CONCLUSION

"Oh, I ken John Peel, from my bed where I lay,As he passed with his hounds in the morning!"

and there was a murmur of applause. Mr. Spokesly, looking out into the darkness, clapped and lit another cigarette. He was startled by a great crash of chords. The young man, a cigar in his teeth, his head enveloped in a blue cloud of smoke, was seated at the piano. Mr. Spokesly turned and watched him. Mr. Marsh came over to the window, smiling.

"D'you do anything?" he asked. "We should be delighted, you know, if you would. It relieves the tension, don't you think?"

"Not in my line, I'm afraid," said Mr. Spokesly. "I never had any accomplishments."

He stood listening to the full, rounded, clangorous voice, toned down to Heine's beautiful words:

"Die Luft ist kühl und dunkelt,Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein,Der Gipfel des Berges funkeltIm Abend Sonnenschein."

"Wonderful voice," whispered Mr. Marsh. "Studied at Leipzig. Rather a talented chap, don't you think? By the way, I heard to-night they intend making an inspection of the outer harbour while they are here. Improving the defences. They don't want any more ships to come in the way you did. Of course it was luck as well as pluck. Probably lay fresh mines."

"Is that a fact?" asked Mr. Spokesly. As in a dream he heard the applause, himself clapping mechanically and then the booming of bass chords. And a voice like a silver trumpet, triumphant and vibrating, blared out the deathless call of the lover to his beloved:

"Isolde! Geliebte! Bist du mein?Hab ich dich wieder?"

"Well it's pretty reliable. A friend of mine who is in the timber trade—got a saw mill up at Menenen and uses horses—has been given a contract to bring down a lot of stones to the harbour. Fill all those lighters, you know. That'll mean quite a lot of work for you, eh?"

Mr. Spokesly turned resolutely to the window and looked out over the dark roofs at the lustrous and spangled dome of the sky. He would have to find Cassar and give him some instructions at once. It would be impossible to get away if they waited for a swarm of workmen and officials to come down and be for ever sailing up and down the Gulf. He ought to have thought of such a contingency. He must find Cassar. And then he must get back to Evanthia and tell her they must go at once. To-morrow night. He heard the heavy stamp of feet that greeted the end of the song and joined in without thinking. As he walked across to the door Mr. Marsh followed him, and Mr. Jokanian, his dark yearning eyes brilliant with the wine he had drunk, came over making gestures of protestation as another voice rose from behind the grand piano:

"Enfant, si j'étais Roi, je donnerais l'empire,Et mon char, et mon sceptre, et mes peuples à genoux,Et mon couronne d'or, et mes bains de porphyre."

"I am coming back," said Mr. Spokesly, "but I must see if my boat is ready."

"You don't need any boat," said Mr. Jokanian. "We are going back in my carriage. Mr. Lietherthal goes with us. I have invited him."

"Pour un regard de vous!" sang the voice, and trembled into a passionate intricacy of arpeggios.

"I shall not be long," he repeated. "I must tell my man I sha'n't need it, in that case."

He felt he must get out of there at once, if only for a moment. This combination of wine and music was becoming too much for him. As he came out into the courtyard he heard Victor Hugo's superb challenge ring out:

"Enfant, si j'étais Dieu, je donnerais le Ciel!"

He walked quickly along in the profound shadow of the Rue Parallel until he reached the great doors of the Passage Kraemer. Here he might have seen, had he been watchful, in a corner by the disused elevator of the hotel, the young Jew talking to a girl in cap and apron. The youth saw him and clutched his companion's arm.

"Madama's husband," he whispered. "The Englishman."

"Well," said the girl, bending her dark brows upon the figure hurrying out upon the quay, "I think your Madama is a fool."

"S-sh!" whimpered the young man. "She is the most glorious creature in the world."

"And a fool," repeated the girl. "That other upstairs in Suite Fourteen will desert her in a month. I know his style. He only left the last one in Kara-hissar, so his servant told us. I know ifIhad a chance of marrying an Englishman.... Yes! She has got you anyhow," she added, laughing. "You are like a cony in love with a snake."

He put up his hand in warning, as though he feared by some occult power Madama would hear these rash and sacrilegious words. He took out a tiny piece of paper and looked at it.

"I must go," he said. "You are certain it is this Frank, who has come?" he urged anxiously.

"Yes," she said, smiling contemptuously. "When I passed him in the corridor, he put his arm round me and said he would love me for ever. You can tell your Madama if you like."

Mr. Spokesly, unaware of this conversation, made his way out, and was on the point of crossing the quay by the custom house when Mr. Cassar, who was drinking a glass of syrup at the café opposite, ran over and accosted him.

