Mr. Dainopoulos let his pen descend to the document he was auditing and nodded in comprehension.
"Yes, all finished, eh? Wal, what you think?" he went on nonchalantly. "She little damn fool. She tell plenty stories to anybody who get sweet on her, you unnerstand? She hearTanganyikago south, time so and so. She talk"—here Mr. Dainopoulos made a gesture with his thumb and fingers indicating violent blabbing—"ba-ba-ba-ba! Now she's in jail.Tanganyika, wal, you know all aboutTanganyika, Mister. You unnerstand; these peoples, French, English, they play, you know, golf and tennees, and seem half asleep." He shook his head. "No! Not asleep. Very bad business that. Me; I go all the time like this." And he drew a perfectly straight line with his pen along the edge of his desk. "That crooked business no good."
Captain Rannie was suddenly overtaken by a violent fit of coughing, and buried his nut-cracker features in a large plum-coloured silk handkerchief. His head was bowed, his shoulders heaved horribly, and from him came a sound like an asthmatic horse whinnying. He might have been laughing save that laughter was unknown to him beyond a short sharp yawp, a "Ha!" involving a lift of the diaphragm and an intake of breath. And since none had ever seen him laugh they would not suspect merriment in this dreadful cacophony, this laryngeal uproar, which had so suddenly assailed him. Mr. Dainopoulos looked at his captain very sternly and then renewed the proposal to eat. Captain Rannie rose, joint by joint, and stuffed his plum-coloured handkerchief into his breast pocket.
"No," he said, and Mr. Spokesly wondered if the man ever agreed to anything except under protest. "No, I'm a two-meal-a-day man myself. I find I am less bilious on two meals a day. And anyhow, after that, I couldn't possibly eat anything."
And he coughed himself out of the door.
Mr. Dainopoulos stared after him, his features destitute of any emotion at all. Captain Rannie halted, turned half round, and it almost seemed as though for once in his life he was going to raise his eyes and look somebody square in the face. But he paused at the second button of his owner's waistcoat and nodded several times, his toothless mouth open, a perfect ventriloquist's dummy.
"I'll have indigestion for a fortnight," he said. "Absolutely." And he started off again, the plum-coloured handkerchief to his face, his shoulders heaving, making a noise like a foundered horse.
"What's the matter with him?" Mr. Spokesly felt justified in asking.
"He's an old bum!" said Mr. Dainopoulos with a gloomy air, but made no further allusion to the bronchial troubles of his captain. The fact was, as Mr. Spokesly became aware in time, that Mr. Dainopoulos, in the course of his many negotiations, was obliged to entrust some of the business to his employees. And a stroke of business entirely correct to him did not make that impression upon Captain Rannie, who was under the illusion that he himself was the soul of honour. So he was, in theory. When Captain Rannie did a mean and dishonourable action, it bore to him the aspect of an act of singular rectitude. And he promptly forgot all about it. He wiped it out of his mind as off a slate. It was gone; had never existed, in fact. For the exploits of others, however, he not only never left off thinking about them, but he could not be induced to refrain from discussing them, for ever and ever. Anyone who had ever had any dealings with him would find him an embarrassing witness at the Day of Judgment, if we are correct in assuming that witnesses will be called. Mr. Dainopoulos could not afford to quarrel with him, but he sometimes wished he had a more amiable disposition, and could get on better with his crew. And he felt for him also the puzzled contempt which men of affairs feel for the sensualist. An elderly man who, as Mr. Dainopoulos had heard, had a wife somewhere and a married daughter somewhere else, and who was continually engaged in some shabby unmentionable intrigue, made one feel a little uncomfortable and slightly ashamed of one's species. Captain Rannie's view of his own conduct was not available, for he never by any chance recognized the existence of such affairs in his intercourse with other men. His sentiments about women were unknown save what might be gathered from his short sharp yawp—"Ha!"—whenever they were mentioned, the laugh of a noble nature embittered by base ingratitude. So he visualized himself. No one had ever betrayed the slightest gratitude for anything he had ever done. So he would be revenged on the whole pack of them—Ha!
It was Mr. Spokesly's chance question, whether the Captain was a visitor at the house, which let him fully into the mind and temper of his new employer.
"He's not that sort of man," said Mr. Dainopoulos, shovelling beans into his mouth with a knife. "My wife, she wouldn't like him, I guess. He's got something of his own, y'unnerstand. Like your friend Mr. Bates, only he don't drink. He take the pipe a leetle. You savvy?"
Mr. Spokesly remembered this conversation later on, when events had suddenly carried him beyond the range of Mr. Dainopoulos and his intense respectability. He remembered it because he realized that Mr. Dainopoulos at that time, and behind his mask of bourgeois probity, which had been so enigmatically received by Captain Rannie, was devising a daring and astute stroke of business based on his exact knowledge of the Ægean and his relations with the late consuls of enemy powers. And Captain Rannie, of course, had been aware of this. But at the moment Mr. Spokesly easily abandoned the morals of his new commander and listened to what might be called the wisdom of the Near East. He thought there was no harm in asking Mr. Dainopoulos what he thought of the emerald ring. That gentleman evidently thought a great deal of it. He offered to buy it, spot cash, for a thousand drachma, about one sixth of its actual value. He merely shrugged his shoulders when he heard the tale of a woman giving it to Archy. According to his own experience that sort of woman did not give such things away to anybody. He thoroughly understood precious stones, as he understood drugs, carpets, currency, bric-à-brac, dry goods, wet goods, and the law of average. He noted a minute flaw in the stone, and finally handed it back hurriedly, telling Mr. Spokesly to give it away to some lady.
"Or throw it into the sea," he added, drinking a glass of wine in a gulp.
"What for?" demanded Mr. Spokesly, mystified by this sudden fancy.
"Bad luck," said Mr. Dainopoulos laconically. "It belong to a drowned man, you unnerstand! Better give it away."
"I'll give it to Miss Solaris."
Mr. Dainopoulos eyed Mr. Spokesly over his shoulder as he sat with his elbows on the table holding up his glass. Mr. Spokesly put the ring in his pocket.
"She'll take it, all right," said his friend at length, and drank.
"What makes you so sure?" asked Mr. Spokesly.
Mr. Dainopoulos was not prepared to answer that question in English. He found that English, as he knew it, was an extraordinarily wooden and cumbersome vehicle in which to convey those lightning flashes and glares and sparkles of thought in which most Latin intelligences communicate with each other. You could say very little in English, Mr. Dainopoulos thought. He could have got off some extremely good things about Evanthia Solaris in the original Greek, but Mr. Spokesly would not have understood him. If he were to take a long chance, however, by saying that the vulture up in the sky sees the dead mouse in the ravine, he was not at all sure of the result.
"Aw," he said in apology for his difficulty, "the ladies, they like the pretty rings."
"I can see you don't like her," said Mr. Spokesly, smiling a little.
"My friend," said Mr. Dainopoulos, and he turned his black, bloodshot eyes, with their baggy pouches of skin forming purplish crescents below them, on his companion. "My friend, I'm married. Women, I got no use for them, you unnerstand? You no unnerstand. By and by, you know what I mean. My wife, all the time she sick, all the time. She like Miss Solaris. All right. For my wife anything in the world. But me, I got my business. By and by, ah!"
"What about by and by?" asked Mr. Spokesly, curious in spite of himself. He began to think Mr. Dainopoulos was a rather interesting human being, a remarkable concession from an Englishman.
