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Captain Macedoine's Daughter

by William McFee · English · Gutenberg #32042 · 456,651 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Captain Macedoine's Daughter

Author: William McFee


        
Release date: April 18, 2010 [eBook #32042]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32042

Credits: Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan
        and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER ***




Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net









                            CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER

                                  By William McFee

Author of "ALIENS", "CASUALS OF THE SEA", "LETTERS FROM AN OCEAN TRAMP,"
"PORT SAID MISCELLANY"


Garden City    New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

     "It is an amiable but disastrous illusion on the part of the
     western nations that they have created a monopoly in freedom and
     truth and the right conduct of life."--_Mr. Spenlove_




    TO
    PAULINE




DEDICATORY


There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of
the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a
while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great
shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the
purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while
among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and say: "There
it is!" And together we will slip and stumble and trot down the steep
hillside to the level-crossing, and we will run along to the little
station, so like ours in America. And when the train is come creaking
and groaning and squealing to a standstill, I shall climb in, while you
will stand for a moment looking.... You will wave as we start with the
usual prodigious jerk, and then you will run back and climb up to the
house again, banging the big iron gate securely shut....

All just as before.

But this time there is this difference, that I am not coming back. I am
ordered to return to England, and I am to sail to-morrow morning. Now,
as I have told you more than once, it is very difficult to know just how
anything takes you because you have at your command an alluring
immobility, a sort of sudden static receptiveness which is, to an
Englishman, a Westerner that is, at once familiar and enigmatic. And
when one has informed you, distinctly if ungrammatically, in three
languages, that one is going away for good, and you assume for a moment
that aforementioned immobility, and murmur "_C'est la guerre_," I ask
you, what is one to think?

And perhaps you will recall that you then went on brushing your hair
precisely as though I had made some banal remark about the weather. A
detached observer would say--"This woman has no heart. She is too stupid
to understand." However, as I am something more than a detached
observer, I know that in spite of that gruff, laconic attitude of yours,
that enigmatic immobility, you realize what this means to us, to me, to
you.

So, while you are down in the garden, and the light is still quite good
by this western window, I am writing this for you. As we say over in
America, "Let me tell you something." I have written a book, and I am
dedicating it to you. As you are aware, I have written books before.
When I explained this to you you were stricken with that sudden
silence, that attentive seriousness, if you remember, and regarded me
for a long time without making any remark. Well, another one is done and
I inscribe it to you. Of course I know perfectly well that books are
nothing to you, that you read only the perplexing and defaced human
hieroglyphics around you. I know that when you receive a copy of this
new affair, through the British Post Office in the _Rue Franque_, you
will not read it. You will lay it carefully in a drawer, and let it go
at that. And knowing this, and without feeling sad about it, either,
since I have no fancy for bookish women, I am anxious that you should
read at least the dedication. So I am writing it here by the window,
hurriedly, in words you will understand, and I shall leave it on the
table, and you will find it later, when I am gone.

Listen.

The fact is, this dedication, like the book which follows after it, is
not merely an act of homage. It is a symbol of emancipation from an
influence under which I have lived for two thirds of your lifetime. I
must tell you that I have always been troubled by visions of beings whom
I call dream-women. I was a solitary child. Girls were disconcerting
creatures who revealed to me only the unamiable sides of their natures.
But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who,
while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few
traits from the illustrations in books, were none the less
extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my
thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with
a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of
myself--what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives
regret, I had been born a girl. And later, when I was a youth, and began
to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a
definite conception. She was everything I disliked--a tiny, slender
creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams
she was always clinging to me, which I detested. I regarded myself with
contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my
temperament. You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism
would soon fade. On the contrary, she assumed a larger and larger
dominion over my imagination. I fancied myself married to her, and for
days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill. It was summer time,
and I lived on the upper floor of my mother's house in an outlying
_faubourg_ of London, from the windows of which one could look across a
wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding
villas. And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the
thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams
sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to
and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward
the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this
woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts
in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if
I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all,
that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it
was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who
would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a
gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my
soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form....

As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the _faubourgs_
and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took
the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power. Beyond the
shady drives and prim gardens of the _faubourg_ her image began to
waver, and she haunted my dreams no more. And I was glad of this because
at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things
at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known,
rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth. I
resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes
where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art. I was consumed
with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to
achieve distinction. And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct
to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and
ideas, as possible. I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these
creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I
hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations. But before I was
aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an
experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman. I saw her in studios,
where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye.
I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures
satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white
teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form. I had a notion,
too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride,
disgust, and fortitude for her to appear in the body. And then things
began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity. In the space of a week
I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea.

Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost
it. Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my
days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow. You come of
inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and
magic casements, is more in your way. But I know without asking that you
will be eager to hear about the falling in love. Indeed this is the
point of the story.

The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite
possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything
about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My God!
Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen--perhaps it
is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their
climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion,
which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The
point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about
love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any
substitute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because
I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about
love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in
manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell,
as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal
Love.

Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love
with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I
have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my
emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell
me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin,
and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally
irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming
concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of
accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense,
since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal
part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class
were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I
loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using
men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal
of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many
years from examining her credentials.

That is what it amounted to. For years after I had discovered that she
thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued
to impose her personality upon me. Whenever I imagined for a moment that
I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl's
disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile.
And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of
sacrifice. I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you
demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read
of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the
illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of
literature from life. And, moreover, although we are accustomed to
assume that all young men have a natural aptitude for love, I think
myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and
thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond
tawdry intrigues and banal courtships, spurious imitations which are
exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing. And again, while
it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"--the thin
book you have so often found by my chair in the garden--that a woman is
in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it
seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling
in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we
invest with the vague splendours of our snobbish and inexperienced
imagination. A great passion demands as much knowledge and experience
and aptitude as a great idea. I would almost say it requires as much
talent as a work of art; indeed, the passion, the idea, and the work of
art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same
emotion. And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be
dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written.

And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever
encountering passion. Englishwomen especially. They are afraid of it.
They think it wicked. So they marry him. Though they suspect that he
will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know
that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him
with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned. Everything is done
to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic passion. And the act
of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering
instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the
great adventure of life!

However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was
obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting
possibilities to pass me without investigating them, I was once more in
London, in late autumn. I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it
is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic--a species of growth.
And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay
a reluctance to discover my folly. But convention was too strong for me,
and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her. And it
was at a picture-show. I remember pondering upon this accident of place
as I made my way along Bond Street in the afternoon sunshine, for I
could not help thinking of that disdainful dream-woman who posed, in my
imagination, as an authority on art. This, I suppose, was due to my
prolonged study of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which I had kept
my reading for a number of years. I remember giving up my ticket to a
sleek-haired, frock-coated individual, and passing along a corridor hung
with black velvet, against which were hung one or two large canvases in
formidable gold frames, cunningly illuminated by concealed electric
globes. A haughty creature stood by a table loaded with catalogues and
deigned to accept my shilling. And then, feeling strange and _gauche_,
as is only felt by the sea-farer ashore when he steps out of his
authentic _milieu_, I passed through into the gallery, a high, dignified
chamber full of the quiet radiance of beautiful pictures, the life-work
of a man whom I had known. I found myself regretting that fate had not
permitted me to remain in such an environment; but one cannot avoid
one's destiny, and mine is to have an essentially middle-class mind, a
_bourgeois_ mentality, which makes it impossible for me to live among
artists or people of culture for any length of time. I should say that
the reason for this is that such folk are not primarily interested in
persons but in types and ideas, whereas I am for persons. Flowers and
trees, perfumes and music, colours and children, are to me irrelevant.
But every man and woman I meet is to me a fresh problem which engages my
emotions. The talk about types is incomprehensible to me, for each fresh
individual will throw me into a trance of speculation. But only when one
has lived among clever people can one realize how tedious and monotonous
their society can be. I was thinking about the man who had painted these
pictures and how he had delighted to frighten me with his obscene
comments about women, when I saw a woman far down on the left, a woman
in an enormous hat, holding extravagant furs about her thin form, and
talking to a tall, handsome man from between her small white teeth.

For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom
I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the
dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she
had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her
identity. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she
was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one--ominous years in a woman's
life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still
struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no
longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from
toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries
of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at
once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who
had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made
our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.

But it was too late. As we drove in a swiftly moving taxi-cab through
the gay streets of West London, and on out to Richmond, where she was
staying with friends, I knew that in the end I should be free. She was
soon to be married, and in her satirical gray eyes I saw a desire to
hold me permanently in a condition of chivalrous abnegation. On these
terms I might achieve some sort of destiny without endangering her
dominion. But I felt the winds of freedom blowing from the future on my
face. I did not see then how it would come about: I did not even
imagine the long years of moody and unprofitable voyaging which lay
before me. But she saw that her own ideal of masculine modern womanhood
no longer appeared to me the supremely evocative thing she claimed it to
be, so that in time, in time, her power would depart. I can see her now,
turned slightly away from me in the cab, regarding me over her shoulder
from beneath that enormous hat, studying even then how she could keep me
true to that worn-out creed, weighing who knows what reckless plans in
her cool, clever brain....

But it was a long time! For years yet I saw her before me whenever I
thought of other women, and her disparaging, slightly satirical smile
would interpose itself and hold me back from experimenting with fresh
emotions. Even when war came and our spiritual and emotional worlds came
crashing about our ears, her power waned but did not depart. I had no
choice between this shadowy, reluctant fidelity and a descent into
regions where I had neither the means nor the temperament to prosper.
And so it went, until suddenly one day the whole thing came to an end.
You will remember how I abruptly abandoned the story upon which I was
engaged, and told you I had begun upon a tale you had told to me, the
tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter? Behold it, transmuted into
something you would never recognize, as is the way of stories when a
novelist of romantic tendencies gets at them! And what I want you to
observe is that the inspiration, as far as I am concerned, was based
upon your brief yet intensely vivid projection of your life in that dull
street in a Saloniki _faubourg_, a street so like many of ours in the
_faubourgs_ of London, stretching away into dim, dusty distances; but
unlike ours in that beyond it rose ranges of hard, sharp mountains that
looked as though they had been cut out of pasteboard, and stuck against
a sky so unreal in its uncompromising blueness that it seemed to be
aniline-dyed. And as the days passed, and the story grew, here by the
blue waters of the Gulf I suddenly realized that the spell of the
dream-woman had been broken, that behind my story of Captain Macedoine's
Daughter another story was working out--the ghost of a story if you
like--the drama of the end of an illusion. My old antagonist had met her
match at last. She tried to frighten me with her slightly satirical
smile. She invoked the innumerable memories and sentiments in which I
had been born and reared. But she had met her match. I took her by the
arm and opening the door, thrust her gently outside. And then, while you
were down there in the garden, I went on to write the tale of Captain
Macedoine's Daughter.

There is another long-drawn shriek--the train is leaving the station
next to ours--and I take a last look out upon the well-remembered view.
Across the shining waters of the Gulf the lights of the city are
glittering already against the many-coloured façades, with their marble
and cedar balconies, their bright green jalousies and gay ensigns.
Already the war-ships in the _rade_ are picked out in bright points, and
the mast-head lights are winking rapid messages to each other. The
western sky over the headland is a smoky orange with pale green and
amber above, and the moon, an incredibly slender crescent of pure
silver, hangs faintly over Mount Pagos. It is quite dark down under the
cypresses, and a smell of humid earth mingles with the perfume of the
jasmine.

Yes, I am now quite ready. No, I have left nothing behind, except
perhaps....

Well, it is for you to say.

    _Bairakli._
    _W. M._




CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER




CHAPTER I


None of the men sitting in deck chairs under the awning were surprised
to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H.
M. S. _Sycorax_ had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which
that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time.
This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a
genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived
in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the
Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of
western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and
only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which
they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that
to the Chief alone the eastern Mediterranean was a known and experienced
cruising ground; and when the _Sycorax_, detailed to escort convoys
through the intricacies of the Ægean Archipelago, awaited her
slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi,
in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said
he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for
Rotterdam.

The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs
which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the
little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected
Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of
each other's idiosyncrasies--another way of saying the _Sycorax_ was a
happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and
paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their
sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and
devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often
accumulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.

And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the
glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard
and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an
ambassador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way
moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had
murmured absently:

"On one occasion, I was an ambassador. I will tell you about it some
time."

"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster--Inness was an Oxford man who
had married into a wealthy merchant's family. He said "Rotterdam"
because he had once been there.

"Yes," said Spenlove. "Rotterdam for Krupp's of Essen. For three years
Krupp's took a hundred thousand tons per annum of high-grade ore out of
this little island alone. They took it in British bottoms to Rotterdam,
and from there it went by way of their interminable canals to Essen. I
know because I helped to take it. It was just about the time, too, that
Chamberlain was preaching his crusade against the evils of Germany
dumping her steel below cost price on our markets, and I was so
indignant about it that I wrote to the newspapers. I often wrote to the
newspapers in those days. I suppose we all catch the disease at some
time or other. As a rule, of course, nothing happened save that the
letter would not be printed, or else printed full of mistakes, with the
vital paragraphs omitted for 'lack of space.' This letter wasn't printed
either, but I received one in return from a fiery young member of
Parliament who had just been returned on the Protective Tariff ticket.
He asked for full details, which I sent to him. I believe he tried to
make a question of it in the House, but he ran up against the Consular
Service, and that did for him. You see, our Consul here was named
Grünbaum.

"More than that," went on Mr. Spenlove, sitting upright in his
deck-chair and looking attentively at a near-by ventilator; "more than
that, Mr. Grünbaum was resident concessionaire of the mining company, he
owned the pumping-plant which irrigates yonder valley, he was connected
by marriage with the Greek governor of the Island, who lives over in the
tiny capital of Ipsilon, and he, Grünbaum, was the richest man in the
Cyclades. That was his house, that big square white barn with the three
tall windows and the outside staircase. He was a man of enormous size
and weight, and I daresay the people of the Island thought him a god. He
certainly treated them most humanely. Every widow was pensioned by him,
which was not very much after all, for they used to have precious little
use for money. You could get a bottle of wine and a great basket of
grapes and figs for a piece of soap, I remember. He built churches for
them, too, like that one perched up there on the rock above his
house--snow-white with a blue dome. You may have noticed the other day
in the wireless news that the friends of freedom in Greece polished off
a few of what were described as reactionaires. Put them up against a
wall and pumped _mannlicher_ bullets into them. One of these obstacles
to liberty was named Grünbaum, I observed.

"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in
Grünbaum's employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain
Macedoine. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a
very remarkable man for all that. He wasn't a captain at all, really,
you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back,
when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, passengers, and
fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed
long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day
and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to
come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and
Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money.
He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least
half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was
sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was
a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated
man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might
almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn,
clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed
passengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of
captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the
trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, 'Oh,
Captain, can we ...' something or other. The skipper was a dried-up
little shell-back who hated passengers and never came down on the
promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in buttons,
who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes
it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. 'Captain Macedoine.' When he
gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical
Louisiana nigger, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: 'All right,
sah, Captain Macedoine!' It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than
that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England,
'retired on a competency,' as he phrased it, he retired as Captain
Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.

"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest
possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to
speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laugh; but you have not been to
sea as long as I have. Such things are possible at sea. I have had a
second engineer from Sunderland, a chap named Philip, who claimed Philip
of Spain as his ancestor. There was Captain Gizzard, in my old London
employ, who had a genealogical tree which traced the old fraud's descent
from the Guiscards of Sicily. No! Captain Macedoine's illusions are
common enough, I fancy, among men. It was only that instead of trying to
master them and clear them away, he cultivated them until they grew to
monstrous proportions and he lost sight of reality altogether. Or if you
like, he was an artist, working upon himself as material, like those old
masters we read about who devoted their lives to the accomplishment of
obscure technical excellences that only the _cognoscenti_ could discover
and enjoy."

"Possibly," murmured the Surgeon, smiling in the darkness of the
evening.

"Well," said Mr. Spenlove, in a musing tone, "of course a certain
latitude of analogy is permitted in describing one man to another, if we
ever can describe him. That was how Macedoine struck me. The aim of his
art was to conceal the artist, which I understand is sound aesthetics.
And it was impossible not to admire his method, his style, if you like.
There was nothing crude in it. So far from leaving nothing to chance, he
left everything to chance. Take the case of his daughter. The brat in
those days was a god-send to him. I used to think she was merely an
invention, he was so circumstantial in his subtly shaded allusions. You
might say that if she hadn't existed, the trend of his emotional
development, the scheme on which he was engaged, would have compelled
him to invent her. As I say, I did believe at one time he had invented
her, for he was always inventing something. In some bewildering,
indefinable way, we became aware, week by week, month by month, of a
fresh touch, a new phase of Captain Macedoine. I don't pretend to know
what final frame he proposed to give to the magnificent picture he was
making. Perhaps he didn't know himself. Perhaps he had no ultimate
design. Anyhow we never had it, for as I said, the company was absorbed
and we all had to come home.

"I admit I was surprised enough when I found out, quite accidentally,
that he had married an octaroon. When I say married, I mean of course,
as far as fidelity and maintenance was concerned. He rented a cottage
out on Tchoupitoulas Street, where the mosquitoes sing loud enough to
drown conversation, and the grass grows man-high between the road and
the sidewalk. And there the woman lived a while and died. I was never in
the house, but young Strellett, the second steward, who was lost when
the _Toro_ turned over in the Yucatan channel, was married and lived
not far from Macedoine's _ménage_, and I can imagine the place.
Strellett had a little three-roomed box where he lived with his big
rosy-cheeked Irish wife, and there was something very homelike about it,
for all the carpets and curtains and a good deal of the table-linen had
come from the Maracaibo Line's cabins. Sent ashore to be cleaned, you
know, and didn't get back. I dare say Macedoine's place was even more
completely furnished at the company's expense. They all did it. Perhaps
that was one of the reasons we all had to come home. That was ... yes,
more than twenty years ago.

"I'm afraid, though, there were not many of us like Macedoine. We didn't
come home to retire on a competency. New Orleans used to be what they
called 'a wide-open little town' and there were plenty of ways of
getting rid of our wages, good as they were. However, that's a detail.
We came home, except one or two youngsters who struck west and got into
Nevada mining plants or San Francisco lumber ships. I was glad to come.
I had a few shots in the locker and I went down into Hampshire to see my
people. I didn't stay as long as I intended. Who of us ever does? After
the first glow of welcome dies away, we have to depend on our personal
attractions to keep people interested. We may keep the ball rolling a
little longer if we get married or even engaged; but it is a sorry
business after all. You fellows are for ever wanting the ship to go
home. Well, you wait and see. You'll be glad to be back. When a man has
got the sea-habit, his relations always regard him as a bit of a
nuisance.

"I went to sea again. I joined a London Company which I always call now
'my old company' because I was so long with them, and have for them a
peculiar sort of cantankerous affection. They paid infernally poor
wages, they were always in a hole financially until the war made them
multi-millionaires, and their accommodation was pretty poor. But for
some reason or other men stayed with them. I believe it was because we
were working for a private firm and not for one of those gigantic
corporations without soul to be damned or body to be kicked, as the
saying is. The firm were real people to us. They came down to see the
ship in London River. Old Gannet--it was Gannet, Prawle and Co.--used to
leave a ten-pound note on the Chief's wash-stand after he'd had a yarn
and a cigar. Young Gannet, home for the holidays from Winchester
College, would come down to St. Katherine's Dock and make himself
squiffy with Madeira the skipper had brought home from the Islands.
Prawle had been an office boy when old Gannet was young, and had worked
up to a partnership and married Daisy Gannet. Smartest man on the
Baltic Exchange, they used to say. Yes, their ships were fierce, but men
stayed in them. Even now, with old Gannet dead and Prawle retired, and
the management paying poor whiskey-soaked young Gannet three thousand a
year to keep out of the office, the old skippers and chiefs are still
ploughing the ocean for them. You see, we know their ways.