"Look here——" began Mr. Spokesly.

"I know," interrupted the engineer. "I've heard something else. Don't go over there now. I want to tell you this. Very important, Captain. Will you have a drink?"

"Coffee," said Mr. Spokesly, sitting at a table in front of a small café. "What is it?"

"I was working on the boat this afternoon, after you had been there," said Mr. Cassar, "and I got that silencer pretty good now, and some officers come up and say, this boat very good, we will want it. They make inspection of harbour, you understand. I say, all right, what time? They say to-morrow. The General he go round and make inspection. Want all three motor boats. I say all right. But I was waiting to see you. If I miss you I was going out to find you at your house. You understand?"

Mr. Spokesly nodded. He understood perfectly well. He reflected upon the wisdom of staying away from the Consulate after saying he would go back. He decided it would be better to return.

"You will have to get off," said Mr. Cassar in a matter-of-fact tone as he looked away towards the mountains. "Don't you think so, Captain?"

"Plenty of time," Mr. Spokesly muttered, "before daylight. Are you sure you are all right? Got everything?"

"Yes, everything," said Mr. Cassar positively.

"Right," said his commander. "Now you tell the customs guard I return to Bairakli at midnight. You go with me to bring the boat back as they want it in the morning. And if I don't come before one o'clock, you go alone. I shall be going by road. Some of them asked me to go with them. You go alone and wait for me at the bath-house jetty. Can you remember that?"

"Easy," said Mr. Cassar. "It is ten o'clock now."

"I'll go back," said Mr. Spokesly.

The evening was just beginning along the front as he passed once again through the great Passage beneath the hotel. There was no young Jew watching him now. That highly strung and bewildered creature was hurrying through the lower town on his way to Bairakli, bearing authentic news for his mistress. He had an uneasy suspicion that the person described by his friend in the hotel would not prove so good a friend as Mr. Spokesly. But he hurried on past the little Turkish shops, his fez on the back of his head, the lamplight reflected on the bony ridge of the large glistening nose that rose up between his scared pale eyes and sallow cheeks. All along the lonely road beyond the railway station he tripped and stumbled, muttering to himself: "Oh, Madama, he is come, he is come! I bring great news. He is come!" Sometimes he clasped his hands in an ecstasy of emotion and would almost fall into some unnoticed slough or channel by the way. All the griefs of the poor seemed to concentrate themselves upon him as he moaned and staggered. "Father of Israel, what shall I do if she abandon me? There is no food for a fatherless boy here. Oh, Madama!"

But when at length he scrambled up to the house on the hillside and saw his mistress and Esther Jokanian sitting in the window overlooking the sea, he took heart again. When Evanthia, leaning out in a loose robe that showed transparent against the lamp behind her, called, "Who is there?" he replied that it was her faithful servant with news. She came down like a swiftly moving phantom and unlocked the gate, pulling it wide with her characteristic energy and courage.

"Speak!" she said in a thrilling, dramatic whisper, all her soul responding to the moment. The youth held out his hand palm upward while he leaned his head against the rough wall.

"Oh, Madama, he is come," he replied in a low tone, as though he sensed the formidable importance of his words in their lives. She stood staring at him for a second and then, pulling him in, she closed the gate with a tremendous clang that jarred the very foundation of his reason. It was at times like these that this young man, born into a chaotic world of alien beings intent upon inexplicable courses of action, inspired by unknown and possibly sinister ideals, was upon the point of dashing his head with maniac energy against those heavy ancient stones which, by comparison, seemed less foreign to his distracted soul.

"Come," she said with a mysterious smile. "Your fortune is made. You must go back with a message."

"Oh, Madama!" he wailed.

She dragged him up the steps leading to the rooms above.

"Endlich!" she cried to Esther, who sat by the window, chin on hand, and muttering in her husky man's voice. "He is here. I must have been born with good fortune after all."

"You are throwing away the greatest chance in your life," growled Esther without looking at her. The young man gave a stifled yelp and choked, holding his arms out as though in supplication. They looked at him, but he could not proceed. His courage failed as his exacerbated imagination pictured the tigerish glare in Evanthia's eyes if he should tell her about the last one that was left at Kara-hissar. He put a hand to his throat and mumbled: "The message, Madama? It is late."

