"I'll have to be getting back," he remarked, rising once more.
Mr. Dainopoulos went to the door and spoke in a low harsh tone into the darkness.
"I'll get you a boat," he said. "There's no boats allowed after dark, but I have a friend on the French Pier. He'll put you on board. Another night, you must come and eat supper. I have had plenty business to-night. I have to go out again later, too. You understand what I tell my wife? Well, the consuls have had to go home. The German and Austrian and Bulgar Consuls went away to-night. I do a good bit of business, you understand, with all these people, and I got to go and see a friend of mine about it. So—will you have coffee——? I'll get you a boat first, and you can come to-morrow night, eh?"
A girl of fifteen with a downcast disdainful countenance came in with a tray and set it on the table. One eyelash flickered towards Mr. Spokesly as she turned and made her way out. He looked at her entranced, noting her slovenly dress, the holes in her stocking, and the ugly slippers that slip-slopped as she moved her small feet. He noted these uncouth garnitures within which she moved with the restless yet indolent rhythm of a captive queen. His mind, as he drank the strong coffee and the tiny glass of cognac, was in a state of unusual exaltation. Never before had he faced an immediate future so fraught with glittering yet unrecognizable possibilities. Mr. Dainopoulos might be a rascal, yet he possessed the power to call up familiar spirits. As he sat there leaning towards the table, his hand abstractedly on the bottle of cognac, thinking deeply of his multifarious concerns, his dexterous dealings in and out among men who slew one another daily, he resembled some saturnine yet benevolent magician about to release a formidable genie who would fill the room with fuliginous vapour. Mr. Spokesly felt his scalp twitching with anticipation. He stepped across to say good-bye to Mrs. Dainopoulos.
"I never expected this," he said simply. "I've had a very pleasant time."
"Come to supper to-morrow," she said, smiling, "Always glad to see anybody from the Old Country."
"Sorry your lady friend couldn't stay," he muttered. "Like to see more of her. Well ... I'll say good-night."
He smiled as he went down the staircase behind the preoccupied Mr. Dainopoulos. He smiled because he could see, by virtue of his exalted mood, that the smug phrases which had always been adequate for his emotions, sounded foolish and feeble. Like to see more of her! Did he? It made him dizzy to think of, though, for all that. It made the simple business of returning to that house an adventure of the soul. Nor did the phrase "lady friend" describe her. He was comfortably vague as to the actual constituents of a lady. A lady was perhaps described as a woman with whom it was impossible to be wholly at ease. Yes, he whispered to himself, but for a different reason. He felt defeated in his attempts to stabilize his impressions. He had no comparisons. It was like comparing a bottle of wine with a bottle of milk. Even Ada.... He moved so abruptly as he followed close on the heels of Mr. Dainopoulos that the latter looked at him in inquiry, and thought a remark was necessary.
"We can fix our little business any time before you go away," he murmured.
But Mr. Spokesly was not thinking of the little business just then. He found himself suddenly confronting the conviction in his mind that his Ada had been little more than a shining reflector of his own image. Ada, in beleaguered England, seemed very far away and her personality lost whatever distinction and magnetism it may have had while he was with her. He saw with perfect clarity a new truth beyond that first one—that Mrs. Dainopoulos had been aware of all this while she had plied her gentle smiling questions. Had she meant anything, then? How could one plumb the mind of a woman? There was something almost sinister in the notion that she had known all along how he was situated, how he felt, and let him sit there while a girl like an indignant enchantress came in and worked some sort of spell upon him. He began to wonder if the girl was real; whether he had not dreamed she was there. He was aghast at the insensibility of Mr. Dainopoulos who was leading the way across the street, his head bent and his damaged features set in a meditative scowl. In what way could one account for it? A woman like that! A woman already with a power over himself that frightened him. Ada! He thought of Ada almost as a refuge from this new emotion assaulting his heart. There was safety with Ada. He knew, within reasonable limits, the range of which she was capable, the tone and timbre of her soul. Here, he comprehended with surprising readiness, he would be called on to do something more than talk conventionally of love. It was all very well, he could see, to jog along from year to year, having a little fun here and there, and getting engaged and even married; but it was no more than the normal function of a human organism. Beyond that he could see something ruthless, powerful, and destructive. He experienced an extraordinary feeling of elation as he walked beside Mr. Dainopoulos towards the street car. He was perplexed because he would have liked to tell Ada the cause of this elation. He had a fugitive but marvellously clear view of Ada's position in the matter. She was away in the future, in a distant and calm region to which he had not yet gained admission. There was something he had to go through before he could get Ada. And while they jangled slowly along the quay, and Mr. Dainopoulos mumbled in his ear the difficulties imposed upon himself by the departure of the consuls, Mr. Spokesly caught a glimpse of what men mean by Fate. Though he knew it not, the departure of the consuls was an event of prime importance to himself. It was an event destined to precipitate the grand adventure of his life. Ada, in beleaguered England, would find her mechanically perfect existence modified by the departure of the consuls. Something he had to go through. He stared out at the shaded lights of the cafés and failed to notice that he no longer desired the tarnished joys of the seafaring boulevardier. Here was a new motive. The facile and ephemeral affairs of his life were forgotten in their sheer nothingness. He drew a deep breath, wondering what lay in store for him.
They left the car and passed through the gates of the dock, along roadways almost incredibly muddy, to where transports worked in the cautious twilight of blue electrics and picket-boats moved up and down gently where they were made fast to the steps, their red and green side-lights giving the quiet stealthy hustle of the quays an air of brisk alertness. Tall negroes, in blue-gray uniforms and red fezzes, moved in slow lines loaded with sections of narrow-gauge track and balks of timber, or pushed trucks of covered material. At a desk in a wooden office sat a Frenchajutant, a blinding tungsten globe illuminating the short black hairs rucked up over his stiff braided collar and reflecting from an ivory-bald spot on his head as he spoke into a telephone. Mr. Dainopoulos slid sideways into the room and sat down on a bench by the door. The officer's eye flickered towards his visitor and he lifted a hand slightly to indicate recognition. Mr. Spokesly stepped in and sat down. On the wall was a drawing cut from theVie Parisienne, a nude, with exaggerated limbs and an enormous picture-hat, riding on a motorcycle. The shriek, as of a soul in torment, of a French locomotive, brought a scowl to the officer's face as he conversed with his friends at the Cercle Militaire. Ringing off with a fat chuckle he demanded in rapid French how his old one was making it. The old one, who was Mr. Dainopoulos, made no definite complaint, but commented on the fact that a man could not sit in Floka's and take a little drink with a friend without a certain person, with a luxuriant beard, taking especial note of it. Theajutantthrew himself back in his chair, tipped it, his heels grinding the boards, and grunted. That, he mumbled, was only to be expected of Père Lefrote. Well, what was it now? Mr. Dainopoulos indicated his companion, an officer from the English ship arrived to-day, now anchored in therade. "What ship?" muttered the officer, looking Mr. Spokesly over as though he were some unsavoury mongrel. From Alexandria, said Mr. Dainopoulos, skilfully evading such an impossible word asTanganyika. "Ah-ha!" crowed the officer, transferring his cold regard to his old one. So the old one was on that game again. By the sacred blue, he was a great old cock. And the officer, getting up, expressed his conviction very fast that if the truth were only revealed, the old one could do a neat business inpoulets de luxeas well. What? The truculent officer, halting at the door, his thumb and finger busy with his moustache, looked back over his shoulder at his old one. No, said the latter, he merely repeated what he had said so many times. He knew none of those creatures, though he admitted three had arrived on the transportJumiègesthat morning. Was that so? Where were they, then? At the Omphale or the Tour Blanche? Come now! Mr. Dainopoulos lit a cigarette and as he trod carefully on the smoking match murmured his conviction that the ladies, whom a friend of his had seen land at Venizelos Steps, entered automobiles, and might not be found at the Omphale for some time. The officer drummed at the door and nodded. True, but the old one knew of some ravishing creature surely who would respond to the delicate attentions of a lonely exile. Amarraine, in fact. But the old one had no such clients. He was a man of business purely. And if it could be arranged his friend here would like to be put on board.
