"It's engineer's work," said Mr. Spokesly irritably. The chief made no reply for a moment, merely studying Mr. Spokesly intently.
"See here, Mister," he began, and reached out a huge hand to close the door. "See here, Mister, you're under a misapprehension. Now I'll tell you the whole trouble. You heard Mr. Tolleshunt just now. D'ye know what he meant when he said he was the Thorn in the Flesh? It's a joke of ours in the mess room. He meant your flesh. And the reason for that is that you men up on the bridge are in a false position. Ye have executive power without knowledge. Ye command a ship and what do ye know about a ship? To whom do ye come for help, whether it is steering or driving or discharging or salving or anything? You want the same consideration and power that you have on a sailing-ship, where you know all about the gear and make out yourselves. Here, you just have to stand by while we do it. And on top o' that, you come down here with your silly damn breakages and expect us to be tinkers as well. You think Mr. Tolleshunt is sadly deficient in respect, I dare say. But what of his side o' the question? He's been up all night and all morning on a breakdown. So's the second, who's still at it. So have I, for that matter. We've all three of us got just as good tickets as you. Ye never heard about it? Of course not. What could ye do for us? When ye've pulled that handle on the bridge and heard the gong answer, you're finished! Ye're in charge of a box of mechanism of which ye know nothing. Ye walk about in uniform and talk big about yer work, and what does it all amount to? Ye're a young man, and I'm, well, not so young, and I tell ye friendly, Mister, ye're a joke. Ye're what the newspapers call an anachronism or an anomaly, I forget which. Ye'll never get men like young Tolleshunt, men who know their work from A to Z, to treat ye seriously unless ye take hold and study a ship for what she is, a mass o' machinery. Ye'll have to get shut o' the notion that as soon as ye become officers, ye must lose the use o' your hands. Now there's just as much engineerin' about that binnacle as there is in a kettle or a rabbit hutch. Put one o' your young apprentices to it, and if he can't, make him learn. I've been with old-time skippers who could do anything, from wire-splicing to welding an anchor shackle. They learned in the yard before they went to sea. Your young fellers can do nothing except slather a hose round the decks and ask for higher wages. Now don't be sore because I'm telling ye the truth. We're busy and we're tired. We've all sorts o' trouble you can't understand, vital matters that mean speed and safety. Suppose, after a spell on the bridge in fog, ye were to come down to yer room and find me there with some ash-bags to sew up, eh? Imagine it! Just imagine it!"
He sat there, looking sideways at Mr. Spokesly, his pipe between his enormous thumb and knuckle, asking Mr. Spokesly to imagine this fearsome thing. But Mr. Spokesly's imagination was for the time being out of commission. He was scarcely conscious of the request, so intensely preoccupied was he with the ghastly cleavage between his own estimate of his position and the chief's. Back of all these frank insults to his dignity, Mr. Spokesly scented the sinister prejudice of his commander. As he strode, in severe mental disarray, back to his room, he discovered a conviction that the chief "had been pumpin' the Old Man." Not that he needed any pumping, of course. It would be only too like him to blab to an engineer about his own officers. Well, there it was! Mr. Spokesly pitched the hapless binnacle on the settee and turned to the wash-stand. Perhaps it was due to the course of the London School of Mnemonics, the course in tracing the association of ideas, that when his eye fell on the tumblers in the rack he should think of that abominable trick of the Old Man sneaking in and smelling the glass to see if he, Mr. Spokesly, had been drinking. Couldn't trust him that far! Do what he would he could give no satisfaction. He would ask to be paid off to-morrow as soon as they dropped anchor in Saloniki harbour. That would be the best way. Just pull out of it. They would realize, when he was gone, the sort of man they had lost. The flame of indignation died out again and he sat moodily pondering the difficulty of commanding an adequate appreciation. Command! The word stung him to bodily movement. If only he could once grasp the sceptre, he could defy them all. He would have the whip-hand then. And there were ways, there were ways of making money. Some he had heard of on this run were quadrupling their incomes. Archy had whispered incredible stories of skippers and stewards working together ... working together. Perhaps it would be worth while to stick to the ship for a voyage or so, even if he did have to put up with this sort of thing. They would reach Saloniki in a few hours, and then they would see.
It frequently happens that moods which would logically drive men mad, moods which seem to have no natural antidote, are broken up and neutralized by some entirely fortuitous event. It is not too much to say that Mr. Spokesly's grievances were inducing one of these moods, when the wholesome activity of affairs on the forecastle-head, the keen autumn wind blowing across the bony ridges of Chalcidice, and the professional criticism evoked by the ships outward-bound, blew the foul vapours away. Captain Meredith, whose reflective and unchallenging blue eyes were visible between the weather-cloth and the laced peak of his cap, made a mental note that "the man was doing himself justice." Of course Captain Meredith did not perceive how very wide of the mark his sensible phrase led him. Mr. Spokesly always did himself justice. What he was eternally hunting for, in and out of the maze in which he spent his life, was justice from others. Captain Meredith did not realize that a middle-aged man with a grievance is like a man who has been skinned—to touch him causes the most exquisite agony. Nay, merely to exist, to permit the orderly march of every-day routine, chafes him to the verge of hysteria. It was nothing to Mr. Spokesly that he was serving his country; nothing to him that he was in imminent peril by mine and torpedo. During the voyage he had scarcely noticed the occasional formal slips that came from the wireless house informing them that an enemy submarine was operating in such and such a position, so many miles ahead or astern as the case might be. Mr. Spokesly had never seen a submarine and he didn't want to. The whole business of war in his eyes became a ghastly farce so long as he was not appreciated at his true worth. It might almost be said that at times he was indifferent to the outcome of the gigantic struggle. A horrible unrest assailed him. The world was heaving in a death grapple with the powers of darkness and he was as nothing in the balance.
But as he walked the forecastle-head and theTanganyikapassed through the bottle neck of Kara Burun into the wide waters of the gulf-head, he was restored to a normal attention to the cut-and-dried duties of his calling. There was exhilaration in the thought of foregathering once more with Archy, of going ashore in a new port. And there would be letters. He drew a deep breath. Ada would write. Unconsciously he straightened up. A warm glow suffused him as he recalled her dark-gray, adoring eyes and the deep tremble of her voice as she called him her sailor sweetheart. After all, he was that. He was understood there, he thought, and was comforted. Rung by rung he climbed up out of the dark dank well in which he had been dwelling until, when the compressors had been screwed up tight and theTanganyikawas swinging gently on her eighty fathom of cable, he was recapitulating the heartening words he had last read in his "course" in the London School of Mnemonics.
Think well of yourself and your ability, it ran.Get the habit of believing in your own ambition. This is only another way of saying that faith can move mountains. But remember that to be satisfied with what you are is to lose grip. If you are standing still you are slipping back. This paradox will be shown....
It was some hours later, after dinner, that Captain Meredith sat at the desk in his room looking out of the big side-scuttle at the blood-red and purple of the western sky beyond the Vardar delta. It was such a sunset as one may see across Lake Pontchartrain in the fall, or looking up some aisle of the dark silent forests that fringe the swamps of the Georgia coast. It has the opaque glamour that comes from the dense vapours rising from a marsh, the tangible beauty of a giant curtain rather than the far glories of miles of ambient mountain air. But Captain Meredith was not occupied with esthetic musings. In his hand he held a letter from the superintendent in London, and he sought seclusion, as was his wont, in looking out towards the immense polychrome of the sky. For the letter contained orders which might involve him in some difficulties. He was instructed to file, in an enclosed form, precise particulars of all his officers' records, and return them accompanied by his own opinion as to their fitness for promotion. It would be necessary, he was informed, to engage a large number of additional officers for a fleet which the company had purchased all standing, and the directors were anxious that those already in their employ should have the pick of the billets. It was important, he was warned, that he use care in recommending any man, as the directors proposed to act upon these suggestions, and the failure of a nominee would react unfavourably upon the prestige of the commander responsible for the report.
