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Command

by William McFee · English · Gutenberg #32114 · 698,403 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Command

Author: William McFee


        
Release date: April 24, 2010 [eBook #32114]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32114

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 COMMAND ***




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









                               COMMAND

                           BY WILLIAM McFEE


GARDEN CITY      NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

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

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

_First Edition_


This book is inscribed to those commanders under whom the author has had
the honour to serve, who have achieved firmness without asperity, tact
and sympathy without interference, and appreciation without fuss. It is
inscribed to these gentlemen because while they lack the gift of
self-advertisement, they have contrived, in spite of the trials and
exasperations of a seafaring existence, to engage the respect and
affections of their lieutenants.




PREFATORY NOTE


This tale is an original invention. It is not founded upon fact, nor are
the characters herein described portraits of actual persons. The
incidents and topography are imaginary.

W. M.




COMMAND




CHAPTER I


She was one of those girls who have become much more common of late
years among the upper-middle classes, the comfortably fixed classes,
than they have ever been since the aristocracy left off marrying Italian
_prime-donne_. You know the type of English beauty, so often insisted
on, say, twenty years ago--placid, fair, gentle, blue-eyed, fining into
distinction in Lady Clara Vere de Vere? Always she was the heroine, and
her protagonist, the adventuress, was dark and wicked. For some occult
reason the Lady Rowena type was the fashion.

Ada Rivers was one of those girls who have come up since. The
upper-middle classes had experienced many incursions. All sorts of
astonishing innovations had taken place. Many races had come to England,
or rather to London, which is in England but not of it; had made money,
had bred their sons at the great public schools and universities and
their daughters at convents in France and Belgium. These dark-haired,
gray-eyed, stylish, highly strung, athletic, talented girls are
phenomena of the Stockbroking Age. They do things Lady Rowena and Lady
Clara Vere de Vere would not tolerate for a moment. Outwardly resembling
the wealthy Society Girl, they are essentially quite different. Some
marry artists and have emotional outbreaks. Some combine a very genuine
romantic temperament with a disheartening sophistication about incomes
and running a home. They not only wish to marry so that they can begin
where their parents leave off, but they know how to do it. They can
engage a competent house-maid and rave about Kubelik on the same
afternoon, and do both in an experienced sort of way. They go everywhere
by themselves, and to men whom they dislike they are sheathed in shining
armour. They can dance, swim, motor, golf, entertain, earn their own
living, talk music, art, books, and china, wash a dog and doctor him.
And they can do all this, mark, without having any real experience of
what we call life. They are good girls, nice girls, virtuous girls, and
very marriageable girls, too, but they have a superficial hardness of
texture on their character which closely resembles the mask of
experience. They are like the baggage which used to be sold in certain
obscure shops in London with the labels of foreign hotels already pasted
on it. It follows that sometimes this girl of the upper-middle,
comfortably fixed class makes a mistake in her choice. Or rather, she
credits with heroic attributes a being of indifferent calibre. She
realizes in him some profound but erratic emotion, and the world in
which she moves beholds her behaviour and listens to her praise of her
beloved with annoyance. They speak, not of a mistake of course, but of
the strangeness of girls nowadays, and incompatibility of temperaments.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these affairs is the blindness
of the girl's friends to her frequent superiority over the being whom
she adores. She isn't good enough for him, they say. The fact is, at the
time of this story, fine women were cheap in England, and gentlemen of
indifferent calibre were picking up bargains every day.

Mr. Reginald Spokesly, a case in point, was accustomed to use this very
phrase when in a mood in which his egotism was lying dormant. "I've
picked up a bargain," he would say to himself as he leaned over the rail
and watched the millions of tiny facets of the sea reflecting the
sunset. "A bargain," he would whisper in an awed voice, nodding gravely
at the opposite bulkhead, as he sat in his room with his feet in a
bucket of hot water, for this was his way with corns. And Mr. Reginald
Spokesly was intensely preoccupied with women. He had often sighed, on
the bridge, as he reflected what he might do "if he only had the means."
Perhaps, when he got a command.... He would halt short at this, suddenly
remembering the bargain he had picked up.

But it must not be for one moment imagined, when I speak of Mr. Spokesly
as being at that time a gentleman of indifferent calibre, that he was so
regarded by himself or his world afloat or ashore. Indeed, he was a
rather magnificent person. He played his cards very well. He "kept his
ears open and his mouth shut," as he himself put it. He had once
confided to Mr. Chippenham, the third officer, that "there was jobs
goin' just now, soft things, too, if y' only wait." The third officer
was not directly interested, for he knew well enough that he himself
stood no chance in that gamble. But he was impressed by Mr.
Spokesly's--the second officer's--exquisite fitness for any such jobs.
Even the Old Man, taciturn, distant, and dignified as he was, was not up
to Mr. Spokesly. Who had so slow and so deliberate a walk? Who could
treat the common people of the ship, the sailors, the firemen, the
engineers and wireless boys, with such lofty condescension? It was a
lesson in deportment to see him stroll into the chief engineer's room
and extend himself on that gentleman's settee. It was unfortunately true
that some of those common people treated Mr. Spokesly, not as a
commander _in posse_, not as one of those select beings born to rule,
but as one of themselves. Mr. Chippenham remembered with pain one
incident which showed this only too clearly. They were watching a
destroyer coming into port, her decks lined with bluejackets, her three
funnels belching oil-smoke, her semaphore working. As she swung round
astern of them, Mr. Spokesly, who had been pacing to and fro paring his
nails, joined the little group at the rail, nodding in majestic
approval.

"Ah," he remarked in his loose-lipped, husky drawl, "I sh'd like to
'andle one o' them little things meself."

And to this the third engineer, his greasy arms asprawl on the rail, had
looked over his shoulder and remarked:

"You! I'd like to see you! You'd pile her up on the beach before you'd
had her five minutes, that's what _you'd_ do."

It was a vile, gratuitous insult, the third officer had thought hotly,
and he had watched Mr. Spokesly do the only thing possible, walk grandly
away. That was the worst of those beastly engineers. If you gave them an
inch they'd take a mile. And he made a mental note of what _he_ would do
when he attained to command--some twenty years ahead.

But this was, I am glad to say, an exceptional incident. Circumstances
as a rule favoured the development of Mr. Spokesly's _amour propre_ and
he brooded with intense absorption upon his own greatness. Now this
greatness was a very intricate affair. It was inextricably tangled up
with the individual soul known as Reginald Spokesly, Esquire, of Thames
Road, Twickenham, England, and the unit of the Merchant Service known as
R. Spokesly, second officer, S. S. _Tanganyika_, a member of what is
called "the cloth." Perhaps it would be better to include another
manifestation of greatness, which was Mr. Spokesly's tremendous power
over women. His own explanation of this last phenomenon was that he
"kept them in their place." To him they were mere playthings of an idle
hour. Perhaps his desire was most aroused by stories of Oriental
domesticity, and he almost regretted not being born a pasha, where his
abilities as a woman tamer could have had more scope. However, he did
not read a great deal. In fact, he could hardly be said to read at all.
He patronized a book now and then by falling asleep over it.

In the early days of the war, Mr. Spokesly's light had been hidden for
some years in the Far East. Indeed, when I think of the sort of life he
was gradually subsiding into out there, I sometimes wonder if he would
ever have attained to such a capacity for moral effort as he afterwards
displayed unless the war had evoked the illusion that he ought to go
home and enlist, and so had opened to him the wealth of bargains to be
picked up in England. That, at any rate, had been his ostensible reason
for quitting the peculiar mixture of tropical languor and brisk
modernity which had been his life for nearly four years. Perhaps it was
not so much love of country as personal destiny, for Mr. Spokesly had a
very real belief in his destiny. Here again his greatness, which was of
course the warp and woof of his destiny, showed a pattern of perplexing
intricacy. He regarded himself with approval. He was putting on weight.
A vigorous man of thirty-odd, coming thousands of miles across the ocean
to fight for his country! He read the roll of honour each week in the
papers that met them on the homeward voyage, and the page blurred to his
sight as he _gazed_ through it into the future. You might almost, he
reflected, count out those who were wounded and missing as well! Whether
he had ever had any genuine intention of becoming a soldier I do not
know. He had a remarkably strong instinct of self-preservation; but then
many soldiers have that. As the liner neared home, however, Mr.
Spokesly's thoughts centred more and more truly about himself and his
immediate future. The seraglios he had quitted in Singapore and Kobe and
Rangoon were, in his own words, "a thing o' the past." The time, "the
psychological moment," as he phrased it without in the least knowing
what the word meant, was come when he would have to marry or, at any
rate, become engaged. He was not, he told himself, "pertickler." He
reckoned he could fall in love with almost anybody who wasn't too old or
too ugly, and providing always that she had "a dot." He was a stern
believer in a dot, even though he did not know how to pronounce it.
Looming behind the steep hill leading to a command were the happy
mountain valleys of a comfortable independence. To marry money! Now he
came to think of it, it had been the pervading ambition of his life. And
here was his chance. He pulled down his vest and settled his tie as he
thought of the golden future before him. He had a vision of an England
full of consolable fiancées, young ladies of wealth, beauty, and
position, sobbing gently for departed heroes, but willing to be
comforted....

It did not turn out that way, of course. Indeed, his first experience on
arrival was of an England of brisk, determined young women making
munitions, clipping tickets, and conducting street cars, and he was
angered at the unwomanliness of it all. Woman's place, he had always
believed, was in the harem. He had held, when lying in his hammock out
East and lazily reading the home news of suffrage riots, that the
Government "ought to have tied some of 'em up and horse-whipped 'em."
But he left the Metropolis behind as soon as possible, and went down to
stay with his family at Twickenham. And it was here, on a perfect day in
late autumn, that Ada Rivers, living with her married sister at
Richmond, brought balm to his wounded spirit.

From the very first day, spent in a punt at Kingston, she had struck the
right note of adoration. He had been telling her how his last ship had
been sunk by the _Emden_, and was going on to say he had providentially
left her just before, when she broke in ecstatically: "And you went
through it all?" He hesitated for a moment, and she followed this up
with, "How glorious! You _have_ been doing your bit!" She leaned back on
the cushions and gazed at him with shining gray eyes as he poled her
gently along, his large hairy arms, one of them clasped by a wrist
watch, outstretched above her, as though in some mystic benediction, his
loose mouth and double chin pendulous with the delicious flattery. For
she was a fine girl--he realized that immediately his sister had
introduced him. She made him feel his masculinity. He liked to think
afterwards of how deliberately he had made his choice.

He floated for a time in a dream of sensuous delight, for she was one of
those girls who will obey orders, who like orders, in fact, and whose
proud subservience sends a thrill of supreme pleasure through the minds
of their commanders. They were soon engaged.

There was not as much difference between this courtship and that of an
average coal or ice man as one might suppose. Mr. Spokesly's emotional
output so far had been, if I may say so, limited. But this was all grist
to Ada's mill. It was put down to the strong, deep, English sailor
nature, just as his primitive methods of wooing were credited to the
bluff English sailor nature. She was under an illusion all the time. All
that her married sister could say was useless. The married sister was
married to a man who was a woman-tamer himself in a way. He was now at
the Front, where he had won a medal for extraordinary bravery, and his
wife was dreading the day of his return. She used the interval of peace
and quiet to warn her sister. But who can fight against an illusion? The
married sister had to shrug her shoulders, and point out that Mr.
Spokesly was throwing himself away on a silly chit. She admired Mr.
Spokesly herself, to tell the truth, and liked to have him in the house,
where he was often to be found during his six weeks' vacation. It was
she who told him his was "a man's work" in a low contralto voice with a
thrill in it. This was really unfair to the husband in Flanders who had
displayed extraordinary bravery in holding an isolated post for goodness
knows how many hours. It would not do to assert that Mr. Spokesly ever
played with the idea of consoling a possible widow who already admired
him. He had not sufficient imagination for this. And Ada herself was
quite able to hold up her end. She made Mr. Spokesly feel not only
great, but good. It was she who led him to see where his weakness lay, a
success possible only to a clever girl. Unconscious of her promptings,
he came to the conclusion that, to do himself justice, he must make an
effort and "improve his education." When he heard the sisters rattling
away in a foreign tongue he made a mental note that "he must rub up his
French." The London School of Mnemonics, however, did the trick. It was
just what he wanted. This school had a wonderful system of
memory-training which was endorsed by kings and emperors, merchant
princes and famous mezzo-sopranos. By means of this system, learned in
twelve lessons, you trebled your intellectual power, quadrupled your
earning power, and quintupled your general value to yourself and to the
world. The system was comprised in twelve books of aphorisms, slim
volumes in gray-green paper covers, daintily printed and apparently
addressed straight to Mr. Spokesly's heart. First, he was told, he was
capable of anything. He knew that, and with an almost physical feeling
of pleasure he read on. Second, came a little story about a celebrated
philosopher. Mr. Spokesly was charmed.

It must not be supposed, however, that this was all bunkum to Mr.
Spokesly. It was, on the contrary, deadly earnest. Like many Englishmen
of his day, he knew there was something wrong with him. He was aware of
people in the world who used their brains and held clear notions about
things and ideas, very much as a man groping along a foggy street is
aware of a _conversazione_ in one of the mansions. To him the London
School of Mnemonics was a sound commercial proposition. In twelve
lessons, by correspondence, they offered to develop his memory,
stimulate his will power, and increase his salary. He had picked up the
first half-dozen pamphlets in his fiancée's home. The husband of the
married sister had taken the course as far as Number Six, which was:
"How to Dominate Your Friends," with a chatty essay on Hypnotism and
Matrimony, before leaving for Flanders and glory. Mr. Spokesly read them
with an avidity unknown to him since he had spent a month in London many
years before studying for his master's license. He felt on the highroad
to success. He joined the London School of Mnemonics. He bought an
engagement ring for Ada and a handsome bracelet for the married sister.
He left them for a while, he said, "to join up." He meant to do it, too,
for there is something pathetically appealing in the atmosphere of late
autumn in England. It goes to the heart. It is not quite so piercing a
call as the early spring, when one's very soul goes out in a mystical
passionate union with the spirit of the land, but it is very strong, and
Mr. Spokesly, without understanding it, felt the appeal. But at
Paddington he stopped and had a drink. For all his years at sea, he was
a Londoner at heart. He spoke the atrocious and barbarous jargon of her
suburbs, he snuffed the creosote of her wooden streets and found it an
admirable _apératif_ to his London beer. And while the blowsy spirit of
London, the dear cockney-hearted town, ousted the gentler shade of
England, Mr. Spokesly reflected that neither the army nor the navy would
have any use for a man of commanding powers, a man whose will and memory
had been miraculously developed. The army would not do, he was sure. The
navy would probably put him in charge of a tug; for Mr. Spokesly had no
illusions as to the reality of the difficulties of life in his own
sphere. And he had been long enough at one thing to dread the wrench of
beginning at the bottom somewhere else. This is the tragic side of
military service in England, for most Englishmen are not adaptable. Mr.
Spokesly, for example, had gone to sea at the age of twelve. Unless he
won a lottery prize he would be going to sea at seventy, if he lived so
long. So he reflected, and the upshot was that he applied--quite humbly,
for he had not as yet developed any enormous will power--and secured a
billet as second officer on the _Tanganyika_. He told his people and Ada
that there was "a chance of a command," which of course was perfectly
true. "It is a man's work," she thrilled softly, echoing her sister, and
she closed her eyes to enjoy the vision of him, strong in character,
large in talent, irresistible in will power, commanding amid storms and
possibly even shot and shell....

       *       *       *       *       *

Having kept the middle watch, which is from twelve to four, Mr. Spokesly
was sitting in his cabin abaft the bridge of the _Tanganyika_, his feet
in a white-enamelled bucket of hot water, contemplating the opposite
bulkhead. He was thinking very hard, according to the System of the
London School of Mnemonics. The key of this system was simplicity
itself. You wanted to remember something which you had forgotten. Very
well; you worked back on the lines of a dog following a scent. From what
you were thinking at the present moment to what you were thinking when
you came in the door, which would lead you by gentle gradations back to
the item of which you were in search. Very simple. Unfortunately, Mr.
Spokesly, in the course of these retrograde pilgrimages, was apt to come
upon vast and trackless oceans of oblivion, bottomless gulfs of time in
which, as far as he could recall, his intellectual faculties had been in
a state of suspended animation. The London School of Mnemonics did not
seem to allow sufficiently for the bridging of these gaps. It is true
they said in Lesson Three, with gentle irony, _Remember the chain of
ideas is often faulty; there may be missing links_. Mr. Spokesly, who on
this occasion was determined to remember what he was thinking of at the
moment when the Old Man spoke sharply behind him and made him jump, was
of the opinion that it was the chain that was often missing and that all
he could discover were a few odd links! He lifted one foot out of the
grateful warmth and felt the instep tenderly, breathing hard, with his
tongue in one corner of his mouth, as his mind ran to and fro nosing at
the closed doors of the past. What _was_ he thinking of? He remembered
it attracted him strangely, had given him a feeling of pleasant
anticipation as of a secret which he could unfold at his leisure. It
was ... it was.... He put his foot into the water again and frowned.
He had been thinking of Ada, he recalled----Ah! _Now_ he was on the
track of it. He had been thinking not of her but of the melancholy fact
communicated to him by his own sister, that Ada had no "dot," no money
until her father died. Now how in the world did that come to react upon
his mind as a pleasant thing? It was a monstrous thing, that he should
have capsized his future by such precipitate folly! Mr. Spokesly
comprehended that what he was looking for was not a memory but a mood.
He had been in a certain mood as he stood on the bridge that morning
about half-past three, his hand resting lightly on the rail, his eyes on
the dim horizon, when the Old Man, in his irritating pink-striped
pajamas, had spoken sharply and made him jump. And that mood, the
product of some overnight reflections on the subject of will power, had
been rising like some vast billow of cumulous vapour touched with
roseate hues from a hidden sun, and he had been just on the brink of
some surprising discovery, when----It was very annoying, for the Old Man
had been preoccupied by a really very petty matter, after all. (The word
"petty" was a favourite with Mr. Spokesly.) It had, however, broken the
spell, and here he was, a few hours later, hopelessly snarled up in all
sorts of interminable strings of ideas. The business of thinking was not
so easy as the London School of Mnemonics made out. Lifting his feet
slowly up and down, he reached out and took Lesson Number Five from the
holdall (with his initials in blue) which hung above his head. As he
turned the richly printed pages, a delicious feeling of being cared for
and caressed stole over him. _Never despair_, said the Lesson gravely,
_Nil Desperandum. Just as the darkest hour is before the dawn, so
victory may crown your toil at the least likely moment._

And so it was! With a feeling of sombre triumph, Mr. Spokesly "saw the
connection" as he would have said. He saw that the importance of that
lost mood lay in the petty annoyance that followed. For the Old Man had
called him down about a mistake. A trifle. A petty detail. A bagatelle.
It only showed, he thought, the narrowness of mind of some commanders.
Now _he_...

But with really remarkable resolution Mr. Spokesly pulled himself up and
concentrated upon the serious side of the question. There had been a
mistake. It was as though the Old Man's quiet sharpness had gouged a
great hole in Mr. Spokesly's self-esteem, and he had been unconsciously
busy, ever since, bringing excuse after excuse, like barrow-loads of
earth, in a vain attempt to fill it up. It was still a yawning hiatus in
the otherwise flawless perfection of his conduct as an officer. He had
made a mistake. And the London School of Mnemonics promised that whoever
followed their course made no mistake. He felt chastened as he
habituated himself to this feeling that perhaps he was not a perfect
officer. He took his feet out of the lukewarm water and reached for a
towel.