Mr. Dainopoulos did not reply immediately. He had a vision splendid in his mind, but it was hazy and vague in details. His somewhat oriental conception of happiness was tempered by an austere idealism inspired by his wife. He could never have achieved his ambition, let us say, in Haverstock Hill, London N., or Newark, N. J. He demanded a background of natural features as a setting for his grandiose plans for the future. No westerner could understand his dreams, for example, of a black automobile with solid silver fittings and upholstery of orange corded silk, in which his wife could take the air along a magnificent corniche road flanked by lemon-coloured rocks and an azure sea. Other refinements, such as silken window-blinds, striped green and white, keeping the blinding sparkle of that sea from invading the cool recesses of voluptuous chambers, came to him from time to time. But he could not talk about it. He did not even speak to his wife of his dream. He believed she knew without his telling her. She knew nothing about it, imagining that he was merely concocting some little surprise such as buying a cottage in the country down in Warwickshire, where she believed her people came from in the days of William the Fourth. Buying cottages was not her husband's idea of solidifying a position, however. For him, living in a hovel while making money was justified by frugality and convenience, but retiring to a cottage would be a confession of defeat.
So he did not enlighten Mr. Spokesly. He paused awhile and then remarked that he hoped to get finished with business some day. No one could possibly take exception to this.
They did not see the officer who had been so anxious for Mr. Spokesly to visit the Persian Gulf during the coming summer. That gentleman had gone to see a dentist, it appeared, and a young writer informed them that it would be all right so long as the captain of the vessel was British.
"Yes, he's British all right—Captain Rannie—he's got a passport," said Mr. Dainopoulos. And when he was asked when he would be ready to load, he said as soon as the Captain gave him a berth.
"He put us three mile away, and it takes a tug an hour and a half to get to the ship," he remarked, "with coal like what it is now."
"Well, of course we can't put everybody at the pier, you know," said the young writer genially, quite forgetting that Mr. Dainopoulos had deftly inserted an item in thecharte partiewhich gave him a generous allowance for lighterage.
"All right," said he, as though making a decent concession. "You know they tell me they want this stuff in a hurry, eh?"
The young writer did not know but he pretended he did, and said he would attend to it. So they bade him good day and took their way back to the Bureau de Change. Mr. Dainopoulos had left it in charge of a young Jew, a youth so desperately poor and so fanatically honest that he seemed a living caricature of all moral codes. Neither his poverty nor his probity seemed remarkable enough to keep him in employment, doubtless because, like millions of other people in southeastern Europe, he had neither craft of mind nor hand. Mr. Dainopoulos got him small situations from time to time, and in between these he hung about, running errands, and keeping shop, a pale, dwarfed, ragged creature, with emaciated features and brilliant pathetic eyes. He was wearing a pair of woman's boots, much too large for him, burst at the sides and with heels dreadfully run over, so that he kept twitching himself erect. Mr. Dainopoulos waved a hand towards this young paragon.
"See if you can find him a job on theKalkis," he said. "Very honest young feller." They spoke rapidly to each other and Mr. Dainopoulos gave an amused grunt.
"He say he don't want to go in a ship. Scared she go down," he remarked.
The boy looked down the street with an expression of suppressed grief on his face. He rolled his eyes towards his benefactor, imploring mercy. Mr. Dainopoulos spoke to him again.
"He'll go," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "Fix him to help the cook. And if you want anybody to take a letter, he's a very honest young feller."
The very honest young feller shrank away to one side, evidently feeling no irresistible vocation for the sea. Indeed, he resembled one condemned to die. He and his kind swarm in the ports of the Levant, the Semitic parasites of sea-borne commerce, yet rarely setting foot upon a ship. He drooped, as though his limbs had liquefied and he was about to collapse. Mr. Dainopoulos, however, to whom ethnic distinctions of such refinement were of no interest, ignored him and permitted him to revel in his agony at a near-by café table.
"You come to my house to-night," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "I got one or two little things to fix."
"Me too," said his new chief officer, who suddenly felt he needed urgently to meet his own kind again. Mr. Dainopoulos was all right of course, but Mr. Spokesly still retained the illusion that Anglo-Saxon superiority was accepted by the world like gravity and the other laws of nature. It would not do to make himself too cheap, he reflected. He had an unpleasant feeling that his late captain on theTanganyikawould have stared if he had seen his chief officer hobnobbing with a money-changer and a Jewish youth of almost inconceivable honesty and destitution. Mr. Spokesly's wit, however, was nimble enough now to see that Captain Meredith himself had not always been a quiet, refined, and competent commander; and moreover, Captain Meredith might quite conceivably have seen and taken a chance like this himself, had he been in the way of it. But just now what was wanted was a chat and a drink with a friend. He would go down to the hotel and find the lieutenant.
But this was not to be. As he entered the foyer of the hotel, a major and a round-faced person in civilian clothes regarded him with exaggerated attention. Their protracted examination of him made him feel somewhat self-conscious, and to ease the situation he spoke to them.
"I'm looking for a friend of mine," he said, "a lieutenant in the Harbour Office. I don't know his name."
"Don't know his name!" said the major, boring into Mr. Spokesly with his cold ironical stare.
"I only met him this morning," he explained. "Me coming ashore from theTanganyika, you see."
"Oh, yes." This in a more human tone.
"And him being the only man I know, pretty near, I was looking for him."
"I see. Well, old chap, he's generally about pickled this time of day, if he's the man I think you mean. Up at the Cercle Militaire—d'you know it?—or the White Tower Bar. Better take a look along."
"Thanks," said Mr. Spokesly with a slight smile.
"Don't mention it. By the way, are you being sent home?"
"I'm going on a local ship down to the Islands," he replied.
"Not theKalkis?"
Mr. Spokesly nodded, and said he was going mate.
"Well, look here. I'm Officer of Supply, you know. You might look me up—you know where it is—and we'll have a word about the cargo. Yes, in the morning."
The major and his friend the censor, who was also a novelist, gazed after Mr. Spokesly as he went out.
"I believe that fellow Dainopoulos is on the level after all," said the major, drawing hard at his cigarette. "I know his skipper is a Britisher, and this chap's all right, I should say. Well, he's making enough out of it to give us a fair deal."
"Most of these local people are on our side, I think," said the other.
"If we pay them more than the other side," added the major drily. And then they went up to get ready for their dinner.