Like all men who have grown up inside the protecting walls of tradition and routine, Captain Meredith was unable to view a situation without prejudice. Some small portion of free and independent judgment he had, or he would never have become master; but the bulk of the decisions which he had to make were obtained by unconscious reference to rules, written or unwritten. This order, however, involved just that small part of his mental equipment which made his work of interest to him, his imagination if you like. It forced him to take a far wider view than was ordinarily advisable. He was aware of the popular legends which have grown around great commanders—legends of their genius for selecting subordinates, their uncanny aptitude for appraising a man's powers at a glance. Not so easy, Captain Meredith had found it. Like most of us, he had in time cultivated a habit of suspending judgment, a habit of discounting the dreadful efficiency of the new broom, the total abstainer, the college-graduate, and the newly married. What he waited for time to reveal was the man's principle. Without the main girder and tie-ribs of principle, all was as nothing. And yet what comprised this principle Captain Meredith would have been sore put to it to explain. It was not enthusiasm, nor was it will power. It was not even intellect or civil responsibility. It was deeper than any of these, a subtle manifestation of character as elusive and imponderable as a beam of light or the expression on a man's face. Somewhat to his surprise Captain Meredith's reflections showed him that not even compatibility of temperament had much to do with it. He and old McGinnis had never been warm friends, had even had frequent differences on minor details of executive routine. Neither of them would have invited the other to his home, had the opportunity served. That did not matter. He had had some experience of officers quite different from Mr. McGinnis, clever, gay young men, "good mixers," passengers' favourites, and he had discovered that a man may be a brilliant social success and a useless incumbrance at the same time. To state the problem to himself was difficult, but it was forced upon him irresistibly when he endeavoured to formulate his mature conclusions upon the subject of Mr. Spokesly. His chief officer was his chief concern. Of the others he was able to set down a fairly just and intelligible estimate. Young Chippenham was a bundle of amiable possibilities. He would have to get his certificates before the company would make him or break him. The chief engineer was at the other end of the scale. His name was made. Behind him was a career of solid responsibility, of grave crises met and mastered with cool generalship and unbeatable energy. He was one of those men who carry in their own personality the prestige of a race, a nation, and a learned profession. Of the others it would be safe to take his verdict. Mr. Spokesly, therefore, remained the chief source of anxiety. For it was not a simple question of bearing witness to Mr. Spokesly's ability as a seaman, as a navigator, or as a desirable junior officer. The tremendous responsibility from which Captain Meredith shrank was twofold. On the one hand, he had to accept the onus of recommending his chief officer for a command. On the other lay the grave danger of injustice to a brother professional. Mr. Spokesly was a man no longer in his first youth, no doubt engaged to be married, with ambitions and aspirations with which Captain Meredith had the deepest sympathy. It was no small matter to stop a man's promotion. He remembered how he himself, piqued at some ungenerous act of the company, had talked of resignation, and his commander had taken him by the arm and muttered contemptuously, "And spoil yourself for life, eh?" And when asked "How?" that same shipmaster had drawn a brutal picture of a man throwing up a billet just as he was getting a name, entering another employ as a junior, spending years working up to chief mate again, only to find about a score of active, intelligent, and experienced officers on the list ahead of him, and gradually resigning himself to the colourless existence of an elderly failure. Captain Meredith was not the man to condemn a brother officer to such a fate without an overwhelming conviction. Rather would he....
But his thoughts refused to travel that road. He sat looking out at the sombre beauty of the sky, noting the long rigid black bar that divided sharply the dark swamps from the shining pallor of the roadstead. He tapped his teeth with his pencil. No, he was not prepared to jeopardize his own prospects. He had a family. He hoped to spend more time with them later ... after the war. He was beginning to think sea life was narrowing. One got out of touch with so many phases of human interest and activity.... One toiled and moiled, and suffered agonies of anxiety and defeated vigilance; sleep and leisure went by the board for days; one found fault and made mistakes; superior young men in warships asked sarcastic questions during the small hours; and all to what end? After all, one only earned for all this the salary which a successful barrister or surgeon would pay his chauffeur. It was preposterous, when one came to regard it. So Captain Meredith's thoughts ran on, with a sort of light bitterness, sharpening their flavour and inclining him to charity. In more senses than one, he and Mr. Spokesly were in the same boat. He put his papers away in a drawer, picked up his cigar to take the air on the bridge. Without registering any final and irrevocable decision, he had made a mental note that "unless the man made an ass of himself" he would not stand in his way.
The sun, concealed behind a distant range, threw up a ruddy and vigorous glow as from an open cupola, but the roadstead lay in a profound shadow whose edge began to sparkle with coloured lights of a singular distinctness and individuality. It was like watching from the depths of space a congregation of blessed yet still intensely personal spirits on the heavenly shores. They stood in clusters or apart, in long lines or zigzags far up the mountain side. At times they were obliterated by trolley cars—gently moving glares which bore on their foreheads flashing blue-white gems. At other times a fountain of sparks indicated an otherwise invisible puff of smoke from a locomotive, and whole galaxies of shining points would vanish while an ammunition train moved laboriously across the city. But no knowledge of the actual causes could destroy the illusion that the lights were informed with an intelligent vitality. They winked and quivered with mysterious emotions. They went on journeys among other fixed stars of greater magnitude. They came out in boats over the dark water as though possessed with a passion for exploring, and then, losing heart, would go back in a hurry, or else expire. They raced along country roads and vanished in folds of the hills. They danced and were smitten with idiotic immobility. They were born, and they died sudden and inexplicable deaths. They were shocked, or were filled with calm content. Low down on the edge of the shore, where an open-air cinema was working convulsively, the lights had collected in some excitement around the screen. Captain Meredith, raising his night glasses to inspect this novel portent, imagined himself watching a square hole in a dark spangled curtain, through which a drama of inconceivable brightness and rapidity could be observed. It was, the captain imagined whimsically, like watching a huge brain at work, if such a thing were possible. He occasionally took refuge from himself in such reflections. Without any pretence to originality, he occasionally found himself in possession of thoughts for which custom had provided no suitable phrase. With the humility common to those of gentle birth who have followed the sea, he kept the results to himself. Even in letters to his wife, he adhered to the conventional insipidity that makes an Englishman's letters home one of the wonders of the world. He had become somewhat fearful of originality, even in others, during his honeymoon, when he had tried timidly to interest his wife in a novel he was reading. It was a novel about sailors and the sea, of all things in the world, and Captain Meredith had been so intrigued with the notion of a story written about sailors without distorting them out of all recognition that he couldn't keep it to himself. And he had been completely nonplussed when his gentle, blonde, and slightly angular young wife had displayed not merely a tepid lack of interest but downright dislike. "I don't like it," she had said acidly, and returned to her own book, an interminable tale of gipsies and highwaymen in masks, and a "reigning toast" with forty thousand pounds. They had been married some time before he realized just what it was she didn't like in the story. And when he realized it, he put the thought from him in trepidation, for he was prepared to sacrifice everything for her sake. She embodied for him all that he craved of England. She was typical, as she bent over their one child, a flaxen-haired little girl with incredibly thin limbs. And he was typical, too—as he thought of them and their setting at Ealing—the modern Englishman who has given intellectual hostages to fortune.
Mr. Spokesly once said in so many words that he disbelieved utterly in premonition. There was, he said, nothing in it. If there were, he remarked, we should be different. When pressed, he admitted freely that if we could read the signs we might get adequate warning of impending events; but by the time we have gotten the experience we are too old to bother about the future at all. This, of course, was when the war was finished and Mr. Spokesly, with the rest of the Merchant Service, had slipped back into that obscure neglect from which they had temporarily emerged. The gist of his remarks, therefore, seems to bear out the view that he had not the faintest notion, when he went ashore that evening in Saloniki with the gifted and amusing Mr. Bates, that he was on the brink of a fundamental change in his life. Looking back, he was almost induced to imagine that it was someone else who came ashore with Mr. Bates, a sort of distant relation, say, who had borrowed his body for the evening. And he was inclined to admit that, assuming what the philosophers say is true—that the only use of knowledge is for the purpose of action—it would preserve our idealism if our subconscious adumbrations could only be induced to function in a more emphatic manner.