It will not do to laugh at such a discovery on the part of Mr. Spokesly.
Only those who have had responsibility can be fully alive to the
enormous significance of self-esteem in imposing authority upon a
frivolous world. And it must be borne in mind that to Mr. Spokesly
himself, at that moment, to fail in being a perfect officer was a
failure in life. It was part of the creed of his "cloth" that each of
them was without blemish until his license was cancelled by the
invisible omnipotence of the law. It was, if you like, his ethic, the
criterion of his integrity, the inexorable condition of carrying-on in
his career. This ideal perfection of professional service resembles the
giant fruits and immaculate fauna depicted on the labels of the canned
articles--a grandiose conception of what was within. Just as nobody
really believes that apples and salmon are like that and yet would
refuse to buy a can without some such symbol, so Mr. Spokesly would have
found his services quite unmarketable if he had discarded the polite
fiction that he was, as far as was humanly possible, incapable of
improvement. It was the aura, moreover, which distinguished him and all
other officers from the riff-raff which nowadays go to sea and ape their
betters--the parsons and surgeons, the wireless operators and engineers.
They were common clay, mere ephemeral puppets, without hope of command,
minions to take orders, necessary evils in an age of mechanism and
high-speed commerce. It was an article of Mr. Spokesly's creed that "the
cloth" should stand by each other. He was revolving this assumption in
his mind as he rubbed the towel gently to and fro, and it occurred to
him in his slow way that if he were to adopt the modern ideas of the
London School of Mnemonics, if he were to devote every fibre of his
being to forging ahead, gaining promotion, proving himself a superior
article with a brain which was the efficient instrument of an
indomitable will, then the obsolete idea of professional solidarity
would have to go overboard. And just at that moment, with the
consciousness of that petty mistake casting a shadow on his soul and the
sharp rebuke of the Old Man rankling below, Mr. Spokesly was quite
prepared to jettison anything that stood in the way of what he vaguely
formulated as "his gettin' on." Mr. Spokesly's conceptions of
advancement were of course largely but not entirely circumscribed by his
profession. His allusions in conversation with Mr. Chippenham to "soft
things" were understood to refer to shore jobs connected with shipping
and transport. At one time the fairy-tale fortune of a shipmate who had
married a shipowner's daughter had turned his thoughts that way. But not
for long. Mr. Spokesly had a feeling that to marry into a job had its
drawbacks. He felt "there was a string to it." And come what might, in
his own hazy, amorphous fashion he desired to be captain of his soul.
Had he the power at that moment of calling up Destiny, he would have
made quite modest demands of her. Of course, a command, a fine large
modern steamer, twin-screw, trading for choice in the Pacific, where as
he knew very well a commander had pickings that placed him in a few
years beyond the reach of penury at any rate.... Ada could come out. She
would do justice to such a position out East. And when the war was
over they could come home and have a little place up the river at Bourne
End ... nothing very great, of course, but just right for Captain and
Mrs. Spokesly. The dream was so very fair, so possible yet so utterly
improbable, that his mouth drew down tremulously at the corners as he
stared at the bulkhead. His eyes grew tired and smarted. Ah! Money! How
often he had mouthed in jest that sorry proverb about the lack of money
being the root of all evil! And how true it was, after all. Suddenly he
stood up and became aware of someone in the alleyway outside his window.
With a sense of relief, for his reflections had become almost
inconveniently sombre and ingrowing, he saw it was someone he already
knew in a friendly way, though he still addressed him as "Stooard."

There is much in a name, much more in a mode of address. When Archy
Bates, the chief steward of the _Tanganyika_, turned round and hoisted
himself so that he could look into Mr. Spokesly's port, their friendship
was just at the point when the abrupt unveiling of some common
aspiration would change "Stooard" into "Bates" or "Mister." For a
steward on a ship is unplaced. The office is nothing, the personality
everything. He may be the confidential agent of the commander or he may
be the boon companion of the cook. To him most men are mere assimilative
organisms, stomachs to be filled or doctored. Archy Bates was, like
another Bates of greater renown, a naturalist. He studied the habits of
the animals around him. He fed them or filled them with liquor,
according to their desires, and watched the result. It might almost be
said that he acted the part of Tempter to mankind, bribing them into
friendship or possibly only a useful silence. It is a sad but solid fact
that he nearly always succeeded.

But he liked Mr. Spokesly. One of the disconcerting things about the
wicked is their extreme humanity. Archy Bates liked Mr. Spokesly's
society. Without in the least understanding how or why, he enjoyed
talking to him, appreciated his point of view, and would have been glad
to repay confidence with confidence. He was always deferential to
officers, never forgetting their potentialities as to future command. He
respected their reserve until they knew him intimately. He was always
willing to wait. His discretion was boundless. He knew his own value.
Friends of his had no reason to regret it. That third engineer, a coarse
fellow, one of the few irreconcilables, had called him a flunkey. Well,
the third engineer paid dearly for that in trouble over petty details,
soap, towels, and so forth. But with "gentlemen" Archy Bates felt
himself breathing a larger air. You could do something with a gentleman.
And Mr. Spokesly, in the chief steward's estimation, was just that kind
of man. So, in the lull of activity before lunch, he came along to see
if Mr. Spokesly felt like a little social diversion.

"Busy?" he enquired, thrusting his curiously ill-balanced features into
the port and smiling. Mr. Bates's smile was unfortunate. Without being
in any way insincere, it gave one the illusion that it was fitted on
over his real face. A long, sharp nose projecting straight out from a
receding brow nestled in a pomatumed and waxed moustache, and his eyes,
of an opaque hazel, became the glinting centres of scores of tiny
radiating lines. His chin, blue with shaving, and his gray hair
carefully parted in the middle, made up a physiognomy that might have
belonged either to a bartender or a ward politician. And there was a
good deal of both in Archy Bates.

To the enquiry Mr. Spokesly shook his head. The steward gave a sharp
look each way, and then made a complicated gesture that was a silent and
discreet invitation.

"Oh, well." Mr. Spokesly shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the
corners of his mouth. The face at the window tittered so violently that
the owner of it nearly lost his balance and put up a hand to support
himself.

"Come on, old chap. I've got half an hour to spare."

"Oh, all right, Bates. Sha'n't be a minute."

The face, like a satiric mask, suddenly vanished.

Mr. Spokesly put on his socks and slippers and, lighting a cigarette,
prepared to go along. He liked the steward, and he felt lonely. It so
happened that, quite apart from his intrinsic greatness, Mr. Spokesly
was very much alone on the _Tanganyika_. Mr. Chippenham was too young;
the chief officer, a gnarled round-shouldered ancient, was too old; the
commander too distant. There remained only the chief engineer, a robust
gentleman who conversed hospitably on all subjects in a loud voice but
invited no confidences. And it was confidences Mr. Spokesly really
wanted to give. He wanted to impress his ideals and superior views of
life upon a sympathetic and receptive mind. Most men are unconscious
artists. Only instead of working in stone or brass or pigment, instead
of composing symphonies or poems, they hold forth to their kindred
spirits and paint, in what crude words they can find, the god-like
beings they conceive themselves to be. Indeed, when we call a man a
"hot-air merchant"; when we say "he does not hate himself," what is it
save a grudging tribute to his excessive artistry? He is striving to
evolve in your skeptical mind an image which can appear only by the
light of your intelligent faith and liberal sympathy. He claims of you
only what all artists claim of the critic--understanding. He seeks to
thrill you with pleasure at the noble spectacle of himself blocked out
against a sombre background of imperfect humanity. But to get the very
best out of him you must become one in soul with him, and do the same
yourself.




CHAPTER II


"You will be pleased to hear, sweetheart, that I have already got
promotion, I am now chief officer, next to the captain. I dare say, in a
short time your only will be coming home to take a command. I am
persevering with the Course you gave me, and I find it a great
assistance. Of course I have a great deal more to do now, especially as
the last man was scarcely up to his work.... While as for the captain, I
may as well tell you ..."

And so on. Mr. Spokesly wrote this letter from Alexandria, where the
_Tanganyika_ was discharging rails and machinery. He wrote it to Ada,
who was staying with her family, including her married sister, in
Cornwall, because of the air raids. She read it by the low roar of the
autumnal seas round the Cornish coast and she was thrilled. Having
written it, Mr. Spokesly dressed himself in discreet mufti and went
ashore with his bosom friend, Archy Bates. His commander, walking to and
fro on the bridge with his after-dinner cigar, saw them disappear
between the tracks and the piles of freight. He frowned. He was no snob,
but he had most explicit views about a ship's officer's relations with
the rest of mankind. It was, in his opinion, _infra dig_ to associate
with a steward. He had mentioned it pointedly yet good-humouredly one
day, and at his amazement Mr. Spokesly had replied that he would please
himself in a private matter. Captain Meredith had been so flabbergasted
at this wholly unexpected turn of the conversation that he said no more.
Later he put it down to swelled head. Yet what else could be done? Mr.
Spokesly had a master's certificate and the third mate had none at all.
Captain Meredith began to muse regretfully upon the loss of his chief
officer. For although Mr. Spokesly had omitted to mention it, the
immediate cause of his promotion was the sudden death at sea of his
predecessor. That gnarled and taciturn being, whose round moon-face had
relapsed with age to the consistency of puckered pink parchment, had
been for many years "taking care of himself." In that remote epoch when
he was young it may be doubted whether he had done this, for he bore the
marks of a life lived to the very delirious verge. That was long before
Mr. Spokesly had got into short pants, however. Mr. McGinnis took care
of himself day and night. He had achieved a miraculous balance of forces
within his frame, a balance which enabled him to stand his watch on the
bridge and give orders to the bo'sun, but no more. He would pass with a
stealthy quietness along the deck and into his room, and there sit, his
claw-like hands on the arms of his chair, his emaciated form encased in
a diamond-patterned kimono, his pink jaws working noiselessly on a piece
of some patent chewing gum, of which he carried a stock. Sometimes he
read a page or two of a quiet story, but usually he switched off the
electric and sat chewing far into the night. At a quarter to four one
morning, the Asiatic sailor who came to arouse him discovered him
hanging by his arms to the edge of his bunk, as though crucified, his
appallingly thin limbs sprawling and exposing tattooings of astonishing
design and colouring, his jaw hanging, his sunken eyes staring with
senseless curiosity at a spot on the carpet. The Japanese sailor went
back to Mr. Spokesly, who was on watch on the bridge, and reported
impassively, "Chief mate all same one stiff." Mr. Spokesly was
incredulous, though he knew from experience the uncanny prescience of
the Oriental in such matters. "What? Sick?" he inquired in a whisper.
The Japanese, a diminutive white wraith in the profound gloom of the
bridge, replied, "No sick. All same one stiff. No can do." This was his
final word. Mr. Spokesly hurriedly aroused the captain, who came out on
the bridge and told them to go down together. They went down and Mr.
Spokesly had a violent shock. He told Archy Bates afterwards he had "had
a turn." He did all that a competent officer could do. He spoke sharply
the man's name. "Mr. McGinnis!" and Mr. McGinnis continued to regard the
spot on the carpet with intense curiosity. He felt the breast, held a
shaving glass to the lips of the silent McGinnis, and realized that the
Oriental who stood by the door, his dark face impassive and his gaze
declined upon the floor, was perfectly right. As Mr. Spokesly raised the
stiffened arms the kimono fell open, and he had another violent shock,
for Mr. McGinnis had evidently been a patron of the art of tattooing in
all its branches. His arms and torso formed a ghastly triptych of green
and blue figures with red eyes. Contrasted with the pallor of death the
dreadful designs took on the similitude of living forms. With a movement
of hasty horror Mr. Spokesly laid the body on the settee and went away
to call Mr. Chippenham and the chief steward.

The conjectures which followed were most of them beside the mark. The
fact was, intelligence has its limits. The miraculous balance of forces
had been in some obscure way disturbed, and Mr. McGinnis, like the
one-hoss shay, had simply crumbled to dust at the appointed time.
Captain Meredith was sorry, for Mr. McGinnis had been what is known as
"a good mate." And Captain Meredith, whether from mere prejudice or
genuine conviction, was unable to discern the makings of a "good mate"
in Mr. Spokesly. It was almost miraculous, he reflected, how the work of
the ship had got balled up since the invaluable McGinnis, neatly sewed
up in some of his own canvas, had made a hole in the Mediterranean. It
should be understood that Captain Meredith was a humane man. He was also
a seafaring man. The fact that McGinnis had been excommunicated from the
church of his baptism did not deter Captain Meredith from reading the
burial service over him. And his annoyance at seeing his new chief
officer and the steward "as thick as thieves," as he put it, was really
a humane feeling. He had served in ships where the commander had been
utterly at the mercy of some contemptible dish-washer who had wormed
himself into his superior's confidence, acting perhaps as a go-between
in some shady deal. He had seen a veteran shipmaster, a man of fine
presence and like no one so much as some retired colonel of guards,
running ignominiously along the quay to fetch back a dirty little
half-breed steward, who had seen fit to take offence and who knew too
much. Captain Meredith had seen these things, and though he kept them
locked up in his own breast he did not forget them. He was perfectly
well aware of the precarious hold most of us have upon honour. He knew
that a certain austerity of demeanour was the only practicable armour
against many temptations.

But of course Captain Meredith couldn't be expected to understand Mr.
Spokesly's state of mind. Mr. Spokesly didn't understand it himself. It
was scarcely sufficient to say that his promotion had carried him away.
Far from it. He regarded this step as merely a start. What had inspired
him at the moment to "stand up to the Old Man" was nothing less than a
wave of genuine emotion. You see, he really liked Archy Bates so far as
he knew him then. They were real chums, telling each other their
grievances and sharing a singularly identical opinion of the Old Man's
fitness for his job. There are more unions of souls in this world than
materialists would like us to believe. What Captain Meredith mistook for
harsh and ill-timed impudence was really a thickness of utterance and a
sudden vision of injustice. Once done, and the Old Man reduced to an
amazed silence, the incident took in Mr. Spokesly's mind a significance
so tremendous that he hardly knew what to think. He had "tackled the Old
Man"! He had broken the spell of a lifetime of silent obsequiousness to
a silly convention. After all ... And, moreover, it took will power to
do it. He was improving. The London School of Mnemonics had achieved
another miracle. He went over it all again in Archy Bates's cabin,
Archy's ear close to his mouth, door shut, curtains folded across the
window. You never can tell who's listening on a ship.... "I turns an'
says to him, 'Look here, Captain'..." Archy listening with intensity,
his shoulders hunched, his opaque, agate-like eyes glittering on each
side of his long sharp nose, while his thumb and forefinger slowly and
repeatedly thrust back his pomatumed and waxed moustache from his lips,
and breathing "Jus' fancy!... And you told him that?... Goo' Lord!...
Well, I always knew 'e 'ad no use for me...." Mr. Spokesly pulled Archy
Bates close up to him so that his lips were actually funnelled in the
other's ear and breathed back: "_Take it from me, Archy, he ain't fit
for his job!_"

Archy Bates had risen, just then, to get the corkscrew. He was
profoundly moved, and actually found himself trying to open a bottle of
whiskey with a button-hook. He showed his idiocy to Mr. Spokesly. "Jus'
fancy. I don't know what I'm doin', straight." And they both laughed.
But he was profoundly moved. He was preoccupied with the possible
developments of this tremendous affair. Mr. Spokesly, by virtue of that
last insane whisper, had of course delivered himself over, body, soul,
and spirit, to the steward, but Mr. Spokesly was a friend of his. He had
quite other plans for Mr. Spokesly. He stared harder than the job
warranted as he put the bottle between his knees and hauled on the
corkscrew. Pop! They drank, and the act was as a seal on a secret
compact.

And it was that--a compact so secret that even they, the parties to it,
were scarcely conscious of the pledge. But as the days passed, days of
hasty clandestine comparing of grievances in each other's rooms, days of
whispering apart, days followed by nights of companionship ashore, each
realized how necessary was the other to his full appreciation of life.
Archy Bates found Mr. Spokesly a tower of strength and a house of
defence. If any complaint sounded in his presence concerning stores, Mr.
Spokesly was silent for a space and then walked away. Only that vulgar
third engineer was insensible to the superb reproof. "There goes the
flunkey's runner," he remarked, in execrable taste, and Mr. Spokesly was
obliged to ignore him. On the other hand, Mr. Spokesly found in Archy
Bates a sympathetic soul, a wit that jumped with his own and understood
without tedious circumlocution "how he felt about it." More precious
than rubies is a friend who understands how you feel about it. He found
in Archy a gentleman who was master of what was to Mr. Spokesly an
incredible quantity of ready cash. At first Mr. Spokesly had
apologetically borrowed "half a quid till to-morrow, being short
somehow," and Archy had scorned to split a sovereign. In some way only
partially understood by Mr. Spokesly as yet, certain eddies of the vast
stream of gold and paper which was turning the wheels of the war swirled
into the pockets of Archy Bates. He had it to burn, as they say. It was
bewildering in its variety. British, American, French, Italian, Greek,
Egyptian, and Japanese notes were rolled into one inexhaustible wad.
More bewildering even than this was Archy Bates's uncanny command of
gold. It was extraordinary how this impressed Mr. Spokesly. At a time
when sovereigns and eagles and napoleons had practically vanished from
the pockets of the private citizen, Archy Bates had bags of them. And
like his paper currency, it was of all nations. Ten-rouble Russian
pieces, twenty-drachma Greek pieces, Australian sovereigns, and massive
Indian medals worth twenty dollars each, chinked and jingled against the
homelier coinage of France and England. "Business, my boy, business!" he
would explain with a snigger when he met Mr. Spokesly's rapt gaze of
amazement. Very good business, too, the latter thought, and sighed. But
there was one point about Archy which distinguished him from many owners
of gold. He spent it. There lay the magic of his power over Mr.
Spokesly's mesmerized soul. He spent it. Mr. Spokesly saw him and helped
him spend it. Those princely disbursements night after night in
Alexandria postulated some source of supply. And night after night Mr.
Spokesly, pleasantly jingled with highballs and feminine society, felt
himself being drawn nearer and nearer the mysterious source from which
gushed that cosmopolitan torrent of money. Mr. Spokesly was in the right
mood for the revelation. He was serious. He was a practical man. He
needed no London School of Mnemonics to teach him to cultivate a man
with plenty of money. When he and Archy Bates had walked quickly away
from the ship and passed the guard at Number Six Gate, they could
scarcely be recognized by one who had seen them an hour before, Mr.
Spokesly silently munching his dinner under the Old Man's frown, Archy
in his pantry, encased in a huge white apron, bending his sharp nose
over the steaming dishes, and communicating in violent pantomime with
the saloon waiter.

Now they stood side by side, brothers, magnificently superior to all the
world. A dingy carriage rattled up and Archy waved it away impatiently.
Another, with two horses and rubber tires, was hailed and engaged.
"Might as well do the thing well," said Archy, and Mr. Spokesly agreed
in every fibre of his soul. And it was the same with everything else.
"My motto is," said Archy, "everything of the best, eh? Can't go far
wrong then. He-he!" The third engineer, vulgarian that he was, would
have laughed a shrill, derisive cackle had he heard that speech. The
third engineer was under the illusion that only the virtuous have
ideals. He was wrong. Archy Bates's profession of faith was sincere and
genuine. He had an instinct for what he called the best, which was the
most expensive. What else could be the best? A love of elegance and
refinement was very widespread in those days of high wages and excessive
profits. Archy's wife (for he had a wife and three children in a suburb
of Liverpool) was rapidly filling her instalment-purchased home with
costly furniture. Only a month ago a grand piano had been put in, and
she had had the dining-room suite reupholstered in real pigskin. Mr.
Spokesly knew all this and it almost unmanned him to think that he was
on the way to this eldorado. One night, soon after their arrival in
Alexandria, Archy had hinted there was no reason why he, Mr. Spokesly,
shouldn't be "in it," too. This was late in the evening, when they were
seated on a balcony high above the glitter and noise of the Boulevard
Ramleh, a balcony belonging to a house of fair but expensive reception,
of which Archy was a munificent patron. Archy, after two bottles of
whiskey, had become confidential. He had hinted that his friend Reggie
should be "put next" the business which produced such amazing returns.
Reggie had waited to hear more but, with amusing inconsequence, Archy
had changed the subject, relapsed indeed into a tantalizing dalliance
with a lady friend.

But to-night, in sober earnest, for Archy had had little besides a
bottle of gin since rising in the morning, he proposed that they should
join a business friend of his, and have a quiet little dinner somewhere.
Mr. Spokesly was all eyes, all ears, all intelligent receptiveness. He
enquired who the business friend might be, and Archy, who had his own
enthusiasms, let himself go. His friend, Jack Miller, had been out there
for years. With Swingles, the ship-chandlers. Occupied, Archy surmised,
a very high position there. Had worked himself up. Plenty of skippers
did business with Swingles simply because Jack was there. If he liked to
leave, Archy hadn't any doubt he'd take a good half of Swingles'
business with him. Knew all the languages, French, Greek, Arabic, and so
on. Kept his own hours, went in and out as he liked. Archy only wished
he had Jack Miller's job!

Mr. Spokesly listened greedily. As they debouched upon the great Place
Mohammed Aly, with its myriads of lights and sounds, its illuminated
Arabic night signs, its cracking of whips and tinkling of bells and
glasses, its gorgeous, tessellated platoons of café tables, he took a
deep breath. He felt he was upon the threshold of a larger life,
inhaling a more invigorating air. It seemed to him he was about to quit
the dreary humdrum world of watch-keeping and monthly wages for a region
where dwelt those happy beings who had no fixed hours, who made money,
who had it "to burn," as they say.

And Jack Miller, whom they met that night and many nights after, was a
magnificent accessory of the illusion. He was a dapper little man in
fashionable clothes, a runner for a local ship-chandler, who introduced
them to half-a-dozen ship-captains of a certain type, and together they
went round the vast tenderloin district of the city. Mr. Spokesly was
conscious of a grand exaltation during the day when he recalled his
nightly association with these gentlemen. There were others,
dark-skinned Greeks and Levantines in long-tasselled fezes, who joined
them in their pursuit of pleasure in the great blocks of buildings
behind the Boulevard Ramleh and their jaunts, in taxicabs, to San
Stefano. They were, as Archy put it, over whiskey and soda in his cabin,
gentlemen worth knowing, men with property and businesses. And it was
one of these, one evening on the balcony of the Casino at San Stefano,
who mentioned casually that he often did business with Saloniki and that
if Mr. Spokesly ever had any little things to dispose of on his return,
he would be glad to make him an offer, privately, of course. He often
did this with Mr. Bates, he added, to their mutual satisfaction. Mr.
Spokesly was charmed.