"I went to sea, and kept on at it. You might say it was force of habit,
for I must admit I could have had jobs ashore in those days. Not now.
But then I could. But it grows on one, going to sea. And I was making
friends. There's nothing like a ship-mate who is a friend. The mere fact
of you or him joining another ship and sailing away is nothing. When you
meet again you take up the tale where you dropped it, years before, half
the world away. But you must be young. It is impossible to weld
friendships when the heat of youth has gone out. Interests, family ties,
danger, sorrow, all may do something, but only when you are young can
you make the friendships that nothing can destroy."

Mr. Spenlove paused, and for a moment there was no sound save the purr
of the dynamos under their feet, the soft swish and suck of the waves
flowing in and out of the under-cut marble cliffs, and the steady tramp
of the Quartermaster patrolling to and fro at the gangway. One of the
noticeable points about Spenlove was that he fitted into no standard
gauge. Neither the Surgeon nor the Oxonian could "place" him precisely,
they would confess. Nor could the more experienced lieutenants, highly
certificated gentlemen from the Liverpool to New York Ferry steamers.
With unconscious humour they "wondered such a man should go to sea." The
notion that the sea should be peopled exclusively with moral and
intellectual derelicts dies hard. The fact was, Mr. Spenlove was a
connoisseur of humanity. He seemed to have met so many types that he
unconsciously addressed himself to the fundamentals. He took the
inevitable superficial features of one's character for granted. This
made him easy to accept but difficult to understand. And so, when he
spoke of friendship and youth, the other men did not laugh. They were
silent--some with assent, some with doubt, and some, possibly, with
regret.

"I was second of one of their oldest boats for two years and Jack Evans
was mate. Jack and I became friends. I don't mean that the Mate and the
Second of that old ship went about with their arms wound round each
other's necks. We were, on the contrary, very often at each other's
throats, so to speak. Mates and second-engineers are professionally
antagonistic. We had terrific altercations over stores, for the company
patronized one of those old-fashioned ship chandlers who sent cabin,
deck, and engine stores all in one chaotic heap. Jack would get my
varnish and I would snaffle a couple of bolts of his canvas. But that
would all blow away by tea time, when we'd go ashore and spend the
evening together. Mind you, we were neither of us very good young men.
We ... well, we had some good times and some bad ones. We were shifted
together into another ship. Then Jack, who'd been nine solid years mate
in the company and was getting so angry about it that the port-captain
used to avoid him, Jack got a command. I shall never forget it. We were
lying as peaceably as you please in the top corner of the old Queens
Dock, Glasgow. It was Saturday night and all was snug for a quiet
week-end. Jack and I were in his room under the bridge having a nip,
when a telegraph-boy came clattering down the brass-edged staircase.
Jack opened the wire, read it, and then gave me a thump on the back that
nearly broke it. He was a stout, florid-faced, peppery little Welshman.
What I liked about him was his crystal-clear character. What he thought
came out like a shell out of a gun--with an explosion. 'The old thief's
given me a ship at last!' he roared. And he had to pack and get away
that night to Bristol. I went for a cab while he got his dunnage
together. And I remember now, waiting on the platform at the Union
Station for the train to move, with Jack in a corner of the compartment
drunk as a lord, and snoring.

"It was in London I met him again. We had had a collision and I was one
of the witnesses called by the company to swear our ship was innocent.
She wasn't: she wasn't: she did everything she shouldn't have done--but
no matter. We all stayed at a little hotel in the Strand, getting a
guinea a day expenses, and we all swore black was white, and the owners,
our owners, lost the case. They had already lost the ship, so we were
told to go home and wait a few weeks until they could get hold of
another one cheap. Of course most of the crowd joined other companies,
but I went off to Waterloo to inflict myself on my people in Hampshire
again. And it was at the bookstall that I saw Jack staring at the
illustrated papers and jangling the money in his pockets. He was in a
very shabby condition, I may tell you. His chin was a rich growth of
black stubble, his round protuberant brown eyes were blood-shot, and his
clothes had been slept in, I'm sure. 'Thank God it's you, Fred,' he
splutters out, for he jumped like a cat when I touched him. We went into
the bar and he told me how he had fallen on such evil days. His ship
had been away nearly a year on the west coast of South America. He
hadn't spent a pound in the whole trip. No going ashore, nobody to speak
to, nothing. And here he'd come into London River and paid off. It was
easy to see what had happened. A young hot-blooded man with three or
four hundred pounds in his pocket, and no decent friends in town. His
contempt for himself was rather amusing. 'Take me away, Fred,' he
implored. 'Take me somewhere where I shan't be tempted.'

"'The fact is,' I said, as we made for the barber shop, 'you ought to
get married, Jack.'

"'Who'd have a drunken old swab like me?' he inquired, sadly. 'You know
I've been brought up common.'

"He was very contrite, but eventually, when he had got himself spruced
up, changed his clothes and fetched his dunnage out of the terrible
little hotel near Waterloo station where he had been lured, he began to
take a less austere view of himself. He was determined, however, never
to wallow in the mire again. He was a ship-master. His plump, rosy face
grew pale and drawn at the possibilities which he had risked. He was a
typical British sailor man. Riotous living was really distasteful to
him, but he had no idea of getting rid of his money in any other way.
However, I missed that train and took him down with me to Hampshire
next day. It was one of the great deeds of my career. He fell in love
the very first week."

"But what has all this to do with Captain Macedoine and this Island of
Ipsilon?" enquired the small, precise voice of the Paymaster.

For a moment there was no reply. It was very dark under the awning now,
for the moon was still behind the cliffs. Four bells rang at the
gangway. Mr. Spenlove lit a cigarette and continued.

"Have you ever seen a sea-captain in the throes of adoration? It is an
astonishing sight. Jack was what he himself called 'open as the day.'
Mind you, I had no ulterior motive in taking my old friend down home
with me. I had no plain sisters or cousins to get settled in life. Both
plain and pretty in our family were married and gone when we arrived. We
lived, you know, just outside Threxford, a small town six miles from a
railway, tucked away in the valley of the Threxe, about ten miles from
where that small stream falls into the Channel. It was a lovely spot,
but so dreadfully quiet I could never live there very long. Over the
town hung a high hill crowned by the workhouse. You see, it was the
workhouse master's daughter Jack had fallen in love with."

"Captain Macedoine's daughter?" suggested the Paymaster.

"No, a very different person, I assure you. Madeline Hanson had been
brought up in a very secluded way. It couldn't have been otherwise. Old
Hanson occupied a somewhat dubious position in the social life of
England. A workhouse master is not the sort of man either rich or poor
want to have much to do with. He is like the hangman or jailer or
rag-and-bone man; a necessary evil. But he may be, as Hanson was, a most
respectable person. And Madeline, his only child, was brought up in
almost solitary confinement until she was twenty. I believe she went to
an aunt in Portsmouth occasionally. Anyhow it suited her. She was a
puny, flat-chested little girl, very prim and precise, and would bridle
at once when any one laughed or made a joke. I never discovered exactly
how Jack got acquainted with her. At church most likely, for he was in
full cry after respectability and went to church regularly with my old
people. I know we used to go fishing together at first, and later I
found myself going alone, for Jack was meeting his inamorata, and going
for walks. Oh, quite above board. Jack was 'open as the day.' He lost no
time in marching up the hill to the workhouse (not the first time he'd
been inside one, he assured me grimly) and informing Mr. Hanson that
Captain Evans wished to pay attention to Miss Hanson. Whether old Hanson
was a man of the world or not, I cannot say, but he certainly knew his
daughter might go a long way farther and fare worse. Jack's affair
prospered. I have often been curious to know just what they said to each
other as they prowled about the lanes in the dark. I suppose it was a
case of the attraction of opposites. For once, anyhow, in spite of
novelists, the course of true love ran smooth.

"Of course Jack had his fits of jealousy. You see, he couldn't
understand how in the world he had managed to pick such a prize without
having to shoot up the whole town. He even suspected me of having
designs on his happiness, and I suddenly realized the tremendous
difficulty of reassuring him. You know, it's a delicate business,
disclaiming all desire for a woman. If you overdo it, you rouse
suspicion at once. When I said, 'Oh, no, _I_ don't want to....' Jack was
up and prancing about the room. 'Why, do you know anything?' he
demanded. I soothed him, telling him he knew I wasn't a marrying man.
'That be d--d for a tale. _I_ wasn't either till I met Madeline.' I had
a stormy time. The contrast between Jack's volcanic temperament and the
calm, meticulous flow of his courtship was comic. I was thankful when he
was finally married and gone to Ilfrocombe for his highly respectable
honeymoon. And then, a fortnight later, I got a telegram ordering me to
join his ship, the _Manola_, at Newcastle, as chief. We were shipmates
once more.

"There now began for me an existence which is rather difficult to
describe. In cargo-boats, as no doubt you know, the skipper and chief
can easily be thrown together a good deal. Jack and I of course were.
But Jack was under the impression that I existed for the sole purpose of
listening to his rapturous idolizing of his darling wife. He wrote to
her every day, and read the letter to me afterward. She wrote to him
every day, and when we reached port and the mail came aboard, Jack would
read the gist of it to me. It was like being married oneself. He would
lie back in his deck chair on the bridge on fine evenings in the
Mediterranean and suck at his cigar, sunk in thought. And then suddenly
he would bring out some profoundly novel and original remark about
Madeline. I had Madeline for breakfast, dinner, supper, and between
meals. It was trying, but it was nothing compared with the frightful
time I put in with him the voyage the baby was born. We were in Genoa,
and he wired home every day. I would march him up town in the evening
and stand him drinks, which he swallowed without looking at them. And it
never entered his head that it was possibly less important to me than to
him. When a telegram came, 'Daughter, both doing well,' he ordered grog
for all hands, took me up town, and stood champagne to every Tom, Dick,
and Harry in the Verdi Bar. I got him down to the harbour in a carriage
and he wanted to fight me because I laughed when he told the driver that
he was going to call the baby Angelina Madeline Evans.

"He did, too. Life for me became impregnated with Madeline and Angelina
as with a domestic odour. That marvellous child haunted my hours of
leisure long before I had ever seen her. As the months and years passed,
and Jack and I fared up and down the world together, I sometimes
wondered whether we hadn't both married Madeline. Jack was a model
husband. The notion that any other woman existed, or that any other man
could love a woman as he loved Madeline, never entered his head. He was
perfectly satisfied as long as one sat and listened to him talking about
Madeline. I believe he would have urged me to go and do likewise, if he
hadn't been convinced that no more Madelines were available. I believe,
too, he thought me a bit of an ass to take him down and introduce him
instead of marrying her myself. But as you will see, she and I were not
affinities.

"So life went on, and now I am coming to the time when Captain
Macedoine's daughter comes into the thing. Oh, no, I haven't forgotten
what I was talking about. Time passed, and one voyage we left home with
Jack in an anxious frame of mind. The child was about five years old
then and she was sick. Something the matter with her throat. Jack was
like a caged bear when we got to sea. There was no wireless then, you
know. You would have thought there had never been a sick child on earth
before. 'Fred,' he would say, 'I left orders--get the best advice, best
of everything. I don't give a damn what it costs,' And he'd prance to
and fro. He never looked at the ship. If we dropped a knot below our
customary two hundred a day, he'd be in my room growling, 'Aren't we
ever goin' to get to Alexandria, Fred?' When we did get there he fled up
to the post office to get his mail--forgot all about ours of course.
'_Not yet out of danger--diphtheria_,' so ran the telegram in reply to
his own frantic message. I never had such a time in my life. He was like
a man demented. He would catch me by the shoulder and coat-collar and
glare at me out of his bulging, blood-shot brown eyes, his fat cheeks
all drawn into pouches, and stutter, 'Fred, this is the end o' me. If I
lose one I lose both. My God, I've a good mind to go home. I tell you
I'm going off my head. If I lose one I lose both. Madeline'll never live
through the loss o' the child. What shall I do, oh, what shall I do?' I
believe he used to go into his cabin, shut the door, and pester the
Almighty with his petitions. You know, they say domestic ties strengthen
a man's personality, stimulate him to ambition. I have not noticed it.
On the contrary, it has often seemed to me that married men adopt the
ethics of the jungle. Life for them is a case of the man and his mate
against the world. The jungle reverberates with their cries of rage,
jealousy, and amorous delight. What are literature and drama but the
coördination of these elevated cat-calls?"

"Oh, come!" murmured the Surgeon.

"Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular?
Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with
love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a
generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made
the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you,
something _had_ to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain
Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We
were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the
halls:

    "_What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids,
    And a nice little home of your own?_

"That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men
were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were
citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch
was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly
blow."

"Well, go on," said somebody.

"You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on
the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a
holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing
existed--for them--outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline
had been brought up to be refined, reserved, 'not like other girls.' She
silently and unconsciously laid down a narrow-gauge line along which she
and Jack were to advance through life, and Jack, who was one of those
men who are very much what their wives make them, was only too glad to
get his orders. And he, with the intuition of despair, knowing her to be
besotted with pride in their child almost beyond endurance, gobbled
hoarsely in my ear in the night watches that if one died the other would
follow, and leave him desolate.

"Well, the child didn't die. I have sometimes wondered whether it was
anything more than a sore throat. It doesn't matter. When we came home,
Angelina was on the mend, and the cable companies must have noticed a
falling off in their receipts. I was relieved. I mean in mind. Jack tore
off home for a night to see for himself. He told me afterward 'he nearly
cracked Madeline's ribs,' he was so glad to see her. Mind, he'd only
been away six weeks! Think of it, in the light of the recent years. Not
that I believed him. Women like Mrs. Evans don't get their ribs cracked.
No matter. My relief was speedily changed to grave apprehension when he
came back to the ship accompanied by wife, child, and a nurse, and
announced that he had obtained permission to take them a voyage. It was
one of the unusual points of old Gannet's employ--he allowed each
skipper and chief to take their wives one voyage per year. I had been
through it before, and disliked the prospect. I have sometimes wondered
whether old Gannet had a secret and sinister intention, for it is a fact
that you can't honestly say you know a woman until you have been to sea
with her. No woman looks her best, either physically or mentally, at
sea. Oh, of course if you are married to her as well, the case is
different. I offer no opinion. But I know of one young man at least who
broke it off after enduring a voyage with a hen-pecked captain.

"I misjudged Jack, however. Jack was his wife's slave, but he remained
in command of his ship. You see he also had been at sea with skippers'
wives in the past. 'One word, Madeline, and home you go,' came up the
ventilator as I was sitting on the bridge after tea. I was astounded. It
was a new Jack, or rather, the old fiery, original Jack. The next
sentence, in reply to some inaudible remark of Madeline's, explained
what I had thought was a quarrel. 'Well, we must have an understanding
before we sail. I know what I'm talking about, dear. I've been Mate many
a year and I never would stand the Skipper's missus interfering with the
ship's discipline.'

"I was admiring Jack for this sagacious warning when there came a squawl
from his bathroom, where the nurse-girl was washing Angelina. Mrs. Evans
rustled across, crying out instructions concerning Babs, as they called
the youngster. And then came Jack's voice exploding in amazement.
'_What's_ that gel's name, Madeline? _What'd_ you call her?' And a voice
as clear, as soft and as pure as a silver bell answered:

"'Artemisia Macedoine, Captain. That's my name.'"




CHAPTER II


And though things do happen like that sometimes, as I sat in my chair,
quite innocently alongside the Captain's ventilator, and sucked at my
cigar, I was taken aback. It was like a voice coming up from the
tomb--the tomb of a buried past. In a way it was a relief, for I was
becoming so involved in Jack's domestic life that I was losing touch
with the outside world altogether. The sound of that name recalled to me
my old, unregenerate, wandering self. I had not forgotten him. One never
forgets a master of illusion, such as he surely was. But the very
existence of so imaginative a man seemed doubtful in the company of
matter-of-fact, open-minded, good old honest Jack. Jack's lack of the
power of dissembling and allusion was devastating. He had no more
_nuance_, as the French say, than a fog-horn. Think of a man who could
say to the wife of his bosom, the goddess before whom he worshipped with
preposterous self-abasement--'One word, and home you go!' Jack would
have had one word for Macedoine and one only--Faker. But I have found,
in the course of my rolling existence, that fakers are often more
interesting, intrinsically, than careful, honest men.

"And I had heard, in a round-about way, some years before, that Captain
Macedoine had not only been an illustrious faker but a fairly competent
swindler as well. We were discharging machinery and stores at Cristobal,
when a young chap who'd been Junior Fourth in the old Maracaibo Line
came aboard and had a chat. He was one of those who hadn't gone home.
Indeed, he was able to take out his final papers--never mind how--as
soon as he was paid off, and being a decent young chap, fairly clever
and a good mixer, he had soon gotten a billet in the Canal Zone. For
some reason or other he had liked me when we were shipmates. I
remembered him as having no aptitude for the sea. He had a sweet-heart
in England he was always talking about, but he married in the States, of
course. Well, young Cotter, with his little waxed moustache and his
superior bank clerk's manner, walked aboard, shook me warmly by the
hand, and gave me an immense quantity of miscellaneous news. What with
the Yucatan ships calling three or four times a week, Cotter was up to
date with everything happening from Galveston to Biloxi and from Tampa
to Boston. Did I remember So-and-so--chap with a squint, or a mole, or
a broken finger, as the case might be. Cotter always emphasized a man's
physical defects in alluding to him. And so the talk came round to 'Oh,
did I remember that chap with the solemn face and the big stomach?
Captain Macedoine we used to call him? Why, didn't you hear? Extradition
order. Yes! The cunning old guy had a dozen opium dives off Rampart
Street in full swing. Must have been coining money. No, they never got
him. He had left England by that time. Nobody knows where he is now, I
suppose. Smart, eh?' Such was Captain Macedoine to me as I sat listening
to the good Jack sputtering in his cabin:

"'Great Christopher! And who in thunder gave you a name like that. What
is it, again?' And then Mrs. Evans interposing with 'That will do, dear.
She can't help her name.'

"'A h--l of a name for a servant,' muttered Jack.

"Well, poor Jack found that taking his family to sea was a more
formidable affair than he had imagined. The fact was, Jack, although he
had been married six years, knew no more about married life than a
bachelor. He hadn't spent more than a week at one time alongside of his
wife. Many sea-faring men are like this. The very routine of ordinary
household existence is novel to them. They live voyage after voyage at
sea, dreaming of an impossibly perfect existence ashore, and their brief
holidays, in their wives' houses only confirm them in the delusion that
shore life is heaven, and life on board ship hell. Whereas, you know, it
is really the other way round."

"Oh, I say!" said Inness, who, in spite of Oxford, retained his
illusions.

"What rot, Spenlove!" said the First Lieutenant, a gentleman still
unmarried, but rigidly engaged.

"Ah, but you forget," retorted Mr. Spenlove, laughing softly as he gazed
up at the moon now high over the cliff. He looked very like a benevolent
satyr as he sat leaning forward in his chair, his chin on his hands, his
trim gray beard pushed out, and his curiously slanted black eyebrows
raised--"You forget that I am dealing with basic realities. You forget
that ninety-nine sailor-men out of each hundred feed themselves
exclusively on dreams. You are like the donkey who imagines he sees a
resplendent carrot hung in front of him. It is not only that he never
gets the carrot. There never was any carrot for him to get. I
repeat--dear old Jack Evans was not a bit singular in his illusions, any
more than Captain Macedoine was in his. They believed in them a bit
longer than you young fellows do nowadays, that's all."

"Well, go on," suggested the Doctor, and moved out of the moonlight into
the shadow, so that Mr. Spenlove remained alone and appeared to be
talking to himself.