The reason for interjecting this sample of Mr. Spokesly's later mentality is to be rid of any possible ambiguity. If Mr. Spokesly had been nothing more than Mr. Bates's boon companion his story would not be worth telling, there being obviously so many other more interesting people in the world. We have seen that Mr. Spokesly himself was aware of his real value, and had appealed to the London School of Mnemonics to elucidate his latent self from the commonplace shell in which he strove. The London School of Mnemonics responded nobly according to its doctrines. It supplied him with an astonishing quantity of intellectual fuel, so to say, but omitted to indicate how it was to be ignited. Indeed, it is very singular how public and commercial organizations continually lose sight of the fact that in the spiritual world spontaneous combustion does not exist. And it is also true that the stark and secular desires of a man's soul, however powerful they may be to achieve a multiplicity of base ends, can do nothing for the man himself unless they are illuminated and shot through by some grand passion, whether of friendship, religion, or love. Which of these, depends upon the man. Some fortunate beings are the exponents of all three. Most of us, and Mr. Spokesly was one, are destined to know very little of either friendship or religion. So much might have been postulated. He was under no illusions as to his emotional resources. His remark that he could fall in love with almost any girl, so long as she had a bit o' money, was really a very fine declaration of extreme modesty. The virtuous are less humble. They lay extravagant claims to the privilege of having an ideal. Mr. Spokesly, as he sat beside Mr. Bates, who was smiling to himself in the darkness, watched the flashing lights of the Place de la Liberté grow larger and larger; and, as the din of the traffic reached his ears, experienced that feeling of pleasant and passive receptivity which he learned in time to know as the inevitable precursor of some momentous change.
Not so Mr. Bates, who smiled in the darkness. Mr. Bates was one of those human beings who manifest the shadowless and unwinking intelligence of the lower animals. The past, to Mr. Bates, was a period in which he had done well. The future was a period in which he would do well. Between these two delectable countries Mr. Bates moved gently along, a slightly intoxicated optimist. The perils of the sea and of war, the hatred of man or the wrath of God made no conscious impression upon Mr. Bates at all. Any of them might crush him at any moment, but he proceeded steadily upon his predatory way very much as a spider crossing a path proceeds until some careless but omnipotent passer crushes it beneath his heel. His attitude towards the gigantic engines of human destiny, which preoccupy most of us so much, was expressed in the pussy-cat smile in the darkness—a smile unseen and undesired.
"We'll go into Floka's first," he remarked, as the boat bumped the marble steps between the kiosks of the Place. He stood up, and his smile was illuminated by the sizzling glare of the arc lights along the quay, a smile that was, as we have said, fitted on over his face, and which bobbed up and down in obedience to the rhythmic undulations of the boat in the water. They waited for a moment until the Greek had made fast, and then stepped ashore.
"Why, is that a good place?" enquired Mr. Spokesly.
"Oh, yes. Thebestplace. My friend, he goes there often. By and by, of course, we'll go along and see the talent. I'll show you, my boy. Believe me...." They crossed the car lines and walked towards the café which Mr. Bates's friend honoured. Floka's was full. The little tables outside were thickly populated with gentlemen engaged in the national pastime of cigarette-smoking and coffee-drinking, and the grandiose interior, as severe and lofty and dirty as a Balkan politician, was thick with smoke and murmurous with conversation and the consumption of food. Mr. Bates led the way to a far corner where a long thin man, his frock coat falling away open from a heavily brocaded vest with onyx buttons, and his scarlet tarboosh on one side of his head, was lolling on the crimson plush cushions. In one hand he held the stem of an amber-mouthednarghileh. On the table was an empty coffee cup and a glass of mastic. Across his long thin thighs lay a Greek newspaper. He was reclining completely inert, gazing moodily across the crowded restaurant. The alteration in his demeanour when he became aware of Mr. Bates standing before him was dramatic. It was as though he had suddenly seen a very funny joke and had been subjected to an electric current of high voltage at the same time. He sprang to his feet with extraordinary animation, and his face was contorted from a sombre melancholy to what seemed to be an almost demoniac joy. It would be a solecism to say he looked as though a fortune had been left him. No one was at all likely to leave Mr. Dainopoulos a fortune. No one had ever left anything of value within his reach without regretting it extremely. It will suffice to say that his features registered a certain degree of pleasure upon seeing Mr. Bates.
"Why, my dear friend!" he exclaimed in a sort of muffled scream, and he wrung the honest hand of Mr. Bates as though that gentleman had only that moment rescued him from a combination of drowning and bankruptcy. "And how are you? Sit down if you please. What will you have to drink? You must be—what you call it?—dry. Ha-ha! Sit down. This is good luck. Your friend? I am very pleased. Sit down please. Here!" He clapped his hands with frightful vehemence, and held up a distracted waiter who was in full flight towards a distant table with a loaded tray. Mr. Dainopoulos, gently pressing Mr. Bates and Mr. Spokesly into two chairs, addressed the waiter as Herakles and gave him an order which sounded to his guests like a loose board being ripped forcibly from a nailed-up box. Mr. Spokesly, sitting immediately opposite this monster of hospitality, was not favourably impressed. Mr. Dainopoulos rarely impressed people favourably at first. The long emaciated face had the texture of the uppers of an old buckskin shoe. The bloodshot brown eyes in their reddened sockets seemed in danger of falling into the great pouches of loose skin below them. The mouth, full of sharp yellow teeth and open as though about to yawn, had been slit back to the salience of the jaw at some time and had been sewn up in a sketchy fashion indicated by a white zig-zag scar like a flash of lightning. As he talked this scar worked with disconcerting vivacity. Mr. Spokesly turned with relief to the whiskies and sodas which appeared, borne by the industrious Herakles.
"And how is business?" asked Mr. Bates, having lifted his glass and set it down empty. Beyond three or four sherries and bitters and a glass of gin and vermouth, before coming ashore, he had drunk nothing all day. He was thirsty. "And how is business?"
A simple question. And yet Mr. Dainopoulos did not render a simple answer. He regarded Mr. Bates for a moment and then turned his head cautiously to right and left. Preserving an impressive silence he caught Mr. Spokesly's eyes and smiled, taking a suck at hisnarghileh. It was at this juncture that two French naval officers, seated at a distant table and smoking cigarettes in long ivory holders (to keep the smoke from their beards), exchanged opinions upon the folly of their British allies in permitting the officers of ships to come ashore in civilian attire.
"You are quite sure, of course, that theyareofficers of a transport?" said the elder, observing with attention.
"Quite, my commandant. From theTanganyika, arrived to-day. The little one I know well. The other I observed upon the forecastle as she anchored."
"But what are they doing in company withhim?"
The lieutenant raised his shoulders.
"I imagine, my commandant, that they do a little business in hashish. But in any case it is not what you imagine. The English do not spy."
"But Dainopoulos may use them, eh?"
"Impossible, my commandant. You do not know them. I do. As you are aware, I was in the Crédit Lyonnais in Lombard Street. If Mr. Dainopoulos attempted to enlist their services they would batter his head in with his ownnarghileh. They have no compunction about robbing their government by peculation, but treachery is not theirmétier. And our friend knows it quite well."
"Business," observed Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly, "is very bad."
Mr. Bates seemed very amused at this and leaned over the dirty marble-topped table.
"Count us both in, my friend here and me, for the same as last time. How about it, eh?"
