thundered the Old Man, rising from his chair but holding it by the arms. It was so sudden I nearly collapsed. I thought he was going to throw Macedoine through the door. That lofty personage was startled, too. He replied hastily: 'Oh, quite so, Captain, er....' when old Pomeroy sat down and dipping his pen in the ink, shut him up with 'Then don't forget it, and don't wait.'
"I mention this highly unusual episode for a special reason. It happened to provide one specific proof of my theory that Macedoine was an artist in his method of building up that grotesque effigy which he presented to the world as himself. He was like that eccentric rich person who once built a most astonishing house in Chelsea many years ago. You remember? It was called So-and-So's Folly. It stood on a valuable site, and each story was decorated in a different style. The basement was Ph[oe]nician and the roof was pure Berlin. But the horrible thing about that house was, not its bizarre commingling of periods, its terra-cotta tigers and cast-iron chrysanthemums, but the fact that inside it was a hollow, spider-haunted shell. There was not even a back to it. There were no floors laid on the joists, weathered planks blocked up the back, and a few forlorn green statues stood amid a dank jungle of creepers and grass and rubbish. Now that was how Macedoine impressed me, and what I was going to say was that by accident I obtained later a peep into his studio, so to speak, and saw his method of putting up that marvellous front, behind which, as you have already learned, there was nothing save the dreamy dirtiness of avarice and ego-mania. No, the solitary and grandiose idea in his mind precluded all recollection of individual humanity. It was not that he forgot us who had been his shipmates. He had never known us. We had not the wit to be knaves, or the credulity to accept him at his own colossal valuation. We ignored his enigmatic claim to greatness, while he passed sublimely along, disdainful of our obvious virtues. For it is presumable that wehadvirtues, since the world—anxious for the replenishing of its larders—hails us nowadays as heroes because we prefer the dangers of sea-life to the tedious boredom of a shore-going existence....
"Yes, I saw into his studio, watched the artist at work at first hand. I might claim the honour, indeed, of being one of the lumps of clay upon which he sought to model his design. Surely an authentic witness this; and I dare say the normal artist's material—since we are fond of saying he blows the breath of life into it—might not join in the universal praise bestowed upon its creator, but might indulge in ironic contemplation of its own birth-pangs and the strange fortunes of its pre-natal existence!
"He did not appear, however, as my stimulated imagination had pictured him appearing, to dominate the situation on theManolaand preoccupy us all with his personality and hypothetical power. Like a higher power, he remained invisible, and Captain Evans, going ashore in a boat with Artemisia and her belongings around him, was the first to encounter him in Grünbaum's office. Encountered him, and came back bursting with the most astonishing tidings. I was sitting in my room that evening after tea, having a quiet pipe and a book, when Jack came down.
"'Come along to my room, Fred,' he said, blowing clouds from his cigar. 'I want to talk to you.'
"'Why not here?' I suggested.
"'No, I want the wife to hear it, too. The gel's gone and the kid's asleep. Come along.'
"And highly mystified, I went along. It seemed like scandal, and I am not above such things once in a way, as you know. I went along, and found Mrs. Evans in her husband's cabin sewing. Nothing would do but I must have a cigar, and the angel child having been dosed with what her mother called 'chempeen', I had to have a glass of that, too. Jack was flushed and excited, and sat down beside me on the red plush settee.
"'What do you say,' he began, in a low, husky tone, 'to a job ashore, Fred?'
"So that was it. The age-old chimera of a 'job ashore.' I looked at Mrs. Evans. Her lips were shut to a thin line. I could see protest and dissent in every line of her body.
"'For you or for me?' I enquired, softly.