And Captain Meredith, walking the upper bridge and seeing a good deal
more than either Mr. Spokesly or Mr. Bates imagined, wondered how it
would all end. Indeed, Captain Meredith did a good deal of wondering in
those days. He saw the wages going steadily up and up, and discipline
and efficiency going, quite as steadily, down and down. Here was this
young sprig Chippenham, his acting second officer, a boy of nineteen
with no license and no experience, pertly demanding more money. Captain
Meredith recalled his own austere apprenticeship in sail, his still more
austere gruelling as junior officer in tramps, the mean accommodation,
the chill penury, the struggle to keep employed, and he smiled grimly.
He had his own private views of the glory of war; but apart from this,
he wondered greatly what the final upshot of it all would be for the
Merchant Service in general and Mr. Spokesly in particular. For he could
not help regarding his chief officer as a brother of the craft. He
himself had received no illumination from the exponents of modern
thought. He had never been impressed by the advertisements of the London
School of Mnemonics, for example. He was so old-fashioned as to imagine
that to get on, a man must work hard, study hard, live hard, and stand
by for the chance to come. Mr. Spokesly, he knew quite well, had been
through the same mill as himself, only some ten years or so later. He
regarded him, therefore, as he could never regard Mr. Chippenham, for
example, who had never been in sail and who didn't know an oxter-plate
from an orlop-beam. As far as the natural shyness and taciturnity of
Englishmen would allow him, he was anxious for Mr. Spokesly to do well.
The man was singularly fortunate, in his opinion, to be chief mate so
soon. In nine or ten years, perhaps, he would have the experience to
warrant the owners' giving him a command. Provided, of course, that he
stuck to his business and took an interest in the fortunes of the firm.
It will be seen from this that Captain Meredith was a hopeless
conservative and reactionary. One of his brother-captains whom he met at
dinner ashore one evening actually told him so. "Why," said this
gentleman as he held a match to Captain Meredith's cigar, "why, my chief
officer told me to my face the other day that there was nothing in
experience nowadays. One man was as good as another, he said, so long as
he had his master's ticket. Yes! A fact!" Captain Meredith was aware,
too, that his ideas concerning conscientious achievement and enthusiasm
for one's employers were equally archaic. The young men of to-day seemed
to regard their jobs with dislike and their employers with suspicion.
Their sole obsession seemed to be money. He had had pointed out to him
an intoxicated youth who was causing a disturbance in a hotel bar, a
youth going out East to a ship as third officer at two hundred dollars a
month, they said. And the tale was received by every junior officer in
the harbour with hushed awe, although it was obvious that the object of
their envy would probably be laid aside with delirium tremens before he
could reach his billet. Captain Meredith noticed, too, that men who were
engrossed in their work were rated "queer" and as back numbers. Even
among captains he sensed a reluctance to discuss a professional problem.
The third engineer, a skilled mechanic with a tongue like a rasp, and
the second, a patient old dobbin who ought to have been promoted long
ago, were examples of an older school, but the good captain was hardly
in a position to appraise them professionally.

It was different with Mr. Spokesly. If anything happened to Captain
Meredith himself, a sudden weight of responsibility would roll upon Mr.
Spokesly that would, in the captain's opinion, crush him. For it must be
confessed that licenses, diplomas, certificates, or whatever you call
your engraved warrants to ply your trade, are no guarantee of character
and nerve. Nor does efficiency in a subordinate capacity imply success
in command. Just as some men are stormy and intractable nuisances until
they reach the top, when they immediately assume a mysterious and
impregnable composure, so others deliberately avoid rising above a
comfortable mediocrity, conscious of their own limitations and well
satisfied that some other human soul should endure the pangs of the
supreme decision. Others there are, and Captain Meredith believed Mr.
Spokesly was one of them, who lack knowledge of themselves, and who have
not sufficient intelligence either to carry the burden or to refuse it.

This, of course, was not Mr. Spokesly's opinion as time went on. On the
contrary, he had come to the conclusion that it was no use being a smart
officer "if the captain wouldn't back a man up." He told Archy Bates
that "the Old Man was doing all he knew to do him dirty." And Archy
riposted at once with evidence that he himself was the victim of a foul
conspiracy between the Captain and the crew over the grub. Mr. Spokesly
would go out on deck from these pow-wows feeling very happy, for Archy
never failed to open a bottle. Mr. Spokesly would sway a little as he
walked forward to see how the work was going on in the fore-hold. The
_Tanganyika_, having discharged most of her cargo, was now reloading a
great deal of it in obedience to orders from certain invisible but
omnipotent beings higher up. He would sway a little, and hold on to the
hatch coaming, looking down upon the toilers below with an air of
profound abstraction. Then he would move gently until he could raise his
eyes and sweep a casual glance in the direction of the bridge. Sometimes
he would see the Old Man's head as he strode to and fro. On one occasion
he "caught 'im at it," as he told Archy. "Yes, he was spying on me.
Watching me. See his game? I tell you, Archy, it makes a man sick. Fancy
havin' to work under a man like that. Watchin' me. Now he'll write home
to the owners in his confidential report. Well, let him. Thanks to you,
I got more than one egg in the basket. Sometimes, I feel inclined to go
and demand my discharge. I would, only it's war time. Got to carry on in
war time."

Archy Bates nodded over his glass and dipped his long sharp nose into it
before making an audible reply. "Me, too!" he said, setting the glass
down empty. "Me, too! If it wasn't for the war and everybody having to
do their bit, I'd swallow the anchor to-morrow."

And they sat for a moment in silence, each honestly believing the other,
and thinking poignantly of home. Over the steward's bunk, stuffed into a
corner of the frame that enclosed his wife's portrait, was a photograph
of a girl, stark naked save for a wrist watch and a feather in her black
hair, sitting on Archy's knee. From behind this Mrs. Bates's thin face
and flat bosom peeped out, and her eyes seemed to be fixed thoughtfully
upon the two exiled patriots who sat with up-lifted glasses before her.

And on one occasion, Mr. Spokesly, who was spending the evening on board
because steam had been raised for sailing, and because the owners had a
tyrannical rule to that effect--Mr. Spokesly had a dream. He confessed
to Archy that in common honesty he didn't know whether he was awake or
asleep. A sort of vision! He was lying on his bunk with one of the
manuals of the London School of Mnemonics in his hand which he was, he
imagined, reading. It was an essay on "Concentration," and perhaps his
thoughts had wandered a bit.... Anyhow, as he lay there, in among his
thoughts slipped a new and alien impression that there was somebody in
the room. He didn't turn his head, but just lay on in contemplation of
this possibility. Perhaps he had half-closed his eyes, for the
instructions how to concentrate included a note that the brain worked
better if you lay down and shut out the distracting phenomena of
existence. Everything was soft and hazy at the time. The notion that
someone was there and yet not there intrigued him. And even a physical
change, a faint movement of the air caused by somebody altering his
position in space, a faint access of minute sounds entering by a cleared
doorway, did not rouse his suspicions. On the contrary, he must have
dozed, he told Archy solemnly. For the next thing he remembered with any
approach to coherence was a figure with its back to him, standing by the
toilet shelf, holding up an empty glass and smelling it.... A figure he
knew. Yes, he nodded to Archy, who clicked his teeth and threw up his
head, it was the Old Man. And as swiftly as it had come, it was gone.
Mr. Spokesly found himself up on one elbow, pressing thumb and
forefinger into his eyes, and then peering from the brightness of the
light above his head into the rose-shaded twilight of the cabin. There
was no one there. Everything was just the same. The glass was still
there on the mahogany shelf, exactly as he had left it after taking a
tot of whiskey before lying down. Now wasn't that a curious experience,
he demanded?

But Archy was no votary of psychic phenomena. He waved everything of
that sort clean out of existence. What time was it? Quarter-past eight?
Why, he saw the Old Man himself sneaking up the saloon stairs to the
chart-room about that time. Of course it was the Old Man. Just the sort
of game he would be up to. It was revolting. Only the other day he had
given orders for his own supply of spirits to be put in his bedroom
instead of leaving it in Archy's charge. Never said a word to _him_,
mind you! Told the second steward to tell the chief steward. See the
game? Couldn't speak out like a man and say he'd missed a bottle or so.
Justice? There is no such thing as justice when you work for an
underhand, sneaking, spying....

Archy Bates had stopped short in his catalogue of the captain's
deformities as though he had been suddenly throttled. A bell was buzzing
in the pantry. They looked at each other. Archy put down his glass,
listened for a moment, hissed venomously, "That's him!" and slipped out.
Mr. Spokesly sat still while his friend was away answering the summons,
and nursed the rage in his heart to a dull glow. At times it died out
and he shivered as before a blackened fire, the dead ashes of a moody
disgust of life. One of the tragedies of mediocrity is the confused
nature of our emotions. We are like cracked bells, goodly enough in
outward form and fashion, but we don't ring true. Our intelligence shows
us many things about ourselves but fails to evoke a master passion. In
Mr. Spokesly's case, his great desire to have riches did not obscure
from his gaze the austere beauties of rectitude and the slow climb to an
honourable command. Neither did it narrow down his interests to the
sordid goal to which he aspired. The boding apprehension which was
rising like a black cloud at the back of his mind, that he was
neglecting his work, only reflected and magnified the blaze of his
resentment. What encouragement had he, he would like to know. Here he
was, slaving away, and no satisfaction. Nothing he did was right. Spied
on! Ignored! Treated like a dog! Well, he would see. If this little
business of Archy's came off, he would see if he was going to be trodden
on by any shipmaster. Archy....

For a moment the clear vision of Archy obsequiously waiting on the
captain, getting him some hot water perhaps, or laying out a fresh suit
of underwear, troubled the darkness of Mr. Spokesly's ruminations. A
clear vision, such as even the mediocre have at times. And close to it,
as though another miniature in another oval frame, a sharp, clear-cut
memory of Ada Rivers looking up at him with gray adoring eyes, the proud
tremble of her passionate mouth, the curve of her white throat....

Mr. Spokesly rose to his feet and he caught sight of the naked girl
sitting on Archy's knee, and of the bourgeois little face looking out
from behind it. Archy's wife! A long dizzy wave of revulsion made Mr.
Spokesly feel momentarily faint and he clutched the edge of the bunk
board. For a moment he stood, slack-mouthed and moody-eyed, gazing at
the photographs. Then he turned away and crept softly along the
corridor.

Archy was surprised, on his return, to find him gone.




CHAPTER III


Much of the diversity and nearly all the bitterness of our lives are due
to the fact that only rarely do we encounter our exact contemporaries.
In any sphere where all start at a prescribed age, as in great
universities and public services, there is a tendency to become
standardized, to be only one example of a prevalent type. Ambition is
coördinated, jealousy is neutralized; and the hot lava-flow of
individualist passion cools and hardens to an admirable solidity and
composure. One's exact contemporaries are around in throngs. One has no
misgivings, no heartburn, no exasperation with fate. The fortunate being
whose destiny lies this way takes on the gravity, the immobility, and
the polish of an antique statue. The common people pass him as they pass
the Elgin marbles--without emotion; but they are aware subconsciously of
the cold pure beauty of outline, the absolute fidelity to type, which is
the melancholy justification of his existence.

But the common people themselves are not like that. They quit their
exact contemporaries at school and thence-forth are out upon the sea of
life with men of all ages and breedings and nationalities around them
and pressing them hard. They act and are reacted upon. Most of them
nurse a secret grievance. Very few of them have any code of honour
beyond law and decency. They are very largely needy adventurers, living
by their wits, and are ready to pay money to those who profess to show
them how they can increase their incomes, or obtain a pension, or
"better their positions," or cure themselves of the innumerable physical
disabilities which their fatuous ignorance and indolence have brought
upon them. They love to decipher word competitions, football
competitions, racing competitions. They have the high-binder's passion
for getting something for nothing, his dislike to real work. And this
lack of contemporary associates, this rough-and-tumble aspect of the
world, induces them to regard their vices as virtues and themselves as
oppressed helots struggling under the iron heels of those whom mere luck
and cunning have placed in authority over them. The London School of
Mnemonics was making a hundred thousand pounds a year net profit out of
these people in England alone. Even the grim witticism of the company
promoter, that there is "a sucker born every minute," seems inadequate
to account for so monstrous a simplicity of soul. The fact is, the very
boldness of the trick rendered it easy. You paid your guinea, and in due
course, in due secrecy, and under duly sworn promises to divulge no hint
of their contents to a living soul, you received a number of
refined-looking pamphlets containing a couple of thousand words each.
You thrilled as you joined in the game. Even Captain Meredith, sitting
in his chart room and looking through Number Four, which Mr. Spokesly
had inadvertently left on the table, was tickled by the subtle
atmosphere of the style. This, he divined, was the newly discovered
rapid-transit route to the Fortunate Isles, and his expression hardened
to rigid attention as his eye fell on the testimony of "a ship's
officer." This gentleman had risen from the humble position of fourth
officer to the command "of one of our largest liners" in the
miraculously brief period of eighteen months, and ascribed this success
entirely to the lessons of the London School of Mnemonics. Captain
Meredith felt he would like to have a talk with this person; but his
mind became preoccupied with another aspect of the case. Here, he felt,
lay the explanation of a good deal of Mr. Spokesly's recent behaviour.
Captain Meredith was fully aware of the perilous nature of an unmarried
man's life between thirty and forty. He himself had married at
thirty-four, having been frankly terrified by the spiritual difficulties
which he beheld surrounding a continued celibacy when combined with a
life of responsible command at sea. And as he sat back on the settee of
his chart-room and looked out over the top of Pamphlet Number Four at
the steel-blue waters of the Mediterranean, he became dimly aware of Mr.
Spokesly's condition. He could not have set down in ordered phrases the
conclusions at which he was arriving; a ship's captain in time of war
has not the leisure to reduce psychological phenomena to their ultimate
first principles; but he was not far wrong in muttering, inaudibly, that
"the man was rattled." It was this tendency to try and understand his
officers which lay at the back of his leniency towards Mr. Spokesly, a
leniency which Mr. Spokesly himself, in later, saner moments, found it
difficult to comprehend.

Mr. Spokesly had "pulled himself together," as he expressed it, when
they went to sea. Archy Bates tacitly retired into the background. Archy
himself was fully aware that the bosom friendliness of the days and
nights in harbour could not continue at sea, and Mr. Spokesly ceased to
share the never-ending refreshment without which Archy could no longer
support existence. Mr. Spokesly felt better at once, for alcohol had no
real hold upon his system. He toiled laboriously through the astonishing
physical exercises which the London School of Mnemonics artfully
suggested were an aid to mental improvement. He practised Concentration,
Observation, and something the pamphlets called Intensive Excogitation,
which nearly made him cross-eyed. Incidentally, he gathered incongruous
scraps of information about Alcibiades, Erasmus, Savonarola,
Nostradamus, Arminius Vámbéry, and Doctor Johnson. It was while he was
busy carrying out their instructions for accurate observation, that
Captain Meredith asked him, calmly enough, if he had noticed that the
binnacle of Number Two lifeboat was smashed and useless. Mr. Spokesly
assumed a mulish expression and said, No, he hadn't. Well, in future, he
was to have the boats not only made ready, but _kept_ ready, quite
ready, all the time. Mr. Spokesly, looking still more mulish, said he'd
attend to it.

With the gimcrack little sheet copper binnacle in his hand, Mr. Spokesly
made his way to the chief engineer's room. He felt rather bitter. Here
he'd been going along nicely for two whole days and now this happens!
Spoken to like a dog over a little petty thing like this. As if it was
_his_ fault the blamed thing had got smashed. Did he notice it! As if
the chief officer of a ship had no more to do than moon round the deck,
looking at things....

If Captain Meredith had told Mr. Spokesly that he himself had achieved a
rung in the ladder by the simple process of paying very strict attention
to his boats, it would have been the bare truth, but Mr. Spokesly would
not have seen the point. He found the chief engineer standing before his
desk in some deshabille, filling a black briar. His broad, hairy torso
was almost naked, for the scanty singlet was torn under the arms and
ripped across the bosom. His high-coloured features and reddish
moustache were smeared with black oil, and he was breathing in heaves as
though he had been running. When Mr. Spokesly presented his broken
binnacle the chief glanced at it with a scarcely perceptible flicker of
his bushy eyebrows and continued to fill his pipe from a canister on the
desk.

"Well, Mr. Spokesly," he remarked in a voice suitable for addressing an
immense open-air meeting. "Well, what is it now?" And he struck a match
and lit his pipe.

Mr. Spokesly explained that he wanted it mended.

"Oh, you want it mended. Well, why don't you ship a tinker, my fine
fellow? Eh? Why not indent for a tinker? You've got a carpenter and a
lamp trimmer and a bo'sun and a squad of quartermasters. What's a tinker
more or less?" And sitting back in his swivel chair and blowing great
clouds, he looked maliciously at Mr. Spokesly. The chief was a man with
an atmosphere. He had an immense experience, which he kept to himself
save at the hour of need. He had an admirable staff who did just what he
wanted without any rhetoric. Save at times like the present moment, when
Mr. Spokesly, though he was quite unaware of it, was very much _de trop_
owing to a breakdown in the engine room, the chief was a tolerant and
breezy example of the old school. Just now, with the sweat cooling on
his back and a battered binnacle offered to him for repair, he took
refuge in dry malice. He studied Mr. Spokesly mercilessly. He was, or at
any rate he looked, perfectly aware of the extreme unfitness of Mr.
Spokesly's bodily frame, for Mr. Spokesly had done no real work since he
had passed for second mate eleven years before. The chief himself was
inclined to obesity, for he verged on fifty and his frame was of the
herculean type, needing much nourishment and upholstery. But there was a
difference between the huge, red-freckled and hirsute masses upon his
bones and the soft puffiness of Mr. Spokesly's fatty degeneration. The
latter's double chin was in singular contrast with the massive and
muscular salience that gave the chief's face an expression of
indomitable vigour. He sat there, tipping himself slightly back in his
swivel chair, looking quizzically at Mr. Spokesly through the tobacco
smoke. Mr. Spokesly was annoyed. The chief had always been a decent
sort, he had imagined, and here he was jibbing at a little thing like
this. After all, it was the engineer's business to do these things. He,
an officer, couldn't be expected to attend to petty details.... A short
figure with a towel over his naked shoulders appeared abruptly out of
the engine room and passed along the alleyway. The chief called in his
stentorian tones, which issued from between twisted and broken teeth,
"Hi, Mr. Tolleshunt, here's a job for ye. Mate wants a binnacle fixed."
And Mr. Spokesly's mind became easy. A voice from behind a slammed door
said that the mate could take his binnacle and chase himself round the
deck with it, and the chief cackled. Mr. Tolleshunt came out of his room
again on his way to the bathroom. He was a young man with a thick white
neck, and black eyes set in a dirty, dead-white face which bore an
expression of smouldering rage. This, however, was merely an index of
character which, like many such indexes, was misleading. Mr. Tolleshunt
was not ill-tempered, but he had a morbid passion for efficiency. He was
an idealist, with a practical working ideal. He was not prepared to
accept anything in the world as an adequate substitute for achievement.
He had seen through Mr. Spokesly at once, for your idealist is often a
_clairvoyant_ of character. And as he passed along to his bath, his
black eyes smouldered upon the chief officer, who remembered the many
insults he had swallowed from this dirty engineer, and hated him.
Suddenly Mr. Tolleshunt paused, with his hand on the bathroom door, and
looked back. His dead-white face, the firm modelling of cheek and chin
curiously exaggerated by the black smears of grease, broke into a grim
smile as he spoke.

"Say, d'you know who I am, Mister?" he asked, and added, "I'll tell ye.
I'm the Thorn in the Flesh," and he disappeared into the bathroom,
whence came the rumble of water being boiled up by steam. Mr. Spokesly's
eyes returned to the burly gentleman who was regarding him with
amusement. Mr. Spokesly threw up his hands.

"Well," he said, looking stonily at nothing, "there it is. I was told to
get it fixed, an'----"

"Fix it then," said the chief quietly. Mr. Spokesly almost bridled.

"Not my work," he muttered.

"Oh, I see; it's mine, you mean!" surmised the other in a tone, of
assumed enlightenment.

"It's engineer's work," said Mr. Spokesly irritably. The chief made no
reply for a moment, merely studying Mr. Spokesly intently.