"Oh!" Mr. Dainopoulos pulled his extended frame up and put his elbows on the table, his eyes blinking quickly. "Oh, that's all right. Yes, certainly. But I mean to say business is very bad. You would not believe me, Mister, but the chances that are going, and all for a little management, are lost! Incredible! Only this week"—here he lowered his voice so that Mr. Spokesly, who was listening with undivided attention, scarcely gathered the words—"only this week, I could have made—ah, much money—if I had with me an Englishman who knows the business. Ten thousand drachma, easy as that!" Mr. Dainopoulos snapped his fingers without a sound and looked depressed.
Mr. Bates did not look depressed. His smile evaporated and he looked down his nose into his moustache with an expression of ruffled propriety.
"I must say——" he began, and added, after a pause, "'Course we hadn't arrived, but I should 'ave thought, seein' we was due here, you might have counted on me."
Mr. Dainopoulos regarded Mr. Bates as though he were sizing him up for the first time and found him to amount to an almost negligible quantity. And then he shook his head.
"No," he murmured in a muffled tone. "That's not what I meant. What I wanted—too late now, of course—was a Kapitan."
Mr. Bates, touching Mr. Spokesly's foot with his own, emitted a snigger right in the face of Mr. Dainopoulos.
"And what about it?" he queried, impudently. "My friend here's got a master's ticket. What's the matter with him? I'm surprised——"
He was. To Mr. Bates it was unpleasant to discover that Mr. Dainopoulos should doubt his ability to cope with any situation which involved a financial reward. That gentleman, however, was not exclusively preoccupied with Mr. Bates and his emotions. He turned immediately to Mr. Spokesly who sat quietly twisting his glass of whiskey on the marble table. The pale, prominent, and bloodshot brown eyes examined Mr. Spokesly with passionless attention. Mr. Dainopoulos had filled many posts in his career. Quite apart from his participation in what he discreetly alluded to as "the wars," he had rendered some slight assistance to the builders of the Panama Canal as stoker on an excavator, he had worked in a felt-hat factory in Newark, New Jersey; he had been a waiter in a Greek café near Franklin Square, New York; he had held the position of clerk in the warehouse of a Turkish tobacco importer in London; and he had also been an assistant purser in one of the Roumanian Lloyd mail steamers which used to run from Costanza to Alexandria. He was one of those people who, as the saying is, "could write a book," which means they can do or have done almost everything except write a book. Such people are rarely of a literary turn. Mr. Dainopoulos certainly was not. But he had one faculty which, if literary people only knew it, is of use even in literature. He could size a man up. By a natural turn of judgment, so necessary to success in his business as a "general merchant and exporter" coupled with ceaseless practice, he had acquired a skill in sizing up which seemed as effortless and intuitive as the driving of a fine golfer or the wrist-work of a professional billiard player. The London School of Mnemonics could teach Mr. Dainopoulos nothing about practical psychology. He might even have given them some useful hints. In the present instance he was not at a loss. He waited, however, for Mr. Spokesly to make some comment.
"That's right enough," said the latter, leaning forward and smiling. "But I'd have to know a little more of the game, you understand? There's a war on, you know. Can't be too careful."
"True," assented Mr. Dainopoulos reflectively and keeping his prominent eyes fixed upon Mr. Spokesly. "You do not wish, then, to take a chance?"
"Oh, achance!" Mr. Spokesly achieved a certain irony as he emphasized the last word. "Your ideas of a chance and mine might be different. S'pose we have another drink."
The watchful Herakles came near as Mr. Spokesly lifted his hand, and took the order.
The fact was—and it may be presumed that Mr. Dainopoulos perceived it sufficiently well to make allowance for it—that Mr. Spokesly, as he sat beside Archy Bates and listened to the conversation, had experienced a sudden access of caution. Archy was not drunk, and as far as was humanly known, never would be really drunk; but he was sufficiently saturated to raise a certain distrust in the mind of a perfectly sober man. It may even be said that while Mr. Spokesly had no clear intention of deserting his chum Archy, he was beginning to wish that Archy were not indispensable in any scheme that might be proposed. And the occasional looks that various British and French officers cast in their direction made Mr. Spokesly uneasy. He suddenly realized the other aspect of making money in a shady fashion: that one has to do business with shady people. Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, looked extremely shady. Archy Bates, his long, sharp nose buried in a fresh whiskey and soda, his hat pushed back revealing the oiled graying hair parted in the middle and slicked back above his ears with their purple veins; Archy, picking dreamily among the pieces of fish and beetroot which had been served on little dishes with the drinks, looked extraordinarily like a rat picking at garbage. All very well, Mr. Spokesly reflected, to buy hashish and sell it in Egypt at four or five hundred per cent. profit, so long as the business could be transacted in a gentlemanly manner. But this new development—he did not see his way clear to accepting Mr. Dainopoulos as an employer. He was not fastidious—he had worked for a Chinese ship owner—but the officers at the other tables, in their inconceivably correct uniforms and polished harness, made him uneasy. Mr. Spokesly knew perfectly well that these people did not consider him as one of themselves. Even amid the noise and chaffering of a Saloniki café, rubbing shoulders with the uniforms of French, Greek, Serbian, Russian, and Italian officers, these men of his own race, he knew, never forgot the abyss that separates the seafaring man from themselves, the socialcrevassewhich even Armageddon was powerless to abolish. Nevertheless, he felt he could never abandon for ever the possibility of entering, some day, the magic circle. It is this peculiarity of the English temperament which so often paralyses its victim at the very moment when he needs to be in possession of all his faculties, when the chance, perhaps of a lifetime, suddenly appears at his elbow.
But Mr. Dainopoulos, as has been said, could size a man up. He was intuitively aware that he had made no great impression upon Mr. Spokesly. And he had a special desire, now that chance had thrown them together, to engage the interest of a skilled navigator. He had received an offer which might result in a very large profit indeed. The business to which he had been referring, a mere matter of running a small cargo of canned goods down to a certain island and transferring it to an Austrian submarine, was a trifle. One could do that every day, right under the noses and beards of a dozen French naval officers. This was a much bigger affair. It involved the sale, at huge profit, of one of his little steamers which he had purchased for a song from the French early in the war, but it also involved the safe conduct of the vessel into an enemy port. His friends in Anatolia might compensate him ultimately for the destruction of his ship by an Allied warship and the crew could look out for themselves; but if the captain lost her by grounding, it would be a disaster of the first magnitude. All this passed through the nimble mind of Mr. Dainopoulos while Mr. Spokesly waited for further light on the nature of the service required. He saw the difficulty and, knowing the English character, he took his measure accordingly. He smiled.
"You come to my house and have some supper?" he remarked. "My wife would be pleased, I'm sure."
Mr. Spokesly looked at Archy Bates. That gentleman was no longer paying attention. In his own peculiar fashion he had arrived at some sort of intuitive recognition of the fact that Mr. Dainopoulos had no intention of letting him in on this affair. Well, that was all right, Mr. Bates reflected in one of those appallingly clear and coherent moments which suddenly open in the mentality of dipsomaniacs. That was all right. They were making a lot of money. Big risk for him, by Jove! but he was willing to shoulder it. By Jove! That last time in Port Said, when the police rushed into his cabin not five minutes after the laundryman, who also took his rake-off, had carried the stuff ashore in a boat-load of dirty sheets. It was a near thing. Two hundred quid he had netted over that, paid in Turkish gold. And they had found the bit of burlap in which it had been wrapped. He saw the chief of police now, standing there, in his bright red fez, and white uniform, legs apart, holding the thing to his nose. Hashish, by Jove! A close call! "What's this?" Mr. Bates jumped and made the table shake. Mr. Spokesly was speaking. For a moment he had forgotten where he was. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He smiled with relief.