"Of course, so far, I hadn't seen any of the party save Jack.
I'd been ashore when they arrived--did I say we were in
Middlesborough-on-Tees?--for I had friends at Stockton. I was really
concerned, for knowing what a headlong, forthright fool Jack was, I
expected to do or say something that might spoil his life's happiness.
And here he was complicating matters ten-fold by bringing a nurse-girl,
a 'governess.' And while I sat there pondering upon the possibilities,
the Mate came up with an expression of immense cunning on his face, his
hand funnelled round his mouth, and whispered 'Seen 'em, Mister?'

"I shook my head. Mr. Bloom, Basil Bloom, had been only a couple of
trips with us, and I knew Jack had very little use for him. Mr. Bloom,
indeed, was one of those extraordinary men who go to sea year after
year, and not only do they never seem to attain to any decent mastery of
their profession, but in their speech and manner and appearance they
resemble piano-tuners or billiard-markers more than sailors. Bloom had a
moustache like an Italian hair-dresser's, immense, fine, full, and
silky, with moist red lips eternally parting and showing a set of
perfect false teeth. His papers were miracles of eulogy, his discharges,
save that he had been in a good many ships, without blemish. And yet
from the moment he had come jauntily on board the previous voyage, Jack
had been straining like a terrier on the leash. Mr. Bloom seemed to do
nothing right. It had been my lot to hear both sides of the question.
Jack, over a whiskey-and-soda in my room, would bewail his fate at
having an agricultural labourer sent him as chief officer; and next day,
Mr. Bloom, bringing me the position and distance run, would twirl his
moustache and allude to the amazingly incompetent persons who secured
commands nowadays. Of course I sided with Jack. Mr. Bloom was nothing to
me. He was the sort of man I would much rather hit in the face than
shake hands with. The man didn't _look_ like a sailor. He had no
sea-going gear. Jack nearly had a seizure on my settee when he told me
the new Mate was patrolling the bridge in red silk socks, patent-leather
dress-pumps, and an old Norfolk jacket. When we began to roll off Ushant
and ship a few seas, it appeared Mr. Bloom had neither oilskins nor
sea-boots. To see him skipping along through green sea water in his
dress-pumps, to look at the patent log, was a revelation of human
improvidence. Here was a man the wrong side of forty, and he hadn't the
sense to bring suitable clothing to sea with him! At the table he
bewildered, angered, and contradicted poor old Jack with political
argument. Once, after getting his anchors fouled, and firing his
clutch-blocks, and otherwise making a mess of things on the
forecastle-head, he had the temerity to tell Jack that 'every
ship-master ought to have tariff-reform at his finger-ends.' Jack nearly
had apoplexy. He managed to sputter out that 'every mate ought to have
his job at his finger-ends, or else go home and buy a farm.' Mr. Bloom,
holding his fine military figure erect and delicately preening his
moustache, told me afterward 'That's the worst of these young
ship-masters--they think insults are arguments.'

"Now I saw trouble ahead for Jack with Mr. Bloom on board. I don't
pretend to have a very profound insight into human character, but I had
an indefinable conviction that Mrs. Evans would look favourably upon Mr.
Basil Bloom. Oh, no, I don't mean that my prurient mind was gloating
over the destruction of Jack's marital bliss. Not at all. I never liked
Madeline, but I do her the justice of proclaiming her inviolable
chastity. What I mean is, I felt that she had more in common
intellectually with Mr. Bloom than with us. He had a good deal of the
fussiness of middle-aged shore-people, clearing his throat, coughing
behind his hand, saying 'excuse me,' smoothing his hair with his palm,
and referring to things he had seen 'in the papers.' And in spite of his
inadequate sea-going gear, he invariably appeared in a more or less
clean stiff collar. A woman, I mean a genteel woman, will never utterly
condemn any man so long as he wears a collar. This would not have
mattered save that Jack and I invariably abandoned collars as soon as
the pilot had left.

"So, when Mr. Basil Bloom, in a dirty gray lounge suit, brown Oxford
shoes, a grimy collar, and a deer-stalker hat, bent over me and enquired
if I had seen the arrivals, I shook my head and got up to walk away. But
Mr. Bloom detained me. Had I not seen the nurse? Nice little piece of
goods. And the baby was a little angel. Between me and him, he was good
enough to say, we ought to have a very pleasant trip, what with ladies
on board, what? And Mr. Bloom, settling his dirty collar and concealing
a brilliant smile behind a hairy, ringed hand, walked off to superintend
his neglected work.

"I was not such a fool as to assume that I could any longer stroll into
Jack's room and have a chat. I am not afraid of women, but I regard
their lairs with considerable trepidation. On board an old tramp steamer
a woman is nothing less than a scourge. There is no place for her, and
consequently you never know where you may find her. If you walk to and
fro on the deck, you are probably keeping her awake. If you go out on
deck in your shirt-sleeves, or come from a bath with a towel round you,
you are outraging her modesty. If you use the ordinary jargon of the
sea, she writes home that the engineers are awfully coarse on her
husband's ship. You moon about in a furtive fashion, closing doors and
ventilators when you converse with one another, and pray for the day
when she will quit the ship and return to the semi-detached mansion in
the suburbs where she reigns as queen, Captain So-and-So's wife. I felt
sadly, as I sat in my room, that my friendship with Jack would remain
for a few weeks in a state of suspended animation. I got up several
times, unconsciously, to go along, and had to sit down again. And as I
sat there, the alleyway was darkened and the familiar stout figure and
short red neck appeared. I had a little table in my room and as a rule
sat behind it on the settee, while Jack sprawled in an old easy chair I
had bought in Savannah, a chair out of an old plantation mansion. Jack
sank into it and remained silent while I poured out two pegs and
squirted some soda-water into them. I knew perfectly well, or thought I
did, that he needed some restorative after his recent adventures. He
drank it thirstily and set the glass on the table.

"'Fred,' he said, in the cautious whisper which, as I have said,
becomes second nature when there is a woman on board, 'Fred, I've made
an infernal fool of meself. They've let me in at the office.'

"'Why,' I said, 'I thought they did you rather well, giving you
permission to take Mrs. Evans _and_ the youngster. You know how they
wired Tompkins once: '_No children_'?'

"'You don't know nothing about it,' says Jack, who was invariably hard
on English when he was moved. 'It's a case of wheels within wheels. They
only did that to get this gel out for nothing. She's going out to her
father in the Grecian Arches, and some clever fool in the office thought
of sending her down to Mrs. Evans to see if she'd do to look after the
kid.'

"'Well, it's only her grub for a fortnight or so,' I remarked.

"Jack looked solemnly at me and shook his head.

"'Have you seen her?'

"'No,' I said, 'Mr. Bloom told me she was a nice little piece of goods.'
Jack snorted.

"'He's down in the cabin now talking about what's on at the theatres.
Fred, I'm in for trouble, and you'll have to stand by me.'

"And he was, for you must bear in mind that there were others on board
besides Mr. Bloom. There was the Second Mate, a young man whose
prospects were tarnished by a weakness for secret drinking. And there
was young Siddons, a stripling just out of his apprenticeship and
uncertificated, the son of a well-to-do merchant in a country town. Jack
used to say there was too much of the lah-di-dah about him, and was down
on him time and again. All the same he liked the boy, as I did, too, for
Siddons was a gentleman--the only one on board, I used to think. He got
the D. S. O. the other day for bombing something or other in Germany. He
was what modern, educated smart women call 'a charming boy' or 'a pretty
little boy.' Not that he was effeminate, by any means. He was simply one
of those to whom virtuous sentiment is a passionate necessity. Instead
of playing in the gutters of life, as so many of us do, his young body
and soul were on tip-toe for the coming of love. You can see it when
they are like that. There is a thirsty look about the lips, a turn for
moodiness, a sudden dilation of the pupils as they catch your glance,
and a quick flush, very pretty to see. And sometimes, I am informed,
they find a woman worthy of the gifts they bear....

"We had a couple of engineers, too, but they were scarcely to be classed
with young Siddons. They were like a good many of us, useful,
shop-soiled articles with plenty of the meretricious conventional
sexuality which passes for passion when stimulated. But neither of them
would have got a look from a modern, educated smart woman. The Third I
didn't know very much about. He came and went, and the principal
impression I have of him now is that he was married. The Second had what
I should call an oppressively incondite mind. He had a cold avidity for
facts. Unlike most seamen he never read fiction unless it was some book
which had achieved notoriety for what is called frankness. He had a
bookshelf in his cabin containing his shore-going boots and a derby hat,
a Whittaker's Almanac, a Who's Who, several year-books, and a shilling
encyclopedia. It was astonishing, the comfort he seemed to derive from
knowing the census-returns of Bolivia, or the Republican majority in
Oregon, or the number of microbes in a pint of milk. But it did no one
any harm. I only mention it because he, too, in his way, fell in love
with Artemisia and for a time neglected his familiar preoccupations.

"For that is what it amounted to--that we all fell in love. Each of us
had to measure ourselves by this standard. At certain times in our lives
we all have to drop what we are doing and submit ourselves to the test.
I'm afraid most of us don't cut a very brilliant figure. It is fortunate
for us that one can achieve success in a lower class, and can pass
muster as human beings because we are honest or sober or clever, and
not simply because we are worthy of love. All the same, I fancy the
contempt which some of us pour upon the lucky ones is born of envy. We
wish to be like them in our heart of hearts. I used to have the most
preposterous dreams of being the lover of some proud, beautiful girl I
had read about or seen in the street.

"Artemisia was like that. She was one of those beings who inspire love,
who are the living embodiments of that tender philosophy which makes
every adjustment of our lives by sentiment alone, and who convince us,
by a gesture, a glance, a timbre in their voices, that our lightest
fancy is a grave resolution of the soul.

"It would be easy, of course, to jeer at a crowd of simple,
half-educated shell-backs losing their hearts to a lady-passenger's
maid, but that would not be a fair account of it. We were not simple in
that sense. My experience is that contact with the great elemental
realities does not breed simplicity so much as a sort of cunning. We
live deprived of so many of the amenities of culture and wealth that we
cannot credit our good fortune when anything really fine comes in our
way. We are not to be had. We are cautious. These good things are for
shore people. And we get into the habit of good-humoured humility,
discounting ourselves and our shipmates beyond recall. We say, 'only
fools and drunkards go to sea,' and that indicates pretty accurately the
value we place upon our hopes and aspirations.

"And so you must not expect me to give you vivid accounts of passionate
declarations of love under the Mediterranean moon, or of desperate
knife-work in the dark with Artemisia bending over the dying man and
kissing his death-dewed forehead in a last farewell. The voyage went on
much as usual outwardly. The days are gone, if they ever existed, when
love ruled the camp or the quarter deck. Yet there was a subtle change.
Men went about their various tasks with an air of charged expectancy.
Now and again a couple could be seen talking earnestly together. The
weather, until we passed Gibraltar, was against any dramatic
developments. Mrs. Evans and Angelina kept below. Only once, at dusk,
while we were passing the Burlings, off Portugal, I looked over the rail
of the bridge-deck and saw young Siddons leaning on the bulwarks below,
his head turned toward someone I could not see. He was laughing as
happily as a child. Leaning over a little further I saw a girl's finely
articulated hand and a corner of a white apron.

"But most of us had no chance. It sounds a strange thing to say, but it
was almost as if Mrs. Evans herself regarded me as married to her. As
though because I had been the means of their meeting, I was entitled to
a sort of founder's share in Angelina! I was in the way to becoming an
expert in infant's complaints. And Jack seemed to think that when I came
into the cabin to talk, he had the right of going off duty, so to speak,
and would go up to the chart room to have a smoke. No, I didn't go
simply to catch a glimpse of Artemisia, though she was worth glimpsing.
I went from a sense of social duty. I felt I owed it to Jack to be
sociable with his wife. And perhaps, too, there was an idea at the back
of my head that contact with Mrs. Evans was a corrective to any tendency
I might have to make a fool of myself over any young woman. That was
Mrs. Evans' specialty, you might say. She didn't mean it, but
unconsciously she shrivelled at the least breath of desire. I used to
watch apprehensively for the blank look in the eyes, the tightening of
the lips, the infinitesimal drawing back of the head, as of a snake
about to strike. There was something sharply astringent about her then,
like biting inadvertently into a green banana. And yet she had her gusts
of enthusiasm over 'darling Babs.' The child was a monster of egoism, as
may be imagined. She was very like her father physically--full-blooded,
plump, bold-eyed, and with a perfectly devilish temper. Without warning
she would explode, scream, scratch, bite, and kick, until she got what
she wanted, when she would subside as suddenly into a self-centred
silence broken by hiccoughs and chokes. She wanted everything--the watch
and money out of your pocket and heart and liver out of your body.
'Angel child!' her mother would call her, and hang fondly over the
odious little brat. For the angel child was still supposed to be
'delicate.' Mrs. Evans had a case of champagne and a stock of Bovril,
and I dare say some of the displays I witnessed were due in part to
intoxication. The carpenter was busy all day making gates and fences
round the companion and bridge deck to prevent the delicate child from
crawling out and getting slung overboard. I used to sit in the cabin
with the angelic Babs on my knee, from which she was always slipping,
listening to Mrs. Evans' account of the diphtheria, and watching
Artemisia moving noiselessly to and fro in the bedroom or sitting just
inside the spare stateroom door sewing. I never enjoyed looking at a
girl so much in my life. She was not pretty in the ordinary sense of the
word. Her skin was not the buttery yellow you associate with
half-breeds. It was more the russet brown of a sunburned blonde. Her
cheeks had a soft peachy glow under the brown bloom that was beautiful.
And yet she did not give one the impression of sheer innocence and
youth which was implied in her unique complexion. Her eyes were
perfectly steady and unabashed, her figure was more mature and matronly
than Mrs. Evans', and she had a gravity of poise and deliberate movement
that one associates with the reflection born of experience. She gave me
the impression, I may say, of a young person who had chanced upon some
astounding revelation, and who was preoccupied with both past and future
more than the immediate present. It made her more attractive than less,
I think. She established a certain careless fondness for talking to Mr.
Chief, as she called me. I dare say I was in love with her even then.
She had a personality. I think Jack, who for all his crude psychology
was a pretty shrewd judge of humanity, saw something beyond a mere
desirable young girl in this nurse. He used to follow her round with his
eyes as though he couldn't make her out. He couldn't recover from the
shock of her name. He would sit in the saloon watching her with the
child, and mutter 'Artemisia! Humph!' She would glance up from her
occupation and regard him with steady, meditative eyes. I was fascinated
by the name myself. It recalled Captain Macedoine to me. It was like
him. Imagine that name reverberating down through the ages from ancient
Attica to classical France, taken out across the Western Ocean by
forlorn _émigrés_, who clung to their pretty trashy artificialities in
spite of, or perhaps because of, the frightfulness of the wilderness,
handed on by sentimental and aristocratic Creoles, filched by German
Jews and prosperous mulattos, picked up right in the gutter by a supreme
illusionist and given to a young person who seemed half school-girl and
half adventuress.

"For it was perfectly obvious to me that whether I had diagnosed her
character truly or not, she was not at all a suitable temperament to
have about a child. There was, for instance, something ominous in the
sudden quiet with which she would regard the angelic Babs when that
odious little being began to pull her hair or jump on her feet or thump
her across the back with the heavy cabin ruler. These things happened to
me, too; but I could scarcely expect to escape. I was Jack's chum. I was
a bachelor and therefore credited with a deep and passionate love of
children. Artemisia, however, was a stranger. When something
particularly outrageous occurred, Mrs. Evans, glancing up, would murmur,
'Oh, Babs, dear!' and then, to my considerable embarrassment, I would
find Artemisia's eyes fixed inscrutably upon mine as she fended off the
attentions of her charge. And so, when I rose one fine evening as we
sailed along the Spanish coast, and she followed me up on deck, I felt
that she was about to take me into her confidence. I looked round as
she slammed the wicket which the carpenter had made to keep Babs from
tumbling down and breaking her neck, and the girl's face was close to
mine. We laughed quietly in the faint light that came up from the cabin.
After all, there was not such a frightful disparity in our ages. As we
walked aft along the bridge deck, and stood between the funnel casing
and the life boats--a matter of seconds--I might have given a swerve to
both our destinies. There are moments, you know, when one can spring
over the most frightful chasms in one's journey through life, and land
with both feet on mossy banks and enamelled meads. It was possibly such
a moment, only I didn't take the chance. As I said, I prefer the part of
super in the play--one sees so much more than either spectator or hero.
And I think she saw, too, in the same flash of intelligence. And so,
nothing happened. When she spoke she merely asked in a low tone what the
punishment was for infanticide.

"'You know, Mr. Chief,' she went on, putting up her arms and swinging
gently on the life-lines of the boats, 'It isn't fair. I'd never have
taken it on if I'd known what I was in for. I have a devil of a temper.
I'm sure I shall do something to that child.'

"'To keep it quiet?' I suggested. She nodded rapidly.

"'For good!' she replied, and added: 'They never used to let me have
anything to do with the kids at school.'

"'Because of the temper?' She nodded again.

"'I nearly killed a girl once,' she remarked, calmly.

"'Oh, tut-tut!' I said, but she insisted, and her eyes gleamed with a
sudden vixenish anger. 'Yes, Mr. Chief. She was a tall, fair girl with
yellow hair and a lovely complexion, like an advertisement for soap. She
hated me, and told the girls I would only be a nigger where she came
from. Her father was in the Civil Service somewhere. And she kept on
calling me nigger, and the other girls followed her lead until I was
nearly _crazy_. And one night I went into the lavatory and put a piece
of caustic soda into her sponge as it lay on the rack. And the next
morning when she was washing there was a horrible row, and she ran up
and down the bedroom screaming, and her face was all one smear of
crimson and purple. She had to go to hospital and it took months to
heal. The sponge was left in the water and there was nothing to show,
but the girls knew I'd done it because I didn't run and see what was the
matter. They didn't call me nigger any more, Mr. Chief.'

"I said I supposed not, and enquired if Mrs. Evans knew this story.
Artemisia shrugged her shoulders and showed the tip of her tongue. 'I
wouldn't tell _her_ much,' she replied.

"'And you are going out to see your father?' she nodded. 'He wants me to
help him in his business.'

"'He's not a captain now, I suppose?' I asked her, to see how much she
knew. She was unconcerned. 'No, he retired from the sea when I was a
little girl. We came home from the States. We lived near Saxhambury
then. Do you know it? Father was very unfortunate. He lost on some of
his investments and had to go abroad again. He was in Egypt a long
while.'

"'And you haven't seen him since when?' I hazarded.

"'Oh, I met him when he came to Paris on business. You see, the company
he's in now is French, and he is in a very important position out
there.'