Mr. Spokesly called a carriage and started along thequai. He wondered what they wanted of him about the cargo! Was it possible Captain Rannie was not regarded with complete confidence at headquarters? He recalled the extraordinary reception the Captain had given to his owner when Mr. Dainopoulos described the undeviating rectitude of his course. Mr. Spokesly was not simple enough to suppose that theKalkiswas as innocent as she looked in the distance. He knew that the delicate and precarious position of the Allies in Saloniki rendered it necessary to wink at a good deal of adventurous trading in which the local Levantine merchants were past-masters. It could not be helped. But he was puzzled to account for Captain Rannie. How had he come to be in the employ of Mr. Dainopoulos? And what was the lure which held him to a sort of snarling fidelity? Perhaps he also had a tremendous love affair, like Jack Harrowby. Mr. Dainopoulos had hinted at shabby intrigues. Even Mr. Dainopoulos, however, was not quite on safe ground here. Captain Rannie had his own way of enjoying himself, and an essential part of that enjoyment was its secrecy. He couldn't bear anybody to know anything about him. He was averse, in fact, to admitting that he ever did enjoy himself. It was too much like letting his opponents score against him. And so people like Mr. Dainopoulos, familiar with evil, imagined the captain to be much more wicked than he ever ventured to be. The drug whose aid he invoked made him look not only aged but sinful as a compensation for the glimpses into the paradise of perpetual youth which it afforded him while he was lying amid huge puffy pillows, in a house near the Bazaar. It gave him genuine pleasure to escape every familiar human eye, and arrive by devious ways at a secret door in a foul alley, which gave on to the back of the house where a quiet, elderly woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter received him and wafted him gently away into elysium. He was a sensualist no doubt, yet it would puzzle a jury of angels to find him more guilty than many men of more amiable repute. When he sank into one of his torpors, the quiet woman holding his pulse, he felt he was getting even with the wife and daughter who had made him so unhappy in past days. Captain Rannie never did anything without what he called "full warrant." He considered he had full warrant for killing himself with drugs if he wished. He merely refrained out of consideration for the world. Away back in the womb of Time, some forgotten but eternal principle of justice had decreed to him the right to do as he pleased, provided, always provided, he did his duty in his public station. This is a common enough doctrine in Europe and a difficult one to abrogate. Mr. Spokesly, driving along thequaitoward the White Tower, would have been the last to deny what Captain Rannie called "a common elementary right." He was invoking it himself. What he was trying to do all this while was to achieve an outlet for his own personality. This was really behind even his intrigue with the London School of Mnemonics. He was convinced he had something in him which the pressures and conventions of the world had never permitted to emerge. It must be borne in mind that the grand ideal of sacrifice which swept over us like a giant wave of emotion at the beginning of the war behaved like all waves. It receded eventually, and those of us whose natures were durable rather than soluble emerged and began to take in the situation while we dried ourselves as quickly as possible. We wondered if there might not be some valuable wreckage washing ashore soon. We got into the universal life-saving uniform, of course, and assumed conventional attitudes of looking out to sea and acting as chorus to the grand principal performers; but the habits and instincts of generations were too strong for us. We kept one eye on the beaches for wreckage. Patriotism became an intricate game of bluffing ourselves. We had returned with naïve simplicity to the habits of our Danish and Saxon and Norman ancestors. Like the Jews in London who joined lustily in the chorus of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," we missed the joke in our furious eagerness to seize the opportunity. But there were many, and Mr. Spokesly was one, whose acquisitive genius was not adequately developed to deal with all the chances of loot that came by, and who were preoccupied with the fascinating problem of establishing their egos on a higher plane. Merely becoming engaged had been an advance, for Mr. Spokesly, because men like him can move neither upward nor downward without the aid of women. Once removed from the influence of Ada by a series of events which he could not control, he was the predestined prey of the next woman ahead. Those who view this career with contempt should reflect upon the happiness and longevity of many who pursue it. Mr. Spokesly was no sensualist in the strict meaning of the word. He simply experienced a difficulty in having any spiritual life apart from women. He could do with a minimum of inspiration, but such as he needed had to come from them. All his thoughts clustered about them. Just as he experienced a feeling of exaltation when he found himself in their company, so he could never see another man similarly engaged without regarding him as a being of singular fortune. Always, moreover, he conceived the woman he did not know as a creature of extraordinary gifts. Evanthia Solaris seemed to have eluded classification because, without possessing any gifts at all beyond a certain magnetism bewilderingly composed of feminine timidity and tigerish courage, she had inspired in him a strange belief that she would bring him good fortune. This was the kind of woman she was. She went much farther back into the history of the world than Ada Rivers. Ada was simply a modern authorized version of Lady Rowena or Rebecca of York. She accepted man, though what she really wanted was a knight. Evanthia had no use for knights, save perhaps those of Aristophanes. She, too, accepted men; but they had to transform themselves quickly and efficiently into the votaries of a magnetic goddess. Sighs and vows of allegiance were as nothing at all to her. She had a divinely dynamic energy which set men going the way she wanted. The gay young devil who had been sent packing with the consuls and who was now sitting in his hotel in Pera was wondering at his luck in escaping from her and scheming how to get back to her at the same time. Yet so astute had she been that even now he did not suspect that she was scheming, too, that she was in an agony at times for the loss of him, and talked to Mrs. Dainopoulos of killing herself. She was scheming as she came walking among the grass-plats at the base of the Tower and saw Mr. Spokesly descend from a carriage and take a seat facing the sea. She came along, as she so often did in her later period, at a vital moment. She came, in her suit of pale saffron with the great crown of black straw withdrawing her face into a magically distant gloom, and holding a delicate little wrap on her arm against the night, for the sun was going down behind the distant hills and touching the waters of the Gulf with ruddy fire. She saw him sitting there, and smiled. He was watching a ship going out, a ship making for the narrow strait between the headland and the marshes of the Vardar, and thinking of his life as it was opening before him. He took out a cigarette and his fingers searched a vest-pocket for matches. They closed on the emerald ring and he held the cigarette for a while unlit, thinking of Evanthia, and wondered how he could make the gift. And as he sat there she seemed to materialize out of the shimmering radiance of the evening air, prinking and bending forward with an enchanting smile to catch his eye. And before he could draw a breath, sat down beside him.
"What you do here?" she asked in her sweet, twittering voice. "You wait for somebody, eh?"
"Yes," he answered, rousing, "for you."
"Ah—h!" her eyes snapped under the big brim. "How do I know you only tell me that because I am here?"
Her hand, gloved in lemon kid, was near his knee and he took it meditatively, pulling back the wrist of it until she drew away and removed it herself, smiling.
"Eh?" she demanded, not quite sure if he had caught her drift, so deliberate was his mood. He took the ring out of his pocket and grasped her hand while he slid the gem over a finger. She let it rest there for a moment, studying the situation. No one was near them just then. And then she looked up right into his face leaning a little towards him. Her voice caught a little as she spoke. It was ravishing, a ring like that. For a flicker of an eyelash she was off her guard, and he caught a smoulder of extraordinary passion in her half-closed eyes.
"You like me," she twittered softly.
The sun had gone, the gray water was ruffled by a little wind, the wind of evening, and as the guns boomed on the warships in the roadstead the ensigns came down.
"You like me," she said again, bending over a little more, for his eyes were watching the ships and she could not bear it. Suddenly he put his arm across her shoulders and held her. And then he used a strange and terrible expression.
"I'd go to hell for you," he said.
She leaned back with a sigh of utter content.
He looked down from his window in the morning into a garden of tangled and neglected vegetation sparkling with dew. Over the trees beyond the road lay the Gulf, a sheet of azure and misty gray. He looked at it and endeavoured to bring his thoughts into some sort of practical order while he shaved and dressed. The adventure of the previous evening, however, was so fresh and disturbing that he could do nothing save return to it again and again. At intervals he would pause and stand looking out, thinking of Evanthia in a mood of extraordinary delight.