"You do not understand," said Evanthia crossly to her friend. "What do you think I am made of? Do you think I can go on for ever like this, pretending love? Men! I use them, my friend. The lover of my heart is here, and you ask me to go out on that cursed water to a country where it is dark wet fog all the time. What should I do there? My God, are you mad? Now I shall go to Europe, and for once I shall live. Ah! The message! Here!" She dragged a blank page from a yellow paper-covered volume lying on a cedar-wood console and hunted for a pencil. With a fragment of black crayon she began to scrawl her name in staggering capitals. "So!" she muttered. "Now I shall put the wordsliebe dich. Sacré! When I go to Europe I will learn this writing—or have a secretary. There! It is enough for my dear lunatic. Take it!" She folded it and gave it to the youth who stood by the door dejectedly. "Ask for the Herr Leutnant Lietherthal. Go down and eat first." She gave him a pat on the shoulder that seemed to put a fresh stream of life into him, and he disappeared.

"Take care, Esther, do not tell him a word of this. Or thy husband either. He might speak in forgetfulness."

"It is nothing to me," muttered Esther. "I like him, that is all. And fidelity is best."

"Fidelity!" said Evanthia slowly. "And is not this fidelity? Have I not followed the lover of my heart across the world? If the father of thy boy came up here and knocked at the gat.... You talk! I am not a white-faced Frank girl to be a slave of an Englishman! He gives me all his money here, yes. But in his England, when I am shut up in the fog and rain, how much will I get,hein?" her voice rose to a shout, a brazen clangour of the throat, and her hand shot out before her, clenched, as though she were about to hurl thunderbolts.

"Very well," assented Esther in a low tone, "but you don't know if the lover of your heart wants you any more. The lovers of the heart are funny fish," she added grimly.

"Prrtt! You are right," said Evanthia in an ordinary tone. "Did I say I was going away to-night, stupid?"

"I see the light of the boat," said Esther. "Perhaps my husband is with him. I must go back to my house."

"No! Stay here a little." Evanthia laid hold of her. "To-night I must have someone with me. I am shaken in my mind. I shall want to shriek. Stay."

"It is at the jetty," said Esther soberly. She looked out into a dense darkness, and in the lower distance she could see a tiny light where the launch had run alongside the old bath-house jetty. And then the light went out.

They waited in silence, smoking cigarettes, until their quick ears caught the sound of footsteps on the hillside. And then the grind of a key in the great lock of the gate.

As Mr. Spokesly came into the room he barely sensed the tension of the atmosphere. He broke breathlessly into his news at once.

"Quick!" he said in a low tone. "We must go to-night, dear. After to-night I may not have any boat. It is all ready. Come now. We have time to get out of sight of land before daylight."

"To-night!" exclaimed Evanthia, clutching her breast, and thinking rapidly. "Impossible."

"It will be impossible any other night," he retorted gently. "Wemustgo."

Evanthia backed away, thinking clearly, concisely, and skilfully behind her astonishment. He turned to Esther.

"You tell her," he said. "We must go. It is our last chance. It was lucky I heard about it. They are going to fortify the Gulf. Go and get ready, dear. Bring me a blanket and I'll carry it down, and some bread and meat. Enough for a day, anyhow."

"Where is my 'usband'?" demanded Esther.

"He's coming by the road. He's got some friends with him, from the hotel. You mustn't mind them being a bit elevated. Plenty of wine to-night. They will be here soon, I expect. I want to get down and away before they arrive."

Evanthia, folding a blanket in the bedroom, stood perfectly still. She could hear her own pulses thumping, and she put her hand to her throat. She felt as though her heart would burst if she did not gain control of herself. She stood perfectly still thinking, her mind darting this way and that, as a trapped animal tests the resistance of the trap in every direction. For a moment she thought of killing him as they went down to the boat. She was strong: she felt she could do it. Under the shoulder-blades and in the throat. No, she must wait. Only as a last resource, that. She folded up the blanket and walked back into the room to give him the food.

He stood for a moment with the blanket and loaves of bread in his arms, unable to utter what he felt for her sacrifice for him. He could only say stumblingly:

"I sha'n't forget this. I know that much," and hurried away with his burden.

Esther sprang up from her seat by the window. Her misfortunes had not made her hard. She saw a light in Evanthia's amber eyes as she made her preparations, a light that frightened her.

"Nobody will ever be able to do anything with you," she muttered. "I must go home to get supper for my husband. You got a good man, and you throw him away like so much rubbish. You got no sense."

"I go!" said Evanthia, pausing with her hands full of things she was stuffing into a bag. "Do I not go?"

"You go!" said Esther savagely. "You make him take you to the town to see your fellow."

"Oh!" exclaimed Evanthia, stopping again and stifling a laugh. She had not thought of such a thing. "What you must think of me!" she murmured.

"And then tell him you are finished. You have a heart, yes, as big as that ring on your finger. You take everything from him, and now you...."

With a sudden gesture of rage the girl flung the things away and stood up to her friend.