"It was clear she knew nothing. She had been brought up upon the
customary vague references to 'position,' and so on, with which young
people in the middle classes are inducted into the real world. One could
imagine her telling her school-chums how her father had 'an important
position out there,' and their subsequent awe and envy. I can remember a
boy at school saying his dad was 'on the Continent,' when his fond
parent had gone for a week-end at Boulogne. We were impressed. And I
wondered what old Macedoine's job might happen to be. So I said that I
had once been shipmates with a Captain Macedoine out in New Orleans. She
exclaimed: 'Were you really! How funny!' and suddenly dropped her voice
to a whisper. 'Were you friends, as you are with Captain Evans?' I said
no, not exactly, and looked up at the figure of young Siddons on the
bridge. He was looking at us, and paused in his walk to and fro trying
to make out who I might be. I was thinking of him and wondering, when I
heard her say that her father did not like America; he was never happy
there. He was misunderstood. Well, many a man has been unhappy and
misunderstood in America. Some men are so exacting in their ideals that
no country can hope to win their approbation. Captain Macedoine was
evidently still on a pilgrimage seeking a home for his wounded spirit. I
asked his daughter if he were happy and understood in Ipsilon. She
regarded me with attention for a moment, as though she suspected me of
irony. Then she said, in the grave tones that middle-class people
reserve for the vital themes of life, that he had a good position and
excellent prospects. And then she left me with a murmur about 'the kid'
and I began to walk to and fro. I was amused. I tried to figure out the
salient features of a 'position' which would meet with the approval of a
man with Macedoine's record. And the prospects! For mind you, he must
have experienced a severe blow when those Federal secret service men had
ferreted out his dealings in the opium traffic and his plan for
establishing himself in England had gone to smash. And in what way could
this young person assist him in his business? I was intrigued, as they
say, but I could form no theory which would adequately account for so
many disparate premises. After all, such musings are their own reward.
The event robs them of their early glamour. I did not even confide in
any one else on the ship. There is a pleasure in an unshared scandal
which many men and all women seem to overlook. It added, I may say, to
the joys of being a super in the play. And when Mr. Basil Bloom, our
effulgent chief mate, informed me one evening that I seemed to be very
chummy with Miss Macedoine, I only smiled and asked him if he had
designs on her himself. He twisted his moustache, looked scornfully at
the horizon, and was evidently perturbed. He had referred
grandiloquently, during the previous voyages, to a peerless female whom
he called 'the future Mrs. Bloom.' This lady lived at Greenwich, and we
had reason to believe that Mr. Bloom, on the strength of his genteel
manners, formidable moustache, and optimistic temperament, had been
sponging on her family for some months before he joined the _Manola_.
'I'll tell the young lady,' I said, 'and perhaps you'll get some
encouragement.' He assured me first that I needn't trouble, and then
added that he knew I was the last person in the world to think less of a
man if he changed his mind. This was so infernally unfair to the lady at
Greenwich that I laughed in his face and walked away.

"The Second Mate took a different line. He was a quiet, inoffensive
creature, and usually preoccupied with a feeble struggle which he
maintained against whiskey. He had a delicately coloured, spiritual,
refined face, with the salient points slightly sharpened, and he seemed
to have neither thoughts, hopes, nor aspirations. However, his finely
chiselled features appeared one day while we were in Alexandria with the
addition of a greenish-yellow puff below the left eye, and the mess-room
boy informed us that the Second Mate was having his meals in his room in
future. There was a laugh from the Third Engineer, and I said nothing,
for I had a notion he and the Second Mate had been ashore together. But
the mess-room boy, whose slant eyes and long nose worried into all the
scandal of the ship, added that young Mr. Siddons had blacked the Second
Mate's eye for him, over the nurse. I told him to dry up. To tell the
truth I was getting tired of the episode. I felt the whole thing was
becoming tawdry and dropping to a rather low plane. I wasn't willing to
admit this to myself, mind you, because it involved my old friend Jack.
I mean it would be the Commander's fault if we all slumped into the mire
together over this young woman. That's what commanders are for--to raise
the tone. That's what a good many of them lack the character to do.
Personal courage, professional skill, long experience, will carry a man
through among men. When there are women in the case, a man needs
something else. What? Well, it may sound strange to you, but I should
call it simplicity of heart. It is almost the only thing women
instinctively respect and fear. Good old Jack was simple in his way, but
I doubted his ability to handle a crisis. I was thankful when we were
through with Alexandria and were heading north for Ipsilon.

"For just as we were entering this sea cluttered with islands so thick
you can always see four or five and sometimes a dozen at once, so we
were in the midst of a score of dubious possibilities. Here was Jack
avoiding me in an apologetic fashion. Here was the Chief Mate whispering
to Mrs. Evans. Here was the Second Mate sitting in remote and solitary
grandeur in his little cubby-hole, comforting himself with a bottle of
Turkish gin. Here was young Siddons, very youthful-looking and shy,
miserable because the Captain was looking black about something. Only
the angel child and her mother seemed untouched by the horrible
paralysis which was creeping upon us and for which they were primarily
responsible. At all hours you could hear the roars of rage from the
cabin when it wanted something--the roar, the squeals, the kicks, the
hiccoughs, and the final sullen silence of satiety. I tell you, that
woman and her baby were driving us all, including her husband, crazy,
and she sat there oblivious. She wasn't even aware that Artemisia hated
her.

"I don't know exactly what Jack had expected me to do to help him. No
doubt if I had proposed to Artemisia during the voyage, married her in
Alexandria, and left her ashore in a flat out at Mex or Gabbari he would
have been satisfied. I should have got him out of a hole and got myself
into one, which appeals to most of us. Or I might have acted like a man
without any emotions at all, and repelled Artemisia's confidences with
chilling disdain. This would have set a good example to the others, he
may have thought. I have never gone in for setting a good example,
however. I have found that even those who follow the example hate the
man who sets it. And in addition, with the curious intuition of the
illiterate, Jack suspected I had not been perfectly frank with him as to
my intimacy with her. And so we were all on the watch, alert, uneasy,
silent, and unhappy.

"I still went in to see Mrs. Evans of an evening. To tell the truth she
fascinated me. I had always held the theory that no married woman could
be an absolute fool. It had seemed to me that such contact with the
realities of life as marriage involved must leave some austere mark of
intelligence, some tinge of altruism, upon the most superficial. She
seemed to disprove this. For her the world did not exist save for the
'angel child.' Even her husband was now only the nearly indispensable
producer of income. She talked, not of him, or of her family, not of Art
or Life or Death or the world to come, not even of Home or the things
she had seen in Alexandria. She had seen nothing in Alexandria. She had
declined to let Jack take her to Cairo 'because of the expense.' She
read no books nor papers. She dressed in perfect propriety. And all the
time she talked about the child, one hand near the child, her eyes fixed
on the child's movements or repose. I think the voyage was a revelation
to Jack. He was finding his place in the world. He was thinking in his
honest, clumsy way. He never took his wife for a trip again. He loved
his child as much as any man could, but this ingrowing infatuation, to
the exclusion of every other desirable thing in the world, was
fatiguing.

"And Artemisia! She sat in her little spare cabin opening on the saloon,
and now and again she would raise her shoulders, draw a deep breath, let
them drop again as though in despair, and go on with her sewing. She
would laugh at me when I tried to amuse the child and distract it from
some preposterous desire. It was not easy. Her tenacity of purpose was
appalling. She was yelling one evening for someone to open the great
medicine chest that stood by the brass fireplace. I tried the
time-honoured ruses for placating the young. I said there was a lion
inside who would jump out and eat Babs. I pretended to go and find the
key and came back with the news that naughty Mr. Siddons had dropped it
into the sea. The brat stopped to breathe for a moment and a faintly
human expression came over the stupendously smug little face. I followed
this up by a story of how Mr. Siddons had shown me how to make a pin
float on the water. I hastily poured some water into a glass, got a
piece of blotting paper, laid my pin on it, and waited for the homely
trick to succeed. I had no luck somehow. The pin went to the bottom and
Babs' opinion of me went with it. She suddenly remembered about the
medicine chest and gave a preliminary yell. Mrs. Evans said, 'Oh,
Babbsy, darling!' I got up and went out on deck. We were running among
the islands. Away to the east-ward I could see the lights of the
Roumania Lloyd mail-boat going south. Suddenly two hands grabbed the
lappets of my patrol-coat, a dark, fluffy head leaned for a delicious
moment against my chest, and Artemisia gurgled, 'Oh, Mister Chief, isn't
she just a little fiend?' She had been listening to my blandishments and
had witnessed the final destruction of my hopes. She put her hands
behind her back, threw up her head, and regarded me with amusement.
'Why,' she whispered, 'why didn't you open the medicine chest, and give
her the prussic-acid to play with?' And then, without waiting for an
answer, she turned and looked across at the islands we were passing. She
sighed. 'Just look at them! How do they know which is Ipsilon? Mister
Chief, Mister Chief, I am afraid.'

"'What of?' I asked. She sighed again.

"'Of the future,' she said. 'This is a change for me. I don't know
what's coming. I haven't had any luck yet.'

"I asked her in what way.

"'You know, Mister Chief, I have been in several situations. I was a
typist....' she shrugged her shoulders.

"'Your father will be here,' I suggested, but she paid no attention,
merely looking at the dark blots on the sea that were islands. And then
she remarked in a perfectly level and unconcerned voice that sometimes
she wished she was dead. I patted her on the shoulder.

"'Go to bed, my child,' I remarked, coldly, 'you'll feel better in the
morning. You won't wish you were dead when Captain Macedoine comes
aboard to fetch you.'

"She walked away in silence and went down to the cabin. I have often
wondered if she had not intended to make some sort of confession.
Perhaps it was a moment in her life when she became suddenly aware of
her insecurity, of her lack of the kindly props and supports which hold
most of us up and give us a good opinion of ourselves. For really she
lacked everything. As I found out later, as she stood talking to me that
evening and trying to find some easy yet adequate method of taking me
into her confidence without losing my esteem, she lacked everything that
most girls have. She was one of those tragic figures who even lack
innocence without having gained any corresponding experience. And
perhaps she felt for a moment the shadow of her destiny upon her, and
seeing the dark path among the islands she was to tread, shrank back,
doubtful even of the power of her father to carry her through."




CHAPTER III


Mr. Spenlove, sitting forward in his deck chair, felt in his pocket for
his cigarette-case and looked round satirically into the profound shadow
of the awning. He still preserved the appearance of a man talking to
himself, but the fancy crossed his mind, as he glanced at the long
horizontal forms in the deck chairs, that he was addressing a company of
laid-out corpses. The air was very still, but a light breeze on the open
water beyond the nets, and the full splendour of a circular moon,
reminded him of an immense sheet of hammered silver. But Mr. Spenlove
did not look long at the Ægean. He swivelled round a little and pointed
with the burnt-out match at the large plain building he had indicated at
the beginning of his story. It was not a beautiful building. It had the
rectangular austerity of a continental customs house or English
provincial "Athenæum." It was built close to the cliff and the outer
wall was provided with a flight of stairs which ascended, in a
mysterious and disconcerting manner, to the second floor. All this was
clearly visible in the brilliant moonlight, and even the long valley
behind, with its dim vineyards and clumps of almond, olive, and fig
trees half concealing the square white houses that dotted the
perspective, were subtly indicated against the enormous background of
the tunnelled uplands and bare limestone peaks. Mr. Spenlove held the
match out for a moment and then flicked it away.

"Romantic, isn't it? This was how it looked the night we anchored, and
Artemisia came up to me as I stood by the engine-room skylights with my
binoculars. It was she who pointed out to me how romantic it was. I
asked her why. I said: 'This place is simply an iron mine. To-morrow
they'll put us under those tips you see sticking out of the cliff there
and a lot of frowsy Greeks will run little wooden trucks full of red
dust and boulders and empty them with a crash into the ship. And
there'll be red dust in the tea and the soup and in your hair and eyes
and nose and mouth. And there'll be nothing but trouble all the time.
Very romantic!' So I sneered, but she wasn't taken in by it a bit. She
looked through the glasses, and laughed. 'Oh, it's beautiful!' she
murmured, 'beautiful, beautiful.'

"I said, 'How do beautiful things make you feel?' and she turned on me
for a moment. 'You know,' she said, and was silent. And I did know. It
was the bond between us. We had become aware of it unconsciously. It had
nothing to do with our age or our sex or our position in life. It was
the common ground of our intense anger with the other people on the
ship. Do you know, I have often thought that Circe has been misjudged.
Men become swinish before women who are unconscious of their unlovely
transformation. Circe should be painted with her eyes fixed in severe
meditation, oblivious of the grunting, squeaking beasts around her.
Artemisia was like that. She really cared nothing for the ridiculous
performances of the various animals on the ship. Nothing for the
magniloquent Mr. Basil Bloom, clearing his throat behind his dirty hand;
nothing for the Second Mate, with his perpetual expression of knowing
something about her and being mightily amused by it. Nothing even for
poor young Siddons, badly hit, moping out of sight, heaving prodigious
sighs and getting wiggings for being absent-minded. As for the Second
and Third, my particular henchmen, she didn't know they existed.
Honourable! Why of course, they were all honourable in their intentions.
Didn't Mr. Bloom express his willingness to throw over the young lady at
Greenwich, although he owed her father fifty pounds? Didn't the Second
Engineer drop a note down her ventilator saying he had a hundred in the
Savings Bank and she had only to say the word? (And didn't Mrs. Evans
pick it up and take it, speechless with annoyance, to Jack, who roared
with laughter?) Honourable? Of course they all wanted to marry her.
Swine are domestic animals."

The Surgeon, who had caused this digression, made a vague murmur of
protest. Mr. Spenlove drummed on the chair between his legs and shrugged
his shoulders, but he didn't turn round.

"I didn't offer to tell you a love-story. Captain Macedoine's daughter,
if she means anything, means just this: that love means nothing. She
passed through all the dirty little gum-shoe emotions which she inspired
on the _Manola_ like a moonbeam through a foul alley. For it is foul,
this eternal preoccupation with sex, like a lot of flies over a
stagnant, fecundating pool. Beauty! You all talk largely of appreciating
beauty, and you don't know, the most educated and cultured of you, the
first thing about it. Your idea of beauty is a healthy young female
without too many clothes. I tell you, I have seen ships so perfect and
just in modelling that I have marvelled at the handiwork of my
fellowmen. I have seen cities at sunrise so beautiful I have gone down
to my room and shed tears of ridiculous sorrow. And I have seen the
patrons of female beauty, too, coming back from the cities to the ships
with dry palates, and their neckties under their ears....

"Well! We stood there, and to ease the pressure of the moment she put up
the binoculars and swept the little beach, finally coming to rest at the
big house--Grünbaum's house. While we had been talking a light had come
out on the balcony, and figures began to move about with the precise and
enigmatic motions of marionettes. Without glasses I could see Grünbaum
seated at a table with a big lamp over his head. Another figure moved to
the open side and stood still. I was wondering what this portended when
Grünbaum half rose and waved his arms, and the other figure turned and
dwindled rapidly into obscurity, suddenly coming into the light again at
the other side of the table. And Artemisia said quietly, 'There's
father!' and handed me the binoculars.

"To say that I was interested would not put the matter in its true
light. I was more than that. There was a fantastic quality in the whole
business which was almost supernatural. It is strange enough to meet a
person after many years; stranger still to meet one who has made a
powerful yet unsympathetic impression upon you--to meet him with all
your old dislikes and prejudices washed to a clear and colourless
curiosity. But to see such a man as I saw Captain Macedoine, afar off,
through an atmosphere charged with the electric blue radiance of
moonlight, moving in an alien orbit, animated by unknown emotions--why,
it was like seeing a man who was dead and gone to another world! I
raised the glasses and focussed them. Captain Macedoine stood leaning
heavily on his hands as they grasped the edge of the table, and he was
staring straight out at me. Of course he could see nothing beyond the
balcony, but the impression was exactly that of a man striving to win
back across the gulf to his former existence. And his strained
immobility was accentuated by the figure of Grünbaum with his jerkily
moving arms, his polished forehead gleaming in the lamplight, the
gyrations of his chin as he turned every moment or so and looked up
sideways at the other. Grünbaum flourished papers, reaching out and
rearranging them, throwing himself back in his chair and beating the
table with a folded document to emphasize his words. And every now and
again the whole scene grew dim as though it were a phantasmagoria, and
about to dissolve, when the smoke from Grünbaum's cigar floated and hung
in the still air.

"And I discovered, too, that I had no words in which to formulate the
peculiar impressions this scene made upon me. I could find no adequate
remark! The girl at my side, reaching out absently for the glasses,
made no sign that this scene going on half a mile away was at all
strange to her. For all one could gather, Captain Macedoine's daughter
was accustomed to see her father submitting passively to the onslaughts
of foreign concessionaires every day in the week. I gazed at her as she
stood there by the awning-stanchion looking at her magnificent parent,
and it was suddenly borne in upon me that it is a miracle we ever learn
anything about each other at all in this world. There is nothing so
inscrutable as an ordinary human being, I am convinced, and I have been
watching them for thirty years. What we know and can tell, even the
acutest of us, is no more than the postmark on a letter. What's
inside--ah, if we only knew. What? Absurd? By no means. I believe
married people do occasionally accomplish it in a small way. I mean I
believe they attain to a fairly complete comprehension of each other's
souls. But as to whether the game is worth the candle they never
divulge....

"Certainly Artemisia did not at that moment. She left me, as every woman
I have ever met has left me, groping. She sighed softly and returned the
glasses, remarking again, 'Yes, there's Father,' and bade me good-night
without a word of explanation. Mind, I don't say I had any right to such
a word. I don't even feel sure she understood anything at all about her
father's position on that island. The bare fact remains that I expected
some explanation simply because I credited her with a character light
yet strong, and capable of supporting the weight of her father's
confidence.

"For observe; if this girl was ignorant of everything, if she came out
here a mere child agape with curiosity, then Macedoine must have been
that extremely rare phenomenon, a completely lonely man. And I was not
prepared to admit the possibility of such an existence for him. He was
one of those men who can live, no doubt, without friendship, but who
must have their audience. So much at least I knew of him in the old days
in the Maracaibo Line, when he would sit near us in Fabacher's on Royal
Street, ostentatiously reading a month-old copy of the London _Financial
News_. It was this incessant urge to inspire wonder which led him to
hint, indirectly, that he had been at school at the Charterhouse. Risky?
Of course it was risky; and I should never have plumbed the mystery but
for a most unimpressionable London purser who informed me there was a
ragged school for slum children in the Charterhouse district in the
city. Not that it mattered. We were not Macedoine's game. It was the
bishops and colonels and eminent surgeons who made the round trip of the
West Indies with us whom he wished to impress. Whether he was a fraud
or not, he certainly had acquired a way of ignoring common people such
as we who go to sea. I knew he would regard good old Jack from such a
lofty pinnacle that Jack would appear to him no more than one of the
Greek labourers who shoved the little wooden cars along and tumbled
their contents into the ship with a terrific clang of ironstone on iron,
and clouds of red dust. I followed up this digression in my mind and
arrived at the fascinating conclusion that if my recollection served me
sufficiently well, he would not recognize me. He never had recognized
me. I once had the pleasure of telling him that if his men didn't keep
my room clean and tidy I would knock his head off. He never looked up
from his desk until my grip on his collar tightened and his body began
to rock to and fro. He complained to the Commander, who had been told of
the incident by the Chief. 'Is this the engineer who assaulted you, Mr.
Macedoine?' says the Captain. Macedoine examined me with a distant,
preoccupied air, pressing his lips together and his eyebrows raised. He
shrugged his shoulders, opened his lips with a slight smacking noise,
and after quite a pause, a most imposing pause, he said he 'really
couldn't say; these workmen were all so much alike when they were
dirty....' Old Pomeroy--he was the first decent skipper the Maracaibo
Line ever had--swung round on his chief steward and retorted: 'Then
what the devil are you wasting all our time for?' He swung back to
his desk again, muttering and slapping papers here and there.
'Preposterous--doesn't know who assaulted him.... Never heard....' I was
standing as stiff as a stanchion waiting for the Old Man to say I could
go, when he saw Macedoine pussy-footing it to the door. 'Oh, and
Macedoine,' called the Old Man. Macedoine stopped but did not look
round. 'I expect the engineers on my ship to be referred to as
engineers, not 'workmen.'' Silence, Macedoine looking at the back of his
hand and smiling with the corner of his mouth pulled down.
'_Understand!_' thundered the Old Man, rising from his chair but holding
it by the arms. It was so sudden I nearly collapsed. I thought he was
going to throw Macedoine through the door. That lofty personage was
startled, too. He replied hastily: 'Oh, quite so, Captain, er....' when
old Pomeroy sat down and dipping his pen in the ink, shut him up with
'Then don't forget it, and don't wait.'