"Shall we go?" repeated Mr. Spokesly. Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Bates shook his head. He was still smiling with relief, for that brief moment, during which his consciousness had slipped back a couple of months, as it were, and reënacted the scene in his cabin, had been very real. Five years in an Egyptian penitentiary missed by five minutes and a quick-witted explanation! While he shook his head and smiled into Mr. Spokesly's face he was thinking that he would take twice as much this time, and he knew where to hide it. Moreover, and he smiled more like a cat than ever, the millions of lines round his eyes deepening, he reflected that if Mr. Spokesly went in on this there was practically no risk at all. Nothing easier than to say——Eh, what? No! He was going along to the Amphitryon, to see a little friend of his. See them later. Aw—ri!
It was a notable feature of Mr. Bates's temperamental failing that it never affected his legs. In earlier years, as a saloon waiter, he had often astounded his shipmates by getting as drunk as a lord before dinner, and yet going down the long dining saloon of a great liner, a plate of soup in each hand, and depositing them in front of passengers in evening dress, without ever an accident. Perhaps his demeanour was a shade more deliberate, his attention a trifle more abstracted, on these occasions; that was all. And now, as he rose and went towards the door of Floka's, after a dignified farewell to Mr. Dainopoulos, although an occasional wandering eye fastened upon him for a moment, Mr. Bates never betrayed himself. He paused courteously at the door while a major with his brigadier in tow passed in, monocles reflecting the light in a blind white glare so that they resembled Cyclops, and then he walked out gently himself, and was immediately lost in the noise and bustle of the Place.
Mr. Dainopoulos looked at Mr. Spokesly and thrust a thumb into the armhole of his coat.
"Your friend," he began in a low mutter, "him and me we do big business—you understand?—but all the same he drink too much highball. No good, eh?"
"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "he's his own master, and he can please himself about that. To tell the truth, though, if there's anything in—what you were speaking of, I'd just as soon he wasn't in it. You see what I mean?" Mr. Dainopoulos nodded and drew at hisnarghileh. "He's a friend of mine, and very good friend, too, but we got to draw a line somewhere." Again Mr. Dainopoulos nodded as he leaned across the table.
"And another thing!" he remarked in his muffled tones, and he held the mouthpiece of thenarghilehjust in front of his lips as though it were a speaking tube and he was engaged in conversation with someone at the other end. He even cast his eyes down, and seemed to abandon Mr. Spokesly entirely. "And another thing. Mr. Bates, he very fond—you know—very fond of themademoiselles. That's all right. If you like them, very good. But Mr. Bates, he comes all the time to me. Want me—you understand? Now, I do no business in that line, none at all. I don't like it. Plenty men tell you, 'Oh, yes, you come with me.' You understand? But me, I got my family to think about.Nowyou understand?"
"It is not respectable," added Mr. Dainopoulos in a deep tone, and relapsed into silence and thenarghileh.
Mr. Spokesly did not reply. Even when they had left the café and were being driven along thequaiin the direction of the White Tower, on their left the dazzle and noise ofcafés-chantantand cinemas, on their right the intense darkness of the Gulf, he did no more than acquiesce in what Mr. Dainopoulos was saying. For to tell the truth, Mr. Spokesly was making certain readjustments within himself. Neither Mr. Bates nor Mr. Dainopoulos was of vital importance to the growth of his soul, yet they come in here. They were backgrounds on which were silhouetted combinations novel to him. He had to find room in his mind for the conception of a shady person who cultivated the domestic virtues. Mr. Spokesly might be a man of inferior calibre, easily swayed by the prospect of easy money, but his mind swung naturally to the equilibriums of respectability. "All that," as he called it, "was a thing o' the past." He was tired of the shabby and meretricious byways he had frequented, in moderation, for so long. With more knowledge of introspection he would have known this as one of the signs of coming change. Coming events are very often a glorified reincarnation of dead desires. Dreams come true. Fortunate men recognize them in time.
"Your family?" said Mr. Spokesly, and the man beside him turned towards him and said:
"When I say 'family' I mean 'my wife.'"
Mr. Spokesly had no definite image in his mind of the domestic arrangements of a man like Mr. Dainopoulos. The scarlet tarboosh on that gentleman's head leaned the Englishman's fancy to a harem. In any case, the Island Race imagine that every Levantine who wears a fez is a Turk, that every Turk is a polygamist, and finally that polygamy implies a score or two of wives locked up in cupboards. But the tone in which Mr. Dainopoulos uttered the word "wife" precluded anything of this sort. It was a tone which Mr. Spokesly immediately comprehended. It was the tone in which Englishmen refer to their most valued possession and their embodied ideals. There is no mistaking it. There is nothing like it in the world. It is a tone implying an authorized and expurgated edition of the speaker's emotional odyssey.
"And so," he went on, "you can see how I don't want to get mixed up in any of these here places." And he opened his hand towards the subdued glare of the cafés and dance halls. Mr. Spokesly saw. He saw also, in imagination, Archy Bates sitting, hand to moustache, amid the chalk-faced hetairai of Saloniki, second-rate harpies who had had their day on the Parisiantrottoirs, and who had been shipped by a benevolent government to assuage the ennui of theArmée d'Orient. He saw them from time to time with his physical eyes, too, as they came to the doors of their refuges and, setting off to visit confederates, flung a glance of shrewd appraisal towards the passing vehicle.
"Yes," he muttered. "I see, Mr.—Mr.——"
"Dainopoulos," said that gentleman.
"Mr. Dainopoulos, I'm no saint, y'understand, but all the same—well, a man wants something, y'understand? Besides," added Mr. Spokesly, "'twixt you an' me an' the stern-post, I'm engaged."
"You don't tell me!" exclaimed Mr. Dainopoulos in that peculiarly gratifying fashion which seemed to imply that this was the first betrothal announced since the Fall of Constantinople. "You don't tell—and I bet you what you like she's English, eh?"
"Yes, she's English all right," said Mr. Spokesly, feeling somewhat embarrassed by his friend's triumphant cordiality. "Pretty safe bet, that," he added as the carriage stopped in front of a black, solid wooden gate in a high yellow wall.
"Safe enough?" laughed Mr. Dainopoulos, not quite seizing the point intended. "Why, sure! Englishwomen are the best of all. I ought to know. Ha-ha!" and he slapped Mr. Spokesly's knee while his other hand sought the price of the ride. Mr. Spokesly failed to appreciate this approval of Englishwomen. A suspicion shot through his mind. He looked at the dark gate in the yellow wall. What, precisely, did this man mean by that last remark? Was all this talk of family and so forth a blind? Was he, Mr. Spokesly, on the brink of an adventure? It must be confessed that he would not have objected to that; but his gorge rose in spite of him at the reference to Englishwomen.
"I don't quite understand," he remarked in a low tone. "How do you happen to know so much about 'em?"
Mr. Dainopoulos laughed again and handed the fare to the driver. He stepped out, held a bunch of keys to the light of the carriage lamp, and selected one. Then he beckoned to Mr. Spokesly to alight.
"I'll tell you, Mister," he said, as he stooped, inserted the key, turned it, and pushed open the gate. "Because I married one myself."
Mr. Spokesly, in a state of considerable astonishment, sat by a balconied upper window and tried to get his recent experiences into some sort of focus. That last remark of Mr. Dainopoulos, that he had married one himself, had dislocated his guest's faculties, so that Mr. Spokesly was unable to note clearly by what means he had arrived at his present position, a balconied window on his right and in front of him a woman lying on a sofa. A woman whose brown hair, extraordinarily long and fine, was a glossy pile pressed into the pillow, and whose thin hand he had just relinquished.
"Well," he said, as Mr. Dainopoulos came forward with a lamp, his swart and damaged features giving him the air of a ferocious genie about to perform some nefarious experiment. "Well, I must say, I'm surprised."
Mrs. Dainopoulos continued to gaze straight out into the darkness over the Gulf.
"Of course," agreed her husband, seating himself and reaching for a large briar pipe. "Of course. And I'll bet you'd be still more surprised if you only knew—eh, Alice?" He screwed up one eye and looked prodigiously sly at his wife with the other, his palms slowly rubbing up some tobacco. Mrs. Dainopoulos did not remove her eyes from the darkness beyond the shore. She only murmured in a curt voice:
"Never mind that now, Boris."