The officer, a frustrated and disappointed sensualist, whose imagination was tantalized but never fed by the fact that he was in the fabled Orient, the abode of lovely Circassians and other houris, nodded agreement. He owed Mr. Dainopoulos a few hundred francs and would have been at a loss even if that gentleman had suddenly produced a beautiful and expensive woman for his amusement. He was ever dreaming of a tremendousaffaire, but he was too close-fisted a Norman from Darnetal to spend much on a sweetheart.
"True," he remarked and then called out into the darkness. "Yes," he said, turning his head into the light, "thechaloupeis going off now. Let your friend tell the patron the ship he wants." And he returned to this desk, yawned, and took up a copy ofExcelsior. What a life, eh, my old one!
Mr. Spokesly pointed out the black bulk of theTanganyika, and as the launch slid along the grating, stepped up and reached his room. The night-watchman said, "Chief steward he no back yet." Mr. Spokesly turned in. He switched out his light and lay for a while thinking with more precision and penetration than even the London School of Mnemonics would have ventured to guarantee. He had some difficulty in identifying himself with the man who had gone ashore with Archy Bates that evening. And he slid away into the deep sleep of the healthy seafarer with a novel notion forming at the back of his mind. Suppose he was ashore in Saloniki, what would happen then? If by some turn of the wheel he found himself there? He might be sick, for instance, and go to the hospital and be left behind. There was no dream, but he saw it—a storm and great toil and anxiety, and in the midst of it a girl awaiting the outcome of his exertions with enigmatic amber eyes.
Mr. Dainopoulos afterwards developed into an excellent diplomatist, his principal virtue being a knack of gauging personal values and extracting usefulness from apparently dry husks. He withdrew from the imaginative sensualist who sat during the night in a highly varnished pine shack brooding upon the exasperating proximity of inaccessible seraglios. A useful instrument in many schemes, he did not merit a whole evening. Like most sensualists of the grosser kind he was a bore, and Mr. Dainopoulos had other clients. He picked his way out of the incredible mire of the docks, and crossed over to the cleaner side of the road which extended from Venizelos Street past the Custom House, and which was being extensively remodelled by the army of occupation. Even as Mr. Dainopoulos crossed he could see a number of industrious beings mounted on newly erected telegraph poles, their movements illuminated by small bright lights so that they resembled a row of burning martyrs elevated by some Macedonian tyrant, their cries and contortions as they reached down into the darkness for material and tools recalling the agonies of shrivelling victims. The hotel was in blank darkness. The squirming, writhing exfoliations which constituted the Berlin architect's conception of loveliness showed not a glint of light. One could not believe that it had inhabitants, or that they were alive. Nevertheless, Mr. Dainopoulos halted before the massive double doors and rang the bell, a tall, high-shouldered shade demanding admission to a familiar vault. It was some time after he had relapsed into a motionless silence and an observer might have imagined him to have forgotten his errand, when one of the leaves of the door opened a few inches, and he raised his head. At the sound of his voice the door opened a little more so that he could slide his body sideways through the aperture. Then the door closed behind him and the hotel resumed its appearance of a monstrous Renaissance tomb.
Inside, the night-porter, a person in a slovenly undress of dirty shirt, riding-breeches open like funnels at the knee, and Turkish slippers, yawned and motioned his visitor to a chair while he slowly ascended the stairs, which were lit by a single invisible lamp on the landing. Mr. Dainopoulos remained sunk in thought. It was, in a way, a perfectly honest and rational proposition he had to make, but he found himself involved in some doubt as to the way the person above, an Englishman, would take it. He knew something of the English, being married to one of that race, and he sometimes reflected upon the unexpected workings of their minds. They were oppressively practical and drove wonderful bargains; and then suddenly they would flare into inexplicable passion over something which he for the life of him could not comprehend. If this person upstairs did that, what would it be? Mr. Dainopoulos shook his head. He could not say. He would have to take a chance. He might be tolerated, or sworn at, or laughed at, or arrested, or thrown down the stairs. All these things happened to honest merchandisers, he was well aware. He sometimes watched these English under lowered lids and marvelled. Personally he preferred German or American men. He felt nearer to them, less conscious of a certain incomprehensible reticence of soul which is peculiar to the English, a sort of polite and poignant regret that he should see fit to cumber the earth, which had happened, by a singular and unexplained destiny, to be their heritage. Association with them, under such circumstances as he encountered, was provocative of considerable thought. To men like him, the confused product of a hundred diverging stocks, from Illyrian to Copt, the phenomenon of these blond and disdainful beings, who came always in ships and were apologetic even in their invasions, bore the mark of something supernatural, since the contemplation of them in their own land filled a normal Latin with inarticulate contempt. Mr. Dainopoulos had no pride. He would have found it an embarrassing impediment in his business. But he did devote an occasional moment of leisure to wondering how men could so impose their eccentric habit of thought upon the nations, and why he, for example, should be directed to obtain his personal ideals from a distant island in the northern seas.
The servant appeared on the landing, and Mr. Dainopoulos immediately went up.
The Berlin architect, no doubt in anticipation of invading armies, had exhausted his ingenuity in the façade and the reception rooms, and the chambers above were left in a state of disturbing starkness. Mr. Dainopoulos was led along corridors that chilled the heart with their bare rectangular perspectives, and was halted at length before a door behind which the voices of men could be heard in conversation. And in reply to a knock a slightly querulous voice intoned, "Come in, come in!" as though in infinite but weary patience with elementary intelligences. Mr. Dainopoulos stepped in.
Three men occupied the room. A naval lieutenant sat on the bed smoking a cigarette, a young man who did not raise his eyes to glance at the intruder. The owner of the room was a major, who was seated at a small escritoire near the window, and whose belt and cap hung over a chair. He was a man of thirty-odd, as clean as though he had been scoured and scraped in boiling water, the small absurd moustache as decorative as a nail-brush, and with a look of capable insolence in his blue-gray eyes. A small safe at his side was open and he remained stooping over this as he looked up and saw Mr. Dainopoulos standing by the door. The other man was in civilian tweeds, astride of a chair with his arms on the back, smoking a large curved meerschaum pipe. A clean-shaven circular-faced man of doubtful age, he was the only one of the three who regarded their visitor in a humane manner. He nodded slightly in response to the low bow made by Mr. Dainopoulos on his entry. The latter, however, knew better than to presume on this. He paused until the major invited him to approach, and the major did not do this. He simply waited, leaning over his safe, for Mr. Dainopoulos to explain his intrusion, his existence on earth, and his intentions as to the future, and anything else which might be regarded as extenuating his conduct. When Mr. Dainopoulos remarked that he had called on a little matter of business, the major bent his head again and went on investigating the papers in the safe, as though Mr. Dainopoulos had suddenly and completely evaporated.
"Well," he observed at length, straightening up and laying some papers on his desk, "why do you call on a little matter of business in the middle of the night?" He brought his left arm up in a peculiar whirl to the level of his eyes and looked at his wrist watch. "Eleven-twenty," he added in a tone of detached contempt, and shot a severe look at his visitor.