"I mention this highly unusual episode for a special reason. It happened
to provide one specific proof of my theory that Macedoine was an artist
in his method of building up that grotesque effigy which he presented
to the world as himself. He was like that eccentric rich person who once
built a most astonishing house in Chelsea many years ago. You remember?
It was called So-and-So's Folly. It stood on a valuable site, and each
story was decorated in a different style. The basement was Ph[oe]nician
and the roof was pure Berlin. But the horrible thing about that house
was, not its bizarre commingling of periods, its terra-cotta tigers and
cast-iron chrysanthemums, but the fact that inside it was a hollow,
spider-haunted shell. There was not even a back to it. There were no
floors laid on the joists, weathered planks blocked up the back, and a
few forlorn green statues stood amid a dank jungle of creepers and grass
and rubbish. Now that was how Macedoine impressed me, and what I was
going to say was that by accident I obtained later a peep into his
studio, so to speak, and saw his method of putting up that marvellous
front, behind which, as you have already learned, there was nothing save
the dreamy dirtiness of avarice and ego-mania. No, the solitary and
grandiose idea in his mind precluded all recollection of individual
humanity. It was not that he forgot us who had been his shipmates. He
had never known us. We had not the wit to be knaves, or the credulity to
accept him at his own colossal valuation. We ignored his enigmatic claim
to greatness, while he passed sublimely along, disdainful of our
obvious virtues. For it is presumable that we _had_ virtues, since the
world--anxious for the replenishing of its larders--hails us nowadays as
heroes because we prefer the dangers of sea-life to the tedious boredom
of a shore-going existence....

"Yes, I saw into his studio, watched the artist at work at first hand. I
might claim the honour, indeed, of being one of the lumps of clay upon
which he sought to model his design. Surely an authentic witness this;
and I dare say the normal artist's material--since we are fond of saying
he blows the breath of life into it--might not join in the universal
praise bestowed upon its creator, but might indulge in ironic
contemplation of its own birth-pangs and the strange fortunes of its
pre-natal existence!

"He did not appear, however, as my stimulated imagination had pictured
him appearing, to dominate the situation on the _Manola_ and preoccupy
us all with his personality and hypothetical power. Like a higher power,
he remained invisible, and Captain Evans, going ashore in a boat with
Artemisia and her belongings around him, was the first to encounter him
in Grünbaum's office. Encountered him, and came back bursting with the
most astonishing tidings. I was sitting in my room that evening after
tea, having a quiet pipe and a book, when Jack came down.

"'Come along to my room, Fred,' he said, blowing clouds from his cigar.
'I want to talk to you.'

"'Why not here?' I suggested.

"'No, I want the wife to hear it, too. The gel's gone and the kid's
asleep. Come along.'

"And highly mystified, I went along. It seemed like scandal, and I am
not above such things once in a way, as you know. I went along, and
found Mrs. Evans in her husband's cabin sewing. Nothing would do but I
must have a cigar, and the angel child having been dosed with what her
mother called 'chempeen', I had to have a glass of that, too. Jack was
flushed and excited, and sat down beside me on the red plush settee.

"'What do you say,' he began, in a low, husky tone, 'to a job ashore,
Fred?'

"So that was it. The age-old chimera of a 'job ashore.' I looked at Mrs.
Evans. Her lips were shut to a thin line. I could see protest and
dissent in every line of her body.

"'For you or for me?' I enquired, softly.

"'For me, and p'raps for you, too, if you play your cards. It's like
this': and he began a long and complicated explanation. The gel's
father, as he called Macedoine, had got the job of secretary to the
company and somehow didn't hit it off with old Grünbaum, who was
resident concessionaire. Of course I knew Grünbaum's father, who had
been the original prospector when the island was Turkish, sold most of
his holdings to the French company, but kept a tenth which descended to
his son who had succeeded him in the concession. Well, Grünbaum wouldn't
hear of a lot of improvements which Macedoine wanted to introduce. The
gel's father was full of modern ideas. Wanted to put in electric
traction for the mines, with electric elevators and tips, and so on. He
also wanted to develop the place, and had a plan for irrigation to
attract settlers. Grünbaum wouldn't hear of it. Very conservative
Grünbaum was. Got his tenth of the three francs per ton on the ore, and
a thousand a year as manager, and was satisfied. Didn't want settlers.
He was king of the island and he and Macedoine had had a row. Macedoine
was sick of it. All this had been explained to Jack by a young Greek, a
clerk in the office, who was sick of it, too, and was 'going in' with
Macedoine in his new venture. And what was that? Well, it was this way:
Macedoine, who had knocked about a bit, had taken an option on some
sites in Saloniki, he had bought a sixty-fourth share in the Turkish
steamboat which carried the mails to the islands, and he was going into
the development of Saloniki. Had formed a small preliminary company,
registered in Athens, to take up the options, and he wanted directors.
This young Greek, Nikitos, was to be secretary, knowing the languages,
you see. He wanted directors, practical men to superintend the actual
business while he, Macedoine, you understand, would be free to control
the financial side of the affair. Oh, it was a big thing. There was to
be a big hotel, a big brewery, a big shipping business, a big real
estate development in Macedonia, a big railroad system, and a big fleet
of ships to carry away the freight which comes from all this. Everything
was to be big, big! Jack blew clouds of smoke, big clouds, and
flourished his fat hands in the air. 'What did I think? Wasn't it worth
jumping at? Five founder's shares of a thousand drachmas each in the
preliminary company, convertible into preferred stock in the big concern
and ten thousand drachmas a year salary. Eh? What did I think? Wasn't it
a sound investment? What about it?' And Jack bored into my ribs with his
powerful finger.

"I looked at Mrs. Evans. It was evident she had already heard something
of this magnificent scheme for making us all millionaires, and her
verdict was evident enough also. She never raised her eyes from her
sewing where she sat in a cane chair, her hair smooth and shining, her
dress smooth and shining, too, the embodiment of prim respectability and
prudence. She had often inspired me with a crazy ambition to see her
being chased by a lunatic with a razor in his hand, or pursued by a
hungry Bengal tiger--to see her in some predicament which would crack
the shell of middle-class reserve in which she was secreted and show me
the live, scampering human being within: but just now I was appalled by
the formidable aspect of her disapproval. Even Jack was aware of it, for
he watched me to see what I would say. And what could I say? What could
any sane human being, with a knowledge of the world, say? I didn't say
anything. I scratched my chin and pretended to be thinking deeply.

"For without claiming any especial perspicuity, I must confess that I
have never been the raw material out of which 'suckers' are
manufactured. It has always seemed to me pertinent to enquire, when
Golcondas and Eldorados are offered for a song, why the vendor should be
so anxious to hypothecate his priceless privileges. I suppose I am a
skeptic. Business, after all, is very much like Religion: it is founded
on Faith. And men like my friend Jack, for instance, have great faith in
the written word, much more in the beautifully engraved word. For them
all the elaborate bunkum by which the financial spell-binder conceals
his sinister intentions is of no avail; the jargon of the prospectus,
the glittering generalties, the superb optimism, the assumption of
austere rectitude, the galaxy of distinguished patrons who for a
consideration lend their names to the venture. For it is a venture, and
men have always a pathetic hope that it may become an adventure as well,
and that their ship will come labouring home, loaded with gold.

"Women, especially married women, are not at all like that, but they are
not so much skeptics as infidels. They start up at the first distant
approach of the financier, every plume and pin-feather quivering. They
don't believe a word of it. They go down on their knees to their
husbands and beg and beseech and supplicate them to have nothing to do
with it. They shed tears over their children. They write long letters of
distracted eloquence to their mothers. The very extremity of their
impotence lends a certain tragic dignity to their tantrums. Of course if
the cruel domestic tyrant persists in casting his bread upon the waters
and speculation turns out to be a huge success, these Cassandras spend
the dividends with a sort of stern joy, as though the money were tainted
and they must exchange it for something useless and inconvenient as soon
as possible. They know, by instinct, I suppose, that a chiffonier or a
Chippendale bedroom suite is not legal tender for stock. They feel
they've _got_ something. It is a truism, I suppose, to say that women
are implacable realists.

"Mrs. Evans was. And she knew, too, that I was of her opinion in this
matter. She never raised her eyes to look at me; but she knew. Her lips
never relaxed from the rigid line they had assumed when I came down, as
though she was still waiting, in severe patience, for me to do my
obvious duty, and corroborate her opinion.

"'What is he putting into it?' I asked, casually.

"'He's the vendor,' retorted Jack, who had picked up the vernacular
pretty quickly. 'He turns over his options and his share in this
mail-boat for ten founder's shares and a seat on the board, see? Then,
when the big company's formed, he takes up shares in that, and is voted
a salary of twenty thousand drachmas a year as financial adviser. That's
how Nikitos put it to me. Nikitos knows the country and he says there's
any amount of capital available once the thing gets started. These
tobacco growers don't know what to do with their money--keep it in those
big Turkish trousers, most of it, he reckons. The great thing is to get
in at the beginning. What do you say? He wants a ship-master and he
wants a man with engineering experience to overlook the shipping
business. I told Nikitos I'd talk it over with you. He says the skipper
of that Swedish ship that's on the same charter as us is putting three
hundred into it--seven thousand five hundred drachmas.'

"'But what did Macedoine say?' I persisted.

"Oh, I didn't see _him_,' admitted Jack, looking at the floor between
his fat knees. 'Nikitos promised to arrange an interview if we decided
to come in.'

"There it was, you see, the touch of the Master. I could not help a
silent tribute of admiration to Captain Macedoine for this remarkable
reserve, this exquisite demonstration of psychological insight. A man of
great affairs! A financial magnate, graciously extending to us the
privilege of participating in his immense schemes. 'An interview could
be arranged!' It was superb, this method of mesmerizing all the
simple-minded skippers and chiefs who came in the iron-ore ships to
Ipsilon. I had a brief but vivid vision of us all ashore in Saloniki
squabbling and bluffing each other, while Macedoine sat enthroned,
apart, the financial adviser, dwelling in oriental magnificence upon our
contributions.

"'What do you think, Mrs. Evans?' I asked, taking the bull by the horns.
'Shall we gamble a hundred or so and get rich quick?'

"'You're not married,' she replied, without looking up. 'You can spare
it I dare say. It is different for Jack. He hasn't any money to throw
away.'

"'Well,' I said, 'I haven't any to throw away, either, I can assure you.
I wouldn't go to sea if I had. But Jack thinks this is a great
opportunity to invest his money where he can look after it. You see,
he'll be drawing a salary as well when he's ashore in Saloniki.'

"Still she didn't look up. She had not budged an inch from her
conviction that I agreed with her.

"'I couldn't think of living abroad,' she said, severely. 'I have Babs
to consider.'

"I'm afraid Jack hadn't thought of that. He hadn't visualized his wife
and baby dwelling in a Turkish town, cut off by thousands of miles of
ocean from home. He had been so preoccupied with the divine prospect of
'a job ashore' that he had forgotten the environment. And we had been to
Saloniki with coal, time and again. I can't say I blamed her. Residence
in southeastern Europe has its drawbacks for a housewife. And quite
apart from a natural repugnance to dirt, Mrs. Evans had an unnatural
repugnance to anything foreign. She never really left England. She took
it with her. She carried with her into her husband's cabin, and along
the wild oriental foliage and architecture of Alexandrian streets, the
prim and narrow ideals of her native valley. It never occurred to her
that those people in turbans and fezzes were human. It never occurred to
her when a French or Italian girl passed, dressed with the dainty and
charming smartness of her race, that she might possibly be virtuous as
well. She shrivelled at their very proximity, drawing the angelic Babs
from their contamination. She was uneasy, and would continue to be
uneasy, until she was safe at home once more in Threxford, England. That
was the burden of her unuttered longing: to get home, to get home, back
to the little semi-detached red-brick villa on the Portsmouth Road,
which her father had given her for a wedding present and which fifty
Macedoines would never induce her to sell.

"For that is what it would mean if Jack invested even two hundred pounds
in this wonderful enterprise to develop Macedonia. He had spent several
hundred in furnishing the house, and since then most of his two hundred
a year had gone in expenses, for he was no niggard either with himself
or those he loved. Neither wife nor chick of his should ever lack for
anything, he had told me proudly. If a neighbour's child got some
expensive and useless contraption to pull about, Babs had one, too, the
very next week. If a neighbour's wife got a fur coat, Mrs. Evans had
orders to go and do likewise, a more expensive one if possible. What
little he had was on deposit in the bank in his wife's name, so that she
could draw on it while he was away.

"And so I came round to the unpleasant conviction that while Mrs. Evans
was silently awaiting my repudiation of the whole thing, her husband was
expecting me to use my eloquence to persuade his wife to let him invest.
They say a bachelor has no worries of his own. Which is as well, when
his married friends endeavour to make him responsible for their own
follies, and use him as a cushion to soften the family collisions. I was
an old hand and slipped out. And I really was not thinking so much of my
own two hundred pounds salted down in Home Rails, as of Jack's home,
when I said, cheerfully:

"'Well, this Captain Macedoine can't object to giving us a little more
information. And he can't expect us to have the cash with us. We shall
have to go home and sell something and--er--draw the money, eh?'

"'It is quite out of the question,' said Mrs. Evans, biting her thread
as though she was severing the spinal chord of the whole proposition.

"'So what I suggest is, Jack will see Captain Macedoine and we'll take
the voyage home to think about it.' And I looked at Mrs. Evans to
approve my machiavellian astuteness.

"'Oh, it's quite impossible, quite. I couldn't think of leaving England.
And we couldn't spare the money.'

"'We shouldn't need the house if we came out here,' said Jack, looking
solemnly at his wife. She stiffened.

"'We _can't_ sell the house,' she muttered through her teeth. 'Where
should we live? I've told you. Jack, it's quite impossible.'

"'The house 'ud fetch three hundred and fifty,' said Jack, looking at me
with round solemn eyes, 'and the furniture 'ud fetch two hundred more.
And there's--how much is there in the bank, Madeline? Say sixty odd. Six
hundred pounds. You can live cheap in a place like Saloniki.'

"I could see Mrs. Evans was going to pieces. She went dull red and then
dull white, dropped a stitch or so, moved her feet, took a deep breath
through her nostrils. I was seeing the human being at last. The lunatic
with the razor was after her. The Bengal tiger was growling near by.

"'Don't be in such a hurry,' I said, sharply, and for the first time
that woman gave me a glance that might be tortured into a faint
semblance of gratitude. 'I am not going into a thing until I've studied
it, and nobody but a madman would commit himself on anybody's mere
say-so. You see Macedoine, Jack, when you go ashore.'

"'You'd better come, too,' he said, rather glumly. 'Old Grünbaum wants
some coal if you can spare it. Forty ton, he said. It'll be a fiver for
you. Can you let him have it and get to Algiers?'

"'I'll see,' I said. 'I'll go through the bunkers in the morning.' And
we left the dangerous subject for the time being. It was positively
refreshing to get out of the heavy atmosphere charged with Macedoine's
grandiose schemes and Mrs. Evans' premonitions of disaster and beggary
for herself and Babs. That angel child slept through it all on the far
end of the big plush settee, fenced in with a teak bunk-board, one
predatory hand clutching the throat of an enormous teddy bear whose eyes
stared upward with the protruding fixity of strangulation, as though
even in sleep she found it necessary to cause someone or something acute
discomfort. Yes, it was refreshing, for I don't mind admitting that the
petty graft of a five-pound note that I was to get from Grünbaum for
selling him forty tons of coal was more to me than all the cloudy
millions of Macedoine's imagination. I am as anxious as any one to get
something for nothing, but this Anglo-Hellenic Development Company, in
which I was to get four hundred a year for living in Saloniki, didn't
appeal. In the regions of fancy Macedoine was an incomparable
inspiration; in business I preferred the unimaginative concessionaire.
As I rose to go up on deck, I felt that whether Mrs. Evans was
grateful or not I had earned her approbation. Perhaps she, with her
feminine intuition--or possibly it was only the instinct of
self-preservation--saw the necessity of flattering a poor silly single
man, for she remarked, with her head bent over the child's to touch the
tumbled locks:

"'I'm sure Mr. Spenlove will give you the _best_ advice, dear.'

"And I felt my bosom swell with pride. Oh, women are wonderful! Even an
inferior woman, as Mrs. Evans was, with a soul like a parched pea, and a
heart so narrow that there was scarcely room in it for husband and child
at the same time, a woman of meagre physique and frumpish in dress--even
she could do a little in the animal-taming way--could crack a whip and
make the lords of the jungle jump through paper hoops, and eat out of
her hand. Oh, yes! Even she could harness us and drive us tandem through
the narrow gate of her desire. She was sure I would give dear Jack the
_best_ advice. And in the glow of this benediction I departed.

"Mr. Bloom was on deck, moving softly to and fro, smoking an immense
meerschaum carved to the likeness of a skull. It was a warm evening and
he had discarded coat and vest, displaying a soiled starched shirt and
black suspenders inadequately furnished with buttons. The doorway was in
shadow and for a moment I watched him, promenading in the moonlight. He
had the air, as he stepped back and forth, of sharing his vigil with
some invisible companion. At times he nodded, and waving his pipe toward
the rail, might have been holding forth in unspoken words. Getting the
best of the argument, of course, I reflected bitterly, and startled him
by stepping out in front of him.

"'Good evening, Chief. Fine night for courtin', eh? A night like this
reminds me o' the time when I was master. The moonlight, and the cliff,
like the Morro. I was under the Cuban flag then you know, Chief. This
brings it all back.' He waved his grisly meerschaum and added: 'Lovely
place, Havana.'

"'Where's the Third Mate?' said Captain Evans, suddenly emerging from
the dark doorway. 'He isn't in his cabin.'

"'He went ashore with the pilot in the cutter, Sir,' said Mr. Bloom. 'I
did think of blowin' the whistle, only it occurred to me it might
disturb the baby.'

"To this piece of extreme consideration Jack offered no reply. He walked
along as far as the engine-hatch and then, putting his fingers in his
mouth, blew a shrill blast that echoed and reëchoed between the cliffs.
Men began to move about the ship, and a sailor appeared with a
hurricane-lamp. A faint cry came out of the intense shadow of the
western shore and Jack answered it with a stentorian 'Cutter ahoy!' that
boomed and reverberated over our heads and trailed away into a wild
racket of distant laughter.

"'Don't shout so loud, man,' I suggested, when a cry once more came out
of the shadow and we could see a faint glow as of a lantern in a boat
moving toward us.

"'Just been havin' a little look round, I dessay,' remarked Mr. Bloom
with a bland tolerance of youthful folly which I remember irritated me
intolerably. Jack kept his gaze fixed on the slowly moving glow.

"'There's something wrong,' he remarked, soberly, ignoring Mr. Bloom at
his elbow.

"'Oh, I don't think so, Captain. Only a ...'

"'I tell you there's something wrong!' snarled Jack, turning on him
suddenly. 'Stand by at the ladder there,' and the man with the
hurricane-lamp said, quietly, 'Right, Sir.' Jack returned his gaze to
the boat, which was approaching the edge of the shadow. How he knew, I
don't pretend to explain. I take it he had a _flair_, as the French say,
the sort of _flair_ most of us acquire in our own profession and take
for granted, but which always appears uncanny in another. And it was
remarkable how the conviction that there _was_ something wrong seized
upon the ship and materialized in a line of shadowy figures leaning on
the bulwarks and projecting grotesquely illuminated faces into the light
of the lamp on the gangway.

"'Mr. Siddons there?' called Jack, quietly, as the boat came into view
in the moonlight. The man at the tiller sang out 'No, Sir,' as he put
the rudder over and added, 'way 'nuff. Catch hold there!' and another
figure stood up in the bows and laid hold of the grating.

"'Stand by,' said Jack coming down to the after deck. 'Come up here,
you,' he added, addressing the man who had spoken. The man, one of the
sailors, came up.

"'We were waitin' for Mr. Siddons, Sir, when you hailed.'

"'What orders did he leave?'

"'Said he was going up the beach a little way, Sir. Told us he wouldn't
be long.'

"'Where did you land the pilot?'

"'At Mr. Grünbaum's jetty, Sir. It's the best for a big boat.'

"'Then where is he now?'