"'For me, and p'raps for you, too, if you play your cards. It's like this': and he began a long and complicated explanation. The gel's father, as he called Macedoine, had got the job of secretary to the company and somehow didn't hit it off with old Grünbaum, who was resident concessionaire. Of course I knew Grünbaum's father, who had been the original prospector when the island was Turkish, sold most of his holdings to the French company, but kept a tenth which descended to his son who had succeeded him in the concession. Well, Grünbaum wouldn't hear of a lot of improvements which Macedoine wanted to introduce. The gel's father was full of modern ideas. Wanted to put in electric traction for the mines, with electric elevators and tips, and so on. He also wanted to develop the place, and had a plan for irrigation to attract settlers. Grünbaum wouldn't hear of it. Very conservative Grünbaum was. Got his tenth of the three francs per ton on the ore, and a thousand a year as manager, and was satisfied. Didn't want settlers. He was king of the island and he and Macedoine had had a row. Macedoine was sick of it. All this had been explained to Jack by a young Greek, a clerk in the office, who was sick of it, too, and was 'going in' with Macedoine in his new venture. And what was that? Well, it was this way: Macedoine, who had knocked about a bit, had taken an option on some sites in Saloniki, he had bought a sixty-fourth share in the Turkish steamboat which carried the mails to the islands, and he was going into the development of Saloniki. Had formed a small preliminary company, registered in Athens, to take up the options, and he wanted directors. This young Greek, Nikitos, was to be secretary, knowing the languages, you see. He wanted directors, practical men to superintend the actual business while he, Macedoine, you understand, would be free to control the financial side of the affair. Oh, it was a big thing. There was to be a big hotel, a big brewery, a big shipping business, a big real estate development in Macedonia, a big railroad system, and a big fleet of ships to carry away the freight which comes from all this. Everything was to be big, big! Jack blew clouds of smoke, big clouds, and flourished his fat hands in the air. 'What did I think? Wasn't it worth jumping at? Five founder's shares of a thousand drachmas each in the preliminary company, convertible into preferred stock in the big concern and ten thousand drachmas a year salary. Eh? What did I think? Wasn't it a sound investment? What about it?' And Jack bored into my ribs with his powerful finger.
"I looked at Mrs. Evans. It was evident she had already heard something of this magnificent scheme for making us all millionaires, and her verdict was evident enough also. She never raised her eyes from her sewing where she sat in a cane chair, her hair smooth and shining, her dress smooth and shining, too, the embodiment of prim respectability and prudence. She had often inspired me with a crazy ambition to see her being chased by a lunatic with a razor in his hand, or pursued by a hungry Bengal tiger—to see her in some predicament which would crack the shell of middle-class reserve in which she was secreted and show me the live, scampering human being within: but just now I was appalled by the formidable aspect of her disapproval. Even Jack was aware of it, for he watched me to see what I would say. And what could I say? What could any sane human being, with a knowledge of the world, say? I didn't say anything. I scratched my chin and pretended to be thinking deeply.
"For without claiming any especial perspicuity, I must confess that I have never been the raw material out of which 'suckers' are manufactured. It has always seemed to me pertinent to enquire, when Golcondas and Eldorados are offered for a song, why the vendor should be so anxious to hypothecate his priceless privileges. I suppose I am a skeptic. Business, after all, is very much like Religion: it is founded on Faith. And men like my friend Jack, for instance, have great faith in the written word, much more in the beautifully engraved word. For them all the elaborate bunkum by which the financial spell-binder conceals his sinister intentions is of no avail; the jargon of the prospectus, the glittering generalties, the superb optimism, the assumption of austere rectitude, the galaxy of distinguished patrons who for a consideration lend their names to the venture. For it is a venture, and men have always a pathetic hope that it may become an adventure as well, and that their ship will come labouring home, loaded with gold.
"Women, especially married women, are not at all like that, but they are not so much skeptics as infidels. They start up at the first distant approach of the financier, every plume and pin-feather quivering. They don't believe a word of it. They go down on their knees to their husbands and beg and beseech and supplicate them to have nothing to do with it. They shed tears over their children. They write long letters of distracted eloquence to their mothers. The very extremity of their impotence lends a certain tragic dignity to their tantrums. Of course if the cruel domestic tyrant persists in casting his bread upon the waters and speculation turns out to be a huge success, these Cassandras spend the dividends with a sort of stern joy, as though the money were tainted and they must exchange it for something useless and inconvenient as soon as possible. They know, by instinct, I suppose, that a chiffonier or a Chippendale bedroom suite is not legal tender for stock. They feel they'vegotsomething. It is a truism, I suppose, to say that women are implacable realists.
"Mrs. Evans was. And she knew, too, that I was of her opinion in this matter. She never raised her eyes to look at me; but she knew. Her lips never relaxed from the rigid line they had assumed when I came down, as though she was still waiting, in severe patience, for me to do my obvious duty, and corroborate her opinion.
"'What is he putting into it?' I asked, casually.