Mr. Dainopoulos remained standing by the door and maintained his attitude of calm urgency. He explained that the departure of the consuls had led him to remodel his arrangements. All three looked at him with attention when he made this statement. The naval lieutenant, whose work it was to examine and pass all neutral vessels, knew Mr. Dainopoulos very well. To his regret he had never found that gentleman doing anything at all shady, but he had never abandoned his conviction that he would catch him some day. The civilian, who was a censor and decoder of neutral correspondence, was familiar with the Dainopoulosdossierin his office and had read with surprise the chatty letters to girls in London which came from the man's wife. He, however, was not in a position to reveal his knowledge, and looked at Mr. Dainopoulos with good-tempered curiosity. The major, who knew his visitor better than either of the others, having purchased large quantities of stores from him at a handsome profit to the vendor, looked as if he had been insulted when the consuls were mentioned. As well he might, since those astute gentlemen had done their best to keep all possible material out of his hands, had blandly checkmated the armies of occupation at every turn, even preaching a holy war against them among the owners of Turkish baths in the Via Egnatia. They had financed Hellenic Turks who laid injunctions on rights-of-way, issued writs against movement of goods, and sought to inflame French against English and Italian against both. The consuls had been the curse of every executive at Headquarters, for their resources and nerve seemed unlimited. They worked together like a team of experienced crooks on a steamship, and never for a moment were the invaders permitted to forget that the local government was neutral. The major was happier than he had been for a long while, though he lacked the emotional demonstrativeness proper to such a mood. All three of these men, by their reports, had aided in the grandcoupwhich had culminated that evening in the expulsion of the consuls across the frontier. But their first thought, when Mr. Dainopoulos mentioned consuls, was that by some ghastly mischance the consuls had got back into Saloniki and the whole weary business was to begin again.
"Eh?" said the major, snarling up his upper lip so that his moustache looked more like a nail-brush than ever, and looking as if he were about to spring up and fasten his teeth in his visitor's neck. "What's that?"
Thus having evoked a suitable interest in his affairs, Mr. Dainopoulos drew a small notebook from his pocket and began to enumerate the list of goods the sudden departure of the consuls had left on his hands. In the midst of it, the major nodded to a chair and said, "Sit down over here, please." Mr. Dainopoulos came forward, sat down, and proceeded. The naval lieutenant reached over to the dressing table, took up a Turkish dagger and began turning it over in his hands, examining the edge with an intense stare. The censor drew steadily at his pipe and looked Mr. Dainopoulos up and down. He was a novelist, and of the three may be said to have had some practice in the gauging of character. He was aware, in spite of a life spent exclusively in southern England and among one small exclusive caste of English people, that this Levantine might have a view of his own. He was interesting. Where had he picked up that English wife? A slight shudder passed over him in spite of himself at the thought of an English woman in a Levantine's arms. No doubt, however, she was a house-maid or something of that sort. Must be making a lot of money. The censor felt a surge of indignation over this. His own family's resources had been quadrupled by the war; but that of course was the reward of patriotic endeavour. He found it intolerable that a neutral should make money out of bloodshed. Mr. Dainopoulos proceeded as calmly and collectedly as though he were a salesman in Birmingham or Liverpool. He certainly was unaware of inspiring horror and contempt. He even mentioned a thousand yards of Indian cotton drill which he had in his warehouse and which he had purchased for a song from a German firm in Alexandria a few days before the English had sequestered the business. The only point on which he was reticent was the fact that he had already been paid in gold for most of it by the consular agents; a most satisfactory arrangement for him, but unfortunate for them in the present juncture, since they had no receipt and the goods were to be held against their order. There was something exasperating in the spectacle of this man sitting there, with all the marks of clandestine knavery about him, merely offeringbona fidegoods for sale. He was a Greek in Greece, transacting business which, although he did not yet know it, was of vital importance to them, for a whole string of vessels bound for Saloniki had been sunk inside of two days, from the Start to Karaburun. They were at a loss for a week or so, and a week or so in war is not to be ignored. And here was an unprepossessing person offering them, at a comparatively reasonable rate, a remarkable consignment of material. Apart from their own needs in Macedonia they had recently sent a few thousand men to an island in the Ægean to prepare a base, and the ships bearing their stores were unreported. Sunk, of course. They sat in various poses thinking of all this, and Mr. Dainopoulos closed his notebook and took out a cigarette.
It should be said for him that if he had known their actual position his price would have been slightly higher, just as later on English merchants' prices became so high that men spat at the sound of their names. But he was not a profiteer in the modern sense. He knew nothing of advertising, for example. He thought 100 per cent. an adequate reimbursement for the risks of trade.
He was asked when he could effect delivery. He said in a week or ten days, some of it being on board a steamer on its way now from Alexandria.
"What steamer is that?" demanded the lieutenant.
"TheKalkis, four hundred tons," he replied. "I have had her a year now."
"What speed?"
"Oh, four. Perhaps four and a half. A very old ship. No good except for my business to the Islands."
"Don't know about that, my friend," muttered the major. "You may have to give up your business to the Islands. We commandeer our own ships; I don't see how you are going to get out of it."
"That would suit me," said Mr. Dainopoulos promptly. "She costs me fifteen thousand francs a month insurance. And coal is four hundred francs a ton in Port Said. I make very little out of her."
This was scarcely the literal truth, though Mr. Dainopoulos might be pardoned for depreciating his profits at a moment when a purchaser appeared. As a matter of fact he had made already out of that small ship about seven times her original purchase price and he had a neat scheme in hand which would make her a very good investment indeed.
"We have some business in the Islands, too, you see," the major remarked abstractedly. "I think you had better come to my office say about ten-thirty to-morrow. You know the place. Next to the Ottoman Bank, eh? G. O. S. Room Fourteen. Ask for Major Begg."
Mr. Dainopoulos, who would probably have done a thousand francs' worth of business before the major had had his bath, expressed his willingness to appear.
"Will you have a drink?" said the major in a harsh, brow-beating tone which was believed by himself and many others of his class to evoke the very soul of bluff hospitality. Mr. Dainopoulos, however, had a strange feeling of having been good-humouredly kicked in the face. He declined the refreshment, not because he felt insulted, but because he knew the only drink these men had was whiskey and the smell and taste of the stuff made him sick.
"All right," said the major, regarding an abstainer with disfavour. He liked a man to take a drink. "To-morrow at ten-thirty. You might close the door. Thanks."
As he closed the door behind him, as requested, Mr. Dainopoulos reflected that he would have time to lay the matter before a French colonel he knew before reaching Room Fourteen. But he believed the best price was to be had from the British. He had found out that much in the course of his career—they did not haggle.
The three men he had left did not speak for a moment, waiting for him to get out of earshot.
"Looks like Providence," observed the lieutenant, making a lunge with the dagger at a knot in the bedstead.
The major pulled up his trouser leg and scratched a hairy calf. "These infernal fleas!" he muttered. "Yes, as you say, Providence. An angel very much in disguise."
"What about that ship, theKalkis?" asked the censor.
"Oh, we shall probably charter her," said the major bitterly. "Take all the risk and pay him a princely sum for sitting tight here and doing nothing. We ought to buy, but we won't."
He sat silent for a moment. He was thinking of those men in Phyros, waiting for their stores, eating sparingly of their emergency rations, sampling the local cheese and bread and keeping a bright look-out for transports which were lying on their sides in eighty fathoms. Something would have to be done at once about them. This Dainopoulos had—here the major glanced at his shorthand notes—four thousand feet of timber and the Phyros crowd were frantic for timber for a jetty. Just think of it! A fertile island which these Greeks had had for a couple of thousand years, and no jetty yet! What could one do with people like that? Hopeless. Then there was flour. He simply had to have some flour soon. Dainopoulos said he had fifteen hundred barrels when theKalkiscame in.