"See here, Mister," he began, and reached out a huge hand to close the
door. "See here, Mister, you're under a misapprehension. Now I'll tell
you the whole trouble. You heard Mr. Tolleshunt just now. D'ye know what
he meant when he said he was the Thorn in the Flesh? It's a joke of ours
in the mess room. He meant your flesh. And the reason for that is that
you men up on the bridge are in a false position. Ye have executive
power without knowledge. Ye command a ship and what do ye know about a
ship? To whom do ye come for help, whether it is steering or driving or
discharging or salving or anything? You want the same consideration and
power that you have on a sailing-ship, where you know all about the gear
and make out yourselves. Here, you just have to stand by while we do it.
And on top o' that, you come down here with your silly damn breakages
and expect us to be tinkers as well. You think Mr. Tolleshunt is sadly
deficient in respect, I dare say. But what of his side o' the question?
He's been up all night and all morning on a breakdown. So's the second,
who's still at it. So have I, for that matter. We've all three of us got
just as good tickets as you. Ye never heard about it? Of course not.
What could ye do for us? When ye've pulled that handle on the bridge and
heard the gong answer, you're finished! Ye're in charge of a box of
mechanism of which ye know nothing. Ye walk about in uniform and talk
big about yer work, and what does it all amount to? Ye're a young man,
and I'm, well, not so young, and I tell ye friendly, Mister, ye're a
joke. Ye're what the newspapers call an anachronism or an anomaly, I
forget which. Ye'll never get men like young Tolleshunt, men who know
their work from A to Z, to treat ye seriously unless ye take hold and
study a ship for what she is, a mass o' machinery. Ye'll have to get
shut o' the notion that as soon as ye become officers, ye must lose the
use o' your hands. Now there's just as much engineerin' about that
binnacle as there is in a kettle or a rabbit hutch. Put one o' your
young apprentices to it, and if he can't, make him learn. I've been with
old-time skippers who could do anything, from wire-splicing to welding
an anchor shackle. They learned in the yard before they went to sea.
Your young fellers can do nothing except slather a hose round the decks
and ask for higher wages. Now don't be sore because I'm telling ye the
truth. We're busy and we're tired. We've all sorts o' trouble you can't
understand, vital matters that mean speed and safety. Suppose, after a
spell on the bridge in fog, ye were to come down to yer room and find me
there with some ash-bags to sew up, eh? Imagine it! Just imagine it!"

He sat there, looking sideways at Mr. Spokesly, his pipe between his
enormous thumb and knuckle, asking Mr. Spokesly to imagine this fearsome
thing. But Mr. Spokesly's imagination was for the time being out of
commission. He was scarcely conscious of the request, so intensely
preoccupied was he with the ghastly cleavage between his own estimate of
his position and the chief's. Back of all these frank insults to his
dignity, Mr. Spokesly scented the sinister prejudice of his commander.
As he strode, in severe mental disarray, back to his room, he discovered
a conviction that the chief "had been pumpin' the Old Man." Not that he
needed any pumping, of course. It would be only too like him to blab to
an engineer about his own officers. Well, there it was! Mr. Spokesly
pitched the hapless binnacle on the settee and turned to the wash-stand.
Perhaps it was due to the course of the London School of Mnemonics, the
course in tracing the association of ideas, that when his eye fell on
the tumblers in the rack he should think of that abominable trick of the
Old Man sneaking in and smelling the glass to see if he, Mr. Spokesly,
had been drinking. Couldn't trust him that far! Do what he would he
could give no satisfaction. He would ask to be paid off to-morrow as
soon as they dropped anchor in Saloniki harbour. That would be the best
way. Just pull out of it. They would realize, when he was gone, the sort
of man they had lost. The flame of indignation died out again and he sat
moodily pondering the difficulty of commanding an adequate appreciation.
Command! The word stung him to bodily movement. If only he could once
grasp the sceptre, he could defy them all. He would have the whip-hand
then. And there were ways, there were ways of making money. Some he had
heard of on this run were quadrupling their incomes. Archy had whispered
incredible stories of skippers and stewards working together ... working
together. Perhaps it would be worth while to stick to the ship for a
voyage or so, even if he did have to put up with this sort of thing.
They would reach Saloniki in a few hours, and then they would see.

It frequently happens that moods which would logically drive men mad,
moods which seem to have no natural antidote, are broken up and
neutralized by some entirely fortuitous event. It is not too much to say
that Mr. Spokesly's grievances were inducing one of these moods, when
the wholesome activity of affairs on the forecastle-head, the keen
autumn wind blowing across the bony ridges of Chalcidice, and the
professional criticism evoked by the ships outward-bound, blew the foul
vapours away. Captain Meredith, whose reflective and unchallenging blue
eyes were visible between the weather-cloth and the laced peak of his
cap, made a mental note that "the man was doing himself justice." Of
course Captain Meredith did not perceive how very wide of the mark his
sensible phrase led him. Mr. Spokesly always did himself justice. What
he was eternally hunting for, in and out of the maze in which he spent
his life, was justice from others. Captain Meredith did not realize that
a middle-aged man with a grievance is like a man who has been
skinned--to touch him causes the most exquisite agony. Nay, merely to
exist, to permit the orderly march of every-day routine, chafes him to
the verge of hysteria. It was nothing to Mr. Spokesly that he was
serving his country; nothing to him that he was in imminent peril by
mine and torpedo. During the voyage he had scarcely noticed the
occasional formal slips that came from the wireless house informing them
that an enemy submarine was operating in such and such a position, so
many miles ahead or astern as the case might be. Mr. Spokesly had never
seen a submarine and he didn't want to. The whole business of war in his
eyes became a ghastly farce so long as he was not appreciated at his
true worth. It might almost be said that at times he was indifferent to
the outcome of the gigantic struggle. A horrible unrest assailed him.
The world was heaving in a death grapple with the powers of darkness and
he was as nothing in the balance.

But as he walked the forecastle-head and the _Tanganyika_ passed through
the bottle neck of Kara Burun into the wide waters of the gulf-head, he
was restored to a normal attention to the cut-and-dried duties of his
calling. There was exhilaration in the thought of foregathering once
more with Archy, of going ashore in a new port. And there would be
letters. He drew a deep breath. Ada would write. Unconsciously he
straightened up. A warm glow suffused him as he recalled her dark-gray,
adoring eyes and the deep tremble of her voice as she called him her
sailor sweetheart. After all, he was that. He was understood there, he
thought, and was comforted. Rung by rung he climbed up out of the dark
dank well in which he had been dwelling until, when the compressors had
been screwed up tight and the _Tanganyika_ was swinging gently on her
eighty fathom of cable, he was recapitulating the heartening words he
had last read in his "course" in the London School of Mnemonics.

_Think well of yourself and your ability_, it ran. _Get the habit of
believing in your own ambition. This is only another way of saying that
faith can move mountains. But remember that to be satisfied with what
you are is to lose grip. If you are standing still you are slipping
back. This paradox will be shown...._

       *       *       *       *       *

It was some hours later, after dinner, that Captain Meredith sat at the
desk in his room looking out of the big side-scuttle at the blood-red
and purple of the western sky beyond the Vardar delta. It was such a
sunset as one may see across Lake Pontchartrain in the fall, or looking
up some aisle of the dark silent forests that fringe the swamps of the
Georgia coast. It has the opaque glamour that comes from the dense
vapours rising from a marsh, the tangible beauty of a giant curtain
rather than the far glories of miles of ambient mountain air. But
Captain Meredith was not occupied with esthetic musings. In his hand he
held a letter from the superintendent in London, and he sought
seclusion, as was his wont, in looking out towards the immense
polychrome of the sky. For the letter contained orders which might
involve him in some difficulties. He was instructed to file, in an
enclosed form, precise particulars of all his officers' records, and
return them accompanied by his own opinion as to their fitness for
promotion. It would be necessary, he was informed, to engage a large
number of additional officers for a fleet which the company had
purchased all standing, and the directors were anxious that those
already in their employ should have the pick of the billets. It was
important, he was warned, that he use care in recommending any man, as
the directors proposed to act upon these suggestions, and the failure of
a nominee would react unfavourably upon the prestige of the commander
responsible for the report.

Like all men who have grown up inside the protecting walls of tradition
and routine, Captain Meredith was unable to view a situation without
prejudice. Some small portion of free and independent judgment he had,
or he would never have become master; but the bulk of the decisions
which he had to make were obtained by unconscious reference to rules,
written or unwritten. This order, however, involved just that small part
of his mental equipment which made his work of interest to him, his
imagination if you like. It forced him to take a far wider view than was
ordinarily advisable. He was aware of the popular legends which have
grown around great commanders--legends of their genius for selecting
subordinates, their uncanny aptitude for appraising a man's powers at a
glance. Not so easy, Captain Meredith had found it. Like most of us, he
had in time cultivated a habit of suspending judgment, a habit of
discounting the dreadful efficiency of the new broom, the total
abstainer, the college-graduate, and the newly married. What he waited
for time to reveal was the man's principle. Without the main girder and
tie-ribs of principle, all was as nothing. And yet what comprised this
principle Captain Meredith would have been sore put to it to explain. It
was not enthusiasm, nor was it will power. It was not even intellect or
civil responsibility. It was deeper than any of these, a subtle
manifestation of character as elusive and imponderable as a beam of
light or the expression on a man's face. Somewhat to his surprise
Captain Meredith's reflections showed him that not even compatibility of
temperament had much to do with it. He and old McGinnis had never been
warm friends, had even had frequent differences on minor details of
executive routine. Neither of them would have invited the other to his
home, had the opportunity served. That did not matter. He had had some
experience of officers quite different from Mr. McGinnis, clever, gay
young men, "good mixers," passengers' favourites, and he had discovered
that a man may be a brilliant social success and a useless incumbrance
at the same time. To state the problem to himself was difficult, but it
was forced upon him irresistibly when he endeavoured to formulate his
mature conclusions upon the subject of Mr. Spokesly. His chief officer
was his chief concern. Of the others he was able to set down a fairly
just and intelligible estimate. Young Chippenham was a bundle of amiable
possibilities. He would have to get his certificates before the company
would make him or break him. The chief engineer was at the other end of
the scale. His name was made. Behind him was a career of solid
responsibility, of grave crises met and mastered with cool generalship
and unbeatable energy. He was one of those men who carry in their own
personality the prestige of a race, a nation, and a learned profession.
Of the others it would be safe to take his verdict. Mr. Spokesly,
therefore, remained the chief source of anxiety. For it was not a simple
question of bearing witness to Mr. Spokesly's ability as a seaman, as a
navigator, or as a desirable junior officer. The tremendous
responsibility from which Captain Meredith shrank was twofold. On the
one hand, he had to accept the onus of recommending his chief officer
for a command. On the other lay the grave danger of injustice to a
brother professional. Mr. Spokesly was a man no longer in his first
youth, no doubt engaged to be married, with ambitions and aspirations
with which Captain Meredith had the deepest sympathy. It was no small
matter to stop a man's promotion. He remembered how he himself, piqued
at some ungenerous act of the company, had talked of resignation, and
his commander had taken him by the arm and muttered contemptuously, "And
spoil yourself for life, eh?" And when asked "How?" that same shipmaster
had drawn a brutal picture of a man throwing up a billet just as he was
getting a name, entering another employ as a junior, spending years
working up to chief mate again, only to find about a score of active,
intelligent, and experienced officers on the list ahead of him, and
gradually resigning himself to the colourless existence of an elderly
failure. Captain Meredith was not the man to condemn a brother officer
to such a fate without an overwhelming conviction. Rather would he....

But his thoughts refused to travel that road. He sat looking out at the
sombre beauty of the sky, noting the long rigid black bar that divided
sharply the dark swamps from the shining pallor of the roadstead. He
tapped his teeth with his pencil. No, he was not prepared to jeopardize
his own prospects. He had a family. He hoped to spend more time with
them later ... after the war. He was beginning to think sea life was
narrowing. One got out of touch with so many phases of human interest
and activity.... One toiled and moiled, and suffered agonies of anxiety
and defeated vigilance; sleep and leisure went by the board for days;
one found fault and made mistakes; superior young men in warships asked
sarcastic questions during the small hours; and all to what end? After
all, one only earned for all this the salary which a successful
barrister or surgeon would pay his chauffeur. It was preposterous, when
one came to regard it. So Captain Meredith's thoughts ran on, with a
sort of light bitterness, sharpening their flavour and inclining him to
charity. In more senses than one, he and Mr. Spokesly were in the same
boat. He put his papers away in a drawer, picked up his cigar to take
the air on the bridge. Without registering any final and irrevocable
decision, he had made a mental note that "unless the man made an ass of
himself" he would not stand in his way.

The sun, concealed behind a distant range, threw up a ruddy and vigorous
glow as from an open cupola, but the roadstead lay in a profound shadow
whose edge began to sparkle with coloured lights of a singular
distinctness and individuality. It was like watching from the depths of
space a congregation of blessed yet still intensely personal spirits on
the heavenly shores. They stood in clusters or apart, in long lines or
zigzags far up the mountain side. At times they were obliterated by
trolley cars--gently moving glares which bore on their foreheads
flashing blue-white gems. At other times a fountain of sparks indicated
an otherwise invisible puff of smoke from a locomotive, and whole
galaxies of shining points would vanish while an ammunition train moved
laboriously across the city. But no knowledge of the actual causes could
destroy the illusion that the lights were informed with an intelligent
vitality. They winked and quivered with mysterious emotions. They went
on journeys among other fixed stars of greater magnitude. They came out
in boats over the dark water as though possessed with a passion for
exploring, and then, losing heart, would go back in a hurry, or else
expire. They raced along country roads and vanished in folds of the
hills. They danced and were smitten with idiotic immobility. They were
born, and they died sudden and inexplicable deaths. They were shocked,
or were filled with calm content. Low down on the edge of the shore,
where an open-air cinema was working convulsively, the lights had
collected in some excitement around the screen. Captain Meredith,
raising his night glasses to inspect this novel portent, imagined
himself watching a square hole in a dark spangled curtain, through which
a drama of inconceivable brightness and rapidity could be observed. It
was, the captain imagined whimsically, like watching a huge brain at
work, if such a thing were possible. He occasionally took refuge from
himself in such reflections. Without any pretence to originality, he
occasionally found himself in possession of thoughts for which custom
had provided no suitable phrase. With the humility common to those of
gentle birth who have followed the sea, he kept the results to himself.
Even in letters to his wife, he adhered to the conventional insipidity
that makes an Englishman's letters home one of the wonders of the world.
He had become somewhat fearful of originality, even in others, during
his honeymoon, when he had tried timidly to interest his wife in a novel
he was reading. It was a novel about sailors and the sea, of all things
in the world, and Captain Meredith had been so intrigued with the notion
of a story written about sailors without distorting them out of all
recognition that he couldn't keep it to himself. And he had been
completely nonplussed when his gentle, blonde, and slightly angular
young wife had displayed not merely a tepid lack of interest but
downright dislike. "I don't like it," she had said acidly, and returned
to her own book, an interminable tale of gipsies and highwaymen in
masks, and a "reigning toast" with forty thousand pounds. They had been
married some time before he realized just what it was she didn't like in
the story. And when he realized it, he put the thought from him in
trepidation, for he was prepared to sacrifice everything for her sake.
She embodied for him all that he craved of England. She was typical, as
she bent over their one child, a flaxen-haired little girl with
incredibly thin limbs. And he was typical, too--as he thought of them
and their setting at Ealing--the modern Englishman who has given
intellectual hostages to fortune.




CHAPTER IV


Mr. Spokesly once said in so many words that he disbelieved utterly in
premonition. There was, he said, nothing in it. If there were, he
remarked, we should be different. When pressed, he admitted freely that
if we could read the signs we might get adequate warning of impending
events; but by the time we have gotten the experience we are too old to
bother about the future at all. This, of course, was when the war was
finished and Mr. Spokesly, with the rest of the Merchant Service, had
slipped back into that obscure neglect from which they had temporarily
emerged. The gist of his remarks, therefore, seems to bear out the view
that he had not the faintest notion, when he went ashore that evening in
Saloniki with the gifted and amusing Mr. Bates, that he was on the brink
of a fundamental change in his life. Looking back, he was almost induced
to imagine that it was someone else who came ashore with Mr. Bates, a
sort of distant relation, say, who had borrowed his body for the
evening. And he was inclined to admit that, assuming what the
philosophers say is true--that the only use of knowledge is for the
purpose of action--it would preserve our idealism if our subconscious
adumbrations could only be induced to function in a more emphatic
manner.

The reason for interjecting this sample of Mr. Spokesly's later
mentality is to be rid of any possible ambiguity. If Mr. Spokesly had
been nothing more than Mr. Bates's boon companion his story would not be
worth telling, there being obviously so many other more interesting
people in the world. We have seen that Mr. Spokesly himself was aware of
his real value, and had appealed to the London School of Mnemonics to
elucidate his latent self from the commonplace shell in which he strove.
The London School of Mnemonics responded nobly according to its
doctrines. It supplied him with an astonishing quantity of intellectual
fuel, so to say, but omitted to indicate how it was to be ignited.
Indeed, it is very singular how public and commercial organizations
continually lose sight of the fact that in the spiritual world
spontaneous combustion does not exist. And it is also true that the
stark and secular desires of a man's soul, however powerful they may be
to achieve a multiplicity of base ends, can do nothing for the man
himself unless they are illuminated and shot through by some grand
passion, whether of friendship, religion, or love. Which of these,
depends upon the man. Some fortunate beings are the exponents of all
three. Most of us, and Mr. Spokesly was one, are destined to know very
little of either friendship or religion. So much might have been
postulated. He was under no illusions as to his emotional resources. His
remark that he could fall in love with almost any girl, so long as she
had a bit o' money, was really a very fine declaration of extreme
modesty. The virtuous are less humble. They lay extravagant claims to
the privilege of having an ideal. Mr. Spokesly, as he sat beside Mr.
Bates, who was smiling to himself in the darkness, watched the flashing
lights of the Place de la Liberté grow larger and larger; and, as the
din of the traffic reached his ears, experienced that feeling of
pleasant and passive receptivity which he learned in time to know as the
inevitable precursor of some momentous change.

Not so Mr. Bates, who smiled in the darkness. Mr. Bates was one of those
human beings who manifest the shadowless and unwinking intelligence of
the lower animals. The past, to Mr. Bates, was a period in which he had
done well. The future was a period in which he would do well. Between
these two delectable countries Mr. Bates moved gently along, a slightly
intoxicated optimist. The perils of the sea and of war, the hatred of
man or the wrath of God made no conscious impression upon Mr. Bates at
all. Any of them might crush him at any moment, but he proceeded
steadily upon his predatory way very much as a spider crossing a path
proceeds until some careless but omnipotent passer crushes it beneath
his heel. His attitude towards the gigantic engines of human destiny,
which preoccupy most of us so much, was expressed in the pussy-cat smile
in the darkness--a smile unseen and undesired.

"We'll go into Floka's first," he remarked, as the boat bumped the
marble steps between the kiosks of the Place. He stood up, and his smile
was illuminated by the sizzling glare of the arc lights along the quay,
a smile that was, as we have said, fitted on over his face, and which
bobbed up and down in obedience to the rhythmic undulations of the boat
in the water. They waited for a moment until the Greek had made fast,
and then stepped ashore.

"Why, is that a good place?" enquired Mr. Spokesly.

"Oh, yes. The _best_ place. My friend, he goes there often. By and by,
of course, we'll go along and see the talent. I'll show you, my boy.
Believe me...." They crossed the car lines and walked towards the café
which Mr. Bates's friend honoured. Floka's was full. The little tables
outside were thickly populated with gentlemen engaged in the national
pastime of cigarette-smoking and coffee-drinking, and the grandiose
interior, as severe and lofty and dirty as a Balkan politician, was
thick with smoke and murmurous with conversation and the consumption of
food. Mr. Bates led the way to a far corner where a long thin man, his
frock coat falling away open from a heavily brocaded vest with onyx
buttons, and his scarlet tarboosh on one side of his head, was lolling
on the crimson plush cushions. In one hand he held the stem of an
amber-mouthed _narghileh_. On the table was an empty coffee cup and a
glass of mastic. Across his long thin thighs lay a Greek newspaper. He
was reclining completely inert, gazing moodily across the crowded
restaurant. The alteration in his demeanour when he became aware of Mr.
Bates standing before him was dramatic. It was as though he had suddenly
seen a very funny joke and had been subjected to an electric current of
high voltage at the same time. He sprang to his feet with extraordinary
animation, and his face was contorted from a sombre melancholy to what
seemed to be an almost demoniac joy. It would be a solecism to say he
looked as though a fortune had been left him. No one was at all likely
to leave Mr. Dainopoulos a fortune. No one had ever left anything of
value within his reach without regretting it extremely. It will suffice
to say that his features registered a certain degree of pleasure upon
seeing Mr. Bates.

"Why, my dear friend!" he exclaimed in a sort of muffled scream, and he
wrung the honest hand of Mr. Bates as though that gentleman had only
that moment rescued him from a combination of drowning and bankruptcy.
"And how are you? Sit down if you please. What will you have to drink?
You must be--what you call it?--dry. Ha-ha! Sit down. This is good luck.
Your friend? I am very pleased. Sit down please. Here!" He clapped his
hands with frightful vehemence, and held up a distracted waiter who was
in full flight towards a distant table with a loaded tray. Mr.
Dainopoulos, gently pressing Mr. Bates and Mr. Spokesly into two chairs,
addressed the waiter as Herakles and gave him an order which sounded to
his guests like a loose board being ripped forcibly from a nailed-up
box. Mr. Spokesly, sitting immediately opposite this monster of
hospitality, was not favourably impressed. Mr. Dainopoulos rarely
impressed people favourably at first. The long emaciated face had the
texture of the uppers of an old buckskin shoe. The bloodshot brown eyes
in their reddened sockets seemed in danger of falling into the great
pouches of loose skin below them. The mouth, full of sharp yellow teeth
and open as though about to yawn, had been slit back to the salience of
the jaw at some time and had been sewn up in a sketchy fashion indicated
by a white zig-zag scar like a flash of lightning. As he talked this
scar worked with disconcerting vivacity. Mr. Spokesly turned with relief
to the whiskies and sodas which appeared, borne by the industrious
Herakles.