She must be, he reflected, one of the most wonderful creatures in the world. He had not believed it possible that any woman could so transmute the hours for him into spheres of golden radiance. The evening had passed like a dream. Indeed, he was in the position of a man whose dreams not only come true but surpass themselves. His dreams had been only shabby travesties of the reality. He recalled the subtle fragrance of her hair, the flash of her amber eyes, the sensuous delicacy and softness of her limbs and bosom, the melodious timbre of her voice. And he paused longer than usual as he reflected with sudden amazement that she was his for the taking. The taking! How deliciously mysterious she had been as she made it clear he must take her away, far away, where nobody knew who she was, where they could be happy for ever together! How she had played upon the strong chords of his heart as she spoke of her despair, her loneliness, her conviction that she was destined for ill fortune! She injected a strange strain of tragic intensity into the voluptuous abandon of her voice. She evoked emotions tinged with a kind of savage and primitive religious mania as she lay in his arms in the scented darkness of that garden and whispered in her sweet twittering tones her romantic desires. And the thought that she was even now lying asleep in another room, the morning sun filtering through green shutters and filling the chamber with the lambent glittering beam-shot twilight of a submarine grotto, was like strong wine in his veins. She depended on him, and he was almost afraid of the violence of the emotion she stirred in him. She had touched, with the unerring instinct of a clever woman, his imagination, his masculine pride and the profound sentimentalism of his race towards her sex. She revealed to him a phase in her character so inexpressibly lovely and alluring that he was in a trance. She inspired in him visions of a future where he would always love and she be fair. Indeed, Mr. Spokesly's romantic illusions were founded on fact. Evanthia Solaris was possessed of a beauty and character almost indestructible. She was preëminently fitted to survive the innumerable casualties of modern life. She was a type that Ada Rivers, for example, would not believe in at all, for girls like Ada Rivers are either Christian or Hebrew, whereas Evanthia Solaris was neither, but possessed the calculating sagacity of a pagan oracle. Such a catastrophe as the departure of the consuls had enraged her for a time, and then she had subsided deep into her usual mysterious mood. So his illusions were founded on fact. She could give him everything he dreamed of, leaving him with imperishable memories, and passing on with unimpaired vitality to adventures beyond his horizon. There was nothing illogical in this. Being an adventuress is not so very different from being an adventurer. One goes into it because one has the temperament and the desire for adventure. And Evanthia was by heredity an adventuress. Her father belonged to that little-known and completely misunderstood fraternity—thecomitadjiof the Balkans. It is not yet comprehended by the western nations that to a large section of these southeastern people civilization is a disagreeable inconvenience. They regard the dwellers in towns with contempt, descending upon them in sudden raids when the snows melt, and returning to their mountain fortresses laden with booty and sometimes with hostages. They maintain within political frontiers empires of their own, defying laws and defeating with ease the police-bands who are sent to apprehend them. They have no virtues save courage and occasionally fidelity and no ideals save the acquisition of spoil. They invariably draw to themselves the high-spirited youths of the towns; and the girls, offered the choice of drudging poverty or the protection of a farmer of taxes, are sometimes discovered to have gone away during the excitement of a midnight foray. So had Evanthia's mother, a lazy, lion-hearted baggage of Petritch whose parents had breathed more easily when they were free at last from her incessant demands and gusts of rage. But the man who had carried her off into the mountains was nearing the end of his predatory career, and very soon (for he had no enemies, having killed them all) he was able to purchase a franchise from the Government and turn tax-farmer himself. He was so successful that he became a rich man, and the family, fighting every inch of the way, took a villa in Pera. It was there Evanthia was educated in the manner peculiar to that part of the world. When she was eighteen she could make fine lace, cook, fight, and speak six languages without being able to write or read any at all. The villa in which they lived was for ever in an uproar, for all three gave battle on the smallest pretext. They lived precisely as the beasts in the jungle live—diversifying their periods of torpor with bursts of frantic vituperation and syncopating enjoyment. Neither European nor Asiatic, they maintained an uneasy balance on the shores of the Bosphorus between the two, until Evanthia's mother, a vigorous, handsome brunette trembling with half-understood longings and frustrated ambitions in spite of her life of animal indolence, suddenly ran away and took her daughter with her. She had fallen in love with a Greek whom she had met in Constantinople, a man of forceful personality, enormous moustaches, and no education, who was selling the tobacco crop from his estate in Macedonia. Evanthia's father, now a man of nearly sixty, did not follow them. He suffered a paroxysm of rage, broke some furniture, and made furious preparations for a pursuit, when one of the servants, a tall, cool Circassian girl with pale brown eyes and an extraordinarily lovely figure, broke in upon his frenzy and told him an elaborate story of how his wife had really gone to France, where she had previously sent a sum of money, and how she herself had been implored to go with them but had refused to desert her master. It was quite untrue, and took its origin from the French novels she had stolen from her mistress and read in bed; but it hit the mark with the man whose only domestic virtue was fidelity. And the Circassian creature made him an admirable companion, ruling the villa with a rod of iron, inaugurating an era of peace which the old gentleman had never experienced in his life.
Evanthia had to adjust herself to new and startling conditions. The swart Hellene stood no nonsense from his handsome mistress. He beat her every day, on the principle that if she had not done anything she was going to do something. When Evanthia began her tantrums he tried to beat her, too, but she showed so ugly a dexterity with a knife that he desisted and decided to starve her out. He cheerfully gave her money to run away to Saloniki, laughing harshly when she announced her intention of working for a living as a seamstress. She arrived in Saloniki to hear stirring news. She was about to enter a carriage to drive to the house of a friend of the Hellene, a gentleman named Dainopoulos, when a young man with glorious blond hair and little golden moustache, his blue eyes wide open and very anxious, almost pushed her away and got in, giving the driver an address. This was the beginning of her adventures. The young man explained the extreme urgency of his business, offered to do anything in his power if she would let him have the carriage at once. She got in with him, and he told her his news breathlessly: War. It seemed a formidable thing to him. To her, life was war. She had no knowledge of what war meant to him in his country. To her London, Berlin, Paris were replicas of Constantinople, cosmopolitan rookeries where one could meet interesting men. Saloniki immediately became a charming place for Evanthia Solaris. The young man was the vice-consul. His father was a wealthy ship-chandler at Stettin, and he himself had been everywhere. It was he who first confirmed her vague gropings after what one might call, for want of a better word, gentility. She was shrewd enough to suspect that the crude and disorderly squabbling in the Pera villa, or the grotesque bullying on the tobacco plantation, were not the highest manifestations of human culture. As has been hinted, she was sure there were people in the world who lived lives of virtuous ease, as opposed to what she had been accustomed. Their existence was confirmed by her new friend. He was the first man she had liked. Later she became infatuated with him. In between these two periods she learned to love someone in the world besides herself.
It would not do to say that she, in her barbaric simplicity, assumed that all Englishwomen lay on their backs and had angelic tempers. But she did arrive at a characteristically ecstatic conclusion about Mrs. Dainopoulos. That lady was so obviously, so romantically genteel that Evanthia sometimes wanted to barter her own superb vitality for some such destiny. She never considered for a moment, until she met Mr. Spokesly, the chances of being adored as Mr. Dainopoulos adored his wife. She knew Mr. Dainopoulos would never dream of adoring a woman like herself. She regarded him with dislike because he betrayed no curiosity about herself and because he obviously knew too much to be hoodwinked by her arts. He even ignored her rather amusing swagger when she paraded her new acquisition, a handsome vice-consul. She knew he would not have tolerated her at all had not his wife expressed a desire to have her remain. Mrs. Dainopoulos had no intention of countenancing evil; but she had been humane enough to see, when Evanthia told her story, how impossible it was for a girl with such a childhood to have the remotest conception of Western ideals. Mrs. Dainopoulos, in fact, belonged to the numerous class of people in England who manage "to make allowances," as they call it, for others. And possibly, too, Evanthia, with her bizarre history and magical personality, possibly even her naïve assumption that she was destined to be mistress of men, appealed to the Englishwoman's flair for romance. Evanthia, contrasted with Haverstock Hill, was wonderful. And to Evanthia, the victim of sudden little spurts of girlish posing, pathetic strivings after an imaginary western self, the invalid woman was a sympathetic angel. She never laughed when Evanthia pretended an absurd lofty patriotism or inaugurated a season of ridiculous religious observances, dressing in white and holding a crucifix to her breast. She did not deride Evanthia's remarkable travesty of English dress, or Evanthia's embarrassing concoctions in the kitchen. These gusts of enthusiasm died out, and the real Evanthia emerged again, a velvet-soft being of sex and sinuous delicacy, of no country and no creed, at home in the world, a thing of indestructible loveliness and problematic utility.