There was in all this hard thinking no complete view of the war or of the world. If they could collar stores from some other front or from one of their allies, it was all one to them. Even the course of events had no interest for them beyond their own base. This was an inevitable result of the intensive pressure of responsibility on executives. They were not callous. They were simply busy. Their own lives were still bounded by the social barriers of England. They never spoke of private affairs except to some man of their own class who had been to one of the great public schools. For them the war was a war to perpetuate this social hierarchy, to place it once more upon an impregnable base. They wished to win, they but could see no difference between democracy and defeat. Even the novelist was a novelist within the radius of his social sphere, and remained within it in a city of Macedonia. He felt it incumbent upon him to remain also a gentleman, even at the expense of valuable collisions with alien temperaments. "He's a Greek, and I loathe them," summarizes, in the major's words, their collective sentiment. And their allies, it is to be feared, suffered under this highly specialized form of criticism. Nothing that happened was adequate to demolish this formidableKultur. In victory and in defeat it was indestructible. Only the genius of the race, working in the very strongholds of thatKultur, can split it open and release new forces and aspirations. But of this even the novelist, who trafficked in happy endings, had no suspicion. He wrote a short story later, a story in which an English girl who had been carried off by a rascally Greek was rescued by an English officer who took her home to England and married her.
To the lieutenant the departure of the consuls and the impending formation of a provisional government were affairs of qualified good. A provisional government would immediately shriek for the return of all sequestrated property. It would demand the status of allies, and all their ships would start a complicated system of espionage and smuggling. It would be, in his opinion, a series of perfect days. Nobody was honest nowadays. Not a week ago he had caught naval stores going over the side of a ship into a local boat, and the guilty party was wearing three medals, for valour and distinguished service. He sometimes wished they would put him on a ship again. It gave one a chance to do something besides play detective anyway. The major spoke again.
"What about a captain for theKalkis? We shall have to have one of our own men, Mathews."
"Afraid that's not possible," said the lieutenant. "We haven't too many men, you know. Better send him out with a convoy going to Alex. I might have had one of those chaps who were rescued the other day off that transport, but they've all gone home overland. And they won't stay, you know. All want to get home."
"Can one blame them?" asked the censor. "I read letters in which these seamen say they have not seen their families for seven or eight months."
"Dear me!" said the major drily. His own family were Indian Civil Service. "What you might call the hardships of war. Possibly we may find someone without family ties, Mathews."
The lieutenant smiled and ran his thumb along the blade of the Turkish dagger.
"Possibly," he replied. He smiled because the major was rather conspicuous at home for his affairs with married women.
"By the way," said the censor, following some obscure association of ideas, "I met Morpeth this evening and he was telling me they expected some new arrivals from Paris at the Omphale."
"Yes, I heard that," said the major, who was not at all interested. "It will be a riot. Probably three or four. And about thirty or forty Greek, French, Italian, and Serbian lieutenants, standing round six deep, making them squiffy on Floka's Monopole. No, thanks. Stale pastry, anyhow."
The lieutenant continued to smile.
"They'd better be doing that than slapping each other's faces and exchanging cards at the Cercle Militaire," he murmured.
"They do that anyhow—afterwards," said the major, thrusting his papers into the safe and lighting a cigarette. He shoved the door to with his foot, twirled the knob, and stood up.
"What about some golf to-morrow afternoon?" he demanded. "Didn't you say you had a friend coming ashore, Mathews?"
"Yes, from theProteus. He'll be here about three, I think. Very decent chap, too."
"Right. We'll go out in the new car. See you in the morning."
Mr. Dainopoulos found the trolley cars had stopped running and began to walk home past the cafés of the front. On the other side of the road the stern rails of a score of small coasting craft moved up and down gently in the slight swell, and from here and there amid the confused dunnage on deck a figure moved in sleep, or a silhouette of a man bending over a lantern showed up for a moment. At intervals strains of American jazz music came from the haunts of pleasure, and one could get a glimpse now and then of a dreary dance-floor with half a dozen soldiers and sailors slathering clumsily to and fro, embracing women that gave one the horrors merely to look at, women like half-starved harpies or cylinders of oily fat, the sweat running down through the calcareous deposits on their faces and their squat chunky feet slewed sideways in bronze and coppery shoes. Mr. Dainopoulos hurried past these abodes. Mr. Bates, Archy Bates, a great business friend of his, was somewhere inside one of them, fulfilling his destiny as a patron of Aphrodite and Dionysos; but Mr. Dainopoulos had finished business for the day and he wanted to get home. This was not to be without meeting Archy. The cat-like smile on his unfortunate features, his hat on the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets, Mr. Bates emerged from theOdéon Barjust as a carriage appeared in the distance. Mr. Bates did not conceal his gratification. Would his friend come back and have a drink?
"Not to-night," said Mr. Dainopoulos quietly. "Me, I'm going home now. Excuse me, Mister."
"Now, now!" protested Archy, clinging with the adhesiveness of the pickled philanthropist. "Now, now! Lissen. Come-a-me to White Tower. Eh? Laddie? You-n-me, eh? Li'l' fren' o' mine Whi' Tower. She gotta fren', y' know. Here y'are."
The driver, seeing a possible fare, stopped, and Archy, still adhering, dragged Mr. Dainopoulos in after him.
"Stivan," said Mr. Dainopoulos to the driver, whom he knew, "go to the White Tower and when this gentleman has got out, drive me home quick, understand? Leave him behind. And go back to him if he wants you. Now!"
The driver at once set off up the road again and Mr. Bates, who, like Shakespeare, had small Latin and less Greek, sat smiling in the darkness, trying to formulate in his mind and articulate with his tongue something that just eluded him. To meet his old fren' like this—it was a—'strornery thing how he couldn't shay just how he felt. He smiled.
Mr. Dainopoulos sat without smiling. He was not a drinking man at any time, and the professional soak was a mystery to him. Mr. Bates was as much a mystery as the major. His actions had the disconcerting lack of rational sequence that one discerns in pampered carnivora. Absent-minded sensuality is a baffling phenomenon. Mr. Dainopoulos had something of the clear sharp logic of the Latin, and the vinous benevolence of Mr. Bates aroused in him a species of alert incredulity. He sat in silence, listening to the gurgle of his companion's incoherence. This was a phase of his daily existence which he never mentioned to his wife; his dealings with the more dissipated of her countrymen. To his relief the carriage stopped at the entrance of the Tower Gardens. He took Mr. Bates's arm to assist him to alight, but Mr. Bates had forgotten the White Tower. He was trying to sing and not succeeding very well. He sat erect, his hat pushed back until the brim formed a dark halo about his smile, beating time with one hand.
"Here you are, Mister Bates," said Mr. Dainopoulos, trying to move him. Mr. Bates resisted gently, drew back his chin a little more and attacked a lower G:
"Mo-na, Mona, my own love!Art—thou not mineThrough the long years to—be-e-e!"
"Mo-na, Mona, my own love!Art—thou not mineThrough the long years to—be-e-e!"
The sound of that small and strangely clear voice, after the odorous gibbering speech, almost appalled Mr. Dainopoulos. He spoke rapidly to the driver, instructing him to wait and he would be paid in due time, and started off into the darkness.
Mr. Bates finished his song to his own satisfaction and having smiled into the darkness for a while, began to wonder where he was. "'Strornery thing, but he was almost shertain ol' fren' of his had been there. Mush 'ave been a mishtake." He got out so suddenly the driver was scared. Mr. Bates took a bill out of his pocket, held it up uncertainly for a moment, and when the driver had clutched it, marched in an intricate manner into the gardens. His smile became more cat-like than ever as the sound of syncopated music reached his ear and he passed a woman strolling under the trees. He hummed his song again. The evening, for him, was only just beginning.