"And how is business?" asked Mr. Bates, having lifted his glass and set
it down empty. Beyond three or four sherries and bitters and a glass of
gin and vermouth, before coming ashore, he had drunk nothing all day. He
was thirsty. "And how is business?"

A simple question. And yet Mr. Dainopoulos did not render a simple
answer. He regarded Mr. Bates for a moment and then turned his head
cautiously to right and left. Preserving an impressive silence he caught
Mr. Spokesly's eyes and smiled, taking a suck at his _narghileh_. It was
at this juncture that two French naval officers, seated at a distant
table and smoking cigarettes in long ivory holders (to keep the smoke
from their beards), exchanged opinions upon the folly of their British
allies in permitting the officers of ships to come ashore in civilian
attire.

"You are quite sure, of course, that they _are_ officers of a
transport?" said the elder, observing with attention.

"Quite, my commandant. From the _Tanganyika_, arrived to-day. The little
one I know well. The other I observed upon the forecastle as she
anchored."

"But what are they doing in company with _him_?"

The lieutenant raised his shoulders.

"I imagine, my commandant, that they do a little business in hashish.
But in any case it is not what you imagine. The English do not spy."

"But Dainopoulos may use them, eh?"

"Impossible, my commandant. You do not know them. I do. As you are
aware, I was in the Crédit Lyonnais in Lombard Street. If Mr.
Dainopoulos attempted to enlist their services they would batter his
head in with his own _narghileh_. They have no compunction about robbing
their government by peculation, but treachery is not their _métier_. And
our friend knows it quite well."

"Business," observed Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly, "is very bad."

Mr. Bates seemed very amused at this and leaned over the dirty
marble-topped table.

"Count us both in, my friend here and me, for the same as last time. How
about it, eh?"

"Oh!" Mr. Dainopoulos pulled his extended frame up and put his elbows on
the table, his eyes blinking quickly. "Oh, that's all right. Yes,
certainly. But I mean to say business is very bad. You would not believe
me, Mister, but the chances that are going, and all for a little
management, are lost! Incredible! Only this week"--here he lowered his
voice so that Mr. Spokesly, who was listening with undivided attention,
scarcely gathered the words--"only this week, I could have made--ah,
much money--if I had with me an Englishman who knows the business. Ten
thousand drachma, easy as that!" Mr. Dainopoulos snapped his fingers
without a sound and looked depressed.

Mr. Bates did not look depressed. His smile evaporated and he looked
down his nose into his moustache with an expression of ruffled
propriety.

"I must say----" he began, and added, after a pause, "'Course we hadn't
arrived, but I should 'ave thought, seein' we was due here, you might
have counted on me."

Mr. Dainopoulos regarded Mr. Bates as though he were sizing him up for
the first time and found him to amount to an almost negligible quantity.
And then he shook his head.

"No," he murmured in a muffled tone. "That's not what I meant. What I
wanted--too late now, of course--was a Kapitan."

Mr. Bates, touching Mr. Spokesly's foot with his own, emitted a snigger
right in the face of Mr. Dainopoulos.

"And what about it?" he queried, impudently. "My friend here's got a
master's ticket. What's the matter with him? I'm surprised----"

He was. To Mr. Bates it was unpleasant to discover that Mr. Dainopoulos
should doubt his ability to cope with any situation which involved a
financial reward. That gentleman, however, was not exclusively
preoccupied with Mr. Bates and his emotions. He turned immediately to
Mr. Spokesly who sat quietly twisting his glass of whiskey on the marble
table. The pale, prominent, and bloodshot brown eyes examined Mr.
Spokesly with passionless attention. Mr. Dainopoulos had filled many
posts in his career. Quite apart from his participation in what he
discreetly alluded to as "the wars," he had rendered some slight
assistance to the builders of the Panama Canal as stoker on an
excavator, he had worked in a felt-hat factory in Newark, New Jersey; he
had been a waiter in a Greek café near Franklin Square, New York; he had
held the position of clerk in the warehouse of a Turkish tobacco
importer in London; and he had also been an assistant purser in one of
the Roumanian Lloyd mail steamers which used to run from Costanza to
Alexandria. He was one of those people who, as the saying is, "could
write a book," which means they can do or have done almost everything
except write a book. Such people are rarely of a literary turn. Mr.
Dainopoulos certainly was not. But he had one faculty which, if literary
people only knew it, is of use even in literature. He could size a man
up. By a natural turn of judgment, so necessary to success in his
business as a "general merchant and exporter" coupled with ceaseless
practice, he had acquired a skill in sizing up which seemed as
effortless and intuitive as the driving of a fine golfer or the
wrist-work of a professional billiard player. The London School of
Mnemonics could teach Mr. Dainopoulos nothing about practical
psychology. He might even have given them some useful hints. In the
present instance he was not at a loss. He waited, however, for Mr.
Spokesly to make some comment.

"That's right enough," said the latter, leaning forward and smiling.
"But I'd have to know a little more of the game, you understand? There's
a war on, you know. Can't be too careful."

"True," assented Mr. Dainopoulos reflectively and keeping his prominent
eyes fixed upon Mr. Spokesly. "You do not wish, then, to take a chance?"

"Oh, a _chance_!" Mr. Spokesly achieved a certain irony as he emphasized
the last word. "Your ideas of a chance and mine might be different.
S'pose we have another drink."

The watchful Herakles came near as Mr. Spokesly lifted his hand, and
took the order.

The fact was--and it may be presumed that Mr. Dainopoulos perceived it
sufficiently well to make allowance for it--that Mr. Spokesly, as he sat
beside Archy Bates and listened to the conversation, had experienced a
sudden access of caution. Archy was not drunk, and as far as was humanly
known, never would be really drunk; but he was sufficiently saturated to
raise a certain distrust in the mind of a perfectly sober man. It may
even be said that while Mr. Spokesly had no clear intention of deserting
his chum Archy, he was beginning to wish that Archy were not
indispensable in any scheme that might be proposed. And the occasional
looks that various British and French officers cast in their direction
made Mr. Spokesly uneasy. He suddenly realized the other aspect of
making money in a shady fashion: that one has to do business with shady
people. Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, looked extremely shady. Archy
Bates, his long, sharp nose buried in a fresh whiskey and soda, his hat
pushed back revealing the oiled graying hair parted in the middle and
slicked back above his ears with their purple veins; Archy, picking
dreamily among the pieces of fish and beetroot which had been served on
little dishes with the drinks, looked extraordinarily like a rat picking
at garbage. All very well, Mr. Spokesly reflected, to buy hashish and
sell it in Egypt at four or five hundred per cent. profit, so long as
the business could be transacted in a gentlemanly manner. But this new
development--he did not see his way clear to accepting Mr. Dainopoulos
as an employer. He was not fastidious--he had worked for a Chinese ship
owner--but the officers at the other tables, in their inconceivably
correct uniforms and polished harness, made him uneasy. Mr. Spokesly
knew perfectly well that these people did not consider him as one of
themselves. Even amid the noise and chaffering of a Saloniki café,
rubbing shoulders with the uniforms of French, Greek, Serbian, Russian,
and Italian officers, these men of his own race, he knew, never forgot
the abyss that separates the seafaring man from themselves, the social
_crevasse_ which even Armageddon was powerless to abolish. Nevertheless,
he felt he could never abandon for ever the possibility of entering,
some day, the magic circle. It is this peculiarity of the English
temperament which so often paralyses its victim at the very moment when
he needs to be in possession of all his faculties, when the chance,
perhaps of a lifetime, suddenly appears at his elbow.

But Mr. Dainopoulos, as has been said, could size a man up. He was
intuitively aware that he had made no great impression upon Mr.
Spokesly. And he had a special desire, now that chance had thrown them
together, to engage the interest of a skilled navigator. He had received
an offer which might result in a very large profit indeed. The business
to which he had been referring, a mere matter of running a small cargo
of canned goods down to a certain island and transferring it to an
Austrian submarine, was a trifle. One could do that every day, right
under the noses and beards of a dozen French naval officers. This was a
much bigger affair. It involved the sale, at huge profit, of one of his
little steamers which he had purchased for a song from the French early
in the war, but it also involved the safe conduct of the vessel into an
enemy port. His friends in Anatolia might compensate him ultimately for
the destruction of his ship by an Allied warship and the crew could look
out for themselves; but if the captain lost her by grounding, it would
be a disaster of the first magnitude. All this passed through the nimble
mind of Mr. Dainopoulos while Mr. Spokesly waited for further light on
the nature of the service required. He saw the difficulty and, knowing
the English character, he took his measure accordingly. He smiled.

"You come to my house and have some supper?" he remarked. "My wife would
be pleased, I'm sure."

Mr. Spokesly looked at Archy Bates. That gentleman was no longer paying
attention. In his own peculiar fashion he had arrived at some sort of
intuitive recognition of the fact that Mr. Dainopoulos had no intention
of letting him in on this affair. Well, that was all right, Mr. Bates
reflected in one of those appallingly clear and coherent moments which
suddenly open in the mentality of dipsomaniacs. That was all right. They
were making a lot of money. Big risk for him, by Jove! but he was
willing to shoulder it. By Jove! That last time in Port Said, when the
police rushed into his cabin not five minutes after the laundryman, who
also took his rake-off, had carried the stuff ashore in a boat-load of
dirty sheets. It was a near thing. Two hundred quid he had netted over
that, paid in Turkish gold. And they had found the bit of burlap in
which it had been wrapped. He saw the chief of police now, standing
there, in his bright red fez, and white uniform, legs apart, holding the
thing to his nose. Hashish, by Jove! A close call! "What's this?" Mr.
Bates jumped and made the table shake. Mr. Spokesly was speaking. For a
moment he had forgotten where he was. Little beads of sweat stood out on
his forehead. He smiled with relief.

"Shall we go?" repeated Mr. Spokesly. Somewhat to his surprise, Mr.
Bates shook his head. He was still smiling with relief, for that brief
moment, during which his consciousness had slipped back a couple of
months, as it were, and reënacted the scene in his cabin, had been very
real. Five years in an Egyptian penitentiary missed by five minutes and
a quick-witted explanation! While he shook his head and smiled into Mr.
Spokesly's face he was thinking that he would take twice as much this
time, and he knew where to hide it. Moreover, and he smiled more like a
cat than ever, the millions of lines round his eyes deepening, he
reflected that if Mr. Spokesly went in on this there was practically no
risk at all. Nothing easier than to say----Eh, what? No! He was going
along to the Amphitryon, to see a little friend of his. See them later.
Aw--ri!

It was a notable feature of Mr. Bates's temperamental failing that it
never affected his legs. In earlier years, as a saloon waiter, he had
often astounded his shipmates by getting as drunk as a lord before
dinner, and yet going down the long dining saloon of a great liner, a
plate of soup in each hand, and depositing them in front of passengers
in evening dress, without ever an accident. Perhaps his demeanour was a
shade more deliberate, his attention a trifle more abstracted, on these
occasions; that was all. And now, as he rose and went towards the door
of Floka's, after a dignified farewell to Mr. Dainopoulos, although an
occasional wandering eye fastened upon him for a moment, Mr. Bates never
betrayed himself. He paused courteously at the door while a major with
his brigadier in tow passed in, monocles reflecting the light in a blind
white glare so that they resembled Cyclops, and then he walked out
gently himself, and was immediately lost in the noise and bustle of the
Place.

Mr. Dainopoulos looked at Mr. Spokesly and thrust a thumb into the
armhole of his coat.

"Your friend," he began in a low mutter, "him and me we do big
business--you understand?--but all the same he drink too much highball.
No good, eh?"

"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "he's his own master, and he can please
himself about that. To tell the truth, though, if there's anything
in--what you were speaking of, I'd just as soon he wasn't in it. You see
what I mean?" Mr. Dainopoulos nodded and drew at his _narghileh_. "He's
a friend of mine, and very good friend, too, but we got to draw a line
somewhere." Again Mr. Dainopoulos nodded as he leaned across the table.

"And another thing!" he remarked in his muffled tones, and he held the
mouthpiece of the _narghileh_ just in front of his lips as though it
were a speaking tube and he was engaged in conversation with someone at
the other end. He even cast his eyes down, and seemed to abandon Mr.
Spokesly entirely. "And another thing. Mr. Bates, he very fond--you
know--very fond of the _mademoiselles_. That's all right. If you like
them, very good. But Mr. Bates, he comes all the time to me. Want
me--you understand? Now, I do no business in that line, none at all. I
don't like it. Plenty men tell you, 'Oh, yes, you come with me.' You
understand? But me, I got my family to think about. _Now_ you
understand?"

"It is not respectable," added Mr. Dainopoulos in a deep tone, and
relapsed into silence and the _narghileh_.

Mr. Spokesly did not reply. Even when they had left the café and were
being driven along the _quai_ in the direction of the White Tower, on
their left the dazzle and noise of _cafés-chantant_ and cinemas, on
their right the intense darkness of the Gulf, he did no more than
acquiesce in what Mr. Dainopoulos was saying. For to tell the truth, Mr.
Spokesly was making certain readjustments within himself. Neither Mr.
Bates nor Mr. Dainopoulos was of vital importance to the growth of his
soul, yet they come in here. They were backgrounds on which were
silhouetted combinations novel to him. He had to find room in his mind
for the conception of a shady person who cultivated the domestic
virtues. Mr. Spokesly might be a man of inferior calibre, easily swayed
by the prospect of easy money, but his mind swung naturally to the
equilibriums of respectability. "All that," as he called it, "was a
thing o' the past." He was tired of the shabby and meretricious byways
he had frequented, in moderation, for so long. With more knowledge of
introspection he would have known this as one of the signs of coming
change. Coming events are very often a glorified reincarnation of dead
desires. Dreams come true. Fortunate men recognize them in time.

"Your family?" said Mr. Spokesly, and the man beside him turned towards
him and said:

"When I say 'family' I mean 'my wife.'"

Mr. Spokesly had no definite image in his mind of the domestic
arrangements of a man like Mr. Dainopoulos. The scarlet tarboosh on that
gentleman's head leaned the Englishman's fancy to a harem. In any case,
the Island Race imagine that every Levantine who wears a fez is a Turk,
that every Turk is a polygamist, and finally that polygamy implies a
score or two of wives locked up in cupboards. But the tone in which Mr.
Dainopoulos uttered the word "wife" precluded anything of this sort. It
was a tone which Mr. Spokesly immediately comprehended. It was the tone
in which Englishmen refer to their most valued possession and their
embodied ideals. There is no mistaking it. There is nothing like it in
the world. It is a tone implying an authorized and expurgated edition of
the speaker's emotional odyssey.

"And so," he went on, "you can see how I don't want to get mixed up in
any of these here places." And he opened his hand towards the subdued
glare of the cafés and dance halls. Mr. Spokesly saw. He saw also, in
imagination, Archy Bates sitting, hand to moustache, amid the
chalk-faced hetairai of Saloniki, second-rate harpies who had had their
day on the Parisian _trottoirs_, and who had been shipped by a
benevolent government to assuage the ennui of the _Armée d'Orient_. He
saw them from time to time with his physical eyes, too, as they came to
the doors of their refuges and, setting off to visit confederates, flung
a glance of shrewd appraisal towards the passing vehicle.

"Yes," he muttered. "I see, Mr.--Mr.----"

"Dainopoulos," said that gentleman.

"Mr. Dainopoulos, I'm no saint, y'understand, but all the same--well, a
man wants something, y'understand? Besides," added Mr. Spokesly, "'twixt
you an' me an' the stern-post, I'm engaged."

"You don't tell me!" exclaimed Mr. Dainopoulos in that peculiarly
gratifying fashion which seemed to imply that this was the first
betrothal announced since the Fall of Constantinople. "You don't
tell--and I bet you what you like she's English, eh?"

"Yes, she's English all right," said Mr. Spokesly, feeling somewhat
embarrassed by his friend's triumphant cordiality. "Pretty safe bet,
that," he added as the carriage stopped in front of a black, solid
wooden gate in a high yellow wall.

"Safe enough?" laughed Mr. Dainopoulos, not quite seizing the point
intended. "Why, sure! Englishwomen are the best of all. I ought to know.
Ha-ha!" and he slapped Mr. Spokesly's knee while his other hand sought
the price of the ride. Mr. Spokesly failed to appreciate this approval
of Englishwomen. A suspicion shot through his mind. He looked at the
dark gate in the yellow wall. What, precisely, did this man mean by that
last remark? Was all this talk of family and so forth a blind? Was he,
Mr. Spokesly, on the brink of an adventure? It must be confessed that he
would not have objected to that; but his gorge rose in spite of him at
the reference to Englishwomen.

"I don't quite understand," he remarked in a low tone. "How do you
happen to know so much about 'em?"

Mr. Dainopoulos laughed again and handed the fare to the driver. He
stepped out, held a bunch of keys to the light of the carriage lamp, and
selected one. Then he beckoned to Mr. Spokesly to alight.

"I'll tell you, Mister," he said, as he stooped, inserted the key,
turned it, and pushed open the gate. "Because I married one myself."




CHAPTER V


Mr. Spokesly, in a state of considerable astonishment, sat by a
balconied upper window and tried to get his recent experiences into some
sort of focus. That last remark of Mr. Dainopoulos, that he had married
one himself, had dislocated his guest's faculties, so that Mr. Spokesly
was unable to note clearly by what means he had arrived at his present
position, a balconied window on his right and in front of him a woman
lying on a sofa. A woman whose brown hair, extraordinarily long and
fine, was a glossy pile pressed into the pillow, and whose thin hand he
had just relinquished.

"Well," he said, as Mr. Dainopoulos came forward with a lamp, his swart
and damaged features giving him the air of a ferocious genie about to
perform some nefarious experiment. "Well, I must say, I'm surprised."

Mrs. Dainopoulos continued to gaze straight out into the darkness over
the Gulf.

"Of course," agreed her husband, seating himself and reaching for a
large briar pipe. "Of course. And I'll bet you'd be still more surprised
if you only knew--eh, Alice?" He screwed up one eye and looked
prodigiously sly at his wife with the other, his palms slowly rubbing up
some tobacco. Mrs. Dainopoulos did not remove her eyes from the darkness
beyond the shore. She only murmured in a curt voice:

"Never mind that now, Boris."

"But it ain't anything to be ashamed of, you know," he returned
earnestly, packing his pipe in a way that made Mr. Spokesly want to
snatch it from him and do it properly.

"I know, but it wouldn't interest Mr. Spokesly, I'm quite certain," she
muttered, and she suddenly looked at their visitor and smiled. It
reassured that gentleman, as it was intended to do, that he was in no
way responsible for this minute difference of viewpoint between husband
and wife. Mr. Spokesly smiled, too.

"Don't mind me," he remarked, lighting a cigarette and offering the
match to Mr. Dainopoulos. After sucking valiantly for a while and
achieving a small red glow in one corner of the bowl, the latter rose
and regarded his wife and his guest attentively for a moment.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said at length, and looked at his pipe,
which was already out. "I'll go in and see Malleotis for a while. He'll
be back by now. And you two can have a little talk before we have
supper."

"Well, don't be all night. You know, when you and Mr. Malleotis get
talking business----"

The woman on the couch paused, regarding her husband as he bent his head
over her. Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly put his pipe in his pocket and put
his hands on either side of the pillow. Mr. Spokesly could see nothing
save the man's broad, humped shoulders. There was a moment of silence.
Mr. Spokesly, very much embarrassed, looked out of the window. When he
turned his head again Mr. Dainopoulos was putting on a large tweed cap
and walking out of the door.

"I suppose," Mr. Spokesly remarked, and fixed his eyes upon the
extremely decorative Scotch travelling rug which covered the woman's
limbs, "I suppose he doesn't go off every evening and leave you here."
He spoke jocosely. Mrs. Dainopoulos looked out into the darkness. There
was a faint colour in her cheeks, as though the sudden revelation of the
passion she could evoke had filled her with exquisite shame. Or perhaps
pride. Her clear, delicate English face, the mouth barely closed, the
short straight nose slightly raised, the brown hair spread in a slight
disorder upon the pillow, were surely indicating pride. Some inkling of
this possibility came to Mr. Spokesly, and he sat regarding her, while
he waited for her to speak, and wondering how a woman like her had come
to marry one of these here dagoes. Peculiar creatures, women, Mr.
Spokesly thought; knowing nothing whatever about them, it may be
mentioned. And when Mrs. Dainopoulos turned to look at him, soon after
she began to speak, the prevailing fancy at the back of his mind was
"She thinks I don't know anything about the ladies! Fancy that!"