"But it ain't anything to be ashamed of, you know," he returned earnestly, packing his pipe in a way that made Mr. Spokesly want to snatch it from him and do it properly.
"I know, but it wouldn't interest Mr. Spokesly, I'm quite certain," she muttered, and she suddenly looked at their visitor and smiled. It reassured that gentleman, as it was intended to do, that he was in no way responsible for this minute difference of viewpoint between husband and wife. Mr. Spokesly smiled, too.
"Don't mind me," he remarked, lighting a cigarette and offering the match to Mr. Dainopoulos. After sucking valiantly for a while and achieving a small red glow in one corner of the bowl, the latter rose and regarded his wife and his guest attentively for a moment.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said at length, and looked at his pipe, which was already out. "I'll go in and see Malleotis for a while. He'll be back by now. And you two can have a little talk before we have supper."
"Well, don't be all night. You know, when you and Mr. Malleotis get talking business——"
The woman on the couch paused, regarding her husband as he bent his head over her. Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly put his pipe in his pocket and put his hands on either side of the pillow. Mr. Spokesly could see nothing save the man's broad, humped shoulders. There was a moment of silence. Mr. Spokesly, very much embarrassed, looked out of the window. When he turned his head again Mr. Dainopoulos was putting on a large tweed cap and walking out of the door.
"I suppose," Mr. Spokesly remarked, and fixed his eyes upon the extremely decorative Scotch travelling rug which covered the woman's limbs, "I suppose he doesn't go off every evening and leave you here." He spoke jocosely. Mrs. Dainopoulos looked out into the darkness. There was a faint colour in her cheeks, as though the sudden revelation of the passion she could evoke had filled her with exquisite shame. Or perhaps pride. Her clear, delicate English face, the mouth barely closed, the short straight nose slightly raised, the brown hair spread in a slight disorder upon the pillow, were surely indicating pride. Some inkling of this possibility came to Mr. Spokesly, and he sat regarding her, while he waited for her to speak, and wondering how a woman like her had come to marry one of these here dagoes. Peculiar creatures, women, Mr. Spokesly thought; knowing nothing whatever about them, it may be mentioned. And when Mrs. Dainopoulos turned to look at him, soon after she began to speak, the prevailing fancy at the back of his mind was "She thinks I don't know anything about the ladies! Fancy that!"
"His business takes him out a good deal," she said in a low voice, "but he wouldn't go if he could help it. To-night is unusual."
"The pleasure is mine," said Mr. Spokesly.
"Not altogether," she smiled, and her speech became perceptibly more racy and rapid. "Don't flatter yourself. Mr. Dainopoulos was thinking of me."
"I dare say he does a good deal of that."
The woman on the sofa laced her fingers lightly and regarded her guest afresh.
"You are saucy," she murmured with a faint smile. Mr. Spokesly smiled more broadly. He was saucy, but he was certainly at home now with his companion. There was in her last speech, in the accent and inflection, something incommunicably indigenous, something no alien ever has or ever will compass.
"No need to ask what part of England you come from," he ventured.
"No?" she queried. "There seems nothing you don't know."
"Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Dainopoulos, that ain't fair. I can't sit here and twiddle my thumbs all the evening, can I?Thatwouldn't be giving you any pleasure as far as I'm aware. The boss didn't reckon I was going to play a mandolin or sing, did he?"
"Well, since you're so clever, what's the answer?"
"Not so very many miles from Charing Cross," he hazarded.
"Wonderful!" she said, laying her head back and smiling. Mr. Spokesly admired the pretty throat. "You ought to be in the secret service. Perhaps you are," she added.
"Of course," he agreed. "They've sent me out to see where all the nice London girls have got to. But am I right?"
She nodded.
"Haverstock Hill," she said quietly.
"No! Do you know Mafeking Road? When I was a kid we lived at sixty-eight."
"Yes, I know it. Don't you live round there now?"
"No, not now. We live down Twickenham way now."
And Mr. Spokesly began to tell his own recent history, touching lightly upon the pathos of Eastern exile, the journey home to join up, and his conviction that after all he would be a fool to go soldiering while the ships had to be kept running. And he added as a kind of immaterial postscript:
"And then, o' course, while I was at home I got engaged."
Mrs. Dainopoulos stared at him and broke into a brief titter behind a handkerchief.
"That'sa nice way to give out the information," she remarked. "Anybody'd think getting engaged was like buying a railway ticket or sending a postal order. Is she nice?"
"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "Ithink so."
"Very enthusiastic!" commented the lady with considerable spirit. "Dark or fair?"
"Well," he repeated, "I should say dark myself."
"You don't intend to take any chances," Mrs. Dainopoulos retorted. "Haven't you a photo to show me?"
Mr. Spokesly felt his pockets, took out a wallet containing a number of unconvincing documents, some postage stamps and a five-piaster note.
"Matter of fact," he said, "I don't seem to have one with me. I got one on the ship, though," he went on. "Bring it ashore to-morrow."
"Sure you didn't tear it up by mistake or send it away in the laundry?" she demanded, watching him intently.
"Oh, all right, go on with the sarcasm," he protested, but enjoying it very much none the less. "Mr. Dainopoulos, you'll be telling me, has got your hair in a locket, I suppose."
Mr. Spokesly stopped abruptly. He saw an expression of extraordinary radiance on the girl's face as she lay there, her thin pale fingers holding the handkerchief by the corner. It suddenly occurred to Mr. Spokesly that this woman was loved. For the first time in his life he became aware of a woman's private emotional existence. He achieved a dim comprehension of the novel fact that a woman might have her own views of these great matters. He did not phrase it quite like this. He only sat looking at the girl on the sofa and remarking to himself that women were peculiar.
"Wouldn't you do that?" she demanded. The light in her eyes diminished to a steady warm regard.
And Mr. Spokesly began to assert himself once more. Women being so peculiar, there was no sense in being bullied into any of this here sentiment. He was a man of the world about to make a—what was it called? Marriage of convenience ... something like that. Not that exactly, either. Ada was a darned fine girl. This invalid lady seemed to think he didn't know what love was.
"Who? Me?" he ejaculated. "Can't say as I see myself, I admit. Not in my line. Not in any Englishman's line, I don't think. And speaking for myself, Mrs. Dainopoulos, I reckon I'm past that sort of thing, you know. Can't teach an old dog new tricks, can you? I look at it this way: so long as there's enough to keep the pot boiling, it's easy enough to fall in love with anybody, you see, and when you're married ... soon get used to it. Ada and me, we'resensible."
"You've got it all arranged, then," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, smiling faintly and looking out into the darkness once more.
"What's the use o' bein' anything else?" inquired Mr. Spokesly, resuming something of the perfect officer pose, hard-bitten, practical, and matter-of-fact. "All that business o' dyin' o' love, you know, I reckon's so much moon-shine. All right in a novel, o' course, but not in real life.Youdon't reckon there's anything in it, really, I mean?" he asked doubtfully.
"I think everything's in it," she sighed. "I think it must be horrible, being married, without it. Haven't you felt you couldn't do without her? That you'd die if you didn't get her; work, and do somebody else in the eye for her? Haven't you?"
"That lets me out," he said soberly, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I'm not guilty."
There was a brief silence. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled. He could not fit this experience in with one of the two cardinal points in an Englishman's creed, the belief that no English girl can really love a foreigner. The other, of course, is that no foreign girl is really virtuous.
"That's a nice thing to say!" she retorted, trembling a little with her emotions. "If that's the new way they have at home——"
"Oh, I don't know," he began and he looked at her. "I'm afraid you're getting all upset. I'm sorry, really, I didn't think you'd have been so serious about it. As if it mattered to you!"