Mr. Dainopoulos hurried forward and soon left the region of hard arc-lights behind. His house was not far from here. He wished to get home. He regretted sometimes that his business took him so much away from the house, for he retained sufficient simplicity to imagine that the laws of nature do not apply to love, that you can increase the volume without diminishing the intensity. But he consoled himself with the thought that in a few years he would be able to devote himself entirely to his wife. His dream was not very clear in its outlines as yet, because the war now raging was far-reaching in its effects. It would be unwise to make plans which the political changes might render impossible of accomplishment. For the present he was satisfied to place his reserves at a safe distance in diversified but thoroughly sound securities, so that unless the civilized world turned completely upside down and all men repudiated their obligations, he would be able to control his resources. There was not much doubt about that in his mind. He knew that business would go on, was going on, even while men moved in massed millions to destroy each other. While the line swayed and crumpled and broke, or surged forward under the incredibly sustained roar of ten thousand cannon, English and French and German business men were perfecting their plans for doing business with each other as soon as it was over. The ethical side of the question scarcely arose in his mind, since he had grown accustomed to wars and the money to be made out of them. To him the struggle in France and on the Slavic frontier was far off and shadowy, as was the grim game at sea. He was not to be blamed for measuring events by the scale in use by those of his race; and if there was somewhat more ferocity and sustained butchery in this war than in others, it was only another significant symptom of Anglo-Saxon temperament, because business, he knew quite well, was going on.
He knocked at the door in the wall which had so impressed Mr. Spokesly earlier in the evening, and was admitted after a parley by a middle-aged servant-woman.
"Madama gone to bed?" he asked, picking up a large cat that was rubbing herself against his leg, and putting her out into the garden.
"No, she's not gone to bed. She said she would wait for you to come home."
"All right. You can go to bed then," he retorted.
The woman shot the bolts and picked up the cheap pink glass lamp without answering. Mr. Dainopoulos made his way upstairs. There was no light in the room looking out over the sea. In their chamber beyond, a night-light, very small and rose-coloured, was burning on a small table below a picture of the Virgin, as though it were a shrine. It took the place of one, for his wife made the most of his rather dilapidated devoutness, and often left a candle burning there. There was an ulterior motive in her action which she had never formulated exactly even to herself. This was the appeal which a strange and sensuous religion made to her romantic instinct. She would always be Church of England herself; but the impression made by candles and an ikon upon her girl-friends in Haverstock Hill in North London was always before her. She could hear them breathe the word "ikon," and then draw in their breath in an ecstasy of awe. And the thought of it gave her pleasure.
But she was not in the chamber and he returned to the other room in search of her.
She was lying as before, her eyes closed and her hands clasped lightly over the tartan rug. A screen had been opened and stationed between her and the window. This was the hour to which his thoughts went forward occasionally during the day of chaffering on the front, or in his blue-distempered office with its shabby chestnut fittings in the Cité Saul. To the western cynic there was a rich humour in the sheer fortuitousness of their meeting in the midst of a drowning multitude. To him it was not humorous at all. To him it was significant of a profound fatality. To him it confirmed his inherited faith in omens and the finger of God. She was a common enough type of woman in most things, yet she embodied for him a singular ideal of human achievement. He knew of nothing in the world comparable with her, and the knowledge that she was his was at times almost unbelievable. Whether she loved him was a question he never faced. He believed it, and doubted, and believed again. He knew by instinct that it was not a matter of importance as was the fact of possession. He extracted a rare and subtle pleasure from the fragrant ambiguity of her smile. After all, though it may be doubted if he had ever entertained the thought, he was fortunate in his circumstances. He had no need to be jealous or watchful. She lay there quietly, thinking of course of him, while he was on his affairs in the port.
He paused now and saw that she was asleep, and he set the little night-light on the table and sat down near her, watching her with an expression of grave enthusiasm on his damaged features. He was not familiar with the stock witticisms concerning the hollowness of marriage and the inevitable disgust which follows possession. Indeed, for all his rascality and guile in business he was a rather unsophisticated fellow. He possessed that infinite patience which is sometimes more effective in retaining love than even courage or folly. Another factor in his favour was his lack of facility for friendship. This worked both ways, for friendship is the secret antagonist of both business and love. He sat there, shading his eyes with his curved palm, watching his wife, thinking of past, present, and future in that confused and gentle abstraction which we call happiness, when she suddenly opened her eyes and looked at him for one brief instant with a blank and vacant gaze. Then she smiled and he bent over her.
"Back, Boris?" she murmured chidingly.
"My business, darling. I had to see a man."
"Always business. I thought you'd never come."
"First I had to take that gentleman to the French Pier, for a boat. And then I went to the Olympos Hotel. I think very good business."
"Don't talk about business now."
"But, my sweetheart, it is all for you. By-and-by you will see."
"See what, silly?" she asked, rumpling his hair.
"See what? You ask a funny question. I cannot tell you, not yet. But in my mind, I see it."
And he did, too. He saw, in his mind, a superb and curving shore of yellow sand encircling a sea of flawless azure. He saw a long line of white villas, white with biscuit-coloured balconies and green jalousies, rising amid gardens of laurel and palm; he saw white yachts rocking at anchor, and illuminated houseboats in the shadow of a great breakwater. He saw the spangled lights of a fairy city, a city filled with fabrics and jewels which he would buy for her. He saw all this, and in his mind the world had fought itself to a standstill and the cautious investor had come into his own. He saw the war-weary battalions returning to their toil, slaving to pay off the cost of their adventure. This was the way of the world as he knew it. It was no use blaming him: he merely took advantage of human need and folly, as we all do. He had been through wars before and knew the inevitable reactions, and the almost incredible cheapness of money that followed. He was by instinct one of those who, like camp-followers on a grand scale, prosper amid the animosities of simpler folk; persons who found fortunes upon great wars, as did the Jews in London after 1815 and the bourgeois bankers of Paris after the Revolution. And it surprised him how little his wife knew, how little she questioned the world in which she lived. Of course it was charming, and he was fascinated just because she had that amazing racial blindness to facts and lived in a fanciful world of her own. The English were all like that, it seemed to him.
He put his arms about her.
"In my mind I see it. You wait. Everything you can think of, all very fine."
"Here in Saloniki?"
"No!"
"In England?"
Mr. Dainopoulos laughed a little and shook his head. He was quite sure England wouldn't be any place for him after this war. In his own private opinion, there wouldn't be any England within ten years from now, which shows how logical and wide-awake Latins can make errors of judgment. In any case, there were too many Jews there.
"Because I don't want to go to America," she remarked, still rumpling his hair.
"America! What makes you think of America? You must be losing your mind, Alice." He almost shivered. He was just as well able to make money in America as anywhere else, but what use would it be to him in such a place? It is extremely difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to realize it, but men like Mr. Dainopoulos find occidental institutions a spiritual desolation. He recalled the time when he boarded in Newark, New Jersey, and worked in a felt-hat factory. The house was of wood without even a floor of stone, and he could not sleep because of the vermin. And the food! He experienced afresh the nausea of those meals among the roomers, the bulging haunches of the negroid waitress colliding with his shoulders as she worked round and served the rows and rows of oval dishes dripping with soggy, impossible provender. And the roomers: English, German, and American, with their horrible whiskey and their ever-lasting gibberish of "wop" and "dago," their hints and blustering invitations to join mysterious fraternities which no one seemed to understand or explain. Mr. Dainopoulos must not be censured for withdrawing from all this. He made no claims upon western civilization, and its lack of logic and continuity led him to prefer something less virtuous, perhaps, but also less of a strain upon normal human nature.