"'He's the vendor,' retorted Jack, who had picked up the vernacular pretty quickly. 'He turns over his options and his share in this mail-boat for ten founder's shares and a seat on the board, see? Then, when the big company's formed, he takes up shares in that, and is voted a salary of twenty thousand drachmas a year as financial adviser. That's how Nikitos put it to me. Nikitos knows the country and he says there's any amount of capital available once the thing gets started. These tobacco growers don't know what to do with their money—keep it in those big Turkish trousers, most of it, he reckons. The great thing is to get in at the beginning. What do you say? He wants a ship-master and he wants a man with engineering experience to overlook the shipping business. I told Nikitos I'd talk it over with you. He says the skipper of that Swedish ship that's on the same charter as us is putting three hundred into it—seven thousand five hundred drachmas.'
"'But what did Macedoine say?' I persisted.
"Oh, I didn't seehim,' admitted Jack, looking at the floor between his fat knees. 'Nikitos promised to arrange an interview if we decided to come in.'
"There it was, you see, the touch of the Master. I could not help a silent tribute of admiration to Captain Macedoine for this remarkable reserve, this exquisite demonstration of psychological insight. A man of great affairs! A financial magnate, graciously extending to us the privilege of participating in his immense schemes. 'An interview could be arranged!' It was superb, this method of mesmerizing all the simple-minded skippers and chiefs who came in the iron-ore ships to Ipsilon. I had a brief but vivid vision of us all ashore in Saloniki squabbling and bluffing each other, while Macedoine sat enthroned, apart, the financial adviser, dwelling in oriental magnificence upon our contributions.
"'What do you think, Mrs. Evans?' I asked, taking the bull by the horns. 'Shall we gamble a hundred or so and get rich quick?'
"'You're not married,' she replied, without looking up. 'You can spare it I dare say. It is different for Jack. He hasn't any money to throw away.'
"'Well,' I said, 'I haven't any to throw away, either, I can assure you. I wouldn't go to sea if I had. But Jack thinks this is a great opportunity to invest his money where he can look after it. You see, he'll be drawing a salary as well when he's ashore in Saloniki.'
"Still she didn't look up. She had not budged an inch from her conviction that I agreed with her.
"'I couldn't think of living abroad,' she said, severely. 'I have Babs to consider.'
"I'm afraid Jack hadn't thought of that. He hadn't visualized his wife and baby dwelling in a Turkish town, cut off by thousands of miles of ocean from home. He had been so preoccupied with the divine prospect of 'a job ashore' that he had forgotten the environment. And we had been to Saloniki with coal, time and again. I can't say I blamed her. Residence in southeastern Europe has its drawbacks for a housewife. And quite apart from a natural repugnance to dirt, Mrs. Evans had an unnatural repugnance to anything foreign. She never really left England. She took it with her. She carried with her into her husband's cabin, and along the wild oriental foliage and architecture of Alexandrian streets, the prim and narrow ideals of her native valley. It never occurred to her that those people in turbans and fezzes were human. It never occurred to her when a French or Italian girl passed, dressed with the dainty and charming smartness of her race, that she might possibly be virtuous as well. She shrivelled at their very proximity, drawing the angelic Babs from their contamination. She was uneasy, and would continue to be uneasy, until she was safe at home once more in Threxford, England. That was the burden of her unuttered longing: to get home, to get home, back to the little semi-detached red-brick villa on the Portsmouth Road, which her father had given her for a wedding present and which fifty Macedoines would never induce her to sell.
"For that is what it would mean if Jack invested even two hundred pounds in this wonderful enterprise to develop Macedonia. He had spent several hundred in furnishing the house, and since then most of his two hundred a year had gone in expenses, for he was no niggard either with himself or those he loved. Neither wife nor chick of his should ever lack for anything, he had told me proudly. If a neighbour's child got some expensive and useless contraption to pull about, Babs had one, too, the very next week. If a neighbour's wife got a fur coat, Mrs. Evans had orders to go and do likewise, a more expensive one if possible. What little he had was on deposit in the bank in his wife's name, so that she could draw on it while he was away.
"And so I came round to the unpleasant conviction that while Mrs. Evans was silently awaiting my repudiation of the whole thing, her husband was expecting me to use my eloquence to persuade his wife to let him invest. They say a bachelor has no worries of his own. Which is as well, when his married friends endeavour to make him responsible for their own follies, and use him as a cushion to soften the family collisions. I was an old hand and slipped out. And I really was not thinking so much of my own two hundred pounds salted down in Home Rails, as of Jack's home, when I said, cheerfully:
"'Well, this Captain Macedoine can't object to giving us a little more information. And he can't expect us to have the cash with us. We shall have to go home and sell something and—er—draw the money, eh?'
"'It is quite out of the question,' said Mrs. Evans, biting her thread as though she was severing the spinal chord of the whole proposition.