And now, while Mr. Spokesly stood at his window gently rubbing his chin and looking down into the dew-drenched garden, Evanthia was lying in another room, smoking a cigarette and meditating. She had a very astute and clearly defined plan in her mind, and she lay thinking how it could be carried out. Unhampered by so many of our modern educational distractions and complexes, her mental processes would have exacted the admiration of the London School of Mnemonics. The apparent impossibility of leaving Saloniki and reaching Constantinople meant nothing at all to her. It had always been an almost impossible task to go anywhere if one were a woman. Women, in her experience, were like expensive automobiles. They were always owned by somebody, who drove them about and sometimes ill-treated them and even rode them to destruction, and who lost them if they were not carefully guarded. Moreover, the parallel, in her experience, went farther, because she observed that nobody ever thought less of them because they were costly to run. Evanthia was now like an ownerless machine of which no one perceived the value or knew how to start. She had been getting accustomed to the notion that independence had its pleasures and defects. She lay thinking with quiet efficiency, until her cigarette was burned down, and then suddenly sprang out of bed. With extraordinary speed and quietness, she rolled up her great masses of black hair, slipped into a yellow kimono and Turkish slippers, and went downstairs. The contrast between her pose, with nothing save the slow curl of smoke coming from the deep pillow to show she was alive, and the sharp vitality of her movements in the kitchen, was characteristic. She could not help doing things in a theatrical way. Mr. Dainopoulos was much nearer the mark than even he knew, when he said in his caustic way that Evanthia imagined herself a queen. There were times when she thought she was an empress walking down ivory staircases strewn with slaughtered slaves. She had a way of striding to the door when she was angry and turning suddenly upon him, her head lowered, her amber eyes full of a lambent, vengeful glare. Mr. Dainopoulos would remain as impassive as a dummy under this exhibition of temperament, but his attitude was artistically correct. She might be exasperated with him, but she really regarded him as a dummy. He represented the cowed and terror-stricken vassal shrinking from the imperial anger. And now she moved in a majestic way here and there in the great stone kitchen, making black coffee and spooning out some preserved green figs into a plated dish. This she arranged on a tray. In imagination she was a great lady, a grand-duchess perhaps, taking refreshment to a secret lover. She loved to figure herself in these fantastic rôles, the rôles she had seen so often at the cinemas. The exaggerated gestures and graphic emotions came naturally to a girl at once theatrical and illiterate. She walked away with the tray in her hand, ascending the stairs as though rehearsing an entrance, and stood stock still outside Mr. Spokesly's door, listening.
Mr. Spokesly was listening, too. He had heard the slip-slop of the loose slippers, the tinkle of spoon against china, and then a faint tap. He went over to the door and pulled it open.
"You!" he said, with a thrill. He could not have said a word more just then. She smiled and held a finger to pursed lips to enjoin silence. He stood looking at her, hypnotized.
"Drink coffee with me?" she whispered sweetly, holding up the tray. And then she moved on along the passage, looking back over her shoulder at him with that smile which is as old as the world, the first finished masterpiece of unconscious art.
She led the way to a darkened room, set the tray down, and pushed the green shutters away, revealing a wooden balcony with chairs and a green iron table. Below, in the hush of early morning, lay the road, and beyond the trees and houses that followed the shore they could see the Gulf, now streaked and splotched with green and gray and rose. The early morning, charged with the undissipated emotions of the night, is a far more beautiful hour than the evening. To Evanthia, however, who had always dwelt amid scenes of extravagant natural beauty, this exquisite sunrise, viewed as it were in violet shadow, the invisible sun tingeing the snow of the distant peaks with delicate shell-pink and ivory-white, the vessels in the roadstead almost translucent pearl in the mist, the shore line a bar of solid black until it rose ominously in the sullen headland of Karaburun—all this was nothing. To Mr. Spokesly it was a great deal. It became to him a memory alluring and unforgettable. It was a frame for a picture which he bore with him through the years, a picture of himself on a balcony, listening to a girl in a yellow kimono while she whispered and whispered and then sat back in her chair and raised her cup to drink, looking at him over the rim of it with her brilliant amber eyes.
"I don't know as it can be done," he muttered, shaking his head slightly, gulping the coffee and setting the cup on the table. "Not so easy, I'm afraid."
"Youcan do it," she whispered imperiously.
"S'pose you get caught?" he replied cautiously. She waved a hand and shrugged.
"N'importe. C'est la guerre.That don't matter. You can do it, eh?"
Mr. Spokesly rubbed his chin.
"I don't say I can and I don't say I can't.Hemight be able to get you down there as a passenger."
She shook her head vigorously, and leaned over the table, touching it with her long filbert nails.
"No!" she said. "He says 'no good.' Nobody allowed to go Phyros, nobody to Alexandria. Nobody. You understand?"
He looked at her as she leaned against the table and then his gaze dropped to where the yellow wrap had opened so that he could see her bosom, and he felt a dizziness as he looked away. It was characteristic of Evanthia that she made no sudden gesture of modesty. She leaned there, her white throat and breast lifting evenly as she breathed, awaiting his answer.
"Yes, I understand," he answered, looking out to where theKalkiswas emerging from the distant haze. "But what I don't see is why you want to do it."
"I want to go wis you," she whispered sharply, and he looked at her again to find her gazing at him sternly, her finger on her lips.
And Mr. Spokesly suddenly had an inspiration. Here he was again, mewing like a kitten for somebody to come and open the door, instead of taking hold and mastering the situation. He took a deep breath, and lit a cigarette. He must play up to this. No good fooling about. In for a penny, in for a pound. Could it be managed? He decided it could. It was evident Mr. Dainopoulos knew something about it but had no intention of taking an active part in the adventure. Mr. Spokesly realized he himself had no notion where theKalkiswas going after discharging in Phyros. It seemed Evanthia did, or had some notion of it. Yes, it could be managed. His hand closed over hers as it lay on the table.
"I'll fix everything," he said. "You be ready and I'll do the rest."
Her face grew radiant. She became herself again—a woman who had got what she wanted. She rose and stroked his hair gently as she bent over him.
"Now I get some breakfast,mon cher," she twittered sweetly. "You stop here. I call you." And with a soft, sibilant flip-flop of her heelless slippers, which showed her own pink heels and delicate ankles, she disappeared.
And Mr. Spokesly, who had come home from distant places to join the forces, who had become engaged in an exemplary way to a girl who was now wondering, away in beleaguered England, why Reggie didn't write, tilted his chair a little and allowed his mind to go forward. When he asked himself what would be the upshot of this adventure, he was compelled to admit that he didn't know. What startled and invigorated him was that he didn't care. He saw himself, as they say, on deck in fine weather, a full moon pouring her glorious radiance down upon them, and Evanthia beside him in a deck chair under the awning. He saw himself in some distant harbour, after much toil and anxiety, sitting at cafés with bands playing and Evanthia in that corn-coloured dress with an enormous black hat. And then his thoughts went so far forward that they lost coherence and he grew dizzy again. His chair was tilted back against the opened jalousie and he stared with unseeing eyes across the glittering water. It was the dream he had had before, on theTanganyika, only a little clearer, a little nearer. They were dead, while he was alive. There you had it. Perhaps in a little while he, too, would be dead—a bomb, a shell, a bullet—and the dreams would be for others while he joined that great army of silent shades. Why had he never seen the simplicity of it before? This was the mood for adventure. You forgot the others and went right on, getting the things that are yours for the taking, never counting the cost, finding your dreams come true....
Then you went back to beleaguered England, and Ada would be there, waiting.
And then, as he sat there, he came slowly back to the present and saw that theKalkiswas moving. He saw steam jetting from the forecastle and that told him they were heaving up the anchor. An obsolete old ship, he reflected, with the exhaust from the windlass blinding everybody and making it difficult to see the bridge. TheKalkisbegan to move.
Now she had way on and was turning towards him. Coming in to a new berth, Mr. Spokesly noted. He rose, and Mr. Dainopoulos appeared at the door leading to the balcony.
"You all right, eh?" he inquired, and seeing the empty cups made a peculiar grimace. He pointed to theKalkis.
"You got a new berth?" said Mr. Spokesly.