"I'll kill you!" she growled through her teeth. "I know you! You are jealous, jealous, jealous! I see you talk, talk English to him at the bath-house. I see you go out with him for the walk through the village. I hear you talk to him about that girl Vera he saw once in Odessa. All right! Go with him! Go! Here are the things. Take them! I spit at you. You...."

She fell back, exhausted with the ferocity of her passion, her hands still making gestures of dismissal to the silent and scornful Esther who remained motionless yet alert, ready to take her own part.

"You are altogether mad!" she said at last in her husky tones. "Here is your husband. Tell him, tell him...."

Evanthia spun round where she stood with her hands on her bosom.

"We must go, dear," said Mr. Spokesly and paused in astonishment at the scene. With a convulsive movement the girl tore at her dress and then flung out her hand towards the shore.

"Go then, go! Why do you come here any more? You want her. There she is, jealous because all the men want me. Look at her. She ask you with her eyes. Oh, yah! I hate you! I never love you. It is finish. Go!"

"Eh!" he called, swallowing hard. He looked at Esther in amazement. "What is this?" he asked. "What have you said to her? My dear!"

"You better go," said Esther sullenly. "She won't go with you. Can't you see?"

"But how can I go without her?" he exclaimed.

"I kill myself before I go. This is my place. Go back, you. I hate you."

Esther came over to him and, taking up the satchel, thrust him out before her. Down the steps and across the dark garden she went with him, and only when the great gate clanged did he make an effort to break through the dreadful paralysis of mind that had assailed him.

"What made her go on like that?" he demanded drearily.

"Go on. I tell you in a minute. You men, you got no sense."

"But what did she mean, about you?"

"Nothing. She's crazy. You no understand."

"You said yourself she'd come," he insisted.

"Yes, Isayso. I tell her she better come. But you no understand women."

He was destined to find out, as years went by, that this was true. And when they stood on the jetty and looked down into the obscurity where Mr. Cassar sat in the boat patiently awaiting his passengers, Mr. Spokesly began to regain command of himself. For a moment, up there, he had been all abroad. The sudden emotional upheaval hardened his resolve.

"Well!" he said with a sudden intake of breath, and paused, once more overwhelmed by the change in his affairs. "I don't know what to say, Esther." He put his hand on her shoulder and she twisted away a little. "I feel as if I'd been having a long dream, and just woke up."

"Go!" she said huskily. "Good-bye. Good fortune. There is a carriage coming. My 'usban'."

"Anyhow ... Esther. I did what I promised her to do ... not my fault." He got down into the boat "Where's your hand? Good-bye ... good-bye.... Push off, son, push off.... After all I done...."

They saw, from a little way off, the white form of Esther spring forward and vanish behind the buildings as a feeble yellow flicker from a carriage lamp crawled slowly along the road and stopped. They heard laughter and confused arguments.

"Drunk!" whispered Mr. Cassar without either envy or malice.

"Full to the guards," assented his commander. "Hark!"

Someone was singing, a full youthful voice of brazen vibrant quality, a voice with an ineluctable and derisive challenge to confident hearts. Though he did not understand the words, Mr. Spokesly was aware of this challenge as he listened:

"Auf, deutches Volk, du stark GeschlechtEs schlug die grosse Stunde,Steh auf und sei nicht länger KnechtMit Kraft und mut steh für dein RechtIm heilgen Volke bunde!"

There was a pause, with protests and guttural amusement which were suddenly engulfed in a clarion shout:

"Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten!"

"Go ahead," said Mr. Spokesly, looking back as he sat in the stern, "and make as little noise as you can."

Out of the darkness came the faint clarion call he had already heard that night:

"Isolde! Geliebte! Bist du mein?"

and the sound, with its echoes from the mountain, seemed to stream out of that open window he had left. Suddenly, with a resolute movement, he turned and bent to the business of steering. The boat was moving through the water.

"Let her out," he muttered, looking at his watch. "We've got four hours to daylight."

And the dawn found him there, still crouching motionless at the tiller, while behind them the mountains of Lesbos rose enormous, the sun rising over Asia. And ahead lay the dark sparkle of an empty sea.

"All I can say is," said the elderly lieutenant, and he applied himself assiduously to the trimming of his nails, "you were in luck all through."

"Yes," said Mr. Spokesly. "I suppose you can call it that."

He was not entirely satisfied that this constituted an adequate description of his experiences. Luck is a slippery word. As witness the old lieutenant, intent on his nails, like some red-nosed old animal engaged in furbishing his claws, who proceeded without looking up:

"Why, what else could you call it? You surely didn't want that woman hanging round your neck all your life like a mill-stone, did you? What if she did keep hold of the money? I call it cheap at the price. And suppose you'd brought her. How could you have squared things?Icall it lucky."