"'I couldn't say, Sir,' said the man. 'He went up the path with the
pilot; that's all we know.'

"Jack took a turn along the deck.

"'P'raps I'd better go and 'unt him up,' suggested Mr. Bloom, stroking
his moustache.

"'And leave me here with one mate and no pilot?' said Jack. 'Fred, you
go.' He followed me into my room where I had a pocket-torch, and
whispered, 'Go up yourself, Jack. See what I mean? He's a decent young
feller, even if I do find fault. Don't let the men see anything.'

"'You don't think he's gone on the booze?' I said, incredulously.

"'I don't know what to think,' he retorted, irritably. 'I always thought
he had plenty o' principle. You can't tell nowadays. But we don't want
him to spoil himself at the beginning of his career. Understand what I
mean?'

"As I sat in the stern of the cutter while the men pulled back into the
shadow which was about to engulf the ship (for the moon was setting) I
felt I liked Jack the better for that kindly whisper out of earshot of
the estimable Mr. Bloom. It was like him. Now and again you could look
into the depths of his character, where dwelt the old immemorial virtues
of truth and charity and loyalty to his cloth. I even twisted round on
the gunwale as I steered and looked back affectionately at his short,
corpulent figure walking to and fro on the bridge deck, worrying himself
about the 'young feller,' the embodiment of a rough yet exquisite
altruism. It seemed to me a manifestation of love at least as worthy of
admiration as was his domestic fidelity. Oh, yes! You fellows call me a
cynic, but I believe in love, nevertheless. It is only your intense
preoccupation with one particular sort of love which evokes the cynicism
and which inspires the monstrous egotism of women like Mrs. Evans.

"'Hard over, Sir,' said the leading seaman. 'Way 'nuff, boys!' I flashed
my torch upon the tiny jetty which Grünbaum had made near his house, for
he often went on fishing expeditions round the island, I had heard.
Steps had been cut down from a path in the face of the cliff which led
away up to some workings facing the sea, but which are out of sight.
When I had climbed up the jetty I said:

"'Now you wait here while I go along to the house, and make enquiries. I
don't suppose he's very far off.'

"I made my own way up the rough stones to the path, midway between the
soft whisper of the waves and the frightful edge above my head and I
felt a momentary vertigo. I was suspended in the depths of an
impenetrable darkness. All things--the jetty, the boat, the path, were
swallowed up. Even the ship was indicated only by the faint
hurricane-lamp at the gangway and the reflection of the galley-fire
against a bulkhead. Stone for building and for buttressing the
mine-galleries had been quarried out below, and the path was under-cut
and littered about with the débris of an old ore-tip. I moved slowly
toward Grünbaum's house, and as my eyes became accustomed to the
darkness I saw another path, a more slanting stairway, on the face of
the cliff. I paused. It was some hundred yards or so to where Grünbaum's
house stood, as you see, at the foot of the slope. In the darkness
Jack's words seemed to me to shed light. There was something wrong. But
if something was wrong, if young Siddons had come to some harm, how had
it happened? He must have had some motive in leaving a cutter with six
men to wait for him. As for my idiotic suggestion that he might have
gone on the booze, there wasn't a café within three miles that young
Siddons would enter. He must have had some plan. Of course we are told,
with wearisome insistence, to look for the woman; but we don't in real
life. We look for all sorts of motives before we look for the woman. And
even if I did in this instance suppose for a moment that Siddons had
gone off on some mysterious adventure involving say, Captain Macedoine's
daughter, I was no further advanced. He could hardly have told the
sailors to wait. It was against all traditions of the service. And as I
was deciding that he must have come to harm, and wondering how the deuce
I was to discover him, a light shone out for a moment above me, I saw a
figure silhouetted in a doorway and then vanish. Someone had gone in. I
started up the steep by-path to make enquiries. I knew the pilot, a
predatory person from Samos, had a hutch on the mountain somewhere, and
it occurred to me that he had negotiated the sale of a flask or two of
the sweetish wine of the island, and young Siddons had seized the
opportunity to get it aboard without the old man knowing it. Quite a
rational theory, I thought, as I toiled up the path getting short of
breath. And suddenly I came upon the door which had opened and closed, a
door in a house like a square white flat-topped box, with a window in
one side shedding a faint glow upon a garden of shrubs.

"And now I was in a quandary. I sat down on a bowlder to take a breath.
Supposing I knocked at the door and asked if any one had seen the Third
Mate, and the inhabitants had not seen him and couldn't understand me, I
should have done no good. And supposing they had seen him, or that he
was inside, I should have some difficulty in explaining my interest in
his private affairs. For I liked him, and we are always afraid of those
whom we like. It is not only that we fear to tarnish our own reputation
in their eyes, but we suffer a mingled terror and pleasure lest we
discover them to be unworthy of their exalted position in our
affections. So I got up and instead of knocking at the door I stepped
among the shrubs and came to the window. And sitting close against the
wall, with a small table in front of him and his head on his hand, sat
Captain Macedoine.

"He was old. He showed, as we say, the ravages of time. And not of time
only. Time alone could not furrow a human face into so many distorting
folds and wrinkles. As I recalled the sleek, full-fed condition of his
big smooth-shaven face when I had known him in the old days, I was
revolted at the change. It was as though an evil spirit had been
striving for years to leave him, and had failed. The cheeks were sunk
into furrows of gray stubble and had sagged into sardonic ridges round
the thin, wavering line of the mouth. The red eyelids blinked and
twitched among the innumerable seams that ran back to the sparse,
iron-gray hair. The nose, quite a noble and aquiline affair once, was
red at the end, and querulous, like the long lean chin and reedy neck.
Only the brow gave any hint that he might not be a casual loafer at a
railroad station willing to carry your grip for a few pennies. High,
narrow, and revealed remorselessly by the passing of the years, it was
the brow of the supreme illusionist, the victim of an implacable and
sinister spiritual destiny. I have said that when I saw him the
previous evening he had the look of a man trying to win back into the
world. Now that I saw him more clearly, he looked as though he had come
back, at some frightful cost, and regretted it.

"He was listening to someone I could not see at the moment, and raising
his eyes with a regularly recurring movement that was almost mechanical.
I shifted a little to take in another view of the small, shabbily
furnished room. Standing by the end of a sofa, on which I could see a
girl's feet and skirt, was a dark young man brushing his frock coat and
talking with what struck me as absurd eloquence. He had never shaved;
his face was obscured in a sort of brown fungus and was blotchy about
the forehead and chin. His black eyes rolled as he talked and flourished
the brush. He seemed to be describing something highly creditable to
himself. This, I may tell you, was Monsieur Nikitos, visible in business
hours as a clerk at Grünbaum's elbow, or in a bare barn of an outer
office. He came over to the table, and sitting down near Captain
Macedoine, opened an account book. This was evidently a _séance_ of the
Anglo-Hellenic Development Company, I thought, and I moved back to the
path. I had no desire to spy upon any of these people, you understand. I
had to find Siddons, and even the intriguing amusement of watching a
great illusionist had to recede before that urgent need. I regained the
path below and thinking I would go down to the boat in case he had
returned I started back. The torch showed me a steep descent of rubble
where a cave-in had occurred, a gash in the edge of the path, I thought
at first it was the way down to the jetty and I flashed the lamp
steadily upon the bottom. There was someone lying down there. It was not
long before I was kneeling over young Siddons.

"At first, you know, I really thought he was dead. He was lying face
upward and his forehead had been gouged open above the left eye with
some jagged edge and was bleeding in thick, slow runnels that
disappeared into his curly hair. He lay perfectly motionless, but as I
bent over him and searched the soft, delicate face in the first horror
of grief, the eyes opened wide and blinked in a gaze of unconscious
enquiry.

"'What is it, my boy?' I asked and after seeming to collect himself he
asked, in perfect calmness:

"'Who is that?'

"'The Chief,' I answered. 'Did you fall?' He closed his eyes and made an
effort to move. I put my arm around him. He said:

"'Chief, is the boat still there?' I told him it was.

"'Help me up. Be careful. I think my collar-bone is broken again. Oh,
Lord! Does--does the Old Man know?'

"'It was he sent me,' I said. 'He was afraid you had had an accident.
Does that hurt?'

"'No--but catch hold of me lower down, will you?'

"'How did it happen? Did you slip?'

"'Oh, Lord! Yes--slipped, you know--look out!'

"'I thought you were dead,' I said jocularly, as we reached the path.

"And under his breath he made a remark that Captain Macedoine's daughter
had made to me not so many hours before.

"He said he wished he was."




CHAPTER IV


"By Jove," said Mr. Spenlove, suddenly, after a long silence, "I have
often wondered what might have happened to us if young Siddons hadn't
tumbled down there and smashed himself up. I mean, supposing our minds
hadn't been taken off the great subject of Captain Macedoine's financial
projects. Because, mind you, although I behaved in a very sagacious
manner while discussing the matter with Jack and his wife, I'm not at
all prepared to say that I wouldn't have submitted if Jack had urged it
in his tempestuous way. The psychology of being stung is a very
complicated affair. We pride ourselves on our strong, clear vision and
so forth, but it is very largely bluff. We are all reeds shaken by the
winds of desire. In spite of my sagacity the notion of making a fortune
was alluring. When I came to think of it the idea of a few years of
ruthless exploitation of the toiling inhabitants of a region for which I
had no sympathy, followed by a dignified return to England with a sunny
competence--say ten thousand a year, afforded an attractive field for
the development of one's personality. I suppose it comes to all of us at
times--a vision of ourselves with the power to expand to the utmost. And
at the back of it all lay the exasperating and tantalizing thought that
it _might_ be possible. The very preposterousness of the suggestion was
in its favour, in a way. The very fact that nobody else had ever thought
of making a fortune out of Macedonia led one to wonder if it might not
be done. You get an idea like that in your head, and it lies there and
simmers and seethes, and finally boils over and you have taken the
plunge. That's what might have happened, if I had not gone ashore to
look for young Siddons, and accidentally beheld the great Captain
Macedoine himself and his lieutenant. I don't say that the mere view of
these two worthies discussing their plans was sufficient to convince me
of their rascality. I'm not convinced of that even now. What I did
acquire, even before young Siddons drove the whole matter into the
background, was a sudden sense of proportion. To associate a golden
fortune with those two shabby and cadaverous birds of prey was too much.
And when we got aboard again the whole proposition seemed to have
vanished into thin air.

"Of course everyone was excited. Jack had to take hold and give orders.
He shut his wife and youngster up in their cabin, ordered us all out of
the saloon except the steward, and set to work on young Siddons, who was
lying on the table with a towel under his head. Mr. Bloom, who had been
rushing to and fro making friends with the Second, the Third, and even
the donkey man, in a frenzied attempt to get information about the coal
which was to be sold the next day, now favoured me with a heart-to-heart
talk on the subject of professional etiquette. It was a mistake, in his
opinion as an experienced ship's officer, for the Captain to be a
surgeon as well. It was time we took a firm stand. Owners should be
informed that this primitive and obsolete state of affairs could be no
longer tolerated. Now when he was sailing under the Cuban flag, they
always carried a surgeon. Compelled to by law. Of course one couldn't
let a man die for lack of attention; but if he was in Captain Evans'
shoes, he would send in a report with a formal protest appended. Do
everything courteously and in due form but--be firm! That was the
trouble with sea-going officers--they were not firm with their
employers. He himself, he was frank to say, had often given owners a
piece of his mind, and no doubt he had suffered for it. And why? Simply
because he got no support. Now he knew I wouldn't take any silly offence
if he mentioned a personal matter, but really for Captain Evans to send
an engineer ashore in a boat was in the highest degree unprofessional.
It was a job for an executive officer, obviously. Not that he wished to
criticise--far from it--but _verb. sap_ as they say at Oxford and
Cambridge. A word to the right man, mind you, was worthy any amount of
useless argument with--well, he wouldn't mention any names, but I knew
what he meant, no doubt.

"How long this enchanted imbecile would have continued his monologue I
shouldn't care to say, if Jack had not called me down to help get young
Siddons into his bunk. The collar-bone, broken more than once at
football, would knit nicely, he said, and he had put a couple of neat
stitches in the gash over the eye. Made him shout, Jack admitted as he
washed his hands with carbolic soap, but what was a little pain compared
with being disfigured for life? He reckoned it would heal up and leave
no more than a faint scar. What did I reckon he was doing, eh? Funny for
him to leave the boat. Very unusual. What did I think?

"'Didn't he give you any explanation?' I enquired.

"'Well, I suppose you can call it an explanation,' said Jack, 'in a way.
He said he went ashore for a few minutes on a private matter, and he
would appreciate it if I took his word. I'm supposed to keep the matter
private, too, so keep your trap shut, Fred. Fact is,' he went on, 'it's
that gel's at the bottom of it. He's one of those young fellers who take
it hard when they do take it. What they call in novvels hopeless
passion.'

"I was surprised at Jack's penetration. Indeed I was surprised at his
allusion to what he called 'novvels' for he had never, so far as I knew,
read any. Perhaps he had taken a surreptitious squint at some of the
exemplary serials which Mrs. Evans affected.

"'Then you won't take any action?' I said.

"'Why should I? He's had an accident, that's all. If he'd fell down and
broke his neck, it would be different. As it is, he's had a lesson. I
must go up and take a look round.'

"Jack went up on deck to take a look at the mooring ropes, for the
weather is treacherous in spring and autumn hereabouts, and more than
once we had to slip and run out to sea. I stepped into the little
alleyway on the port-side and walked along to young Siddons' room. The
door was on the hook and a bright bar of light lay athwart the floor of
the alleyway. He was lying on his back as we had left him, his
unbandaged eye staring straight up at the deck overhead. As I opened the
door and closed it behind me he turned that eye upon me without moving
his head.

"'All right?' I asked, just for something to say. He made a slight
gesture with his hand, signifying, I imagine, that it was nothing. His
face had that expression of formidable composure which the young assume
to conceal their emotions. I don't know exactly why I bothered myself
with him just then. Perhaps because there is for me a singular
fascination in watching the young. I won't say it is affection, because
our relations are usually of the sketchiest description. Sometimes I
don't know them at all. I fancy it is because one sees oneself in them
surrounded by the magical glamour of an incorruptible destiny. As we
say, they are refreshing, even in their griefs, and there is something
in the theory that we, as we are crossing the parched areas of middle
age, can draw upon their spiritual vitality to our own advantage if not
to theirs.

"'Nothing you want, eh?' I said, looking round. The one bright eye
stared straight up again.

"'Will you do me a favour, Chief?' he asked in a low tone.

"'Of course I will,' I answered. 'What is it?'

"'If you wouldn't mind, when you go ashore, to see Miss Macedoine and
tell her I am sorry she couldn't--you see,' he broke off, suddenly, 'I
said I'd see her this evening. I went up ... she wasn't there. I
couldn't wait ... boat waiting, you know. Then something ... well, I
fell down. Would you mind?'

"'I'll tell her,' I said. 'Is she fond of you?'

"His eye closed and he lay as motionless as though he were dead.

"'I don't suppose it matters now,' he remarked, very quietly. 'I shan't
see her again, very likely. Only I thought--if you told her how it
was ... you understand?'

"'I tell you what I'll do,' I replied. 'I'll ask her to come and see
you. Isn't that the idea?'

"'Yes, that's the idea,' he returned with extraordinary bitterness.
'That's all it's likely to be--an idea. I never did have any luck. It's
always the way, somehow. The things you want ... you can't get. And now,
this ... I say, Chief.'

"'Well?'

"'Excuse me, won't you, talking like this. I'm awfully grateful really.
It means a good deal to me, if she only knows I meant to be there. She
said I could--if I liked.'

"'Isn't she playing with you?' I asked, harshly. He put up his hand.

"'No, she's not that sort. She's different from other girls. She's had a
rotten time ... I can't tell you.... It would have been different if she
was coming home with us. Everything seems against me. No matter ... a
chap has to put up with his luck, I suppose.'

"'You'll pick up,' I suggested, without much brilliance I am afraid. He
made no reply, lying with a sort of stern acquiescence in the enigmatic
blows of fate.

"And the next day, when the ore was crashing into the holds and the ship
lay in a red fog of dust, Jack and I went ashore on our business. I
remember Mr. Bloom walking to and fro on the bridge deck with the Second
Mate, nudging him facetiously as they passed the Second, who was rigging
his tackle over the bunker, and nodding toward us as we made our way
among the ore-trucks and down to the beach. The Second had told me that
'the nosey blighter' had been making inquiries about the coal, with sly
innuendoes dusted over his sapient remarks. It was a subject to which
Mr. Bloom's lofty conceptions of 'professional etiquette' would do full
justice. As we climbed the steps which ran up outside Grünbaum's house,
I was wondering to myself if I should be able to redeem my promise to
young Siddons. There seemed small likelihood of it unless I took Jack
into our confidence. We entered a high stone passage through the farther
end of which we could see Grünbaum's orchard and Grünbaum's five
children playing under the trees in the care of a fat Greek woman. We
turned to the left into an immense chamber with a cheap desk and office
chair in one corner. The whitewashed walls were decorated with
oleographs of imaginary Greek steamships, all funnels and bridge, with
towering knife-like prows cleaving the Atlantic at terrific speed. There
were advertisements of Greek and Italian insurance companies, too, and a
battered yellow old map of the Cyclades. And standing at the tall
windows was a figure in a frock coat squinting through a telescope. He
put it down hurriedly as we entered, walked across to the desk, and
resting his hand on it, made us a bow. This was Monsieur Nikitos, the
lieutenant of the mighty enterprise. I must confess that his pose at
that moment was less of the financier than of a world-famous virtuoso at
the piano bowing to a tumult of applause.

"'This is the Chief Engineer,' said Jack. The virtuoso favoured me with
a special bow, and waved his hand to a couple of chairs.

"'Take a seat, Captain. Take a seat, Mister Chief. Mr. Grünbaum is
engaged at the moment. I take the opportunity of mentioning the little
matter we discussed yesterday, Captain. I have no doubt you will take
shares in our company.'

"Jack looked at me, and I regarded Monsieur Nikitos with fresh interest.
He was a most mysterious creature to look at, now we were close to him.
He was quite young, not more than twenty-five, and the black fuzz on his
face gave him a singularly dirty appearance. As he sat in his swivel
chair with the tails of his dusty frock coat draped over the arms,
tapping his large white teeth with his pen and brushing his black hair
from his blotchy forehead, he suddenly gave me the impression of a poet
trying to think of a rhyme.

"'We have decided,' I said, and he dropped his hands and inclined his
ear, 'to think it over.' He slumped back in his chair, smiled, and shook
his head. Then he straightened up and reaching for a ruler looked
critically at it.

"'We cannot wait. In affairs of finance one must think quickly, then
act--so!' He snapped his thumb and finger. 'If not, the chance is gone.
Now I show you. To-day, Captain Macedoine resigns. Yes! To-morrow, _I_
resign. Like that. To-morrow also, Monsieur Spilliazeza, our invaluable
manager of works, resigns! To-night, the _Osmanli_ calls for the mails.
We go by the _Osmanli_, our vessel, to Saloniki. We arrive. We take
action at once.' He waved his arms. 'Action! Next week it will be too
late. Option taken up, work commenced, contracts awarded, organization
complete. It is all here.' He tapped his forehead. 'I have it complete,
in inauguration, here.' And he regarded us with a gaze of rapt
abstraction in his brilliant black eyes.

"I don't mind telling you that the chief impression this performance
made upon me was that he was a lunatic. Jack was staring solemnly at
him. I imagine he began to have doubts of the wisdom of entrusting this
creature with real money. And then a bell tinkled, one of a pair of high
dark folding doors opened, and I had a glimpse of a great room where an
enormously fat man sat in the curve of a vast horseshoe shaped desk. It
was only a momentary view, you understand, of the diffused light shed by
three tall windows upon a chamber of unusual size. I had an impression
of glancing into a museum, a glimpse of a statue, very white and tall
with an arm broken off short, gleaming glass cases of small things that
shone like opals and aquamarines, and great bunches of coral like
petrified foam. I saw all this as the door stood for a moment, the
fezzed head of a little old gentleman looking out and mumbling the word
'_Kapitan!_' We stood up. Jack made a movement to go in. Monsieur
Nikitos came between us and regarded us as though we were conspirators.