"His business takes him out a good deal," she said in a low voice, "but
he wouldn't go if he could help it. To-night is unusual."

"The pleasure is mine," said Mr. Spokesly.

"Not altogether," she smiled, and her speech became perceptibly more
racy and rapid. "Don't flatter yourself. Mr. Dainopoulos was thinking of
me."

"I dare say he does a good deal of that."

The woman on the sofa laced her fingers lightly and regarded her guest
afresh.

"You are saucy," she murmured with a faint smile. Mr. Spokesly smiled
more broadly. He was saucy, but he was certainly at home now with his
companion. There was in her last speech, in the accent and inflection,
something incommunicably indigenous, something no alien ever has or ever
will compass.

"No need to ask what part of England you come from," he ventured.

"No?" she queried. "There seems nothing you don't know."

"Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Dainopoulos, that ain't fair. I can't sit here and
twiddle my thumbs all the evening, can I? _That_ wouldn't be giving you
any pleasure as far as I'm aware. The boss didn't reckon I was going to
play a mandolin or sing, did he?"

"Well, since you're so clever, what's the answer?"

"Not so very many miles from Charing Cross," he hazarded.

"Wonderful!" she said, laying her head back and smiling. Mr. Spokesly
admired the pretty throat. "You ought to be in the secret service.
Perhaps you are," she added.

"Of course," he agreed. "They've sent me out to see where all the nice
London girls have got to. But am I right?"

She nodded.

"Haverstock Hill," she said quietly.

"No! Do you know Mafeking Road? When I was a kid we lived at
sixty-eight."

"Yes, I know it. Don't you live round there now?"

"No, not now. We live down Twickenham way now."

And Mr. Spokesly began to tell his own recent history, touching lightly
upon the pathos of Eastern exile, the journey home to join up, and his
conviction that after all he would be a fool to go soldiering while the
ships had to be kept running. And he added as a kind of immaterial
postscript:

"And then, o' course, while I was at home I got engaged."

Mrs. Dainopoulos stared at him and broke into a brief titter behind a
handkerchief.

"_That's_ a nice way to give out the information," she remarked.
"Anybody'd think getting engaged was like buying a railway ticket or
sending a postal order. Is she nice?"

"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "_I_ think so."

"Very enthusiastic!" commented the lady with considerable spirit. "Dark
or fair?"

"Well," he repeated, "I should say dark myself."

"You don't intend to take any chances," Mrs. Dainopoulos retorted.
"Haven't you a photo to show me?"

Mr. Spokesly felt his pockets, took out a wallet containing a number of
unconvincing documents, some postage stamps and a five-piaster note.

"Matter of fact," he said, "I don't seem to have one with me. I got one
on the ship, though," he went on. "Bring it ashore to-morrow."

"Sure you didn't tear it up by mistake or send it away in the laundry?"
she demanded, watching him intently.

"Oh, all right, go on with the sarcasm," he protested, but enjoying it
very much none the less. "Mr. Dainopoulos, you'll be telling me, has got
your hair in a locket, I suppose."

Mr. Spokesly stopped abruptly. He saw an expression of extraordinary
radiance on the girl's face as she lay there, her thin pale fingers
holding the handkerchief by the corner. It suddenly occurred to Mr.
Spokesly that this woman was loved. For the first time in his life he
became aware of a woman's private emotional existence. He achieved a dim
comprehension of the novel fact that a woman might have her own views of
these great matters. He did not phrase it quite like this. He only sat
looking at the girl on the sofa and remarking to himself that women were
peculiar.

"Wouldn't you do that?" she demanded. The light in her eyes diminished
to a steady warm regard.

And Mr. Spokesly began to assert himself once more. Women being so
peculiar, there was no sense in being bullied into any of this here
sentiment. He was a man of the world about to make a--what was it
called? Marriage of convenience ... something like that. Not that
exactly, either. Ada was a darned fine girl. This invalid lady seemed to
think he didn't know what love was.

"Who? Me?" he ejaculated. "Can't say as I see myself, I admit. Not in my
line. Not in any Englishman's line, I don't think. And speaking for
myself, Mrs. Dainopoulos, I reckon I'm past that sort of thing, you
know. Can't teach an old dog new tricks, can you? I look at it this way:
so long as there's enough to keep the pot boiling, it's easy enough to
fall in love with anybody, you see, and when you're married ... soon get
used to it. Ada and me, we're _sensible_."

"You've got it all arranged, then," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, smiling
faintly and looking out into the darkness once more.

"What's the use o' bein' anything else?" inquired Mr. Spokesly, resuming
something of the perfect officer pose, hard-bitten, practical, and
matter-of-fact. "All that business o' dyin' o' love, you know, I
reckon's so much moon-shine. All right in a novel, o' course, but not in
real life. _You_ don't reckon there's anything in it, really, I mean?"
he asked doubtfully.

"I think everything's in it," she sighed. "I think it must be horrible,
being married, without it. Haven't you felt you couldn't do without her?
That you'd die if you didn't get her; work, and do somebody else in the
eye for her? Haven't you?"

"That lets me out," he said soberly, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I'm
not guilty."

There was a brief silence. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled. He could not fit
this experience in with one of the two cardinal points in an
Englishman's creed, the belief that no English girl can really love a
foreigner. The other, of course, is that no foreign girl is really
virtuous.

"That's a nice thing to say!" she retorted, trembling a little with her
emotions. "If that's the new way they have at home----"

"Oh, I don't know," he began and he looked at her. "I'm afraid you're
getting all upset. I'm sorry, really, I didn't think you'd have been so
serious about it. As if it mattered to you!"

"I'm thinking of _her_," she said with a little hysterical sob. "You
mustn't----"

Mr. Spokesly was in a quandary again. If he put Ada's adoration in its
true perspective, he would not think very highly of himself. He took no
real pleasure in speaking of himself as a promised man even to a married
woman. Yet how was he to get this particular married woman in delicate
health and extremely robust emotions to see him as a human being and not
a monster of cold-blooded caution? And there was another problem. What
of this new and astonishing revelation--new and astonishing to him, at
any rate--that love, to a woman, is not a mere decoction of bliss
administered by a powerful and benevolent male, but a highly complicated
universe of subjective illusions in which the lover is only dimly seen
as a necessary but disturbing phantom of gross and agonizing
ineptitudes? The wonder, however, is not that Mr. Spokesly was slow to
discover this, but that he did not live and die, as many men do, without
even suspecting it. He nodded his head slightly as he replied:

"You're right in a way," he muttered. "She thinks I'm--well, she thinks
I'm brave to go to sea in war-time!" The extreme incongruity of such an
hallucination made him giggle.

"She would! You are!" said the woman on the couch, almost irritably.
"What do you want to laugh for? Don't you see what you miss?" she added
in illogical annoyance.

"That the way you feel about Mr. Dainopoulos?" Mr. Spokesly asked. The
woman turned her face so that the lamplight illumined her coiled hair
and for a moment she did not reply. Then she said, her face still in the
shadow:

"You'd only laugh if I told you."

"No," declared Mr. Spokesly. "Honest I won't. Laugh at meself--yes. But
you--that's different."

"But you don't believe in love at first sight, I can see very well."

"I only said I hadn't anything like that happen to me," he replied
slowly, pondering. "But I s'pose it has to be something like that in a
case like yours."

"I don't understand you."

"Well, you being English, you see, and Mr. Dainopoulos a foreigner."

"As an excuse, I suppose? Father made the same remark, but I never
thanked him."

Mr. Spokesly looked at her soberly. Her eyes were bright and resolute,
and the lamplight threw into salience the curve of her jaw and chin. A
fugitive thought flitted about his mind for a moment and vanished
again--whether her father was inconsolable at his daughter's departure.

"You got married at home then?"

"Yes, after Mr. Dainopoulos saved my life."

"Did he?"

"Of course. That's how we met. Didn't you ever hear of the _Queen Mab_
accident? It was in the papers."

"Can't say as I did. I was out East so long, you see. Wait a bit,
though----" Mr. Spokesly pondered. "I fancy I remember reading something
about it in the home papers; an excursion steamer in collision with a
cargo boat, wasn't it?" The girl nodded.

"Down the river. I was in it. My sister--she was drowned. We were going
to Southend."

"I see. And Mr. Dainopoulos, he was with you and----"

"No. I'd never seen him then. You see, we were all standing by the
paddle-box when the other ship cut into us, my sister Gladys and two
boys we'd been keeping company with. It was something awful, everybody
screaming and the boat going up in the air. I mean the other end was
going down. At last we couldn't stand, so we sat on the paddle-box. Then
all of a sudden the boat slid over to one side and we went in."

Mr. Spokesly made a sound expressive of intense sympathy and interest.

"And next thing I knew was somebody was holding me up and he said,
'Don't move! Don't move!' But I couldn't! Something must have hit me
when I fell in. I didn't know where then--the water was awfully cold.
And then a boat came, and they lifted me in. And then he swam off again
to find the others. I don't faint as a rule, but I did then. There were
so many, and the screams--oh, it was shocking!

"But the worst was when we got on land again. It was near Woolwich and
they turned a chapel or something into a hospital for us. And all the
relations of the people on the _Queen Mab_ came down, and Mr.
Dainopoulos, who'd taken his landlady's daughter for the excursion, was
sitting there in a blanket when the landlady and her husband came in.
They hadn't found her. You know bodies don't come up sometimes,
especially when a ship turns over. And they caught hold of him, calling
out 'Where is our girl? What have you done with our girl?' They
_screamed_ at him!"

"Was he engaged to her?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

"Just the same as I was with Georgie Litwell who was drowned. Keeping
company."

"And what happened then?"

"Why, we fell in love. That's what I was going to tell you so long as
you promised not to laugh. He was in a wholesale tobacco merchant's in
Mark Lane then and he took lodgings near us at Haverstock Hill. Those
other people behaved as though he'd held their daughter's head under.
Really they did. How could he help it? He saved six besides me. It
wasn't his fault the boat sank."

"No, of course not. I see now."

"And then, you know, Mother made a fuss because he was foreign. Mother's
a Berkshire woman, and she said she'd never thought she'd live to see a
child of hers marry a man from goodness knows where. She didn't half go
on, I can tell you. And Father had his own way of making me perfectly
happy. He'd ask me, how many in the harem already? And I couldn't do a
thing, lying on my back helpless. And at last, with the doctor saying I
needed a sea-voyage to get my strength back, I thinks to myself, I'll
take one; and with the accident insurance I had had the sense to carry
ever since I'd started going to business, and what Boris had in the
bank, we went. Or came, rather. We've been here ever since and nobody's
heard either of us regret it, either."

And as she lay there looking out into the darkness of the Gulf with
shining resolute eyes, it was plain that this romantic destiny of hers
was a treasured possession. It dominated her life. She had found in it
the indispensable inspiration for happiness, an ethical yet potent
anodyne for the forfeiture of many homely joys. It was for her the
equivalent of a social triumph or acceptance among peeresses of the
realm. It is to be suspected that she had ever in her mind a vision of
the wonder and awe she had evoked in the souls of the suburban girls
among whom she had spent her life, and that this vision supported her
and formed the base of a magnificent edifice. And it was an integral
part of this edifice that love should be a romantical affair, a flame,
noted by all and fed by the adoration of a husband who was harsh to the
world, but to her a monster of infatuated fidelity.

Something of this impinged upon Mr. Spokesly's consciousness and he
regarded her for a moment with profound respect.

"I should say," he muttered, returning to his cigarette, "you haven't
done so badly for yourself."

She gave him an extraordinarily quick look, like a flash of sheet
lightning from a calm evening sky, which left him puzzled. He was not
aware, at that time, that no woman will ever admit she has bettered
herself by marrying a given man. She must retain for ever that shining
figure of him she might have loved, a sort of domestic knight-errant in
golden armour, who keeps occasional vigils at her side while the weary
actuality slumbers in gross oblivion. Mrs. Dainopoulos knew that Mr.
Spokesly saw nothing of this. She knew him for what he was, a being
entirely incapable of compassing the secrets of a woman's heart. She
knew he imagined that love was all, that women were at the mercy of
their love for men, and that chivalrous ideas, rusted and clumsily
manipulated, were still to be found in his mind. And she saw the
fragility and delicate thinness of his love affair with Ada Rivers.
Anything could break it, anything could destroy it, she reflected. Those
fancies ... of course he said he was engaged; but an engagement, as Mrs.
Dainopoulos knew, having lived in a London suburb, was nothing. Yes,
anything might make him forget Ada. And as she repeated the word
"anything" to herself in a kind of ecstasy, Mrs. Dainopoulos turned her
head quickly and listened. There was a sound of someone being admitted.

"So you've met your fate, anyway," she observed to Mr. Spokesly, yet
still listening to the distant sound.

"Yes," he said with a smile, "I reckon you can cross me off as caught.
What's that? Come back, I s'pose. Time for me to be off, anyway. I'm
sure...."

Mrs. Dainopoulos held up her hand. She was still listening with her head
slightly inclined, her eyes fixed upon Mr. Spokesly, as though absently
pondering the perilous chances of his emotional existence. Cross him off
as caught! She smiled again in that lambent heat-lightning way of hers.
A woman who spends her life in a reclining seclusion becomes very much
of a clairvoyant, an electric condenser of emotions. Mr. Spokesly was
agreeably flattered by the intent interest of his companion's gaze.
Quite a nice little tête-à-tête he'd had. It gave him a thrill to sit in
intimate exchange of love experiences with an attractive married woman,
even if she was an invalid. He felt a bit of a dog. He would write to
Ada and tell her. Or would he? Did he want Ada to know anything about
this visit to a mysterious house in Macedonia, a house so clandestine
and bizarre he could scarcely convince himself that it was the abode of
virtue? Did he? Ada was a long way off, in beleaguered England. He
suddenly wondered what Ada had to do with this at all. With an ease that
rather disturbed him he told himself that you could never tell what
might happen nowadays. No use worrying about the future. Why, he might
never get home. He dropped the ash from his cigarette into the tray on
the table. Someone was coming with a quick decisive step up the stairs.
He smiled at Mrs. Dainopoulos, not quite sure why she was holding up her
hand. She was thinking "cross him off as caught," and smiling, when the
someone arrived at the door and knocked.

"Why didn't you get married before you left England?" she asked quickly,
and added in louder tone, "Come in!"

In sharp contrast to the rapid movements without, the door opened with
extreme cautiousness, and at first nothing could be seen save the hand
on the knob. Mr. Spokesly had been thrown into some disorder of mind by
that last question. Why hadn't he, anyway? It was something he had never
decided. Why had they not done what thousands had done in England, which
was simply to marry on the spot and sail a week, or perhaps a few days,
later? Why had he not taken the hazards of war? He had more, far more,
than many of those girls and boys at home. It was at this point, facing
for the first time the unconscious evasions of life, that he found
himself facing something else, a girl with a startled and indignant
light in her eyes. He uncrossed his legs and began to rise as Mrs.
Dainopoulos said, "Come in, Evanthia. It is all right."

She came in, letting the door swing to as she moved with a long
rapacious stride towards the sofa. It was obvious she was preoccupied
with some affair of intense importance to herself. Once Mr. Spokesly's
presence had been indicated she became again absorbed in her errand. Her
amber-coloured eyes, under exquisitely distinct brows, were opaque with
anger, and she held one hand out with the fingers dramatically clenched,
as though about to release a thunderbolt of wrath. The gesture was as
antique as it was involuntary. One heard drums muttering and the
gathering of fierce Ægean winds as she came on, and leaning forward,
flung out both hands in a passionate revelation of sorrow. Mr. Spokesly
sat down again, embarrassed and fascinated. He could not take his eyes
from her. She was something new in his experience; a woman with passion
and the power to express it. Such women are almost non-existent in
England, where sentiment is regarded as legal tender for passion. He
regarded her with a kind of stupefaction, as though he had never set his
eyes on a woman before. One might say with approximate truth that he had
not. His ways had lain among the artificial products of his age. In
trepidation he realized, as he sat there watching the movements of this
girl, that he would not know what to do with a woman like that. He sat
there and listened.

"Gone?" repeated Mrs. Dainopoulos.

"Yes, they are all gone. The French sent soldiers. And they would not
let me go to speak to him."

"But where will they go?"

The girl, whose eyes were bent upon the carpet at her feet, shrugged her
shoulders violently.

"Who knows that? To Sofia; or to Constantinople. Oh, I would have gone,
too. These pigs, pigs, pigs of French! Not a word! And he is gone!" She
dragged a chair from the table, and sat down suddenly, thrusting her
chin over her arm and staring at the floor. There was a moment's
silence, while Mr. Spokesly sat in doubt and Mrs. Dainopoulos looked out
over the Gulf.

"Gone!" muttered the girl again sullenly.

"Don't do that, dear. It is very bad for you when you get in such
rages!" Mrs. Dainopoulos spoke in a soft cool tone, like a recumbent
sybil whose knowledge of rage and sorrow was vast. The girl's foot swung
to and fro more and more rapidly, the red Turkish slipper slapping the
floor, "You will hear from him after a little."

"Ah, if they let him write. But these French! With their beards and hats
like cooking pots! They see everything. Of course he will write, but
that is no good. He cannot send anything."

An expression of disappointment crossed the other woman's face as she
patted the girl's shoulder.

"Wait a little," she said. "You can't tell yet."

"I would have given a thousand drachma to have got to the train," said
the girl moodily. "And I would give a million to get to Constantinople.
This place stifles me. I hate it ... hate it."

She stood up suddenly, raising her hands to her magnificent coil of dark
hair, and revealing the poise and vigour of her body. "Ah!" she moaned,
bending over her friend and caressing her. "I am a bad girl, forgetting
how ill you are. Evanthia is a bad, bad girl, with her troubles--and you
have a visitor----" She turned her head for a moment and Mr. Spokesly
was caught unawares in the brilliance of a dazzling yet enigmatic glance
from the amber eyes.

"A friend of my husband's," said Mrs. Dainopoulos. "He is English, you
know, like me. From London. We have been talking of London."

"Ah, yes!" The lingering syllables were a caress, yet there was no more
comprehension in them than in the inarticulate sounds of an animal. The
girl bent her dark head over the blonde masses on the pillow. "Forgive
your bad girl, Alice."

"Oh, all right," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, emerging with an embarrassed
English smile. "Only you must be good now and go back to bed. There's
Boris coming in."

"I am going!" said the girl and started. And then she remembered Mr.
Spokesly sitting there in dumb stupefaction, his gaze following her, and
she turned to make him a bow with a strange, charming gesture of an
out-flung hand towards him. The next moment she dragged the door open
and passed out.

He looked up to see Mrs. Dainopoulos regarding him thoughtfully, and he
made a sudden step forward in life as he realized the ineffectiveness of
any words in his vocabulary to express his emotions at that moment. He
made no attempt to corrupt the moment, however, which was perhaps
another step forward. He sat silent, looking at the glowing end of his
cigarette, endeavouring to recapture the facile equilibrium of mind
which had been his as he followed Mr. Dainopoulos through the gateway an
hour or so before. But that was impossible, for it was gone, though he
did not know it, for ever. He was trying to remember the name Mrs.
Dainopoulos had called her. Evanthia! And once at the beginning, Miss
Solaris. Something like that. Evanthia Solaris. He said to himself that
it was a pretty name, and was conscious at the same time of the
inadequacy of such a word. There was something beyond prettiness in it;
something of a spring morning in the Cyclades, when the other islands
come up out of the mist like hummocks of amethyst and the cicadas shrill
in the long grass under the almond trees. There was in it an adumbration
of youth beyond his experience, a hint of the pulsing and bizarre
vitality of alien races, a vitality fretted into white wrath by her will
and her desire, as the serene breath of the morning is suddenly lashed
into a tempest by the howling fury of an Ægean white squall. She was
gone, yet the room was still charged with her magnetic presence, so that
Mr. Dainopoulos came in quietly, put down his tweed cap, and seated
himself beside his wife, and Mr. Spokesly scarcely noticed his arrival.

As he became aware of outside phenomena once more--and he was rather
frightened to discover how his thoughts had flown out into the unknown
darkness in search of the girl--he saw that Mr. Dainopoulos was
preoccupied and anxious. They were speaking in a low tone and in a
foreign tongue, Mr. Spokesly noted. He recalled a story he had read in a
magazine some little time before--a story of an Englishman who had a
most miraculous command of foreign languages, who overheard a
conversation which revealed a plot to destroy the British Army. The plot
was revealed by the simple process of torturing a beautiful girl of
neutral origin who was to be forced to marry a brutal enemy colonel. It
did not occur to Mr. Spokesly to reflect that beautiful girls are
usually eager to marry colonels of any denomination, or that colonels do
not usually blend love and espionage. But he did notice the extreme
improbability of an Englishman being a linguist. It made the tale seem
unreal and artificial. Especially when the story added that he was a
naval officer of good family who afterwards married the beautiful
neutral and settled in a castle in Dalmatia. Fanciful! Mr. Spokesly knew
enough of naval officers to doubt the _dénouement_. He himself, for that
matter, would rather live in a bungalow in Twickenham than in Dalmatia.
As for foreign girls--he rubbed his chin, puzzled over his own blurred
sensations. Mr. Dainopoulos was speaking again. The woman lay back,
looking up at the high ceiling, an expression of calm and careful
consideration on her face, which was illuminated sharply, like an
intaglio, by the lamp. And Mr. Spokesly experienced a shock to discover
that they were not speaking of the girl at all. They seemed to have
forgotten her existence. They looked at him and so brought him into the
conversation.