Mr. Spokesly, however, did not feel that way. He looked round at the green expanse of St. James's Park and up towards the enormous arch which enshrines the dignity and cumbrous power of the Victorian Age, and wondered if the taste of life would ever come back. It was now eighteen months since he had experienced what the elderly lieutenant called uncommon luck, when a sloop of war, hurrying on her regular patrol from Lemnos to Malta had found him and Mr. Cassar in their boat some ten miles east of Psara Island, a black spot on a blue sea, over which there fluttered a patch of white. And on coming cautiously alongside, the commander of that sloop was surprised to discover a Maltee engineer somewhat in disarray through his struggles with his engine, and under a blanket in the bilge forward a sick Englishman.

For Mr. Spokesly had been sick. Looking back at it from this seat in St. James's Park, with his demobilization completed, he saw well enough that the culmination of the spiritual stresses under which he had been existing had been suddenly transmuted into a bodily collapse. As the sun rose over the Ægean, he had given the tiller to Mr. Cassar and lain down without a word. He had not cared whether he ever got up or not. He lay staring up at the extraordinary brilliance of the sky, his throat very sore, his eyes tired and smarting, a feverish tremor in his limbs, refusing food, and even when the engine stopped, giving no sign that he was aware of any change in their fortunes. It had only been when Mr. Cassar informed him of the sloop bearing down upon them that he rose on an elbow and croaked hoarsely:

"Show a white flag; handkerchief or something," and fell back, drawing the blanket over himself. He had been very sick. The surgeon, without waiting for a temperature reading, had carried him away into an extremely hygienic sick-bay, where between a boy with tonsillitis and a stoker with a burnt arm, he had lain all the way to Malta. And after that, during weeks of dreary waiting, he had looked out of the high windows of the Bighi Hospital across the Harbour to Valletta, watching the ships go in and out, and seeing the great flame of the sunset show up the battlements of the Lower Barracca and die in purple glory behind the domes and turrets of the city.

For it seemed to him, in his intervals of lucid reflection, that the taste of life had gone, not to return. It had gone, and in place of it was an exceedingly bitter flavour of humiliation and frustrated dreams. It was almost too sudden a revelation of his own emotional folly for any feeling save a numb wonder to remain. He had told Esther that he felt as though he had had a long dream and was suddenly woke up. And while this was true enough of his mind, which maintained a dreary alertness during his sickness, his heart on the other hand was in a condition of stupor and oblivious repose. Even when sufficiently recovered to walk abroad and sit at the little tables in the arcades by the Libreria, or to journey across the Marsamuscetto to Sliema and follow the long smooth white beach, he moved slowly because he had no accurate means of gauging his intensity of existence. He would mutter to himself in a sort of depressed whisper: "What's the matter with me, I wonder?"

The surgeons had called it something ending in osis and prescribed finally "light duty." He remembered that light duty now well enough; a commission as lieutenant and the visiting of many offices in the formidable buildings which constituted the dockyard. And gradually, as the scope and meaning of this work became apparent, he found a certain interest returning, an anticipation of the next week and perhaps month. But of the years he did not dare to think just yet.

Because, once established there, he had sought, as a homing pigeon its cotes, to find Ada. He had written, full of weariness and a sort of gentle contrition, and implored her to write. He had missed all the mails since theTanganyikahad gone—she must make allowances for the hazards of the sea, and try again. He had put a shy, boyish postscript to it, a genuine afterthought—"I want so much to see you again," and mailed it on the Marseilles boat.

To that there had come nothing in reply save a letter from her married sister, who evaded the subject for three pages and finally explained that her own husband was missing and Ada was married. The paper had distinctly said all were lost on theTanganyika. Ada's husband was a manufacturer of munitions in the Midlands, making a colossal income, she believed. They lived in a magnificent old mansion in the West Riding. The writer of the letter was going up to spend a week with them and would be sure to mention him. She had already sent on his letter and Ada had asked her to write.

There it was, then. Both ends of the cord on which he had been precariously balanced had been cut down, and he had had no interior buoyancy which could have kept him from hitting the earth with conclusive violence. And near the earth for a long time he had remained, very much in doubt whether he would ever go about again with the old confidence. Possibly he would never have done so, had not an accident sent him out to sea on patrol service. Here came relief in the shape of that active enemy he had preferred to his bureaucratic and scornful government. Here was an invisible and tireless adversary, waiting days, weeks, and possibly months for his chance, and smashing home at last with horrible thoroughness. This, in Mr. Spokesly's present condition, was a tonic. He got finally into a strange, shuttle-like contraption with twin gasolene-engines, a pop-gun, and a crew of six. They went out in this water-roach and performed a number of deeds which were eventually incorporated in official reports and extracted by inaccurate special correspondents whose duty it was to explain naval occasions to beleaguered England, an England whose neglect of seamen was almost sublime until the food-ships were threatened.