"'Monsieur Grünbaum will see the Kapitan,' he remarked in a loud voice,
and then in a whisper, 'Of this--not a word,' And he pressed his
knuckles to his lips. And then Jack passed into the room, the door
closed softly, and I was alone with Monsieur Nikitos.

"My feelings at that moment, you know, were mixed. I was astonished.
I was amused. I was indignant. I looked at the frock-coated
figure before me with an expression of profound distaste and
contempt. He gave me a confidential smile and indicated a chair.
I sat down, looking at the closed folding doors. And as I sat
there I became aware that Monsieur Nikitos was indulging in
a whispered monologue. I caught the words--man of wide views--great
wealth--vast experience--unlimited prospects--unique grasp of
detail--necessary in affairs--man of affairs ... and then, in
a lower tone--daughter--beauty--happiness--future--efforts
redoubled--found fortunes--ideals--cannot express feelings--humble
aspirations--many years--ambition--travel....

"I suppose I must have made some sound to indicate my coherent interest
in this unlooked-for rigmarole, for he sprang up, and placed himself
between me and the folding doors. He bent his head to my ear. He desired
to know if I considered my Kapitan reliable. Would he invest? That was
the thing. Would he invest? Had he character? Why did he ask? Because he
had a design. The Swedish Kapitan who had invested was a single man, a
man of no education, I was to understand--no culture. But my Kapitan was
a married man. Of course he would settle in Saloniki, that fairest
jewel in the Turkish crown. He himself knew a house in a good
street--just the thing. He was anxious about this because he himself
would shortly become a married man. He sat down abruptly and waved the
ruler. As in a dream I sat there listening to his words. I have a notion
now that he gave me his whole life history. I recall reference to--early
years--great ambitions--great work--frustrated--years of exile--unique
qualifications--international journalism--special correspondent--highly
commended--friend of liberty--confidential agent, and so on. He had an
immense command of rapidly enunciated phrases which were run together
and interspersed with melodramatic pauses and gestures. And I said
nothing--nothing at all. He ran on, apparently quite satisfied that I
had a deep and passionate interest in his vapourings. As a matter of
fact, I paid very little attention. I was wondering whether it would be
worth my while to obtain an interview with the girl, if what he had
hinted were true, that her assistance in her father's designs was to
many this eloquent lieutenant and satisfy his 'humble aspirations.' And
while I wondered I heard harsh words uttered within the folding
doors--_confidence in my dispositions_--said a voice of grating
power and guttural sound. Monsieur Nikitos looked at me for an
instant and waved his ruler. He muttered. He alluded to tyrannical
obstinacy--unimaginative autocracy--intolerable domination--and other
polysyllabic enormities. The harsh voice went on in an unintelligible
rumble, rising again to 'post of a secretarial nature--a man of
undeserved misfortune--my disgust--effrontery to submit--resignation.' I
listened, and Monsieur Nikitos, who was gazing at me, gradually assumed
an expression of extreme alarm. He rose and went on tip-toe into the
outer hall. He reappeared suddenly with a broad-brimmed felt hat on his
head. He muttered some excuses--appointment--return immediately--urgent
necessity--apologies--in a moment--and tip-toed away again, leaving me
alone.

"I was beginning to think Jack had forgotten all about me when he came
out and closed the door behind him. We walked out into the passage
together, but he made no remark until I asked him if it was all right
about the coal. He said yes, it was all right, but what did I think?
That chap Macedoine was a wrong-un, according to Grünbaum. Trying to get
control. Grünbaum had sacked him. After fetching his daughter out for
him, too. It was true, what Nikitos had told us. They were going all
right but because they had to. Grünbaum was in a devil of a rage over
it. Had cabled to Paris to send out some more men. Good job he'd had
the notion of asking Grünbaum about it, eh? Might have lost our money.
Now he came to think of it, that Greek didn't look very reliable. Was I
coming back on board?

"We paused on the beach, where a few fishing boats were drawn up and the
nets lay in the sun drying.

"'I don't think I will,' I said. 'I guess I'll take a walk up the cliff
over there. When will you pull off to the buoys?'

"'Not a minute after five,' he returned. 'It's none so safe here at
night. Steam ready all the time remember, Fred. Grünbaum was just giving
me a friendly warning.'

"I started off for a walk up the cliff. The point where the path cut
round the corner stood sharp against the sky and led me on. As I gained
the beginning of the rise I could look back and down into Grünbaum's
garden where lemon, fig, plum, and almond trees grew thickly above green
grass cut into sectors by paths of white marble flags and with a
fountain sending a thin jet into the air. I could see children playing
about under the trees, but there were no birds. There were no birds on
the island. I realized this perfectly irrelevant fact at that moment,
and I became aware of the singular isolation of this man living under
the gigantic shadow of the mountain. It gave me a sudden and profound
consciousness of his extreme security against the designs o£ imaginative
illusionists. The vast bulk of the man became identified in my mind with
the tremendous mass of rock against which I was leaning. The momentary
glimpses into his office, the memory of the bizarre conjunction of
ancient statuary with the furniture of business and money-making, the
harsh voice reverberating through the lofty chambers, gave me a feeling
that I had been assisting at some incredible theatrical performance. I
started off again. I felt I needed a walk. After all, these reflections
were but an idle fancy. Jack and I were not likely to risk our small
savings in any such wild-cat schemes. Jack's words about pulling off to
the buoys had recalled me to a sense of serious responsibility. One
always had that hanging over one while in Ipsilon. Grünbaum, from his
secure fastness under the mountain, was familiar with the incalculable
treachery of the wind and sea.

"I was soon far above the habitation of men. Above me slanted the masses
of weathered limestone and marble; below, reduced to the size of a
child's toy, I could see the _Manola_. At intervals I could hear a faint
rattle and another cloud of red dust would rise from her deck, like the
smoke of a bombardment. Far below me were a tiny group of men at work in
a quarry. They seemed to be engaged in some fascinating game. They
clustered and broke apart, running here and there, crouching behind
boulders, and remaining suddenly still. There would be a dull thump, a
jet of smoke, and a few pieces of rock, microscopic to me, would tumble
about. And then all the pigmy figures would run out again and begin
industriously to peck at these pieces, like ants, and carry them, with
tiny staggerings, out of sight. I watched them for a moment and then
walked on until I came to the corner where the path curves to the right
and eventually confronts the open sea. I was alone with the inaccessible
summits and the soft murmur of invisible waves breaking upon half-tide
rocks. I was in mid-air with a scene of extraordinary beauty and
placidity spread before me. The sea, deep blue save where it shallowed
into pale green around the farther promontory, was a mirror upon which
the shadows of clouds flickered and passed like the moods of an innocent
soul. In the distance lay the purple masses of other islands, asleep. It
was as though I were gazing upon a beautiful and empty world, awaiting
the inevitable moment when men should claim the right to destroy its
loveliness....

"At intervals along the face of the cliff were tunnels which led
through the marble shell of the mountain into the veins of ore. I walked
along looking for a place to sit down, stepping from tie to tie of the
narrow-gauge track along which the mine trucks were pushed by Grünbaum's
islanders. I suppose the vein had petered out up there.... I don't know.
One of Grünbaum's dispositions, perhaps. Anyhow it was deserted. I came
to a huge mass of rock projecting from the face, so that the track
swerved outward to clear it. I walked carefully round and stopped
suddenly.

"She was sitting there, leaning against the entrance to a working, and
looking out across the sea. Without alarm or resentment she turned her
head slightly and looked at me, and then bent her gaze once more upon
the distance. I hesitated for a moment, doubtful of her mood, and she
spoke quietly.

"'What is it?' she asked. I went up and stood by her.

"'I have a message for you,' I remarked, and took out a cigarette. 'But
I had no idea you were up here. In fact, I dare say I should have gone
back on board without giving it to you.'

"'What is it?' she said again, and this time she looked at me.

"'You don't know, I suppose,' I said, 'that Siddons--the Third Mate--has
had an accident?'

"She looked away and paused before answering.

"'I see,' she remarked, though what she saw I did not quite comprehend
at the moment. It seemed a strange comment to make.

"'Oh, come!' I said. 'Don't say you're not interested.'

"'How did it happen?' she enquired, looking at her shoe.

"I told her. She turned her foot about as though examining it, her
slender hands clasped on her lap. She had an air of being occupied with
some problem in which I had no part.

"'And the message?' she said at length. I gave her that, too, briefly,
and without any colouring of my own. She put one leg over the other,
clasping her knee with her hands, and bent forward, looking suddenly at
me from under bent brows.

"'What can I do?' she demanded in a low tone.

"'But don't you see,' I returned. 'He's in love with you.'

"She gave a faint shrug of the shoulders and uttered a sound of
amusement.

"'Then you are indifferent?' I asked, annoyed.

"'What else can I be?' she said. 'Boys always think they are in love. I
don't think much of that sort of love.' And she fell silent again,
looking at the sea.

"'Look here, my dear,' I said abruptly, 'tell me about it. I'm in the
dark. Can't I help you?'

"'No,' she said. 'You can't. Nobody can help me. I'm in a fix.'

"'But how?' I persisted.

"'Do you suppose,' she said, slowly, 'that nobody has been in love with
me before I came on your ship? I thought you'd understand, when I told
you I had never had any luck. I haven't. I had no one to tell me. I
thought people were kinder, you know--men, I mean. And now all I can do
is wait ... wait. Sometimes I wish I was dead, wish I'd never been born!
Before you came up, I was wondering if I couldn't just jump--finish it
all up--no more waiting. And then I found I hadn't the pluck to do that.
I tried to tell Mrs. Evans once, give her a hint somehow, but she
doesn't understand. She's safe. She's got a husband as well as ... no
matter. I was going to tell you, one evening, you remember, but I got
scared. I didn't feel sure about you. Oh, I'm sorry, of course, about
Mr. Siddons. I liked him, you know. He's a gentleman. But even gentlemen
are very much the same as anybody else.'

"'But what will you do?' I asked in astonishment.

"'I must go with my father,' she replied, stonily. 'He wants me to be
with him. He is not happy here. He is misunderstood. He is going into
business with my--with another man. We are going to Saloniki. I dare
say I shall do as he wishes. That's what a daughter should do, isn't
it?' And her eyes flickered toward me again.

"I didn't answer, and there was a long silence. I had no words of
consolation for that solitary soul engaged in the sombre business of
waiting. And I understood the trivial rôle which young Siddons played in
her tragic experience. To her we were all pasteboard figures actuated by
a heartless and irrelevant destiny. Fate had shut the door upon her with
a crash, and she was alone with her griefs in an alien world. I put my
arm round her shoulders. She looked at me with hard bright eyes, her red
lips firmly set.

"'Can I help you?' I whispered. She shook her head. 'At least,' I went
on, 'you can write to me, if you were in trouble--ever. I would like you
to feel that someone is thinking of you.'

"'It's kind of you,' she said, with a faint smile, 'but _you_ wouldn't
be able to do much. Oh! I know what men are,' she added with a
hysterical little laugh. 'Always thinking of themselves. There's always
that behind everything they do. They don't mean it, but it's there, all
the time. Even you wouldn't do anything to make yourself uncomfortable,
you know.'

"'You don't think a great deal of us,' I remonstrated, taking my arm
away.

"'No, I don't!' she said with sudden hard viciousness of tone. 'I've had
very little reason to, so far.'

"'You are meeting trouble half way, going on like this,' I said,
severely. 'Come now. I insist. Promise me you will write when you get to
Saloniki. Here, I'll give you my address.' And I gave it to her. She
sighed.

"'I'm not afraid of life,' she said, 'when it is fair play. But I
haven't had fair play. I've been up against it every time. If I got a
chance----'

"'What sort of a chance?' I asked, curiously. There was a look of savage
determination on her face, and she clenched her teeth and hands on the
word 'chance.'

"'Oh, I'm not done yet,' she exclaimed to the air. 'I'm in a fix, but if
I ever get out of it alive, look out!'

"'What do you mean?' I asked again.

"'Nothing that you would approve of,' she answered, dropping her voice.
'Nothing any of you would approve of.'

"'That means it's something foolish,' I remarked.

"'Perhaps. We'll see,' she retorted.

"'I would like to have taken a word back to young Siddons,' I hinted.
'Just to show you cared a little.'

"'But I don't!' she burst out. 'I don't! He bothered me to let him come
and see me and I said--I don't know what I said. Tell him anything you
like. I don't care. I'm sick of it all there!'

"'You are making it very hard for me,' I said, gently, and she flung
round suddenly and faced me, her eyes shining, her lips parted in a
rather mirthless smile. She was an extraordinarily beautiful creature
just then. Her face, with its slightly broad, firmly modelled nostrils,
the small ears set close under the cloud of soft dark hair, and the
thick black eyebrows, was informed with a kind of radiance that
heightened the sinister impression of her scorn. She regarded me
steadfastly as though she had had her curiosity suddenly aroused.

"'You!' she said. 'Hard for you? What is there hard for you anywhere?
_You_ don't take any chances. Humph!' and she turned away again.

"'Just what does that mean?' I enquired. 'If you don't care anything
about young Siddons, you're hardly likely to care much about any of the
rest of us.'

"'No?' she said, tauntingly. 'No?'

"'I offered you my sympathy,' I began, and she turned on me again.

"'This?' she asked, holding up the address I had given her. 'What's the
good of this, if I wanted help?'

"'But what can I do?' I insisted. 'Use me. Tell me what you want me to
do!'

"'Well,' she said in a dry, hard voice and looking away out to sea. 'I
suppose you know what a girl in my position usually wants of a single
man, don't you?'

"'But, my child,' I said, 'this is extraordinary!'

"'Oh, don't '_my child_' me,' she retorted in a passion. 'I thought you
understood.'

"Well, I suppose I had understood in a vague sort of way, but I
certainly had not credited her with any active designs of this sort. And
while I sat beside her reflecting upon the precarious nature of a
bachelor's existence, I found she had glanced round upon me again, her
expression at once critical and derisive. She saw through my sentimental
interest in her affairs. She knew that at the first signal of danger to
my own peace and position I would sheer off, regretfully but swiftly. Of
course she was perfectly right. The mere thought of her father and his
mangy lieutenant was sufficient. She had so much against her. It was
horrible. As I sat there counting up the handicaps which Fate had
imposed upon her I was aware of that critical and derisive smile
regarding me over her shoulder. And I felt ashamed. I had an uneasy
feeling that she was thinking of my severely paternal manner when I put
my arm round her and made her take my address. She thought more of young
Siddons, no doubt, more even of Nikitos, who was willing to marry her
without knowing her secret, than she did of me. That is one of the
penalties of remaining a super in the play. The leading lady regards you
with critical derision or she doesn't regard you at all.

"'Let us suppose,' I suggested after a silence, 'that I do understand.
Then why do you turn down young Siddons?'

"She made a sound and a gesture of impatience.

"'Oh, because of any amount of reasons,' she said, looking out to sea
again. 'A lot I'd see of him if he knew.'

"'Doesn't he? He told me you had had a bad time.' She shrugged her
shoulders.

"'I told him some sort of tale, just to pass the time. I'm not such a
fool. _You_ can tell him if you like,' she laughed shortly. 'I knew a
girl in the office who was engaged. She told him one day, after making
him promise to be her friend, and he nearly killed her, and left her.'

"'Young Siddons wouldn't do that,' I asserted.

"'No, he's a gentleman,' she sneered. 'He'd sail away. A handy
profession, a sailor's!'

"I must confess that I was hypocrite enough to be shocked at this. She
wasn't far wrong, though. We do sail away, most of us, whether we are
gentlemen or not. I suppose we are all of us, at times, the victims of
the perplexing discrepancy between romance and reality. Only I wonder
why it is so many of us recover, and think of our escapades with a
shamefaced grin on our damaged countenances. They say these tremendous
emotional experiences tend to make us nobler. Why is it, when we come to
analyze ourselves and others in middle life, we seem to find nothing
save the dried-up residues of dead passions and the dregs of
relinquished aspirations? Why is it the young can see through our
tattered make-ups and judge us so unfalteringly and with such little
mercy? No doubt we get our revenge, if we live long enough and are
sufficiently rapacious to take it!

"Yes, I was shocked, and she regarded me with defiant derision in her
bright dark eyes. She challenged me. I needn't tell you I did not then
accept. Here was a woman making the supreme appeal, locked up in a
castle kept by a whole regiment of ogres, and challenging me to come to
her rescue. And, as she put it, I sailed away.

"'And besides,' she broke in on me with a short laugh, 'thirty shillings
a week! You can't keep house on that anywhere, as far as I know.'

"This shocked me, too, until I reflected that this girl was not making
sentimental overtures, that she was simply explaining her extremely
secular reasons for rejecting a particular candidate. She was in that
mood and predicament. You can call it, with a certain amount of truth, a
girl's cross-roads. It certainly seems to me to be a more momentous
point in a woman's life than the accepted and conventional crisis which
confronts virginity. A man may successfully deceive a woman, as we
phrase it (rather ineptly), and make not the smallest impression upon
her personality or character. But the man who assumes the abandoned
function of protector, no matter what you call him, is invested with
tremendous powers. No power on earth can bring her back from the road on
which he sets her feet. She's got to take her cue from him. I suppose
she knows this, and when the time comes to mark down her victim she
brings to the business all the resources of her feminine intuition and
the remorseless judgment of a panther's spring. The ruthless reference
to poor young Siddons' six pounds a month wages--thirty shillings a
week--illustrates the mood exactly. Mind you, it is absurd to accuse a
girl of being merely callous and mercenary when she talks like that. She
is really merciful to her rejections in the long run. And she is
proceeding on the very rational argument that a man's value to a woman
may be roughly gauged by the value the world sets on him. She is not
merely a greedy little fool. Women upon whom such decisions are forced
achieve extraordinary skill in estimating the characters of men. Young
chaps like Siddons simply don't count--they are thrown to the discard at
once. Innocence and purity of soul are not negotiable assets in this
sort of thing. Even men with merely a great deal of money are not so
successful as one might imagine. They fizzle out if they lack the
character which the woman admires. I have seen them fizzle. A man who
roves as I do, reserving for himself, as I have insisted, the part of a
super in the play, naturally has many opportunities of watching the
lives of these emotional adventurers and the women who constitute the
inspiration of the adventures. The singularity of the present instance
was that, for the first time in my life, I was assisting at the
inauguration of such a career. That is how I interpreted her enigmatic
references to 'something I would not approve of.' And when I had got
that far I could see it was useless to bring in Siddons any more. His
destiny lay ahead. I have no doubt he achieved it with chivalrous
rectitude. We English have a way of weathering the gales of passion.