"Yeh. Over here," said Mr. Dainopoulos. "It's the best we can get just now. No room inside. Now," he went on, "You got to go on board, see, and have a look round. There's two hundred ton to be loaded quick, but I think her winches, they ain't very good. You let me know. The captain, he talk plenty aboutnewwinches. Where do I get new winches, eh? I ask you, where do I get 'em, out here?"
This time, when called, Mr. Spokesly was ready.
"We'll get her loaded," he said. "If it's all light general we can do it, winches or no winches. Is the other mate finished?"
"Just about. He don't get any more pay, anyhow."
Evanthia suddenly came out of the shadow of the room and looked at them in a theatrical way, as though she were about to begin a big scene and was waiting for her cue from the rear.
"Breakfast," said Mr. Dainopoulos, upon whom this sort of histrionics was lost, and they went down to a room on the ground floor, a room that was full of moving green shadows and pale green beams as the dense foliage of the garden swayed in the breeze. It was like sitting in a recess at the bottom of the sea. The slim girl with the contemptuously taciturn expression was laying the table.
"My wife, she don't come down," said Mr. Dainopoulos, devouring lamb stew. They might have been in the breakfast room of a home in Haverstock Hill. Only the figure of Evanthia hissing incomprehensible commands into the ears of the sullen young girl, who stared at Mr. Spokesly and moved unwillingly into the kitchen, recalled the adventure behind this little scene. On the walls were enlarged photographs of the father and mother of Mr. Dainopoulos, life-size coloured prints in gold frames that were enclosed in an outer glass case on account of flies. The furniture had come, at his wife's order, from Tottenham Court Road, and was a glossy walnut with dark green plush. A giant dresser of black Anatolian oak which stood against one wall bore on its broad shelves a couple of blue and green and yellow Armenian vases and a great shining copper tray like an ancient shield. Across this shield the green sunlight wavered and shook so that even Mr. Dainopoulos allowed his eye to rest on it. He wanted to get rid of that dresser and buy one of those white kitchen cabinets he saw in advertisements. He did not know furniture, strange to say, or he would have asked an extremely high price for his dresser. He sat looking at the light playing on the copper shield, which sent it flying back in a fairy flicker athwart the ceiling, which was dark brown and riven with huge cracks, and doing a little posing on his account.
"My wife she don't come down," he said. It reminded him of something he had been going to tell Mr. Spokesly that first night and his wife had stopped him. Why did she always do that? Always there was something about the English he couldn't follow. He went on with his lamb stew, noisily enjoying it, and pretending he did not see Evanthia's rehearsal of one of her favourite poses, a great madama dispensing hospitality to her guests in the morning room of herchâteau.
"I met a major yesterday," said Mr. Spokesly, "in the Olympos. He said he wanted me to go and see him about the cargo."
"Eh!" Mr. Dainopoulos stared, knife and fork raised.
"Oh, I fancy he just wants to give us a few hints about the discharging in Phyros."
"He can do that," said Mr. Dainopoulos, letting his hands fall to the table. "He can do that. Yes," he went on, seeing the possibilities of the thing, "you go along and tell him you'll attend to it all yourself, see? You fix him. The captain, he don't like government peoples."
"I'll go this morning, after I've got some gear."
"It ain't a very long voyage to Phyros," said his employer.
"Where do we go, from Phyros?" asked Mr. Spokesly.
"To Piræus for orders," said the other quickly. Mr. Spokesly could not help glancing at Evanthia, who regarded him steadily.
"I see," he said. Piræus was the port of Athens. Athens, just then, was a peculiar place, like Saloniki. So that was it.
"Captain Rannie said he didn't know," he observed. Mr. Dainopoulos grunted.
"Perhaps he didn't know, when you ask him. I think I got a charter, but I ain't sure. I take a chance, that's all."
After they had finished and as he was waiting for Mr. Dainopoulos, he saw Evanthia in the garden, an apron over her pink cotton dress, smoking a cigarette.
"So it's Athens you want," he said, smiling. She put her finger to her lips.
"By and by, you will see," she said and led him away down among the trees. She pulled his head down with a gesture he grew to know well, and whispered rapidly in his ear. And then pushed him away and hurried off to look for eggs in the chicken-house. He joined Mr. Dainopoulos in a thoughtful mood, more than ever convinced that women were, as he put it, queer. He was so preoccupied that he did not notice the lack of originality in this conclusion.
Mr. Dainopoulos was thoughtful, too, as they made their way into the city and he opened his office. He was in a difficulty because he did not know how far Mr. Spokesly, being an Englishman, could be trusted with the facts. He was perfectly well aware of the difference between doing a little business in hashish, which destroyed the soldiers in Egypt body and soul, and an enterprise such as he had in mind. What would be Mr. Spokesly's attitude after his interview with the major, and after getting away to sea? He had said he was taking a chance of a cargo. This was scarcely true; but he was taking a chance in sending Mr. Spokesly out ignorant of what was in store for him. But he decided to do it. He decided to make that drug-rotted old captain of his earn his salt. He would let Captain Rannie tell Mr. Spokesly after they were at sea. Scraping his chin with his fingernail as he stood in front of his big safe, Mr. Dainopoulos felt sure that, out at sea, there would be no trouble. Then he opened his safe. He would make sure. The major had his own personal influence, no doubt; and it would be a powerful one if he exercised it. Mr. Dainopoulos could imagine him engaging Mr. Spokesly's interest tremendously with the story of those men waiting for their stores in Phyros. He took out a cash-box, and closing the safe went back to his desk.
"Listen here, Mister," he said, and suddenly broke off to wave away the young Jew, who was gazing in upon them with eyes enlarged and charged with pathos. "Listen here," he went on when the youth had vanished like a wraith. "I want to fix you so you'll be all right if anything happens, you understand. I don't know. Perhaps the Government take theKalkiswhen she get to Piræus—plenty trouble now in Piræus—and you gotta come back here. So I pay you six months now. You give me a receipt for six months' pay."
"What for?" demanded Mr. Spokesly, astonished.
"You understand, easy to cover risks with underwriter, yes. But s'pose I buy another ship and I got no captain. See?"
Something told Mr. Spokesly, though he did not understand at all, that money was money. The man was straight anyhow, he thought, taking the pen. He'd watch that old Rannie didn't try any monkey tricks. Very decent of him. He signed. He took the money in large, blue and purple denominations, crisp, crackling, delicious.
"And you don't forget," said Mr. Dainopoulos, turning towards the safe again. "By and by I'll have some more business, big business, and you'll get a big piece o' money if you work in with me. When you come back, eh? Out here, plenty business but nobody honest, to manage." He paused, looking down at the floor, hampered by his deficient English to explain what he meant. He was rather moved, too, because he saw, right there in his own continuing city, opportunities for business undreamed of by the tall blond officers in their shining brown harness down at headquarters. He saw buildings going up which would be sold for a song, a floating dock which might be acquired for a purely nominal sum when the war was over. He saw jetties and rolling-stock and launches which would be sold at hurried auctions for knock-down prices, a score at a time. But one must have somebody one can trust, a partner or a manager. Mr. Dainopoulos wanted no partners. His temperament was to feel his way along alone, making sudden rushes at his objective or sitting down to wait. A partner was of no use to him. But he figured that someone like Mr. Spokesly would be of great assistance in his business as he planned it later.
He put his cash-box away, slammed his safe shut, and began to open his shop for his ostensible business of money-changing.
"Now you get out to the ship as soon as you got your gear," he said, "and that young feller'll go with you in the boat."