So he had found a niche again in life, and very slowly the dead flat look in his face gave way to one of sharp scrutiny. When he came ashore from his cock-boat he would go to a hotel in a street like a scene from theTales of Hoffmann, and he would sleep in a great bed in a mighty room where papal legates had snored in preceding centuries, and the rulers of commanderies had dictated letters to the grand masters of their order. But even there, in that seclusion and fine repository of faith and peace, he dared not recall that last adventure at Bairakli, that catastrophe of his soul. Even the banjo of the occupant of the next room, a nice-looking boy with many medals and a staff appointment, did not mean much to him. He listened apathetically to the nice young voice singing a Kipling ballad:

"Funny an' yellow an' faithful—Doll in a tea-cup she were,But we lived on the square, like a true-married pair,An' I learned about women from 'er!"

But the nice boy had never lived and never would live with anybody on such terms, and his clear young voice lacked the plangent irony of the battered idealist. It was perfectly obvious that he was entirely ignorant of the formidable distortion of character which living with people brought about. He evidently imagined marriage was a good joke and living with girls a bad joke. Mr. Spokesly would lie on his huge bed and try to get his bearings while his neighbour gave his version of "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and "I'd Wait Till the End of the World for You." He was visible sometimes, on his balcony overlooking the steep Via Sant' Lucia raising his eyes with a charming and entirely idiotic diffidence to other balconies where leaned dark-browed damsels, and dreaming the bright and honourable dreams of the well-brought-up young Englishman. Mr. Spokesly got no assistance from such as he. Even in his most fatuous moments he had known that for them the war was only an unusually gigantic and bloody football match, for which they claimed the right to establish the rules. When it was over we would all go back to our places in the world and touch our hats to them, the landed gentry of mankind.

Sitting on his park-seat, under the shadow of Victoria's triumphal arch, Mr. Spokesly saw this would not be the case. Behind his own particular problem, which was to regain, somehow or other, the taste of life, he saw something else looming. How were these very charming and delightful beings, the survivors of an age of gentles and simples, of squires and serfs, to be aroused to the fact that they were no longer accepted as the heirs of all the ages? How to make them see the millions of people of alien races moving slowly, like huge masses of rotting putrescence, to a new life? Indeed, they were very fond of using those words "rotten" and "putrid" for alien things they did not like. He felt sure they would apply both to Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, and those men he met at the Consulate. And with a twinge he reflected they might say the same thing about Evanthia, if they knew it all. Yet they must be made to know, those of them who were left, that the game was up for the cheerful schoolboy with no ascertainable ideas. The very vitality of these alien races was enough to sound a warning. "After all," Mr. Marsh had said in his throaty way, "you can't beat that type, you know." And the question looming up in the back of Mr. Spokesly's mind, as he sat on that seat in St. James's Park, was: "Couldn't you?"

He discovered with a shock that his friend the elderly lieutenant, who had been visiting the Admiralty that morning and so had met Mr. Spokesly, was explaining something:

"I told him that taking everything into consideration, I really couldn't see my way. Not now. You see, we aren't getting any younger, and my wife is so attached to Chingford she won't hear of leaving. And of course I couldn't go outtherealone now."

"Where did you say it was?" Mr. Spokesly asked. He had not heard.

"West Indies. It's a new oiling station and they want an experienced harbour-master. You see, I knew about it, oh, years ago, when the place was first projected, and I put in for it. And now he's offered it to me, I can't go. I don't have to, you see. And yet I would like to put someone in the way of it for the old chap's sake. So I say, why don't you go round and see him? Three hundred a year and quarters. It isn't so dusty, I can assure you. If I hadn't been rather lucky in my investments I would be very glad to go, I can tell you that."