"I was turning these things over in my mind as we sat up there on the
cliff and half regretting, perhaps, my usual inability to play up to my
romantic situation when she raised her hand and pointed out to sea. The
surface of the ocean lay like shimmering satin in the hush of the
afternoon, but far away a small black blot, with a motionless trail of
smoke astern, moved at the apex of a diverging ripple. She pointed to it
and looked at me with that hard, bright, radiant smile. It certainly was
significant. This was the _Osmanli_, the little tin-kettle steamboat in
which her father had invested his capital, the humble beginning of that
vast enterprise, the Anglo-Hellenic Development Company. The actual
presence of that forlorn little vessel made a profound difference to our
words. It was impossible to deny that Captain Macedoine's dreams might
come true after all. His remarkable countenance might yet feature in our
magazines as one of our great captains of industry, while I, with old
Jack, pursued our obscure ways, the victims of a never-ending regret.
The _Osmanli_ came on, slowly pushing that immense ripple across the
opaline floors. Perhaps the girl perceived the significance of this. Her
hand dropped to her lap but she continued to regard me in a sort of
defiant silence. There! she seemed to say, there lies our future, wide
as the sea, glorious as the afternoon sun on purple isles and the
fathomless blue of heavens! She was extraordinarily lovely. I found
myself trying to picture the sort of man who would appear later to
fashion her destiny--perhaps one of the capitalists who would inevitably
be drawn into the great enterprise. She would develop tremendously. For
a moment I felt an access of regret at my renunciation. Too late, no
doubt. But I have not scrupled since to think of what might have been,
had I not--well, lost my nerve, let us say, and preferred to keep in the
cool, shadowy by-ways of life. That's what her bright, defiant smile
really meant, I believe now. I was no use to her because I didn't dare
to grab her and take the consequences. They say women nowadays are
rebelling against being possessed. The trouble seems to be rather that
so many men shrink from the trouble and the strain and responsibility
that possession entails. Too much civilization, I suppose. We are afraid
of looking foolish, afraid of taking a chance. We sail away. And when we
read in the news of some intrepid soul who does take a chance, who
snatches a breathless woman off her feet and gallops thundering through
all our mean and cowardly conventions and finishes up perhaps with a
bullet in his brain, we shrug and mutter that he was a fool. We remain
safe and die in our beds, but we have to suffer in silence that bright,
critical, derisive smile which means 'Thou art afraid!'"




CHAPTER V


"Yes, afraid!" said Mr. Spenlove, suddenly, after another long pause, as
though one of the silent and recumbent forms under the awning had
contradicted him. "We have got so that no man dare do anything off his
own bat, as we say. We hunt in packs. It makes no difference whether the
individual man is a saint or a sinner.

"We pull him down. Our whole scheme of life has been designed to put a
premium on the tame and well-behaved, on the careful and steady
householder and his hygienic _ménage_. We read with regret of disorder
in various parts of the world, and we despatch our legions from our own
immaculate shores to 'restore order.' Punitive expeditions we call them.
We have assumed the rôle of policeman in an ebullient world. Faith,
Love, Courage, are well enough if they declare a dividend and fill up
the necessary forms. We are dominated by the domestic. Women like Mrs.
Evans wield enormous power. It is not so much that they have character
as characteristics. They are the priestesses of the Temples of Home. I
used to watch that woman on the voyage to England. I was inspired by a
new and rabid curiosity. I wanted to see her in that aspect of security
which had moved the girl with such bitterness. Because Mrs. Evans hadn't
struck me as very safe when I had last seen her, sending out wireless
calls to me in her extremity. She had been sure I would give dear Jack
the best advice. That, in her private mind, was my mission on earth--to
minister to the needs of her and her angel child. But she was safe now.
She would greet me in what for her was almost a melting mood. I was the
confidant of the angel child's imaginary maladies. I was permitted to be
by while this precious being, sitting among blankets after her bath, was
fed with a highly nitrogenous extract of something or other from a cup.
Once I made a remark to the effect that they would have to get a fresh
nurse when they got home. Mrs. Evans bridled. She drew down the corners
of her mouth and remarked that in future she would look after Babs
herself.

"'But,' I said, 'if you could get a girl like Miss Macedoine.' Mrs.
Evans kept her gaze on Babs, who was staring at me over the rim of the
cup with her bold, protuberant black eyes like those of some marine
animal.

"'No,' she said, 'girls like that are too much trouble.'

"'You mean--followers?' I suggested. Mrs. Evans turned red and moved
slightly.

"'She wasn't nice,' she replied, coldly, and pronounced it 'neyce.'

"'Oh,' I said, 'I wasn't aware you knew.' She got redder.

"'I don't know what you are talking about,' she muttered. 'As far as I
could see, she was very fortunate in getting her passage out free, very
fortunate. She was not neyce with Babs. Babs didn't take to her.
Children _know_!'

"'Still,' I said, looking at the omniscient Babs lying back in repletion
and trying to decide upon some fresh demand, 'Still, I felt sorry for
her, a pretty creature like that, at a dangerous age, you know...' I
had to stop, for Mrs. Evans' usually pale features were a dull brick
red. Her head was drawn back and she became rigid with disapproval. This
is what I mean when I say such women wield enormous power. They are
panoplied in prejudice and conventional purity. Mrs. Evans was like
that. She was safe. She was a pure woman. I looked at her thin, peaked
little features as she replaced the blanket about the kicking limbs of
the angel child and thought of that girl with her bright, defiant,
derisive smile challenging me to high adventure. Mrs. Evans' function in
life was not to challenge but to disapprove. She could endure no
discussion of the fundamentals. She could read tales of passion and
rape, and not a flicker of emotion would cross that pallid face. But
there must be no spoken word. Instinctively she drew back and became
rigid, protecting her immaculate soul and the angel child from the
faintest breath of reality. In that flat bosom raged a hatred, a horror,
of beauty and the desire of it--a conviction that it was neither good
nor evil, but simply strange, foreign, unknown, unsuitable; incompatible
with the semi-detached house on the Portsmouth Road whose photograph
hung on the bulkhead behind her. There was something shocking in the
contrast this woman presented to her environment out there. Grünbaum,
living under the shadow of his mountain, claiming from the world
'confidence in his dispositions'; Macedoine and his lieutenant devising
fantastic skin-games to be played out among the haunts of the old
Cabirian gods; Artemisia fighting her own sad little battle with the
fates and steeling her soul with reckless resolutions; even old Jack, no
bad prototype of the ancient ship-masters who ran their battered biremes
up on yonder beach to mend their storm-strained gear--all were more or
less congruous with this old Isle of Ipsilon, where Perseus grew to
manhood and from whose shores he set out on his journey to find Medusa.
But not she. She transcended experience. To know her made one
incredulous of one's own spiritual adventures. One nursed indelicate and
never-to-be-satisfied curiosities about her emotional divagations. She
once confessed, in a tone of querulous austerity, that she 'lived only
for the child.' Possibly this was the key. Beauty and Love, and even
Life itself, as men understood them, were to her the shocking but
inevitable conditions of attaining to an existence consecrated to her
neat and toy-like ideal. I am only explaining how she impressed me. As
you say, she was, and is, simply a respectable married woman. But
respectable married women, when you live with them without being married
to them, are sometimes very remarkable manifestations of human nature.

"Yes, I used to watch that woman on the voyage home. I was full of
curiosity about her. I was loth to believe in a human being so
insensitive to what we usually call human emotions. There was difficulty
about getting her ashore in Algiers. It was only when Jack said she
would get smothered in coal-dust if she stayed that she consented to go
at all. She came back with a very poor opinion of Africa. It appears
that it was hot and they did not know at the café how to make tea. A
mosquito had had the effrontery to bite Babs. I was informed of this
momentous adventure after we had gone to sea again, though Mrs. Evans
had been cultivating a certain evasion where I was concerned since our
talk about Artemisia. She had sheered off from me and tried to pump Jack
about the girl. He came to me, his bright brown eyes globular with the
news. What did I know, eh? Missus was saying she'd heard there was
something fishy about the gel. Not that he'd be surprised. It only
showed, he went on, how particular a man had to be. Gel like that ought
to be _married_. Mrs. Evans was very particular whom she had about.
Always had been. I knew, of course, how carefully she'd been brought up.
A lady. There was something about that gel ... no, he never could give
it a name, but he didn't like it. Bad for the kid. Children _knew_. And
they were the devil for picking things up. Here was Angelina, only the
other night, getting him into a regular pickle because she'd heard him
say 'damn' and brought it out plump in front of Mrs. Evans. Couldn't be
too careful. Fancy a kid that age saying a thing like that--'Damn
by-bye, damn by-bye!' Jack's eyes grew larger and more prominent. Mrs.
Evans had been very upset when he had remarked irascibly that a ship was
no place for a child anyway. No more it was. 'Fred'--(I could see this
coming, mind you, a week before)--'Fred, my boy,' said he, 'I shall be
glad when we get home. I can see it now. It's a mistake. I always said
so when the commander brought his wife along.' It didn't do to take a
woman away from where she belonged. She saw too much, as well. What did
I think she said the other day? A fact. 'You and Mr. Spenlove don't seem
to me to _do_ much.' Think of that! And sometimes he wondered if she
didn't pay more attention to that infernal pier-head jumper, Bloom, than
to her own husband. I should hear him at the cabin table--'When _I_ was
commander, Mrs. Evans, I always insisted on the junior officers
overseeing the routine of the ship. When _I_ was commander, I made it a
rule that engineers should keep to their own part of the ship.' It was
enough to make a man sick, but women didn't know any better.... Glad to
get home. Was I going to Threxford?

"Well, no, I didn't go down to Threxford. I went to the station to see
them off from Glasgow, though. Mrs. Evans held up the angel child for me
to kiss. 'Kiss Mr. Spenlove, Babsy, darling.' The youngster favoured me
with one of her bold, predatory stares as she desisted from torturing
her immense teddy bear for a moment. I had a sudden and disconcerting
vision of Jack's daughter as she would be-well, as she is to-day, I
expect ... a robust, self-centred, expensively attired autocrat, ruling
her parents, her friends, and her adorers with the smooth efficiency of
a healthy tigress. Jack once muttered to me that she'd 'knock the men
over' and he seemed to take a certain grim relish in contemplating the
future overthrow of the love-sick swains. And I saw in the background of
this vision, as one sees a pale bluish shadow of a form in the
background of a bright, highly coloured portrait, I saw Mrs. Evans,
shrinking as the angel child developed, and cowering before that
nonchalant vampirism. A well-nourished young cannibal, I figure her, for
such characters need human beings for their sustenance, if you take the
trouble to observe their habits. I suppose she regarded me as
indigestible, for she kissed me without rapture, and I never saw her
again.

"And the next voyage we slipped back into our usual jog-trot round. Mr.
Bloom, that fine flower of professional culture, was replaced by one of
our skippers who had lost his license for a year for some highly
technical reason. Jack was rather perturbed by the prospect of having a
brother-captain under him, but the new chief-officer was temporarily
stunned by the blow fate had dealt him and was a good fellow anyhow.
Young Siddons, who was able to carry on by the time we sailed, said he
was a jolly decent old sort. Young Siddons and I had a good many talks
together that voyage. He was in sore need, you know, of somebody to
confide in. We all need that when we are in love. It has been my lot,
more than once, to be favoured with these confidences. Tactless? Oh, no.
As the Evanses said about children, these young hearts _know_. Yes, we
talked, and I received fresh light upon the mysteries of passion. As
Jack had said, young Siddons was the sort to take it hard. His face grew
thinner and there was a new and austere expression in his fine gray
eyes. We say easily, oh, the young don't die of love! But don't they?
Doesn't the youth we knew die? Don't we discover, presently, that a
firmer and more durable and perhaps slightly less lovable character has
appeared? So it seems to me. Not that Siddons was less lovable. But the
gay and somewhat care-free youth who had laughed so happily on the
voyage out when the girl had stopped for a while to chat with him was
dead. He had a memory to feed on now, a sombre-sweet reminiscence dashed
with the faint bitterness of an inevitable frustration. He took it out
of me, so to speak, using me as a confessor, not of sins, but of
illusions.

"He enlightened me, moreover, concerning the mishap which had befallen
him and thrown him so definitely out of the race. He had met M. Nikitos
on his way up to keep his tryst. She was standing at the door above
them, silhouetted against the light, when they met on the path below. In
darkness, of course. The lieutenant of the Anglo-Hellenic Development
Company had adopted an extremely truculent attitude. He did not allow,
he said, people from the ship to seek interviews in that clandestine
manner. Ordered young Siddons to depart. Which, of course, an Englishman
couldn't tolerate from a beastly dago. Punched his head. M. Nikitos,
familiar with the terrain, had flung a piece of rock, and young Siddons,
stepping back quickly in the first agony of the blow, had fallen over
the edge, where I had found him. This was illuminating. It explained a
number of obscure points which had puzzled me. I wondered, as I heard
it, whether the recital of this feat to Captain Macedoine and his
daughter had made any difference in the latter's attitude toward the
victor. She had not regarded him with any enthusiasm when I had talked
with her on the cliff, I noticed. I wondered. For you must be prepared
to hear that I was tremendously preoccupied with thoughts of her at that
time. That is one of the inestimable privileges of being a mere super in
the play. You haven't much to do and you can let your mind dwell upon
the destiny of the leading lady. You can almost call it a hobby of mine,
to dwell upon the fortunes of the men and women who pass across the
great stage on which I have an obscure coign of vantage. Some prefer to
find their interest in novels. They brood in secret upon the erotic
exhalations which rise from the Temple of Art. But I am not much of a
reader, and I prefer the larger freedom of individual choice.

"And there was much in young Siddons which helped me to visualize the
personality which had suddenly irradiated his soul. Of course he was
English, with all the disabilities of his race to express emotion. But
the need for sympathy triumphed over these, and he would come along to
my room in the dog-watch when I learned something of the tremendous
experience which had befallen him. The Second Engineer, who had
apparently suffered very slightly indeed, for I saw him in Renfield
Street one night with two young ladies on his way to the theatre,
assumed an air of dry detachment when he noticed these visits. The
Chief, I heard him growling to the Third one day when he thought I was
out of earshot, was nursing the mates nowadays. I knew the Second
disapproved of friendship on principle. His ideal was to be more or less
at loggerheads with everybody. He would wait until you had made some
ordinary human remark, when he would retire into his formidable arsenal
of facts and figures, and returning with a large and hard chunk of
information, throw it at you and knock you down with it. His
unreasonableness lay in his failure to realize that a man cannot be your
friend and your enemy at the same time, that people are never grateful
for being set right. He had a dry and creaking efficiency which made him
silently detested. I for one rejoiced when I heard indirectly, at a
later period, that a widow of forty, with seven children, had sued him
for breach-of-promise.

"Young Siddons was unaware of the Second's disapproval, and would slip
down after supper, ready to go on at eight, and smoke cigarettes on my
settee. You men know how, in fine weather, when you walk to and fro on
the bridge, the empty, dragging hours induce the shades of the past to
come up and keep you company. We in the engine-room generally have
enough to do to keep away the crowds of ghosts. We had fine weather most
of the time and young Siddons would come down with a fresh set of
impressions which he would try to explain to me. He had been down to see
his people while we were at home and I imagine the impact of cheerful,
prosperous, well-bred folk had done a lot to modify his views. It was
difficult, he confided one evening, to reconcile one's feelings for a
girl with the grave problem of one's 'people.' Some chaps had such
thundering luck. There was his brother, articled to a solicitor, who had
been engaged for three years to a doctor's daughter. They were just
waiting until he was admitted. Now, what luck that was! Everything in
good taste. She lived in the same road. He saw her every day. Her people
were well off. When the time came the brother would have the usual
wedding, go to Cromer for a honeymoon, and--start life. Young Siddons
was puzzled by the fact that he himself had been bowled over by a girl
who, he couldn't help admitting, would not have been approved by the
'people' down in Herefordshire. He saw that! I could perceive in his air
a rather amusing amazement that love was apparently the antithesis
instead of the complement of happiness. Now how could that be? And yet
he admitted he had never seen his brother display any rapture over his
love affair with the doctor's daughter. Took it very much as a matter of
course. Oh, a very nice girl, very nice. But ... he would fall silent,
his chin on his hand, recalling the memory of Artemisia as she had
seemed to him, an alluring and unattainable desire.

"Yes, it was interesting, and it fed my interest in her. I was too
experienced, I suppose, to expect to see her again, but it amused me to
brood upon her destiny. And it was a wish to learn something about that
strange trio that took me up to Grünbaum's one afternoon when we
arrived, and I had the privilege of an interview with the concessionaire
himself. Surrounded by attentive minions, who had full 'confidence in
his dispositions' he reposed, with the urbane placidity of a corpulent
idol, in the curve of his great horseshoe desk. The yellow blinds were
down over the tall windows against the westering sun, and the statue
with the arm broken short gleamed like old ivory. It was startling to
see a student's sword and long German pipe hanging crossed on the wall
beside that ancient piece of statuary. Grünbaum confessed, when I spoke
of them, to being 'largely cosmopolitan,' though loyal of course to the
Hellenic Government and his consular obligations to Great Britain. When
I made mention of Macedoine, he frowned heavily and admitted that he had
'taken the necessary steps.' The concessions in the Saloniki hinterland
would be dealt with by the Paris House 'with a view to safe-guarding our
interests.' No doubt the railroad to Uskub would in time render such
concessions extremely valuable. M. Nikitos doubtless obtained this
information surreptitiously from the official archives. But it was
necessary that these financial dispositions should be in the hands of
Western Europeans, since western capital was inevitably attracted to
such enterprises. He himself was a man of western ideas. Educated in
Berlin and Paris, he had been trained in affairs in Lombard Street. Our
banking system was sound and our climate ferocious--so he summed us up
more or less adequately. As regards the future of M. Macedoine he could
tell me nothing. No doubt that gentleman would be fully occupied in
setting his new venture on its feet. Oh, of course, these things
occasionally prospered; but in the long run, stability of credit was
essential. This, M. Macedoine, as far as could be ascertained, did not
command.

"The harsh, guttural, cultured voice rolled on--the voice of established
authority, of resistless financial power. To the simple and insular
intelligences of the islanders his potency must have seemed god-like
indeed. In this forgotten island of the sea he had assumed the rôle of
arbiter of their humble destinies, the source of their happiness, and
the omnipotent guardian of their fortunes. He was the head of what is
deprecatingly called in these days a Servile State. We are warned that
democracy is advancing to sweep up all such anachronisms and cast them
into the fire. I am not so sure. None of us, who have seen the new
liberty stalking through the old lands like a pestilence, are altogether
sure. After all, there is something to be said for the theory of a
Golden Age....

"The guttural voice rolled on. The business of the day was nearly over,
and he spoke in general terms of the tendencies of the day. It was a
mistake, he thought, to assume that all men were equal. He had not found
it so. The Anglo-Saxon race had a genius for misgovernment on the
democratic principle. He was not convinced that this could be applied to
Southeastern Europe. Democracy was an illusion founded on a
misconception. The power must be in one hand. Otherwise, chaos. Observe
these works of supreme art about me--these exquisite examples of ancient
craftsmanship--the products of a simple monarchic age. A man might be a
slave, unlettered and unenfranchised, yet fashion works of imperishable
beauty. Of course, the exponents of democracy denied this, but he
himself was in a position to know. He had studied the past glories of
the Cyclades. And he had failed to observe any striking improvement in
human life when the fanatics of liberty assumed command. Liberty! It was
a phantom, a _Lorelei_, singing to foolish idle men, luring them to
destruction. All things, all men, are bound. This was a restless age. He
regarded the future with some misgiving. We lacked men of strong
character, animated by sound ideals, an aristocracy of intellect, with
financial control.... These, of course, were large questions....

"That is the memory I have of him, the reactionary whom the romantic
votaries of liberty set up against a wall and shot full of holes the
other day. I don't offer any opinion. I am only puzzled. I recall the
man as I saw him that afternoon, in the midst of his prosperity and his
life's work, the embodiment of a cultured despotism.

"But of the girl he could tell me nothing, and it was of the girl I
wished to hear. Grünbaum would not have noticed her. His own
divagations, his emotional odyssies, his mistresses, would be dim
memories now, and he would not have noticed her. And as young Siddons
gradually developed an air of gentle and resigned melancholy, one of
those moods which are the aromatic cerements of a dead love, I
discovered in myself an increasingly active desire to know what had
happened to her. Because I didn't even know for certain whether she had
married M. Nikitos. And when we got home once more and young Siddons
bade us farewell to go up to sit for his examination, I was disappointed
that, as far as I could see, the longing I had to follow the Macedoines
in their strange career was not to be gratified. But this so often
happens in my life that I am grown resigned. We sailed again, for
Venice

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