"'So what I suggest is, Jack will see Captain Macedoine and we'll take the voyage home to think about it.' And I looked at Mrs. Evans to approve my machiavellian astuteness.
"'Oh, it's quite impossible, quite. I couldn't think of leaving England. And we couldn't spare the money.'
"'We shouldn't need the house if we came out here,' said Jack, looking solemnly at his wife. She stiffened.
"'Wecan'tsell the house,' she muttered through her teeth. 'Where should we live? I've told you. Jack, it's quite impossible.'
"'The house 'ud fetch three hundred and fifty,' said Jack, looking at me with round solemn eyes, 'and the furniture 'ud fetch two hundred more. And there's—how much is there in the bank, Madeline? Say sixty odd. Six hundred pounds. You can live cheap in a place like Saloniki.'
"I could see Mrs. Evans was going to pieces. She went dull red and then dull white, dropped a stitch or so, moved her feet, took a deep breath through her nostrils. I was seeing the human being at last. The lunatic with the razor was after her. The Bengal tiger was growling near by.
"'Don't be in such a hurry,' I said, sharply, and for the first time that woman gave me a glance that might be tortured into a faint semblance of gratitude. 'I am not going into a thing until I've studied it, and nobody but a madman would commit himself on anybody's mere say-so. You see Macedoine, Jack, when you go ashore.'
"'You'd better come, too,' he said, rather glumly. 'Old Grünbaum wants some coal if you can spare it. Forty ton, he said. It'll be a fiver for you. Can you let him have it and get to Algiers?'
"'I'll see,' I said. 'I'll go through the bunkers in the morning.' And we left the dangerous subject for the time being. It was positively refreshing to get out of the heavy atmosphere charged with Macedoine's grandiose schemes and Mrs. Evans' premonitions of disaster and beggary for herself and Babs. That angel child slept through it all on the far end of the big plush settee, fenced in with a teak bunk-board, one predatory hand clutching the throat of an enormous teddy bear whose eyes stared upward with the protruding fixity of strangulation, as though even in sleep she found it necessary to cause someone or something acute discomfort. Yes, it was refreshing, for I don't mind admitting that the petty graft of a five-pound note that I was to get from Grünbaum for selling him forty tons of coal was more to me than all the cloudy millions of Macedoine's imagination. I am as anxious as any one to get something for nothing, but this Anglo-Hellenic Development Company, in which I was to get four hundred a year for living in Saloniki, didn't appeal. In the regions of fancy Macedoine was an incomparable inspiration; in business I preferred the unimaginative concessionaire. As I rose to go up on deck, I felt that whether Mrs. Evans was grateful or not I had earned her approbation. Perhaps she, with her feminine intuition—or possibly it was only the instinct of self-preservation—saw the necessity of flattering a poor silly single man, for she remarked, with her head bent over the child's to touch the tumbled locks:
"'I'm sure Mr. Spenlove will give you thebestadvice, dear.'
"And I felt my bosom swell with pride. Oh, women are wonderful! Even an inferior woman, as Mrs. Evans was, with a soul like a parched pea, and a heart so narrow that there was scarcely room in it for husband and child at the same time, a woman of meagre physique and frumpish in dress—even she could do a little in the animal-taming way—could crack a whip and make the lords of the jungle jump through paper hoops, and eat out of her hand. Oh, yes! Even she could harness us and drive us tandem through the narrow gate of her desire. She was sure I would give dear Jack thebestadvice. And in the glow of this benediction I departed.
"Mr. Bloom was on deck, moving softly to and fro, smoking an immense meerschaum carved to the likeness of a skull. It was a warm evening and he had discarded coat and vest, displaying a soiled starched shirt and black suspenders inadequately furnished with buttons. The doorway was in shadow and for a moment I watched him, promenading in the moonlight. He had the air, as he stepped back and forth, of sharing his vigil with some invisible companion. At times he nodded, and waving his pipe toward the rail, might have been holding forth in unspoken words. Getting the best of the argument, of course, I reflected bitterly, and startled him by stepping out in front of him.
"'Good evening, Chief. Fine night for courtin', eh? A night like this reminds me o' the time when I was master. The moonlight, and the cliff, like the Morro. I was under the Cuban flag then you know, Chief. This brings it all back.' He waved his grisly meerschaum and added: 'Lovely place, Havana.'
"'Where's the Third Mate?' said Captain Evans, suddenly emerging from the dark doorway. 'He isn't in his cabin.'