"You say you don't want to go to America. And I'll say it, too. I've been there, and that was enough for me. I should die there, with the food they give you. It's a fine country, with fine trees in the streets," he added, thinking of an imperial horse-chestnut tree which had thrust a branch bearing pale candles of bloom against his window out there, "and the big men are good men to do business. But not for me. Dirty wood houses and soot coming down all the time on the bed. Like ashes from the engines."
"Like London," said Alice, smiling.
But Mr. Dainopoulos had been living on a somewhat higher scale in London and he had not noticed the dirt so much. Moreover, he could always get the food he wanted in London.
"Well, where?" insisted Alice, humouring him.
"There's plenty places," he said soberly, rather faint as he compared their present surroundings with that dream-villa by the blue sea. "Too soon yet to be sure we get there. I got a lot of business to finish up first. And we're all right here for a while. You're not lonesome, darling?"
"Oh, no! You saw Evanthia here to-night?"
"Yes, I saw her, but she didn't tell me anything."
"He's gone away, with the consuls."
Mr. Dainopoulos gave a low whistle.
"I never thought about that. What'll she do now? That's bad for her, though."
"She wants to follow him but I don't think she can. I believe she heard he'll go to Constantinople. She said she'd do anything to get there."
"Well, if she wants to go to Constantinople, she might be able to," he said, pondering. "I heard to-day a ship might be going down to the Islands. There's always a chance. I'll see. But if she's got any sense she'll go back to her mother. That feller Lietherthal is good company but he'll go back to Munich by-and-by."
"She doesn't love him, I am almost sure."
"Evanthia, she don't love anybody except herself. I told you that."
"She loves me," said Alice.
"Well, p'raps she does, but you know what I mean."
"That gentleman this evening, Mr. Spokesly, he was interested in her."
"He's got a young lady in London," said Mr. Dainopoulos.
"Has he?" she murmured absently. "Do you think he'll come to-morrow night?"
"Yes, I think so. I bet you're goin' to have Evanthia in, too."
"Well, perhaps he'll fall in love with her," she whispered delightedly.
"What, and him with a young lady in London!"
"I don't think he's very fond of his young lady in London."
"Well, how do you know that? Women...."
"Never mind. It's easy to tell if a man is in love," she answered, watching him. He held her tightly for a moment.
"Not so easy to tell about a woman," he said into her hair. "Is it, my little wife, my little wife?"
"Why, don't you know yet?" she bantered, giving him that secret, fragrant, ambiguous smile.
"My little wife!" he repeated in a tense whisper. And as he said it, he felt in his heart he would never know.
It was evening and theTanganyika, a tall unwieldy bulk, for she had only a few hundred tons in her, lay at anchor waiting for her commander, who was ashore getting the ship's papers. She was about to sail for Alexandria, carrying back, through an area infested with enemy submersibles, some of the cargo already discharged and reloaded in the southern port. This apparently roundabout method of achieving results had in it neither malice nor inefficiency. Those who have had anything to do with military matters will understand the state of affairs, and the seemingly insane evolutions of units proceeding blindly upon orders from omnipotent commanders. The latter had ever before them the shifting conditions of a dozen theatres of war, and to them it was nothing that a crate of spark-plugs, for example, sorely needed in Persia, should be carried to and fro over the waters of the Ægean, or that locomotives captured from an Austrian transport and suitable for the Macedonian railroads should be rusting in the open air in Egypt. These men, scoured clean and pink as though with sand and boiling water every morning, in their shining harness and great gold-peaked hats, moved swiftly in high-powered motor cars from one consultation to another, the rows of medal ribbons glowing on their breasts like iridescent plumage. They lived in a world apart. For them it was inevitable that a whole fleet of ships should be no more than a microscopic point in some great curve named Supply. Behind them was a formidable element called Politics, a power which appeared to them to come out of Bedlam and which would suddenly change its course and make the labour of months of no avail. Their eyes were steadily fixed upon certain military dispositions, and they sent forth, from their lofty stations, standing orders which enclosed each subordinate commander in an isolated compartment, beyond which he could not possibly wander, but within which he could exercise a practically god-like power. This system, admirable because it relieved each executive from any concern with the final upshot of the struggle, ultimately reached theTanganyika. Her captain, receiving his instructions from the Naval Transport office, found himself in sole charge of life and property upon her, while for subsequent sailing orders he was referred to the commanding officer of a sloop now moving slowly towards the boom. Captain Meredith in no wise objected to this. What struck him with ironical emphasis was the ineffectiveness of military traditions when applied to a ship with a civilian crew. He might issue orders, but who was to foreshadow the effect on the minds of the Orientals who steered and stoked and oiled below? What might he expect in a sudden disaster from those yellow enigmas padding to and fro or sitting on their hams drinking rice-water and staring at the shores of Macedonia with unfathomable eyes? He had been asked if in his opinion the crew were loyal, and he had wondered how any one could find that out. Loyalty, when you came to place it under analysis, presented a somewhat baffling problem. It was like trying to find out whether men were religious. The assumption, of course, was that all men had in them, deep down, something of ultimate probity. But of what use was that in such a sudden emergency as confronted one at sea these days? Captain Meredith refrained from dwelling too long upon probabilities as he returned to theTanganyika. He hoped he would get through all right again. He had heard hints of a cargo for Basra, in the Persian Gulf; and until they could get him a white crowd he would rather not take any more risks in the Ægean. The longer the war went on the less important seemed abstractions like loyalty or patriotism, and the more shiningly important the need for unimaginative and quick-witted efficiency. There lay the trouble. The naval or military commander had behind him the prestige and power of service discipline and he was supported in his ruthless judgments by the rank and file. The naval officer spoke his orders in a quiet, refined voice, and massive muscular bluejackets, drilled for years, sprang smartly to carry them out. Here, Captain Meredith reflected, it was not quite like that. Seamen in merchant ships were largely individualists. Had they, for example, been forced by law to go to sea immediately after being sunk, they would almost inevitably have rebelled and sulked ashore. Being free agents, they were filled with fury, and mobbed shipowners to send them out again. This was the good side. The bad side was the difficulty in getting them to obey orders. Moreover, as was made plain during his recent interview with the officers in the Transport Department, his own class, the commanders, had something to learn about doing as they were bid. They had shown him a Weekly Order, just in from Malta, demonstrating the urgent necessity of all captains carrying out their instructions. The hugeAfganistan, triple screws and with four thousand souls on board, had been sunk and many lost, while her escort was awaiting her two hundred miles to the south. It was pointed out to Captain Meredith that theAfganistanwas lost simply because her commander had disobeyed explicit orders given at Port Said. Well! It was not pleasant, but had to be borne. This was, he supposed, being faithful unto death. He climbed on board, waved good-bye to the lieutenant in the launch, and ordered the anchor up.
Mr. Spokesly was waiting at the gangway for that very purpose and went forward at once. Captain Meredith, on reaching his room, rang the bell. The second steward appeared at the door, a long lubberly lout with yellow hair plastered athwart a dolichocephalous cranium and afflicted with extraordinarily unlovely features.
"Where is the chief steward?" the captain demanded.
"In 'is room, sir. I was to sye, sir, as 'e ain't feelin' very well this afternoon, sir, if you'll excuse 'im."
"Drunk, I suppose," said the commander quietly.
"Ow, it's not for me to sye, sir," the creature whinnied, moving enormous feet encased in service shoes pilfered from cargo. "Was it tea you was wantin', sir?"
"Bring it," said Captain Meredith, regarding him with extreme disfavour, and the man disappeared.