"I'm thinking ofher," she said with a little hysterical sob. "You mustn't——"
Mr. Spokesly was in a quandary again. If he put Ada's adoration in its true perspective, he would not think very highly of himself. He took no real pleasure in speaking of himself as a promised man even to a married woman. Yet how was he to get this particular married woman in delicate health and extremely robust emotions to see him as a human being and not a monster of cold-blooded caution? And there was another problem. What of this new and astonishing revelation—new and astonishing to him, at any rate—that love, to a woman, is not a mere decoction of bliss administered by a powerful and benevolent male, but a highly complicated universe of subjective illusions in which the lover is only dimly seen as a necessary but disturbing phantom of gross and agonizing ineptitudes? The wonder, however, is not that Mr. Spokesly was slow to discover this, but that he did not live and die, as many men do, without even suspecting it. He nodded his head slightly as he replied:
"You're right in a way," he muttered. "She thinks I'm—well, she thinks I'm brave to go to sea in war-time!" The extreme incongruity of such an hallucination made him giggle.
"She would! You are!" said the woman on the couch, almost irritably. "What do you want to laugh for? Don't you see what you miss?" she added in illogical annoyance.
"That the way you feel about Mr. Dainopoulos?" Mr. Spokesly asked. The woman turned her face so that the lamplight illumined her coiled hair and for a moment she did not reply. Then she said, her face still in the shadow:
"You'd only laugh if I told you."
"No," declared Mr. Spokesly. "Honest I won't. Laugh at meself—yes. But you—that's different."
"But you don't believe in love at first sight, I can see very well."
"I only said I hadn't anything like that happen to me," he replied slowly, pondering. "But I s'pose it has to be something like that in a case like yours."
"I don't understand you."
"Well, you being English, you see, and Mr. Dainopoulos a foreigner."
"As an excuse, I suppose? Father made the same remark, but I never thanked him."
Mr. Spokesly looked at her soberly. Her eyes were bright and resolute, and the lamplight threw into salience the curve of her jaw and chin. A fugitive thought flitted about his mind for a moment and vanished again—whether her father was inconsolable at his daughter's departure.
"You got married at home then?"
"Yes, after Mr. Dainopoulos saved my life."
"Did he?"
"Of course. That's how we met. Didn't you ever hear of theQueen Mabaccident? It was in the papers."
"Can't say as I did. I was out East so long, you see. Wait a bit, though——" Mr. Spokesly pondered. "I fancy I remember reading something about it in the home papers; an excursion steamer in collision with a cargo boat, wasn't it?" The girl nodded.
"Down the river. I was in it. My sister—she was drowned. We were going to Southend."
"I see. And Mr. Dainopoulos, he was with you and——"
"No. I'd never seen him then. You see, we were all standing by the paddle-box when the other ship cut into us, my sister Gladys and two boys we'd been keeping company with. It was something awful, everybody screaming and the boat going up in the air. I mean the other end was going down. At last we couldn't stand, so we sat on the paddle-box. Then all of a sudden the boat slid over to one side and we went in."
Mr. Spokesly made a sound expressive of intense sympathy and interest.
"And next thing I knew was somebody was holding me up and he said, 'Don't move! Don't move!' But I couldn't! Something must have hit me when I fell in. I didn't know where then—the water was awfully cold. And then a boat came, and they lifted me in. And then he swam off again to find the others. I don't faint as a rule, but I did then. There were so many, and the screams—oh, it was shocking!
"But the worst was when we got on land again. It was near Woolwich and they turned a chapel or something into a hospital for us. And all the relations of the people on theQueen Mabcame down, and Mr. Dainopoulos, who'd taken his landlady's daughter for the excursion, was sitting there in a blanket when the landlady and her husband came in. They hadn't found her. You know bodies don't come up sometimes, especially when a ship turns over. And they caught hold of him, calling out 'Where is our girl? What have you done with our girl?' Theyscreamedat him!"
"Was he engaged to her?" asked Mr. Spokesly.
"Just the same as I was with Georgie Litwell who was drowned. Keeping company."
"And what happened then?"
"Why, we fell in love. That's what I was going to tell you so long as you promised not to laugh. He was in a wholesale tobacco merchant's in Mark Lane then and he took lodgings near us at Haverstock Hill. Those other people behaved as though he'd held their daughter's head under. Really they did. How could he help it? He saved six besides me. It wasn't his fault the boat sank."
"No, of course not. I see now."
"And then, you know, Mother made a fuss because he was foreign. Mother's a Berkshire woman, and she said she'd never thought she'd live to see a child of hers marry a man from goodness knows where. She didn't half go on, I can tell you. And Father had his own way of making me perfectly happy. He'd ask me, how many in the harem already? And I couldn't do a thing, lying on my back helpless. And at last, with the doctor saying I needed a sea-voyage to get my strength back, I thinks to myself, I'll take one; and with the accident insurance I had had the sense to carry ever since I'd started going to business, and what Boris had in the bank, we went. Or came, rather. We've been here ever since and nobody's heard either of us regret it, either."
And as she lay there looking out into the darkness of the Gulf with shining resolute eyes, it was plain that this romantic destiny of hers was a treasured possession. It dominated her life. She had found in it the indispensable inspiration for happiness, an ethical yet potent anodyne for the forfeiture of many homely joys. It was for her the equivalent of a social triumph or acceptance among peeresses of the realm. It is to be suspected that she had ever in her mind a vision of the wonder and awe she had evoked in the souls of the suburban girls among whom she had spent her life, and that this vision supported her and formed the base of a magnificent edifice. And it was an integral part of this edifice that love should be a romantical affair, a flame, noted by all and fed by the adoration of a husband who was harsh to the world, but to her a monster of infatuated fidelity.
Something of this impinged upon Mr. Spokesly's consciousness and he regarded her for a moment with profound respect.
"I should say," he muttered, returning to his cigarette, "you haven't done so badly for yourself."
She gave him an extraordinarily quick look, like a flash of sheet lightning from a calm evening sky, which left him puzzled. He was not aware, at that time, that no woman will ever admit she has bettered herself by marrying a given man. She must retain for ever that shining figure of him she might have loved, a sort of domestic knight-errant in golden armour, who keeps occasional vigils at her side while the weary actuality slumbers in gross oblivion. Mrs. Dainopoulos knew that Mr. Spokesly saw nothing of this. She knew him for what he was, a being entirely incapable of compassing the secrets of a woman's heart. She knew he imagined that love was all, that women were at the mercy of their love for men, and that chivalrous ideas, rusted and clumsily manipulated, were still to be found in his mind. And she saw the fragility and delicate thinness of his love affair with Ada Rivers. Anything could break it, anything could destroy it, she reflected. Those fancies ... of course he said he was engaged; but an engagement, as Mrs. Dainopoulos knew, having lived in a London suburb, was nothing. Yes, anything might make him forget Ada. And as she repeated the word "anything" to herself in a kind of ecstasy, Mrs. Dainopoulos turned her head quickly and listened. There was a sound of someone being admitted.
"So you've met your fate, anyway," she observed to Mr. Spokesly, yet still listening to the distant sound.
"Yes," he said with a smile, "I reckon you can cross me off as caught. What's that? Come back, I s'pose. Time for me to be off, anyway. I'm sure...."
Mrs. Dainopoulos held up her hand. She was still listening with her head slightly inclined, her eyes fixed upon Mr. Spokesly, as though absently pondering the perilous chances of his emotional existence. Cross him off as caught! She smiled again in that lambent heat-lightning way of hers. A woman who spends her life in a reclining seclusion becomes very much of a clairvoyant, an electric condenser of emotions. Mr. Spokesly was agreeably flattered by the intent interest of his companion's gaze. Quite a nice little tête-à-tête he'd had. It gave him a thrill to sit in intimate exchange of love experiences with an attractive married woman, even if she was an invalid. He felt a bit of a dog. He would write to Ada and tell her. Or would he? Did he want Ada to know anything about this visit to a mysterious house in Macedonia, a house so clandestine and bizarre he could scarcely convince himself that it was the abode of virtue? Did he? Ada was a long way off, in beleaguered England. He suddenly wondered what Ada had to do with this at all. With an ease that rather disturbed him he told himself that you could never tell what might happen nowadays. No use worrying about the future. Why, he might never get home. He dropped the ash from his cigarette into the tray on the table. Someone was coming with a quick decisive step up the stairs. He smiled at Mrs. Dainopoulos, not quite sure why she was holding up her hand. She was thinking "cross him off as caught," and smiling, when the someone arrived at the door and knocked.