"I'll have to be getting back," he remarked, rising once more.

Mr. Dainopoulos went to the door and spoke in a low harsh tone into the
darkness.

"I'll get you a boat," he said. "There's no boats allowed after dark,
but I have a friend on the French Pier. He'll put you on board. Another
night, you must come and eat supper. I have had plenty business
to-night. I have to go out again later, too. You understand what I tell
my wife? Well, the consuls have had to go home. The German and Austrian
and Bulgar Consuls went away to-night. I do a good bit of business, you
understand, with all these people, and I got to go and see a friend of
mine about it. So--will you have coffee----? I'll get you a boat first,
and you can come to-morrow night, eh?"

A girl of fifteen with a downcast disdainful countenance came in with a
tray and set it on the table. One eyelash flickered towards Mr. Spokesly
as she turned and made her way out. He looked at her entranced, noting
her slovenly dress, the holes in her stocking, and the ugly slippers
that slip-slopped as she moved her small feet. He noted these uncouth
garnitures within which she moved with the restless yet indolent rhythm
of a captive queen. His mind, as he drank the strong coffee and the tiny
glass of cognac, was in a state of unusual exaltation. Never before had
he faced an immediate future so fraught with glittering yet
unrecognizable possibilities. Mr. Dainopoulos might be a rascal, yet he
possessed the power to call up familiar spirits. As he sat there leaning
towards the table, his hand abstractedly on the bottle of cognac,
thinking deeply of his multifarious concerns, his dexterous dealings in
and out among men who slew one another daily, he resembled some
saturnine yet benevolent magician about to release a formidable genie
who would fill the room with fuliginous vapour. Mr. Spokesly felt his
scalp twitching with anticipation. He stepped across to say good-bye to
Mrs. Dainopoulos.

"I never expected this," he said simply. "I've had a very pleasant
time."

"Come to supper to-morrow," she said, smiling, "Always glad to see
anybody from the Old Country."

"Sorry your lady friend couldn't stay," he muttered. "Like to see more
of her. Well ... I'll say good-night."

He smiled as he went down the staircase behind the preoccupied Mr.
Dainopoulos. He smiled because he could see, by virtue of his exalted
mood, that the smug phrases which had always been adequate for his
emotions, sounded foolish and feeble. Like to see more of her! Did he?
It made him dizzy to think of, though, for all that. It made the simple
business of returning to that house an adventure of the soul. Nor did
the phrase "lady friend" describe her. He was comfortably vague as to
the actual constituents of a lady. A lady was perhaps described as a
woman with whom it was impossible to be wholly at ease. Yes, he
whispered to himself, but for a different reason. He felt defeated in
his attempts to stabilize his impressions. He had no comparisons. It was
like comparing a bottle of wine with a bottle of milk. Even Ada.... He
moved so abruptly as he followed close on the heels of Mr. Dainopoulos
that the latter looked at him in inquiry, and thought a remark was
necessary.

"We can fix our little business any time before you go away," he
murmured.

But Mr. Spokesly was not thinking of the little business just then. He
found himself suddenly confronting the conviction in his mind that his
Ada had been little more than a shining reflector of his own image. Ada,
in beleaguered England, seemed very far away and her personality lost
whatever distinction and magnetism it may have had while he was with
her. He saw with perfect clarity a new truth beyond that first one--that
Mrs. Dainopoulos had been aware of all this while she had plied her
gentle smiling questions. Had she meant anything, then? How could one
plumb the mind of a woman? There was something almost sinister in the
notion that she had known all along how he was situated, how he felt,
and let him sit there while a girl like an indignant enchantress came in
and worked some sort of spell upon him. He began to wonder if the girl
was real; whether he had not dreamed she was there. He was aghast at the
insensibility of Mr. Dainopoulos who was leading the way across the
street, his head bent and his damaged features set in a meditative
scowl. In what way could one account for it? A woman like that! A woman
already with a power over himself that frightened him. Ada! He thought
of Ada almost as a refuge from this new emotion assaulting his heart.
There was safety with Ada. He knew, within reasonable limits, the range
of which she was capable, the tone and timbre of her soul. Here, he
comprehended with surprising readiness, he would be called on to do
something more than talk conventionally of love. It was all very well,
he could see, to jog along from year to year, having a little fun here
and there, and getting engaged and even married; but it was no more than
the normal function of a human organism. Beyond that he could see
something ruthless, powerful, and destructive. He experienced an
extraordinary feeling of elation as he walked beside Mr. Dainopoulos
towards the street car. He was perplexed because he would have liked to
tell Ada the cause of this elation. He had a fugitive but marvellously
clear view of Ada's position in the matter. She was away in the future,
in a distant and calm region to which he had not yet gained admission.
There was something he had to go through before he could get Ada. And
while they jangled slowly along the quay, and Mr. Dainopoulos mumbled in
his ear the difficulties imposed upon himself by the departure of the
consuls, Mr. Spokesly caught a glimpse of what men mean by Fate. Though
he knew it not, the departure of the consuls was an event of prime
importance to himself. It was an event destined to precipitate the grand
adventure of his life. Ada, in beleaguered England, would find her
mechanically perfect existence modified by the departure of the consuls.
Something he had to go through. He stared out at the shaded lights of
the cafés and failed to notice that he no longer desired the tarnished
joys of the seafaring boulevardier. Here was a new motive. The facile
and ephemeral affairs of his life were forgotten in their sheer
nothingness. He drew a deep breath, wondering what lay in store for him.

They left the car and passed through the gates of the dock, along
roadways almost incredibly muddy, to where transports worked in the
cautious twilight of blue electrics and picket-boats moved up and down
gently where they were made fast to the steps, their red and green
side-lights giving the quiet stealthy hustle of the quays an air of
brisk alertness. Tall negroes, in blue-gray uniforms and red fezzes,
moved in slow lines loaded with sections of narrow-gauge track and balks
of timber, or pushed trucks of covered material. At a desk in a wooden
office sat a French _ajutant_, a blinding tungsten globe illuminating
the short black hairs rucked up over his stiff braided collar and
reflecting from an ivory-bald spot on his head as he spoke into a
telephone. Mr. Dainopoulos slid sideways into the room and sat down on a
bench by the door. The officer's eye flickered towards his visitor and
he lifted a hand slightly to indicate recognition. Mr. Spokesly stepped
in and sat down. On the wall was a drawing cut from the _Vie
Parisienne_, a nude, with exaggerated limbs and an enormous picture-hat,
riding on a motorcycle. The shriek, as of a soul in torment, of a French
locomotive, brought a scowl to the officer's face as he conversed with
his friends at the Cercle Militaire. Ringing off with a fat chuckle he
demanded in rapid French how his old one was making it. The old one, who
was Mr. Dainopoulos, made no definite complaint, but commented on the
fact that a man could not sit in Floka's and take a little drink with a
friend without a certain person, with a luxuriant beard, taking especial
note of it. The _ajutant_ threw himself back in his chair, tipped it,
his heels grinding the boards, and grunted. That, he mumbled, was only
to be expected of Père Lefrote. Well, what was it now? Mr. Dainopoulos
indicated his companion, an officer from the English ship arrived
to-day, now anchored in the _rade_. "What ship?" muttered the officer,
looking Mr. Spokesly over as though he were some unsavoury mongrel. From
Alexandria, said Mr. Dainopoulos, skilfully evading such an impossible
word as _Tanganyika_. "Ah-ha!" crowed the officer, transferring his cold
regard to his old one. So the old one was on that game again. By the
sacred blue, he was a great old cock. And the officer, getting up,
expressed his conviction very fast that if the truth were only revealed,
the old one could do a neat business in _poulets de luxe_ as well. What?
The truculent officer, halting at the door, his thumb and finger busy
with his moustache, looked back over his shoulder at his old one. No,
said the latter, he merely repeated what he had said so many times. He
knew none of those creatures, though he admitted three had arrived on
the transport _Jumièges_ that morning. Was that so? Where were they,
then? At the Omphale or the Tour Blanche? Come now! Mr. Dainopoulos lit
a cigarette and as he trod carefully on the smoking match murmured his
conviction that the ladies, whom a friend of his had seen land at
Venizelos Steps, entered automobiles, and might not be found at the
Omphale for some time. The officer drummed at the door and nodded. True,
but the old one knew of some ravishing creature surely who would respond
to the delicate attentions of a lonely exile. A _marraine_, in fact. But
the old one had no such clients. He was a man of business purely. And if
it could be arranged his friend here would like to be put on board.

The officer, a frustrated and disappointed sensualist, whose imagination
was tantalized but never fed by the fact that he was in the fabled
Orient, the abode of lovely Circassians and other houris, nodded
agreement. He owed Mr. Dainopoulos a few hundred francs and would have
been at a loss even if that gentleman had suddenly produced a beautiful
and expensive woman for his amusement. He was ever dreaming of a
tremendous _affaire_, but he was too close-fisted a Norman from Darnetal
to spend much on a sweetheart.

"True," he remarked and then called out into the darkness. "Yes," he
said, turning his head into the light, "the _chaloupe_ is going off now.
Let your friend tell the patron the ship he wants." And he returned to
this desk, yawned, and took up a copy of _Excelsior_. What a life, eh,
my old one!

Mr. Spokesly pointed out the black bulk of the _Tanganyika_, and as the
launch slid along the grating, stepped up and reached his room. The
night-watchman said, "Chief steward he no back yet." Mr. Spokesly turned
in. He switched out his light and lay for a while thinking with more
precision and penetration than even the London School of Mnemonics would
have ventured to guarantee. He had some difficulty in identifying
himself with the man who had gone ashore with Archy Bates that evening.
And he slid away into the deep sleep of the healthy seafarer with a
novel notion forming at the back of his mind. Suppose he was ashore in
Saloniki, what would happen then? If by some turn of the wheel he found
himself there? He might be sick, for instance, and go to the hospital
and be left behind. There was no dream, but he saw it--a storm and great
toil and anxiety, and in the midst of it a girl awaiting the outcome of
his exertions with enigmatic amber eyes.




CHAPTER VI


Mr. Dainopoulos afterwards developed into an excellent diplomatist, his
principal virtue being a knack of gauging personal values and extracting
usefulness from apparently dry husks. He withdrew from the imaginative
sensualist who sat during the night in a highly varnished pine shack
brooding upon the exasperating proximity of inaccessible seraglios. A
useful instrument in many schemes, he did not merit a whole evening.
Like most sensualists of the grosser kind he was a bore, and Mr.
Dainopoulos had other clients. He picked his way out of the incredible
mire of the docks, and crossed over to the cleaner side of the road
which extended from Venizelos Street past the Custom House, and which
was being extensively remodelled by the army of occupation. Even as Mr.
Dainopoulos crossed he could see a number of industrious beings mounted
on newly erected telegraph poles, their movements illuminated by small
bright lights so that they resembled a row of burning martyrs elevated
by some Macedonian tyrant, their cries and contortions as they reached
down into the darkness for material and tools recalling the agonies of
shrivelling victims. The hotel was in blank darkness. The squirming,
writhing exfoliations which constituted the Berlin architect's
conception of loveliness showed not a glint of light. One could not
believe that it had inhabitants, or that they were alive. Nevertheless,
Mr. Dainopoulos halted before the massive double doors and rang the
bell, a tall, high-shouldered shade demanding admission to a familiar
vault. It was some time after he had relapsed into a motionless silence
and an observer might have imagined him to have forgotten his errand,
when one of the leaves of the door opened a few inches, and he raised
his head. At the sound of his voice the door opened a little more so
that he could slide his body sideways through the aperture. Then the
door closed behind him and the hotel resumed its appearance of a
monstrous Renaissance tomb.

Inside, the night-porter, a person in a slovenly undress of dirty shirt,
riding-breeches open like funnels at the knee, and Turkish slippers,
yawned and motioned his visitor to a chair while he slowly ascended the
stairs, which were lit by a single invisible lamp on the landing. Mr.
Dainopoulos remained sunk in thought. It was, in a way, a perfectly
honest and rational proposition he had to make, but he found himself
involved in some doubt as to the way the person above, an Englishman,
would take it. He knew something of the English, being married to one of
that race, and he sometimes reflected upon the unexpected workings of
their minds. They were oppressively practical and drove wonderful
bargains; and then suddenly they would flare into inexplicable passion
over something which he for the life of him could not comprehend. If
this person upstairs did that, what would it be? Mr. Dainopoulos shook
his head. He could not say. He would have to take a chance. He might be
tolerated, or sworn at, or laughed at, or arrested, or thrown down the
stairs. All these things happened to honest merchandisers, he was well
aware. He sometimes watched these English under lowered lids and
marvelled. Personally he preferred German or American men. He felt
nearer to them, less conscious of a certain incomprehensible reticence
of soul which is peculiar to the English, a sort of polite and poignant
regret that he should see fit to cumber the earth, which had happened,
by a singular and unexplained destiny, to be their heritage. Association
with them, under such circumstances as he encountered, was provocative
of considerable thought. To men like him, the confused product of a
hundred diverging stocks, from Illyrian to Copt, the phenomenon of these
blond and disdainful beings, who came always in ships and were
apologetic even in their invasions, bore the mark of something
supernatural, since the contemplation of them in their own land filled a
normal Latin with inarticulate contempt. Mr. Dainopoulos had no pride.
He would have found it an embarrassing impediment in his business. But
he did devote an occasional moment of leisure to wondering how men could
so impose their eccentric habit of thought upon the nations, and why he,
for example, should be directed to obtain his personal ideals from a
distant island in the northern seas.

The servant appeared on the landing, and Mr. Dainopoulos immediately
went up.

The Berlin architect, no doubt in anticipation of invading armies, had
exhausted his ingenuity in the façade and the reception rooms, and the
chambers above were left in a state of disturbing starkness. Mr.
Dainopoulos was led along corridors that chilled the heart with their
bare rectangular perspectives, and was halted at length before a door
behind which the voices of men could be heard in conversation. And in
reply to a knock a slightly querulous voice intoned, "Come in, come in!"
as though in infinite but weary patience with elementary intelligences.
Mr. Dainopoulos stepped in.

Three men occupied the room. A naval lieutenant sat on the bed smoking a
cigarette, a young man who did not raise his eyes to glance at the
intruder. The owner of the room was a major, who was seated at a small
escritoire near the window, and whose belt and cap hung over a chair. He
was a man of thirty-odd, as clean as though he had been scoured and
scraped in boiling water, the small absurd moustache as decorative as a
nail-brush, and with a look of capable insolence in his blue-gray eyes.
A small safe at his side was open and he remained stooping over this as
he looked up and saw Mr. Dainopoulos standing by the door. The other man
was in civilian tweeds, astride of a chair with his arms on the back,
smoking a large curved meerschaum pipe. A clean-shaven circular-faced
man of doubtful age, he was the only one of the three who regarded their
visitor in a humane manner. He nodded slightly in response to the low
bow made by Mr. Dainopoulos on his entry. The latter, however, knew
better than to presume on this. He paused until the major invited him to
approach, and the major did not do this. He simply waited, leaning over
his safe, for Mr. Dainopoulos to explain his intrusion, his existence on
earth, and his intentions as to the future, and anything else which
might be regarded as extenuating his conduct. When Mr. Dainopoulos
remarked that he had called on a little matter of business, the major
bent his head again and went on investigating the papers in the safe, as
though Mr. Dainopoulos had suddenly and completely evaporated.

"Well," he observed at length, straightening up and laying some papers
on his desk, "why do you call on a little matter of business in the
middle of the night?" He brought his left arm up in a peculiar whirl to
the level of his eyes and looked at his wrist watch. "Eleven-twenty," he
added in a tone of detached contempt, and shot a severe look at his
visitor.

Mr. Dainopoulos remained standing by the door and maintained his
attitude of calm urgency. He explained that the departure of the consuls
had led him to remodel his arrangements. All three looked at him with
attention when he made this statement. The naval lieutenant, whose work
it was to examine and pass all neutral vessels, knew Mr. Dainopoulos
very well. To his regret he had never found that gentleman doing
anything at all shady, but he had never abandoned his conviction that he
would catch him some day. The civilian, who was a censor and decoder of
neutral correspondence, was familiar with the Dainopoulos _dossier_ in
his office and had read with surprise the chatty letters to girls in
London which came from the man's wife. He, however, was not in a
position to reveal his knowledge, and looked at Mr. Dainopoulos with
good-tempered curiosity. The major, who knew his visitor better than
either of the others, having purchased large quantities of stores from
him at a handsome profit to the vendor, looked as if he had been
insulted when the consuls were mentioned. As well he might, since those
astute gentlemen had done their best to keep all possible material out
of his hands, had blandly checkmated the armies of occupation at every
turn, even preaching a holy war against them among the owners of Turkish
baths in the Via Egnatia. They had financed Hellenic Turks who laid
injunctions on rights-of-way, issued writs against movement of goods,
and sought to inflame French against English and Italian against both.
The consuls had been the curse of every executive at Headquarters, for
their resources and nerve seemed unlimited. They worked together like a
team of experienced crooks on a steamship, and never for a moment were
the invaders permitted to forget that the local government was neutral.
The major was happier than he had been for a long while, though he
lacked the emotional demonstrativeness proper to such a mood. All three
of these men, by their reports, had aided in the grand _coup_ which had
culminated that evening in the expulsion of the consuls across the
frontier. But their first thought, when Mr. Dainopoulos mentioned
consuls, was that by some ghastly mischance the consuls had got back
into Saloniki and the whole weary business was to begin again.

"Eh?" said the major, snarling up his upper lip so that his moustache
looked more like a nail-brush than ever, and looking as if he were about
to spring up and fasten his teeth in his visitor's neck. "What's that?"

Thus having evoked a suitable interest in his affairs, Mr. Dainopoulos
drew a small notebook from his pocket and began to enumerate the list of
goods the sudden departure of the consuls had left on his hands. In the
midst of it, the major nodded to a chair and said, "Sit down over here,
please." Mr. Dainopoulos came forward, sat down, and proceeded. The
naval lieutenant reached over to the dressing table, took up a Turkish
dagger and began turning it over in his hands, examining the edge with
an intense stare. The censor drew steadily at his pipe and looked Mr.
Dainopoulos up and down. He was a novelist, and of the three may be said
to have had some practice in the gauging of character. He was aware, in
spite of a life spent exclusively in southern England and among one
small exclusive caste of English people, that this Levantine might have
a view of his own. He was interesting. Where had he picked up that
English wife? A slight shudder passed over him in spite of himself at
the thought of an English woman in a Levantine's arms. No doubt,
however, she was a house-maid or something of that sort. Must be making
a lot of money. The censor felt a surge of indignation over this. His
own family's resources had been quadrupled by the war; but that of
course was the reward of patriotic endeavour. He found it intolerable
that a neutral should make money out of bloodshed. Mr. Dainopoulos
proceeded as calmly and collectedly as though he were a salesman in
Birmingham or Liverpool. He certainly was unaware of inspiring horror
and contempt. He even mentioned a thousand yards of Indian cotton drill
which he had in his warehouse and which he had purchased for a song from
a German firm in Alexandria a few days before the English had
sequestered the business. The only point on which he was reticent was
the fact that he had already been paid in gold for most of it by the
consular agents; a most satisfactory arrangement for him, but
unfortunate for them in the present juncture, since they had no receipt
and the goods were to be held against their order. There was something
exasperating in the spectacle of this man sitting there, with all the
marks of clandestine knavery about him, merely offering _bona fide_
goods for sale. He was a Greek in Greece, transacting business which,
although he did not yet know it, was of vital importance to them, for a
whole string of vessels bound for Saloniki had been sunk inside of two
days, from the Start to Karaburun. They were at a loss for a week or so,
and a week or so in war is not to be ignored. And here was an
unprepossessing person offering them, at a comparatively reasonable
rate, a remarkable consignment of material. Apart from their own needs
in Macedonia they had recently sent a few thousand men to an island in
the Ægean to prepare a base, and the ships bearing their stores were
unreported. Sunk, of course. They sat in various poses thinking of all
this, and Mr. Dainopoulos closed his notebook and took out a cigarette.

It should be said for him that if he had known their actual position his
price would have been slightly higher, just as later on English
merchants' prices became so high that men spat at the sound of their
names. But he was not a profiteer in the modern sense. He knew nothing
of advertising, for example. He thought 100 per cent. an adequate
reimbursement for the risks of trade.

He was asked when he could effect delivery. He said in a week or ten
days, some of it being on board a steamer on its way now from
Alexandria.

"What steamer is that?" demanded the lieutenant.

"The _Kalkis_, four hundred tons," he replied. "I have had her a year
now."