Not much chance there, thought the captain, as he noted the awkward knuckly hands, with nails bitten to the quick, which arranged the tray before him and made a number of the indescribable motions peculiar to stewards. Hands! How marvellously they indicated character! He was reminded afresh of his own brother-in-law, a surgeon, of whose death in action he had learned during the week. Wonderful hands he had had, long with broad shallow points, indicative of a very fine skill with the knife. Now he was dead; and this creature here would no doubt survive and prosper when it was all over. The captain had been thinking a good deal during the past few days. An old friend of his, a school-master in happier times, had suddenly descended upon him, a bronzed person in khaki with a major's crowns on his shoulder-straps. Had a few days' leave from the Struma front. He was not elated at his rise in rank, it transpired, for it had simply been a process of rapid elimination. All the senior officers had been killed; and here he was, an old gray badger of an elderly lieutenant promoted to major. There was a lull on the Struma, he said, his tired, refined voice concealing the irony. Very delightful to have a few days' peace on a ship with a friend. Now he was back on the Struma; and perhaps next time Captain Meredith got news there would be another gap in that little staff. He stepped out on the bridge. The anchor was coming up.
Mr. Spokesly was thinking, too, in spite of the immediate distraction of heaving-up. It had been a week of extraordinary experiences for him. As he leaned over the rail and looked down into the waters of the Gulf, and noted the immense jelly-fish, like fabled amethysts, moving gently forward to the faint rhythmic pulsing of their delicate fringes, he began to doubt afresh his identity with the rather banal person who had left England a couple of short months before. He found himself here now, outwardly the same, yet within there was a readjustment of forces and values that at times almost scared him. For he had reached a position from which it was impossible to gauge the future. Nothing would ever be the same again. He was frankly astonished at his own spiritual resources. He had not known that he was capable of emotions so far removed from a smug commonplace. Love, as he had conceived it, for example, had been an affair of many oppressive restrictions, an affair of ultimate respectability and middle-aged affection. Oh, dear, no! It appeared to be a different thing entirely. He discovered that once one was thoroughly saturated with it, one stepped out of all those ideas as out of a suit of worn and uncomfortable clothing. Indeed, one had no need of ideas at all. One proceeded through a series of transmigrations. One arrived at conclusions by a species of intuition. Life ceased to be an irritating infliction and became a grand panorama.
And yet in the present situation what did it all amount to? With its well-known but inexplicable rapidity, rumour had already gone round the ship hinting at a trip to the Persian Gulf. If that were so, Mr. Spokesly, by all the laws of probability, would never be in Saloniki again. Yet he was quite confident that he would be in Saloniki again. He had no clear notion of what he proposed to do when he reached Alexandria, but he was determined to manage it somehow. He had a feeling that he was matched against fate and that he would win. He did not yet comprehend the full significance of what he called fate. He was unaware that it is just when the gods appear to be striving against us that they need the most careful watching lest they lure us to destroy ourselves. He was preoccupied with the immediate past; which he did not suspect is the opiate the gods use when they are preparing our destinies. And while he was sure enough in his private mind that he would get back to Saloniki somehow, the slow movement of theTanganyikaas she came up on her anchor gave the episode an appearance of irrevocable completeness. He was departing. Somewhere among those trees beyond the White Tower, trees that shared with everything else in Saloniki an appearance of shabby and meretricious glamour, like a tarnished and neglected throne, was Evanthia Solaris. And the ship was moving. The anchor was coming up and the ship was going slow ahead. Mr. Spokesly looked down at the water that was gushing through the hawse-pipe and washing away the caked mud from the links and shackles. As far as he could see he was going back to Alexandria, back by devious ways to London, and Evanthia Solaris, with her amber eyes, her high-piled glossy black hair and swift, menacing movements, would be no more than an alluring memory. And as the anchor appeared and the windlass stopped heaving while the men hosed the mud from the flukes, Mr. Spokesly began to realize, with his new-found perception, that what he took to be confidence was only desire. He was imagining himself back there in Saloniki; a man without ties or obligations. He saw an imaginary Spokesly seizing Evanthia and riding off into the night with her, riding into the interior, regardless of French sentries with their stolid faces and extremely long bayonets. As he recapitulated the actual conditions he saw he had only been dreaming of going back there. He had drawn all the money he could and he owed Archy Bates a ten-pound note. Stowed away under his clothes in his cabin he had nearly an oke, which is about three pounds, of a dark brown substance which Mr. Dainopoulos had mentioned was worth eighty pounds in Egypt if it were adroitly transferred to the gentleman who had expressed his willingness to do business with the friends of Mr. Bates. Here lay the beginnings of that desire, it seemed. That eighty pounds might put Mr. Spokesly in a position to go where he liked. It might; but the chances were that Mr. Spokesly would fail to get away from himself after all. It is not so easy to be an outlaw as it appears, when one has been one of the respectable middle classes for so long. The seaman is as carefully indexed as a convict, and has very little more chance in ordinary times of getting away. Mr. Spokesly knew that and had no such notion in his head. What he did meditate was some indirect retirement from the scene, when a pocketful of loose cash would enable him to effect a desirable man[oe]uvre in a dignified manner, and he would have no need to forfeit his own opinion of himself. The temperament of the crook may sometimes be innate, but in most cases it is the result of a long apprenticeship. Mr. Spokesly wanted money, he wanted a command, he even wanted romance; but he did not want to be wicked. He could no more get away from Haverstock Hill, North West London, than could Mrs. Dainopoulos with all her romantical equipment. Therein lay the essential difference between himself and Mr. Dainopoulos, who also desired respectability, but who had in reserve a native facility for swift and secret chicanery. Mr. Dainopoulos slipped in and out of the law as easily as a lizard through the slats of a railing. Mr. Spokesly could not do that, he discovered to his own surprise and perhaps regret. Unknown to himself, the austere integrity of distant ancestors and the hard traditions of an ancient calling combined to limit his sphere of action. The reason why many of us remain merely useful and poverty-stricken nonentities is that we can serve no other purpose in the world. We lack the flare for spectacular exploits; and even the war, which was to cleanse and revitalize the world, has left us very much as we were, the victims of integrity.