Mr. Spokesly was startled to see how close theKalkiswas in shore, opposite the house. Without a glass he could see the balcony and the window within which Mrs. Dainopoulos lay watching the sunlight on the sea. As he came nearer to the ship, however, sitting in the row boat with the trembling young Hebrew beside him, he became preoccupied with her lines. And indeed to a seafaring man theKalkiswas a problem. She resembled nothing so much as the broken-down blood animal whom one discovers hauling a cab. Mr. Spokesly could see she had been a yacht. Her once tall masts were cut to stumps and a smooth-rivetted funnel at the same graceful rake was full of degrading dinges. A singularly shapely hull carried amidships a grotesque abortion in the form of a super-imposed upper bridge, and the teak deck forward was broken by a square hatchway. All the scuttles along her sides, once gleaming brass and crystal, were blind with dead-lights and painted over. Another hatch had been made where the owner's skylight had been and a friction-winch screamed and scuttered on the once spotless poop. As Mr. Spokesly once phrased it later, it was like meeting some girl, whose family you knew, on the streets. A lighter lay alongside loaded with sacks and cases, and the friction-winch shrieked and jerked the sling into the air as a gang of frowzy Greeks hooked them on.
They came round her bows to reach the gangway and Mr. Spokesly gave way to a feeling of bitterness for a moment as he looked up at the gracile sprit stem from which some utilitarian had sawed the bowsprit and carefully tacked over the stump a battered piece of sheet-copper. It affected him like the mutilation of a beautiful human body. What tales she could tell! Now he saw the mark of her original name showing up in rows of puttied screw-holes on the flare of the bow.Carmencita.She must have been a saucy little craft, her snowy gangway picked out with white ropes and polished brass stanchions. And now only a dirty ladder hung there.
Leaving the little Jew to get up as best he could, Mr. Spokesly climbed on deck and strode forward. He was curious to see what sort of mate it could be who came into port with a ship like this. His professional pride was nauseated. He kicked a bucket half full of potato peelings out of the doorway and entered the deck-house.
Garlic, stale wine, and cold suet were combined with a more sinister perfume that Mr. Spokesly knew was rats. He looked around upon a scene which made him wonder. It made him think of some forecastles he had lived in when he was a seaman, forecastles on Sunday morning after a Saturday night ashore on the Barbary Coast or in Newcastle, New South Wales. It was the saloon, apparently, and the breakfast had not been cleared away. A large yellow cat was gnawing at a slab of fish he had dragged from the table, bringing most of the cloth, with the cruet, after him. On the settee behind the table lay a man in trousers and singlet, snoring. He was wearing red silk socks full of holes, and a fly crawled along his full red lips below a large black moustache. In a pantry on one side a young man with a black moustache and in a blue apron, spotted with food, was smoking a cigarette and wiping some dishes with an almost incredibly dirty cloth.
"Where's the cap'en?" demanded Mr. Spokesly in a voice so harsh and aggressive he hardly recognized it himself. The young man came out wiping his hands on his hips and shrugging his shoulders.
"Where's the mate?"
The young man pointed at the figure on the settee. Mr. Spokesly went round the table and gave the recumbent gentleman a shake. Uttering a choking snort, the late chief officer opened his eyes, sat up, and looked round in a way that proved conclusively he had no clear notion of his locality. Eventually he discovered that the shakings came from a total stranger and he focussed a full stare from his black eyes upon Mr. Spokesly.
"I'm the new mate," said the latter. "Where's my cabin?"
"Ai!" said the other, staring, both hands on the dirty table-cloth. "Ai! You gotta nerve. What you doin' here, eh?"
"All right," said Mr. Spokesly, "I'll see to you in a minute. Here, you! Where's the mate's cabin, savvy? Room, cabin, bunk."
The young man, wiping his hands again on his hips, went over to an opening which led down a stairway and beckoned. Mr. Spokesly followed.
What he found was very much of a piece with the saloon. One side of the ship was occupied by a large room marked "Captain." On the other side were two cabins, the forward one of which he was given to understand was his. To call it a pigsty would not convey any conception of the dire disorder of it. The delicate hardwood panelling of the yacht had been painted over with a thick layer of greenish-white paint; and this was coated, at each end of the bunk, with a black deposit of human origin where the oiled head and neglected feet of the late incumbent had rubbed. The walnut table was marked with circles where hot cups had been set down, and the edges were charred by cigarette-ends left to burn. The basin was cracked and half full of black water. Mr. Spokesly gave one glance at the toilet shelf and then turned away hastily to the young man, who was watching him in some curiosity.
"You speak English?" he was asked curtly.
"Oh yass, I spick Ingleesh. Plenty Ingleesh."
"Right. Get this place clean. You savvy? Clean all out. Quick, presto. Savvy?"
"Yass, I savvy."
"Go on then."
"I finish saloon...."
"You let the saloon alone. Clean this place outnow."
There was a footfall on the staircase and the late chief officer, Cæsare Spiteri by name, came slowly down, holding by the hand-rail fixed over the door of the alleyway. There was a dull smoulder in his large bloodshot black eyes which seemed to bode trouble. He came forward, elaborately oblivious of Mr. Spokesly, his shoulders hunched, his large hand caressing his moustache. He spoke rapidly in Greek to the nervous steward, who began to edge away.
"Hi!" called Mr. Spokesly. "Do what I tell you. See here," he added to Mr. Spiteri, "you finished last night, I understand. You get your gear out of this and get away ashore."
"Yah! Who are you?" snarled Mr. Spiteri in a quiet tone which made the steward more nervous than ever.
"I'm mate of this ship, and if you don't get out in five minutes...."
He had no chance to finish. Mr. Spiteri made a circular sweep with one of his stockinged feet, which knocked Mr. Spokesly off his own, and he fell backwards on the settee. The effect upon him was surprising. Reflecting upon it later, when he got away to sea, Mr. Spokesly was surprised at himself. He certainly saw red. The filthy condition of the ship, the degradation of the yachtCarmencitato the baseness of theKalkis, and his own spiritual exaltation, reacted to fill him with an extraordinary vitality of anger. Mr. Spiteri was not in the pink of condition either. He had been drinking heavily the previous evening and his head ached. He went down at the first tremendous impact of Mr. Spokesly's fleshy and muscular body, and Mr. Spokesly came down on top of him. He immediately sank his large white teeth in Mr. Spokesly's left hand. Mr. Spokesly grunted. "Leggo, you bastard, leggo!" And at short range mashed the Spiteri ear, neck, and jaw hard and fast. Mr. Spiteri let go, but his antagonist was oblivious until he saw the man's face whiten and sag loosely under his blows, while from his own head, where the plaster had come off in the struggle, blood began to drip over them both.
Mr. Spokesly got up, breathing hard, and pointed into the room.
"Get busy," he said to the steward, "and clean all up. Shift this out of the way," and he touched the redoubtable Spiteri with his foot. Quite unwittingly, for he had been in a passion for the moment, Mr. Spokesly had struck hard on one of the vital places of a man's body, just behind the ear, and Mr. Spiteri, for the first time in his life, had fainted.
Out on deck, the new mate realized what he had let himself in for, and clicked his tongue as he thought, a trick he had never been able to abandon since he had left school. Tck! Tck! He saw his young Jew friend making expressive motions with his hands to the boatman who was waiting for his money. Mr. Spokesly had an idea. He whistled to the boatman.
"You wait," he called and held up his hand. Then he beckoned to the youth.
"What's your name?" he demanded. The youth laid his hand on his breast and made a deep obeisance.
"Yes, yes!" shouted the exasperated chief officer. "What's your name? Moses, Isaac, Abraham, eh? Never mind, come on." He led the way into the saloon and waved his hands. The cat rushed out of the door, followed by a kick.
"Now you clean up, understand?"
To his unalloyed delight the youth did understand. The latter's nervous prostration had been due chiefly to the fact that he was entirely ignorant of what was expected of him. He took off his deplorable coat and grasped a bucket.
Mr. Spokesly went downstairs again.