"What speed?"

"Oh, four. Perhaps four and a half. A very old ship. No good except for
my business to the Islands."

"Don't know about that, my friend," muttered the major. "You may have to
give up your business to the Islands. We commandeer our own ships; I
don't see how you are going to get out of it."

"That would suit me," said Mr. Dainopoulos promptly. "She costs me
fifteen thousand francs a month insurance. And coal is four hundred
francs a ton in Port Said. I make very little out of her."

This was scarcely the literal truth, though Mr. Dainopoulos might be
pardoned for depreciating his profits at a moment when a purchaser
appeared. As a matter of fact he had made already out of that small ship
about seven times her original purchase price and he had a neat scheme
in hand which would make her a very good investment indeed.

"We have some business in the Islands, too, you see," the major remarked
abstractedly. "I think you had better come to my office say about
ten-thirty to-morrow. You know the place. Next to the Ottoman Bank, eh?
G. O. S. Room Fourteen. Ask for Major Begg."

Mr. Dainopoulos, who would probably have done a thousand francs' worth
of business before the major had had his bath, expressed his willingness
to appear.

"Will you have a drink?" said the major in a harsh, brow-beating tone
which was believed by himself and many others of his class to evoke the
very soul of bluff hospitality. Mr. Dainopoulos, however, had a strange
feeling of having been good-humouredly kicked in the face. He declined
the refreshment, not because he felt insulted, but because he knew the
only drink these men had was whiskey and the smell and taste of the
stuff made him sick.

"All right," said the major, regarding an abstainer with disfavour. He
liked a man to take a drink. "To-morrow at ten-thirty. You might close
the door. Thanks."

As he closed the door behind him, as requested, Mr. Dainopoulos
reflected that he would have time to lay the matter before a French
colonel he knew before reaching Room Fourteen. But he believed the best
price was to be had from the British. He had found out that much in the
course of his career--they did not haggle.

The three men he had left did not speak for a moment, waiting for him to
get out of earshot.

"Looks like Providence," observed the lieutenant, making a lunge with
the dagger at a knot in the bedstead.

The major pulled up his trouser leg and scratched a hairy calf. "These
infernal fleas!" he muttered. "Yes, as you say, Providence. An angel
very much in disguise."

"What about that ship, the _Kalkis_?" asked the censor.

"Oh, we shall probably charter her," said the major bitterly. "Take all
the risk and pay him a princely sum for sitting tight here and doing
nothing. We ought to buy, but we won't."

He sat silent for a moment. He was thinking of those men in Phyros,
waiting for their stores, eating sparingly of their emergency rations,
sampling the local cheese and bread and keeping a bright look-out for
transports which were lying on their sides in eighty fathoms. Something
would have to be done at once about them. This Dainopoulos had--here the
major glanced at his shorthand notes--four thousand feet of timber and
the Phyros crowd were frantic for timber for a jetty. Just think of it!
A fertile island which these Greeks had had for a couple of thousand
years, and no jetty yet! What could one do with people like that?
Hopeless. Then there was flour. He simply had to have some flour soon.
Dainopoulos said he had fifteen hundred barrels when the _Kalkis_ came
in.

There was in all this hard thinking no complete view of the war or of
the world. If they could collar stores from some other front or from one
of their allies, it was all one to them. Even the course of events had
no interest for them beyond their own base. This was an inevitable
result of the intensive pressure of responsibility on executives. They
were not callous. They were simply busy. Their own lives were still
bounded by the social barriers of England. They never spoke of private
affairs except to some man of their own class who had been to one of the
great public schools. For them the war was a war to perpetuate this
social hierarchy, to place it once more upon an impregnable base. They
wished to win, they but could see no difference between democracy and
defeat. Even the novelist was a novelist within the radius of his social
sphere, and remained within it in a city of Macedonia. He felt it
incumbent upon him to remain also a gentleman, even at the expense of
valuable collisions with alien temperaments. "He's a Greek, and I loathe
them," summarizes, in the major's words, their collective sentiment. And
their allies, it is to be feared, suffered under this highly specialized
form of criticism. Nothing that happened was adequate to demolish this
formidable _Kultur_. In victory and in defeat it was indestructible.
Only the genius of the race, working in the very strongholds of that
_Kultur_, can split it open and release new forces and aspirations. But
of this even the novelist, who trafficked in happy endings, had no
suspicion. He wrote a short story later, a story in which an English
girl who had been carried off by a rascally Greek was rescued by an
English officer who took her home to England and married her.

To the lieutenant the departure of the consuls and the impending
formation of a provisional government were affairs of qualified good. A
provisional government would immediately shriek for the return of all
sequestrated property. It would demand the status of allies, and all
their ships would start a complicated system of espionage and smuggling.
It would be, in his opinion, a series of perfect days. Nobody was honest
nowadays. Not a week ago he had caught naval stores going over the side
of a ship into a local boat, and the guilty party was wearing three
medals, for valour and distinguished service. He sometimes wished they
would put him on a ship again. It gave one a chance to do something
besides play detective anyway. The major spoke again.

"What about a captain for the _Kalkis_? We shall have to have one of our
own men, Mathews."

"Afraid that's not possible," said the lieutenant. "We haven't too many
men, you know. Better send him out with a convoy going to Alex. I might
have had one of those chaps who were rescued the other day off that
transport, but they've all gone home overland. And they won't stay, you
know. All want to get home."

"Can one blame them?" asked the censor. "I read letters in which these
seamen say they have not seen their families for seven or eight months."

"Dear me!" said the major drily. His own family were Indian Civil
Service. "What you might call the hardships of war. Possibly we may find
someone without family ties, Mathews."

The lieutenant smiled and ran his thumb along the blade of the Turkish
dagger.

"Possibly," he replied. He smiled because the major was rather
conspicuous at home for his affairs with married women.

"By the way," said the censor, following some obscure association of
ideas, "I met Morpeth this evening and he was telling me they expected
some new arrivals from Paris at the Omphale."

"Yes, I heard that," said the major, who was not at all interested. "It
will be a riot. Probably three or four. And about thirty or forty Greek,
French, Italian, and Serbian lieutenants, standing round six deep,
making them squiffy on Floka's Monopole. No, thanks. Stale pastry,
anyhow."

The lieutenant continued to smile.

"They'd better be doing that than slapping each other's faces and
exchanging cards at the Cercle Militaire," he murmured.

"They do that anyhow--afterwards," said the major, thrusting his papers
into the safe and lighting a cigarette. He shoved the door to with his
foot, twirled the knob, and stood up.

"What about some golf to-morrow afternoon?" he demanded. "Didn't you say
you had a friend coming ashore, Mathews?"

"Yes, from the _Proteus_. He'll be here about three, I think. Very
decent chap, too."

"Right. We'll go out in the new car. See you in the morning."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Dainopoulos found the trolley cars had stopped running and began to
walk home past the cafés of the front. On the other side of the road the
stern rails of a score of small coasting craft moved up and down gently
in the slight swell, and from here and there amid the confused dunnage
on deck a figure moved in sleep, or a silhouette of a man bending over a
lantern showed up for a moment. At intervals strains of American jazz
music came from the haunts of pleasure, and one could get a glimpse now
and then of a dreary dance-floor with half a dozen soldiers and sailors
slathering clumsily to and fro, embracing women that gave one the
horrors merely to look at, women like half-starved harpies or cylinders
of oily fat, the sweat running down through the calcareous deposits on
their faces and their squat chunky feet slewed sideways in bronze and
coppery shoes. Mr. Dainopoulos hurried past these abodes. Mr. Bates,
Archy Bates, a great business friend of his, was somewhere inside one of
them, fulfilling his destiny as a patron of Aphrodite and Dionysos; but
Mr. Dainopoulos had finished business for the day and he wanted to get
home. This was not to be without meeting Archy. The cat-like smile on
his unfortunate features, his hat on the back of his head, and his hands
in his pockets, Mr. Bates emerged from the _Odéon Bar_ just as a
carriage appeared in the distance. Mr. Bates did not conceal his
gratification. Would his friend come back and have a drink?

"Not to-night," said Mr. Dainopoulos quietly. "Me, I'm going home now.
Excuse me, Mister."

"Now, now!" protested Archy, clinging with the adhesiveness of the
pickled philanthropist. "Now, now! Lissen. Come-a-me to White Tower. Eh?
Laddie? You-n-me, eh? Li'l' fren' o' mine Whi' Tower. She gotta fren',
y' know. Here y'are."

The driver, seeing a possible fare, stopped, and Archy, still adhering,
dragged Mr. Dainopoulos in after him.

"Stivan," said Mr. Dainopoulos to the driver, whom he knew, "go to the
White Tower and when this gentleman has got out, drive me home quick,
understand? Leave him behind. And go back to him if he wants you. Now!"

The driver at once set off up the road again and Mr. Bates, who, like
Shakespeare, had small Latin and less Greek, sat smiling in the
darkness, trying to formulate in his mind and articulate with his tongue
something that just eluded him. To meet his old fren' like this--it was
a--'strornery thing how he couldn't shay just how he felt. He smiled.

Mr. Dainopoulos sat without smiling. He was not a drinking man at any
time, and the professional soak was a mystery to him. Mr. Bates was as
much a mystery as the major. His actions had the disconcerting lack of
rational sequence that one discerns in pampered carnivora. Absent-minded
sensuality is a baffling phenomenon. Mr. Dainopoulos had something of
the clear sharp logic of the Latin, and the vinous benevolence of Mr.
Bates aroused in him a species of alert incredulity. He sat in silence,
listening to the gurgle of his companion's incoherence. This was a phase
of his daily existence which he never mentioned to his wife; his
dealings with the more dissipated of her countrymen. To his relief the
carriage stopped at the entrance of the Tower Gardens. He took Mr.
Bates's arm to assist him to alight, but Mr. Bates had forgotten the
White Tower. He was trying to sing and not succeeding very well. He sat
erect, his hat pushed back until the brim formed a dark halo about his
smile, beating time with one hand.

"Here you are, Mister Bates," said Mr. Dainopoulos, trying to move him.
Mr. Bates resisted gently, drew back his chin a little more and attacked
a lower G:

    "_Mo-na, Mona, my own love!
          Art--thou not mine
            Through the long years to--be-e-e!_"

The sound of that small and strangely clear voice, after the odorous
gibbering speech, almost appalled Mr. Dainopoulos. He spoke rapidly to
the driver, instructing him to wait and he would be paid in due time,
and started off into the darkness.

Mr. Bates finished his song to his own satisfaction and having smiled
into the darkness for a while, began to wonder where he was. "'Strornery
thing, but he was almost shertain ol' fren' of his had been there. Mush
'ave been a mishtake." He got out so suddenly the driver was scared. Mr.
Bates took a bill out of his pocket, held it up uncertainly for a
moment, and when the driver had clutched it, marched in an intricate
manner into the gardens. His smile became more cat-like than ever as the
sound of syncopated music reached his ear and he passed a woman
strolling under the trees. He hummed his song again. The evening, for
him, was only just beginning.

Mr. Dainopoulos hurried forward and soon left the region of hard
arc-lights behind. His house was not far from here. He wished to get
home. He regretted sometimes that his business took him so much away
from the house, for he retained sufficient simplicity to imagine that
the laws of nature do not apply to love, that you can increase the
volume without diminishing the intensity. But he consoled himself with
the thought that in a few years he would be able to devote himself
entirely to his wife. His dream was not very clear in its outlines as
yet, because the war now raging was far-reaching in its effects. It
would be unwise to make plans which the political changes might render
impossible of accomplishment. For the present he was satisfied to place
his reserves at a safe distance in diversified but thoroughly sound
securities, so that unless the civilized world turned completely upside
down and all men repudiated their obligations, he would be able to
control his resources. There was not much doubt about that in his mind.
He knew that business would go on, was going on, even while men moved in
massed millions to destroy each other. While the line swayed and
crumpled and broke, or surged forward under the incredibly sustained
roar of ten thousand cannon, English and French and German business men
were perfecting their plans for doing business with each other as soon
as it was over. The ethical side of the question scarcely arose in his
mind, since he had grown accustomed to wars and the money to be made out
of them. To him the struggle in France and on the Slavic frontier was
far off and shadowy, as was the grim game at sea. He was not to be
blamed for measuring events by the scale in use by those of his race;
and if there was somewhat more ferocity and sustained butchery in this
war than in others, it was only another significant symptom of
Anglo-Saxon temperament, because business, he knew quite well, was going
on.

He knocked at the door in the wall which had so impressed Mr. Spokesly
earlier in the evening, and was admitted after a parley by a middle-aged
servant-woman.

"Madama gone to bed?" he asked, picking up a large cat that was rubbing
herself against his leg, and putting her out into the garden.

"No, she's not gone to bed. She said she would wait for you to come
home."

"All right. You can go to bed then," he retorted.

The woman shot the bolts and picked up the cheap pink glass lamp without
answering. Mr. Dainopoulos made his way upstairs. There was no light in
the room looking out over the sea. In their chamber beyond, a
night-light, very small and rose-coloured, was burning on a small table
below a picture of the Virgin, as though it were a shrine. It took the
place of one, for his wife made the most of his rather dilapidated
devoutness, and often left a candle burning there. There was an ulterior
motive in her action which she had never formulated exactly even to
herself. This was the appeal which a strange and sensuous religion made
to her romantic instinct. She would always be Church of England herself;
but the impression made by candles and an ikon upon her girl-friends in
Haverstock Hill in North London was always before her. She could hear
them breathe the word "ikon," and then draw in their breath in an
ecstasy of awe. And the thought of it gave her pleasure.

But she was not in the chamber and he returned to the other room in
search of her.

She was lying as before, her eyes closed and her hands clasped lightly
over the tartan rug. A screen had been opened and stationed between her
and the window. This was the hour to which his thoughts went forward
occasionally during the day of chaffering on the front, or in his
blue-distempered office with its shabby chestnut fittings in the Cité
Saul. To the western cynic there was a rich humour in the sheer
fortuitousness of their meeting in the midst of a drowning multitude. To
him it was not humorous at all. To him it was significant of a profound
fatality. To him it confirmed his inherited faith in omens and the
finger of God. She was a common enough type of woman in most things, yet
she embodied for him a singular ideal of human achievement. He knew of
nothing in the world comparable with her, and the knowledge that she was
his was at times almost unbelievable. Whether she loved him was a
question he never faced. He believed it, and doubted, and believed
again. He knew by instinct that it was not a matter of importance as was
the fact of possession. He extracted a rare and subtle pleasure from the
fragrant ambiguity of her smile. After all, though it may be doubted if
he had ever entertained the thought, he was fortunate in his
circumstances. He had no need to be jealous or watchful. She lay there
quietly, thinking of course of him, while he was on his affairs in the
port.

He paused now and saw that she was asleep, and he set the little
night-light on the table and sat down near her, watching her with an
expression of grave enthusiasm on his damaged features. He was not
familiar with the stock witticisms concerning the hollowness of marriage
and the inevitable disgust which follows possession. Indeed, for all his
rascality and guile in business he was a rather unsophisticated fellow.
He possessed that infinite patience which is sometimes more effective in
retaining love than even courage or folly. Another factor in his favour
was his lack of facility for friendship. This worked both ways, for
friendship is the secret antagonist of both business and love. He sat
there, shading his eyes with his curved palm, watching his wife,
thinking of past, present, and future in that confused and gentle
abstraction which we call happiness, when she suddenly opened her eyes
and looked at him for one brief instant with a blank and vacant gaze.
Then she smiled and he bent over her.

"Back, Boris?" she murmured chidingly.

"My business, darling. I had to see a man."

"Always business. I thought you'd never come."

"First I had to take that gentleman to the French Pier, for a boat. And
then I went to the Olympos Hotel. I think very good business."

"Don't talk about business now."

"But, my sweetheart, it is all for you. By-and-by you will see."

"See what, silly?" she asked, rumpling his hair.

"See what? You ask a funny question. I cannot tell you, not yet. But in
my mind, I see it."

And he did, too. He saw, in his mind, a superb and curving shore of
yellow sand encircling a sea of flawless azure. He saw a long line of
white villas, white with biscuit-coloured balconies and green jalousies,
rising amid gardens of laurel and palm; he saw white yachts rocking at
anchor, and illuminated houseboats in the shadow of a great breakwater.
He saw the spangled lights of a fairy city, a city filled with fabrics
and jewels which he would buy for her. He saw all this, and in his mind
the world had fought itself to a standstill and the cautious investor
had come into his own. He saw the war-weary battalions returning to
their toil, slaving to pay off the cost of their adventure. This was the
way of the world as he knew it. It was no use blaming him: he merely
took advantage of human need and folly, as we all do. He had been
through wars before and knew the inevitable reactions, and the almost
incredible cheapness of money that followed. He was by instinct one of
those who, like camp-followers on a grand scale, prosper amid the
animosities of simpler folk; persons who found fortunes upon great wars,
as did the Jews in London after 1815 and the bourgeois bankers of Paris
after the Revolution. And it surprised him how little his wife knew, how
little she questioned the world in which she lived. Of course it was
charming, and he was fascinated just because she had that amazing racial
blindness to facts and lived in a fanciful world of her own. The English
were all like that, it seemed to him.

He put his arms about her.

"In my mind I see it. You wait. Everything you can think of, all very
fine."

"Here in Saloniki?"

"No!"

"In England?"

Mr. Dainopoulos laughed a little and shook his head. He was quite sure
England wouldn't be any place for him after this war. In his own private
opinion, there wouldn't be any England within ten years from now, which
shows how logical and wide-awake Latins can make errors of judgment. In
any case, there were too many Jews there.

"Because I don't want to go to America," she remarked, still rumpling
his hair.

"America! What makes you think of America? You must be losing your mind,
Alice." He almost shivered. He was just as well able to make money in
America as anywhere else, but what use would it be to him in such a
place? It is extremely difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to realize it, but
men like Mr. Dainopoulos find occidental institutions a spiritual
desolation. He recalled the time when he boarded in Newark, New Jersey,
and worked in a felt-hat factory. The house was of wood without even a
floor of stone, and he could not sleep because of the vermin. And the
food! He experienced afresh the nausea of those meals among the roomers,
the bulging haunches of the negroid waitress colliding with his
shoulders as she worked round and served the rows and rows of oval
dishes dripping with soggy, impossible provender. And the roomers:
English, German, and American, with their horrible whiskey and their
ever-lasting gibberish of "wop" and "dago," their hints and blustering
invitations to join mysterious fraternities which no one seemed to
understand or explain. Mr. Dainopoulos must not be censured for
withdrawing from all this. He made no claims upon western civilization,
and its lack of logic and continuity led him to prefer something less
virtuous, perhaps, but also less of a strain upon normal human nature.

"You say you don't want to go to America. And I'll say it, too. I've
been there, and that was enough for me. I should die there, with the
food they give you. It's a fine country, with fine trees in the
streets," he added, thinking of an imperial horse-chestnut tree which
had thrust a branch bearing pale candles of bloom against his window out
there, "and the big men are good men to do business. But not for me.
Dirty wood houses and soot coming down all the time on the bed. Like
ashes from the engines."

"Like London," said Alice, smiling.

But Mr. Dainopoulos had been living on a somewhat higher scale in London
and he had not noticed the dirt so much. Moreover, he could always get
the food he wanted in London.

"Well, where?" insisted Alice, humouring him.

"There's plenty places," he said soberly, rather faint as he compared
their present surroundings with that dream-villa by the blue sea. "Too
soon yet to be sure we get there. I got a lot of business to finish up
first. And we're all right here for a while. You're not lonesome,
darling?"

"Oh, no! You saw Evanthia here to-night?"

"Yes, I saw her, but she didn't tell me anything."

"He's gone away, with the consuls."

Mr. Dainopoulos gave a low whistle.

"I never thought about that. What'll she do now? That's bad for her,
though."

"She wants to follow him but I don't think she can. I believe she heard
he'll go to Constantinople. She said she'd do anything to get there."

"Well, if she wants to go to Constantinople, she might be able to," he
said, pondering. "I heard to-day a ship might be going down to the
Islands. There's always a chance. I'll see. But if she's got any sense
she'll go back to her mother. That feller Lietherthal is good company
but he'll go back to Munich by-and-by."

"She doesn't love him, I am almost sure."

"Evanthia, she don't love anybody except herself. I told you that."

"She loves me," said Alice.

"Well, p'raps she does, but you know what I mean."

"That gentleman this evening, Mr. Spokesly, he was interested in her."

"He's got a young lady in London," said Mr. Dainopoulos.

"Has he?" she murmured absently. "Do you think he'll come to-morrow
night?"

"Yes, I think so. I bet you're goin' to have Evanthia in, too."

"Well, perhaps he'll fall in love with her," she whispered delightedly.

"What, and him with a young lady in London!"

"I don't think he's very fond of his young lady in London."

"Well, how do you know that? Women...."

"Never mind. It's easy to tell if a man is in love," she answered,
watching him. He held her tightly for a moment.

"Not so easy to tell about a woman," he said into her hair. "Is it, my
little wife, my little wife?

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