And the odd thing, to Mr. Spokesly's mind, was that he did not envy his elderly friend's happy position as to his investments. Here again luck masqueraded as a slippery word. Was he so lucky? From where he sat now, beneath the Arch of the great queen of the money-making, steam-engine era—the era, that is, when the steam-engines made the money and the old order fattened upon rents and royalties—Mr. Spokesly was able to see that money was no longer an adequate gauge of a man's calibre. One had to grow, and that was another name for suffering. In his hand was a newspaper, and as he turned it idly, his eye caught an urgent message in heavy type. The London School of Mnemonics pleaded with him to join up in the armies of Efficiency. They urged him to get out of the rut and fit himself for executive positions with high salaries attached. His eye wandered from the paper to the vista of the Mall, where the metallic products of efficiency were ranged in quadruple lines of ugliness, the stark witnesses of human ineptitude. He saw the children playing about those extraordinarily unlovely enemy guns, their muzzles split and dribbling with rust, their wheels splayed outwards like mechanical paralytics, and he fell to wondering if he could not find his way out of his spiritual difficulties sooner if he did what his friend suggested. He would have to do something. A few hundred pounds was all he had. And the chances of a sea job were not immediately promising. He recalled his visit the other day to the office of the owners of theTanganyika, and the impression he had gained that their enthusiasm had cooled. They had done a big business with Bremen before the war, and they would be doing a big business again soon. Their attitude had contrasted oddly with the roll-of-honour tablet in the office where, printed in gold, he had seen the names of the officers of theTanganyika"murdered by the enemy." All save his own. Somehow that word "murdered," to him who had been there, did not ring true. It was like the nice schoolboy's "rotten" and "putrid"; it signified a mood, now gone no one knew where. It was like Lietherthal's "Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten," a gesture which meant nothing to the millions of Hindoos, Mongolians, Arabs, Africans, and Latins in the world. "A family squabble," that sharp young man had called it, a mere curtain-raiser to a gigantic struggle for existence between the races....

He rose and turned to his friend.

"It's the very thing for me," he said. "I don't feel any particular fancy for staying on in England."

"As soon as I saw you waiting in that corridor," said his friend, "I thought of it. Now you go and see him. You know the Colonial Office. He's a fine old boy and a thorough gentleman. There are prospects, too, I may tell you. It's a sugar-cane country, and I believe you'll have some very nice company in the plantations all round. And I believe there's a pension after twenty years. Well ... not that you'll need to bother about it by that time.... As I say, it's a jumping-off place. Fine country, you know. But what about a little drink? I know a place in Chandos Street—they know me there. And now about coming down to Chingford...."

Mr. Spokesly accompanied his friend through the great Arch of Victoria into the Square and as they made their way round by the National Gallery he reached a decision. He would go. His elderly friend, toddling beside him, added details which only confirmed the decision. That gentleman knew a good thing. He himself, however, having more by luck than judgment held on to his shipping shares, was now in a position of comfortable independence. He had served his country and sacrificed his sons and now he was going to enjoy himself for the rest of his life. After drawing enormous interest and bonuses he had sold at the top of the market and was buying bonds "which would go up" a stockbroking friend had told him. "A safe six hundred a year—what do I want with more?" he wheezed as they entered the place in Chandos Street. "My dear wife, she's so nervous of these shipping shares; and there's no doubt theyarea risk. Mine's a large port-wine, please."

Yes, he would go, and it interested Mr. Spokesly to see how little his tender and beautiful picture of two old people "going down the hill together" appealed to him. With a sudden cleavage in the dull mistiness which had possessed his heart for so long, he saw that there was something in life which they had missed. He saw that if a man sets so low a mark, and attains it by the aid of a craven rectitude and animal cunning, he will miss the real glory and crown of life, which by no means implies victory. He was prepared to admit he had not done a great deal with his own life so far. But he was laying a new course. The night he received his instructions to depart he walked down to the river and along the embankment to his hotel with a novel exaltation of spirit. The taste of life was coming back. He saw, in imagination, that new place to which he was bound, a tiny settlement concealed within the secure recesses of a huge tropical harbour. He saw the jetty, with its two red lights by the pipe-line and the verandahed houses behind the groves of Indian laurel. He saw the mountains beyond the clear water purple and black against the sunset or floating above the mist in the crystal atmosphere of the dawn. He saw the wide clean space of matted floors and the hammock where he would lie and watch the incandescent insects moving through the night air. He saw himself there, an integral part of an orderly and reasonable existence. He had no intention of wasting his life, but he saw that he must have time and quiet to find his bearings and make those necessary affiliations with society without which a man is rootless driftage. He saw that the lines which had hitherto held him to the shore had been spurious and rotten and had parted at the first tension.

There was time yet. What was it the elderly lieutenant had called her? "A mill-stone round your neck all your life." No, he could not take that view. He did not regret that supreme experience of his life. He recalled the swift derisive gesture she had once flung at him as she spurned his reiterated fidelity: "You learn from me, to go back to an Englishwoman." Even now he delighted in the splendid memory of her charm, her delicious languors and moments of melting tenderness, her anger and sometimes smouldering rage. No, he did not regret. It was something achieved, something that would be part of him for ever. He could go forward now into the future, armed with knowledge and the austere prudence that is the heritage of an emotional defeat. He looked out across the river and saw the quick glow of an opened cupola in a foundry on the Surrey Side. There was a faint smile on his face, an expression of resolution, as though in imagination he were already in his island home, watching the glow of a cane-fire in a distant valley.