"Why didn't you get married before you left England?" she asked quickly, and added in louder tone, "Come in!"
In sharp contrast to the rapid movements without, the door opened with extreme cautiousness, and at first nothing could be seen save the hand on the knob. Mr. Spokesly had been thrown into some disorder of mind by that last question. Why hadn't he, anyway? It was something he had never decided. Why had they not done what thousands had done in England, which was simply to marry on the spot and sail a week, or perhaps a few days, later? Why had he not taken the hazards of war? He had more, far more, than many of those girls and boys at home. It was at this point, facing for the first time the unconscious evasions of life, that he found himself facing something else, a girl with a startled and indignant light in her eyes. He uncrossed his legs and began to rise as Mrs. Dainopoulos said, "Come in, Evanthia. It is all right."
She came in, letting the door swing to as she moved with a long rapacious stride towards the sofa. It was obvious she was preoccupied with some affair of intense importance to herself. Once Mr. Spokesly's presence had been indicated she became again absorbed in her errand. Her amber-coloured eyes, under exquisitely distinct brows, were opaque with anger, and she held one hand out with the fingers dramatically clenched, as though about to release a thunderbolt of wrath. The gesture was as antique as it was involuntary. One heard drums muttering and the gathering of fierce Ægean winds as she came on, and leaning forward, flung out both hands in a passionate revelation of sorrow. Mr. Spokesly sat down again, embarrassed and fascinated. He could not take his eyes from her. She was something new in his experience; a woman with passion and the power to express it. Such women are almost non-existent in England, where sentiment is regarded as legal tender for passion. He regarded her with a kind of stupefaction, as though he had never set his eyes on a woman before. One might say with approximate truth that he had not. His ways had lain among the artificial products of his age. In trepidation he realized, as he sat there watching the movements of this girl, that he would not know what to do with a woman like that. He sat there and listened.
"Gone?" repeated Mrs. Dainopoulos.
"Yes, they are all gone. The French sent soldiers. And they would not let me go to speak to him."
"But where will they go?"
The girl, whose eyes were bent upon the carpet at her feet, shrugged her shoulders violently.
"Who knows that? To Sofia; or to Constantinople. Oh, I would have gone, too. These pigs, pigs, pigs of French! Not a word! And he is gone!" She dragged a chair from the table, and sat down suddenly, thrusting her chin over her arm and staring at the floor. There was a moment's silence, while Mr. Spokesly sat in doubt and Mrs. Dainopoulos looked out over the Gulf.
"Gone!" muttered the girl again sullenly.
"Don't do that, dear. It is very bad for you when you get in such rages!" Mrs. Dainopoulos spoke in a soft cool tone, like a recumbent sybil whose knowledge of rage and sorrow was vast. The girl's foot swung to and fro more and more rapidly, the red Turkish slipper slapping the floor, "You will hear from him after a little."
"Ah, if they let him write. But these French! With their beards and hats like cooking pots! They see everything. Of course he will write, but that is no good. He cannot send anything."
An expression of disappointment crossed the other woman's face as she patted the girl's shoulder.
"Wait a little," she said. "You can't tell yet."
"I would have given a thousand drachma to have got to the train," said the girl moodily. "And I would give a million to get to Constantinople. This place stifles me. I hate it ... hate it."
She stood up suddenly, raising her hands to her magnificent coil of dark hair, and revealing the poise and vigour of her body. "Ah!" she moaned, bending over her friend and caressing her. "I am a bad girl, forgetting how ill you are. Evanthia is a bad, bad girl, with her troubles—and you have a visitor——" She turned her head for a moment and Mr. Spokesly was caught unawares in the brilliance of a dazzling yet enigmatic glance from the amber eyes.
"A friend of my husband's," said Mrs. Dainopoulos. "He is English, you know, like me. From London. We have been talking of London."
"Ah, yes!" The lingering syllables were a caress, yet there was no more comprehension in them than in the inarticulate sounds of an animal. The girl bent her dark head over the blonde masses on the pillow. "Forgive your bad girl, Alice."
"Oh, all right," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, emerging with an embarrassed English smile. "Only you must be good now and go back to bed. There's Boris coming in."
"I am going!" said the girl and started. And then she remembered Mr. Spokesly sitting there in dumb stupefaction, his gaze following her, and she turned to make him a bow with a strange, charming gesture of an out-flung hand towards him. The next moment she dragged the door open and passed out.
He looked up to see Mrs. Dainopoulos regarding him thoughtfully, and he made a sudden step forward in life as he realized the ineffectiveness of any words in his vocabulary to express his emotions at that moment. He made no attempt to corrupt the moment, however, which was perhaps another step forward. He sat silent, looking at the glowing end of his cigarette, endeavouring to recapture the facile equilibrium of mind which had been his as he followed Mr. Dainopoulos through the gateway an hour or so before. But that was impossible, for it was gone, though he did not know it, for ever. He was trying to remember the name Mrs. Dainopoulos had called her. Evanthia! And once at the beginning, Miss Solaris. Something like that. Evanthia Solaris. He said to himself that it was a pretty name, and was conscious at the same time of the inadequacy of such a word. There was something beyond prettiness in it; something of a spring morning in the Cyclades, when the other islands come up out of the mist like hummocks of amethyst and the cicadas shrill in the long grass under the almond trees. There was in it an adumbration of youth beyond his experience, a hint of the pulsing and bizarre vitality of alien races, a vitality fretted into white wrath by her will and her desire, as the serene breath of the morning is suddenly lashed into a tempest by the howling fury of an Ægean white squall. She was gone, yet the room was still charged with her magnetic presence, so that Mr. Dainopoulos came in quietly, put down his tweed cap, and seated himself beside his wife, and Mr. Spokesly scarcely noticed his arrival.
As he became aware of outside phenomena once more—and he was rather frightened to discover how his thoughts had flown out into the unknown darkness in search of the girl—he saw that Mr. Dainopoulos was preoccupied and anxious. They were speaking in a low tone and in a foreign tongue, Mr. Spokesly noted. He recalled a story he had read in a magazine some little time before—a story of an Englishman who had a most miraculous command of foreign languages, who overheard a conversation which revealed a plot to destroy the British Army. The plot was revealed by the simple process of torturing a beautiful girl of neutral origin who was to be forced to marry a brutal enemy colonel. It did not occur to Mr. Spokesly to reflect that beautiful girls are usually eager to marry colonels of any denomination, or that colonels do not usually blend love and espionage. But he did notice the extreme improbability of an Englishman being a linguist. It made the tale seem unreal and artificial. Especially when the story added that he was a naval officer of good family who afterwards married the beautiful neutral and settled in a castle in Dalmatia. Fanciful! Mr. Spokesly knew enough of naval officers to doubt thedénouement. He himself, for that matter, would rather live in a bungalow in Twickenham than in Dalmatia. As for foreign girls—he rubbed his chin, puzzled over his own blurred sensations. Mr. Dainopoulos was speaking again. The woman lay back, looking up at the high ceiling, an expression of calm and careful consideration on her face, which was illuminated sharply, like an intaglio, by the lamp. And Mr. Spokesly experienced a shock to discover that they were not speaking of the girl at all. They seemed to have forgotten her existence. They looked at him and so brought him into the conversation.