Mr. Spiteri was resting on one elbow watching the steward take his simple personal effects from the drawers under the bunk and stow them in an old suitcase.
"Get up on deck," ordered Mr. Spokesly. "I wouldn't have a swab like you in the forecastle. Don't wonder the Old Man complained."
Mr. Spiteri rose half way, coughed and spat, rose to his feet, and wavered uncertainly towards the stairs.
"Come on, stuff 'em in! That'll do. Now take it up and pitch it into the boat."
The steward hurried up with the bulging and half-closed suitcase and Mr. Spokesly followed with his predecessor's boots.
"Down you go," he said, dropping the boots into the boat and following them up with the suitcase. "That's it," as he saw Mr. Spiteri step from the ladder and topple against the thwarts. "Now we'll see who's in charge of this ship."
He walked to the bridge-rail, put two fingers in his mouth and blew a shrill blast. Presently out of the little forecastle emerged a stout man in a canvas apron and sporting a large well-nourished moustache. Mr. Spokesly's heart sank.
"Come here!" he shouted, beckoning.
"What's the matter, Mister?" said the aproned one, climbing up the abominable ladder with its stairs of iron rods. Mr. Spokesly's heart rose again.
"You English?" he asked.
"Sure, I'm a French Canadian," retorted the other. "What's the matter? Are you the new mate?"
"Yes," said Mr. Spokesly. "I'm the new mate. Are you the bosun?"
"Sure I am," said the other indignantly. "What did you think I was? The cook?"
"Now, now, cut it out," warned the new mate. "I've had all I can stand just for the present. How many men have you got?"
"Three. How many did you think I got? Thirty?"
"Bosun, if you want it, you can have it, but I tell you straight you got to help me get this ship clean."
"Sure I will. What did you think I was doin'?"
"Send a man along with a bucket of soft soap and water," said Mr. Spokesly hastily. "I'll go round with you later."
"Where's that other mate?" asked the bosun, rather mystified.
"Over the side," said Mr. Spokesly, pointing.
"You seen the captinne yet?" the bosun pursued.
"Plenty, plenty. Send a man along."
Mr. Spokesly turned and to his intense astonishment found Captain Rannie in the saloon.
"Why, where were you all the time?" he asked.
"In my cabin," said Captain Rannie, staring at the floor nervously. "I must say you make noise enough when you join a ship."
"Well, Captain, I'll argue all you want later. Where's the medicine chest?"
"In my cabin."
"Then you'll have to give me the run of it to stop this bleeding. Got any friars' balsam?"
"I—I—I'll see. I'll see." Captain Rannie objected to be approached directly. He was already beginning to wonder, after listening to the very emphatic remarks of his new chief officer through the bulkhead of his cabin, if he had not made a mistake in demanding a change. Very unsettling, a change. He went downstairs again and unlocked his door. It had three locks, Mr. Spokesly observed in some surprise. After opening the door, Captain Rannie stepped through and quickly drew a heavy blue curtain across.
"I'll bring it out to you," he said from within.
Mr. Spokesly dragged the curtain back and stepped in himself. He was indignant at this extraordinary treatment. He was astounded, however, to see Captain Rannie shrink away towards the settee, holding up his arms.
"Don't you dare to touch me!" he shrieked in a very low key. "Don't you...."
Mr. Spokesly suddenly caught sight of himself in the glass across the room. He was not a very reassuring spectacle. His face was dirty and blood-smeared, and his collar was torn away from his throat. He closed the door.
"Captain," he said, "we'd better have an understanding right at the start. I'm going to be mate o' this ship for six months."
"You think you are," whispered the captain, slowly approaching a cabinet on the wall. "You only think you are."
"Well, I been paid for it anyway," said Mr. Spokesly, examining his wounded hand. "So we'll take it for granted. Now if you back me up, I'll back you up. Why didn't you come out and help me when that stiff started to make trouble?"
Captain Rannie absolutely ignored this question. He was in a corner, and like some animals in similar plight, he might almost be said to have feigned death. He stood stock still looking into his medicine chest, his back to Mr. Spokesly, his high shoulders raised higher. He was in a corner, for he had been betrayed already into the demonstration of nervous fear. It was the knowledge of his horror of the slightest physical contact with others that Mr. Spiteri had been unable to resist.
"He's nearly bit my thumb through," went on Mr. Spokesly, walking over to the wash-bowl. The ship shook as the winch hurled the slings into the air. Down below a worn pump was knocking its heart out in a succession of hacking coughs.
Captain Rannie, the flask of friars' balsam in his hand, turned slowly from the cabinet and moved cautiously to the table. He set it down, went back, and drew out a roll of bandage. He was beginning to recover his normal state of mind. Everything so far had taken the form in his view of violating the privacy of the commander. Everything! Here was this man, not five minutes on the ship, actually forcing his way into the captain's room. Captain Rannie had never heard of such a thing in his life. It loomed before him with the grimness of an irrevocable disaster. He had always had that last resource in his encounters with Spiteri—he could go into his room, lock all three locks, draw the heavy blue curtain, and remain in a mysterious seclusion for as long as he liked. Now—he almost shuddered with anguish—here was this new chief officer—a perfect stranger—didn't know him from Adam—washing his wounds absolutely in the sacred wash-bowl, standing in not over clean shoes on the very piece of matting on which he himself, the master of the vessel, stood while shaving and making stern faces at himself in the glass as he rehearsed imaginary scenes with the rabble outside. In a few moments Mr. Spokesly's eyes, grown accustomed to the sombre twilight of the blue curtains of the scuttles, would be wandering round the cabin, noting things Captain Rannie showed to no one. No one. He grew fierce as he thought of his outraged privacy. He must get this man out of the room quickly. He slopped friars' balsam on some cotton wool, and fixing his pale, exasperated gaze upon Mr. Spokesly's thumb, began to bind it up. Mr. Spokesly felt an urgent need for a smoke. He reached out and drew a cigarette from a box on the table and Captain Rannie's head bent lower as he flushed with a renewed sense of outrage. Nothing sacred! Without the slightest hint of a request.
"We may have a passenger, I hear," said the oblivious Mr. Spokesly as he managed to get the cigarette alight.
"Oh, dear me, no!" retorted Captain Rannie, with a sort of despairing chuckle. "Quite impossible, quite. I shouldn't dream of allowing anything of the sort."
"Not if the boss wanted it?"
"Oh, no doubt, in that case, the master of the vessel would be the last to hear of it." He returned to the cabinet to cut some plaster. Captain Rannie had not a bedside manner. His method of affixing the plaster made his patient grunt. Gazing over the upraised arm of the captain, Mr. Spokesly suddenly fixed his eyes with attention on the pictures round the bunk. They were pictures of people who were, so to say, the antithesis of his new commander, pugilists and wrestlers and dancers, men and women of exaggerated physical development. Some of them were so stark in their emphasis on the muscles that they resembled anatomical diagrams. There were photographs, too, of sculptures—sharp, white, and beautiful against black velvet backgrounds; boys wrestling, girls dancing, a naked youth striving with a leopard. And on a hook near the door was a set of those elastic cords and pulleys whereby athletic prowess is developed. Mr. Spokesly suddenly lost his belligerent mood. He had encountered something he did not quite understand. He turned as the captain finished and his eye fell on shelves packed with books. And outside the winch groaned and squeaked, down below the pump thumped and bucketed.
"I'll go," said Mr. Spokesly. "I must find the bosun...." And he went out, eager to go at the job and get rid of this dreadful grime on the unhappy old ship. As he went the captain stood in front of the medicine chest swallowing something, a dull red flush on his peaked and wrinkled face. Suddenly he darted to the door and slammed it, locking it and hurling the curtain across. And then he sat down in a wicker chair and covered his eyes with his hand. He was trembling violently.