And eastward, some five thousand miles, in the costly Villa Dainopoulos on the shores of an ancient sea, Evanthia Solaris pursued the mysterious yet indomitable course of her destiny. She had arrived back from "Europe," as has been hinted earlier, in some disarray, alighting from a crowded train of frowsty refugees, silent, enraged yet reflective after her odyssey. At her feet followed the young Jew, who incontinently dropped upon his knees in the road and pressed his lips, in agonized thankfulness, to his native earth. "Je déteste les hommes!" was all she had said, and Mr. Dainopoulos had spared a moment in the midst of his many affairs to utter a hoarse croak of laughter. Her story of Captain Rannie's sudden escape from the problems of living struck him for a moment, for he had of course utilized his commander's record and peculiarities in explaining the disappearance of theKalkis. But the event itself seemed to perplex him not at all. He said, briefly, to his wife in adequate idiom: "He got a scare. He was afraid of himself. In wars plenty of men do that. He think and think, and there is nothing. And that scare a man stiff, when there is nothing." Crude psychology no doubt, yet adequate to explain Captain Rannie's unsuccessful skirmish with life.

But Mrs. Dainopoulos was not so callous. She suspected, under Evanthia's hard exterior, a heart lacerated by the bitterness of disillusion. Who would have believed, either, that Mr. Spokesly, an Englishman, would have deserted her like that? Mrs. Dainopoulos was gently annoyed with Mr. Spokesly. He had not behaved as she had arranged it in her story-book fashion. Evanthia must stay with them, she said, stroking the girl's dark head.

As she did. Seemingly she forgot both the base Englishman and the Alleman Giaour who had so infatuated her. She remained always with the invalid lady, looking out at the Gulf, watching the transports come and go. And when at last it came to Mr. Dainopoulos to journey south, when the sea-lines were once again open and a hundred and one guns announced the end, she went with them to the fairy villa out at San Stefano that you reach by the Boulevard Ramleh in Alexandria. It was there that Mr. Dainopoulos emerged in a new rôle, of the man whose dreams come true. His rich and sumptuous oriental mind expanded in grandiose visions of splendour for the being he adored. He built pleasaunces of fine marbles set in green shrubberies and laved by the blue sea, for her diversion.

He had automobiles, as he had resolved, of matchless black and cream-coloured coachwork, with scarlet wheels and orange silk upholstery. He imported a yacht that floated in the harbour like a great moth with folded wings. Far out on the breakwater he had an enormous bungalow built of hard woods upon a square lighter, with chambers for music and slumber in the cool Mediterranean breeze, while the thud and wash of the waves against the outer wall lulled the sleeper to antique dreams. He did all this, and sat each day in the portico of the great marble Bourse, planning fresh acquisitions of money. His wife lay in her chair in her rose-tinted chamber at San Stefano, looking out upon the blue sea beyond the orange trees and palms, smiling and sometimes immobile, as though stunned by this overwhelming onslaught of wealth pressed from the blood and bones of the youth of the world. She smiled and lay thinking of her imaginary people, who lived exemplary and unimportant lives in an England which no longer existed. And near her, hovering, shining like a creature from another world, clad miraculously in robes of extraordinary brilliance, could be seen Evanthia Solaris, the companion of her hours. Often it was she who shot away along the great corniche road in those cars of speed and beauty, their silver fittings and glossy panels humming past like some vast and costly insect. She it was who lay in a silken hammock in the great houseboat by the breakwater, and listened to the sweet strains from the disc concealed in a cabinet shaped like a huge bronze shell. "Je déteste les hommes," she murmured to herself as she wandered through the orange groves to the curved marble seats on the shore.

Hearing these words as she passed, the young Jew, working among the roses, would tremble and recall with an expression of horror their experiences in Europe. Often, when in their destitution she had taken him by the hair and hissed them in his affrighted ear, and he would utter an almost inaudible moan of "Oh, Madama!" For he loved her. He was the victim of a passion like a thin, pure, agitated flame burning amid conflagrations. He would have expired in ecstasy beneath her hand, for it would have needed more courage to speak than to die. And now he was in paradise tending the roses and suffering exquisite agonies as she passed, her beautiful lips muttering, "Je déteste les hommes!" As perhaps she did; yet she would sometimes look suddenly out across the waves with smouldering amber eyes and parted lips, as though she expected to behold once more the figure of a man coming up out of the sea, to offer again the unregarded sacrifices of fidelity and love.

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