When he had seen the anchor made fast and the compressors screwed tight, Mr. Spokesly went aft to get his tea. He was to go on watch at eight. This was the Captain's idea, he reflected. They were supposed to pick up a new third mate in Alexandria. In the meanwhile the Captain was taking a watch. It was very unsatisfactory, but what was one to do? The Old Man had been very quiet about the shore-going in Saloniki. Hardly left the ship himself. Had that friend of his, a major, living in the spare cabin. Whiskies and sodas going upstairs too, the second steward had mentioned. Too big to notice what his own officers were doing, no doubt. If he knew what his chief officer was doing! By Jove! Mr. Spokesly was suddenly inflated, as he sat eating his tea, with extraordinary pride. He had recalled the moment when he had walked into the concert-hall of the White Tower Gardens with Evanthia Solaris. The proudest moment of his life. Every officer in the room had stared. Every woman had glared at the slimsvelteform with the white velvet toque set off by a single spray of osprey. As well they might, since they had never seen her before. They had seen the toque, however, in Stein's Oriental Store, and had wondered who had bought it. And as they had moved through the dense throng of little tables surrounded by officers and cocottes, amid a clamour of glasses and laughter and scraping chairs, with music on the distant stage, Mr. Spokesly experienced a new pleasure. They sat down and ordered beer. Upstairs a number of Russian officers, in their beautiful soft green uniforms, were holding a girl over the edge of a box and enjoying her screams. Someone threw a cream cake at the girl who was singing on the stage and it burst on her bosom, and everyone shrieked with laughter. The girl went into a paroxysm of rage and snarled incomprehensibly at them before flinging out of sight, and they all bawled with merriment. It was rich. Suddenly the Russian officers pushed the girl over the edge of the box and she dangled by her wrists. The audience howled as she kicked and screamed. The uproar became intolerable. Officers of all nations rose to their feet and bawled with excitement. One of them put a chair on a table and reached up until he could remove the dangling girl's shoe. It was filled with champagne and passed round. The girl was drawn up and disappeared into the box. The manager appeared on the stage to implore silence and order. Someone directed a soda-siphon at him and he retired, drenched. Finally a large placard was displayed which informed the audience that "À cause du tapage le spectacle est fini," and the curtain descended. They went out into the gardens, Evanthia holding his arm and taking short prinking little steps. Why had she wanted to go to such a place? He was obliged to admit she hardly seemed aware of the existence of the people around her. She sat there sipping her beer, smiling divinely when she caught his eye, yet with an air of invincible abstraction, as though under some enchantment. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled, as he would always be puzzled about women. Even his robust estimate of his own qualification as a male was not sufficient to explain the sudden mysterious change in Evanthia Solaris. Was she afraid, she who gave one the impression of being afraid of nothing? But Mr. Spokesly was not qualified to comprehend a woman's moods. His destiny, his function, precluded it. He never completely grasped the fact that women, being realists, see love as it really is, and are shocked back into a world of ideal emotions where they can experiment without imperilling their sense of daintiness and vestal dedication to a god. And Evanthia Solaris was experimenting now. Herliaisonwith the gay and debonair creature who had journeyed out of Saloniki that night with the departing consuls had been an inspiration to her to speculate upon the ultimate possibilities of emotional development. Just now she was quiet, as a spinning top is quiet, her thoughts, her conjectures, merely revolving at high speed. With the quickness of instinct she had admitted this friend of Mrs. Dainopoulos to a charming and delicate comradeship committing her to nothing. That he should love, of course, went without saying. She was debating, however, and revolving in her shrewd and capable brain, how to use him. And it gave her that air of diffident shyness blended with saucy courage which made him feel, now he was soberly eating his tea on board theTanganyika, outward bound, that she was a sorceress who had thrown an enchantment about him. And he wanted, impossible as he knew it to be, to go back there and resign himself again to the enchantment, closing his eyes, and leaving thedénouementto chance. No doubt the novelty of such a course appealed to him, for he came of a race whose history is one long war against enchantments and the poisonous fumes of chance. He went on stolidly eating his tea, substantial British provender, pickled pig's feet, beet-and-onion salad, stewed prunes, damson jam, and tea as harsh as an east wind. He loitered over the second cup, while the second steward passed behind him with a napkin, eager for him to finish, for that gentleman intended to gorge, while Archy Bates was indisposed, on pig's feet and pickled walnuts. Mr. Spokesly loitered because he knew, when he was once again in his own cabin, that he would be facing a problem which makes all men, except artists and scoundrels, uneasy. The problem was Ada. He did not want to think about Ada, a girl who was in an unassailable position as far as he was concerned. He wanted her to stay where she was, in beleaguered England, until he was ready to go back, until he had regained command of himself. He rose up suddenly and went along to his cabin. His idea was that Ada should wait for him, wait while he went through this extraordinary experience. His mind even went forward and planned the episode. He would get the money in Alexandria, get out of the ship somehow, return to Saloniki ... and when the war was over he would of course return to England and find Ada waiting for him. It was an admirable scheme and more frequently carried out than Mr. Spokesly was aware. Yet he was secretly ashamed. He had also a vague, illogical notion that, after all, he was not contemplating any real infidelity to Ada since he fully intended to return to her. He was very confused in his mind. He was not accustomed to such crises. He took up the little green pamphlets of the London School of Mnemonics. An aphorism caught his eye.Be sure your chin will find you out.The idea was expanded in an essay on forcefulness of character. The theory propounded was that we have all of us a minute germ of character force which by exercise and correct training can be developed into a formidable engine for the acquisition of power, position, and wealth. Another aphorism ran:Train the muscles of your mind.Just as the use of dumb-bells brought out rippling rolls of muscle under a satin skin, so the use of the Mnemonic method of Intensive Excogitation rounded out the sinews of the mind and gave a glistening polish to the conversation. Above all, it augmented one's cerebral vitality. One became a forceful personality and exerted a magnetic influence over women....
Mr. Spokesly's feet hurt him slightly. He went along to the pantry and ordered a bucket of hot water, and proceeded to go the rounds of the ship to see that all ports and doors were screened. His feet hurt him. And it seemed to him that his mind hurt him in very much the same way. He was in a mood which people like the London School of Mnemonics dread and deprecate more than anything else, a mood which renders suddenly valueless millions of dollars' worth of advertising, which empties theatres and leaves the purveyors of commodities with warehouses crammed with moribund stock. He was suspicious. He had suddenly perceived in a dim way the complete and humorous fallacy of trying to become somebody else through the mails. It did not present itself to him in this form. He was not clever enough to get anything so clear as that. The London School of Mnemonics prospered exclusively upon people who lacked the power of coherent thought. But he had become suspicious. He had lost faith, not in himself, but in the resources of ultra-modern advertising. He was beginning to wonder what Mr. Dainopoulos would say to the theory of Intensive Excogitation. Mr. Spokesly did not realize it, of course, but the mere fact that he was losing faith in the London School of Mnemonics was evidence of his progress in life. So much Evanthia Solaris had already done for him. She had induced in him a certain contempt and cantankerous suspicion of life. He saw himself with appalling clearness as the mate of a transport, quarrelling with dirty, insolent engineers who could not be induced to blind the scuttles of their cabins properly. And as he came back from the forecastle he heard Captain Meredith's quiet voice. The captain wanted the fall of the big steel boom made more secure. This boom was kept up against the mast, since it was too long to lay down. Mr. Spokesly blew his whistle. The bosun and a couple of seamen came out and began bending the heavy fall about the bollards near the standing rigging. Then they hauled on the guys which brought the boom hard up against the mast, and it appeared from the silence of the commander that he was satisfied. That, thought Mr. Spokesly, was what you had to put up with. He himself had sent a man up to the crosstrees hours ago to make fast the head of the boom. The man had not mentioned the fact that the dead-eye was loose up there, for the reason that he was a young chap and did not notice it. While the guys held the boom up he had slipped the pin into place and climbed down. And this was what one had to put up with. Impossible to give satisfaction. Day after day. Nag, nag, nag. Mr. Spokesly went back to his cabin and found Archy Bates sitting on the settee.
Archy was in that mood which follows heavy drinking by the initiated. Archy was always ready for each mood as it came and made the most of it. With a confidence that resembled to an extraordinary degree the faith of an inspired fanatic, he gave himself over to the service of the god for the time being. Coming back from ashore he had fallen out of the boat into the water and then fallen off the gangway into the boat again; yet his faith in his star never faltered. When the boat drifted from the grating he had assumed a stern expression, and raising his arms proceeded to walk across the water. When Archy was in that benign mood incidental to his return from a souse, there was nothing in the world to prevent him walking on water or ascending into the air, should he deem it a dignified thing to do. There was something rather awful, to one who believed in the laws of nature, in the inebriated accuracy of Archy's movements along intricate alleyways, through doors and up ladders. Through it all he held in reserve the fixed cat-grin which implied a bemused omniscience, a dreadful knowledge of secret human standards.
But that mood was gone and he sat here on Mr. Spokesly's settee, smoking a cigarette, completely normal and master of himself. It was a grotesque feature of his convalescence, this austere assumption of efficiency. He was very much upset at the way the second steward had made a mess of things that afternoon. Just as soon as he took his eye off him, things went wrong. It was most discouraging. And he would like to recommend him for promotion, too. By the way, had Mr. Spokesly heard the company was going to buy some ships? This was an example of the way Archy "heard" of things. No one could tell how he got hold of the most secret information while stewed. Mr. Spokesly was not alert. He made no comment, not realizing how nearly that stray remark might touch him.