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CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER
By William McFee
Author of "ALIENS", "CASUALS OF THE SEA", "LETTERS FROM AN OCEAN TRAMP,"
"PORT SAID MISCELLANY"
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
"It is an amiable but disastrous illusion on the part of the
western nations that they have created a monopoly in freedom and
truth and the right conduct of life."--_Mr. Spenlove_
TO
PAULINE
DEDICATORY
There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of
the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a
while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great
shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the
purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while
among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and say: "There
it is!" And together we will slip and stumble and trot down the steep
hillside to the level-crossing, and we will run along to the little
station, so like ours in America. And when the train is come creaking
and groaning and squealing to a standstill, I shall climb in, while you
will stand for a moment looking.... You will wave as we start with the
usual prodigious jerk, and then you will run back and climb up to the
house again, banging the big iron gate securely shut....
All just as before.
But this time there is this difference, that I am not coming back. I am
ordered to return to England, and I am to sail to-morrow morning. Now,
as I have told you more than once, it is very difficult to know just how
anything takes you because you have at your command an alluring
immobility, a sort of sudden static receptiveness which is, to an
Englishman, a Westerner that is, at once familiar and enigmatic. And
when one has informed you, distinctly if ungrammatically, in three
languages, that one is going away for good, and you assume for a moment
that aforementioned immobility, and murmur "_C'est la guerre_," I ask
you, what is one to think?
And perhaps you will recall that you then went on brushing your hair
precisely as though I had made some banal remark about the weather. A
detached observer would say--"This woman has no heart. She is too stupid
to understand." However, as I am something more than a detached
observer, I know that in spite of that gruff, laconic attitude of yours,
that enigmatic immobility, you realize what this means to us, to me, to
you.
So, while you are down in the garden, and the light is still quite good
by this western window, I am writing this for you. As we say over in
America, "Let me tell you something." I have written a book, and I am
dedicating it to you. As you are aware, I have written books before.
When I explained this to you you were stricken with that sudden
silence, that attentive seriousness, if you remember, and regarded me
for a long time without making any remark. Well, another one is done and
I inscribe it to you. Of course I know perfectly well that books are
nothing to you, that you read only the perplexing and defaced human
hieroglyphics around you. I know that when you receive a copy of this
new affair, through the British Post Office in the _Rue Franque_, you
will not read it. You will lay it carefully in a drawer, and let it go
at that. And knowing this, and without feeling sad about it, either,
since I have no fancy for bookish women, I am anxious that you should
read at least the dedication. So I am writing it here by the window,
hurriedly, in words you will understand, and I shall leave it on the
table, and you will find it later, when I am gone.
Listen.
The fact is, this dedication, like the book which follows after it, is
not merely an act of homage. It is a symbol of emancipation from an
influence under which I have lived for two thirds of your lifetime. I
must tell you that I have always been troubled by visions of beings whom
I call dream-women. I was a solitary child. Girls were disconcerting
creatures who revealed to me only the unamiable sides of their natures.
But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who,
while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few
traits from the illustrations in books, were none the less
extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my
thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with
a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of
myself--what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives
regret, I had been born a girl. And later, when I was a youth, and began
to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a
definite conception. She was everything I disliked--a tiny, slender
creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams
she was always clinging to me, which I detested. I regarded myself with
contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my
temperament. You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism
would soon fade. On the contrary, she assumed a larger and larger
dominion over my imagination. I fancied myself married to her, and for
days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill. It was summer time,
and I lived on the upper floor of my mother's house in an outlying
_faubourg_ of London, from the windows of which one could look across a
wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding
villas. And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the
thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams
sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to
and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward
the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this
woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts
in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if
I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all,
that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it
was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who
would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a
gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my
soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form....
As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the _faubourgs_
and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took
the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power. Beyond the
shady drives and prim gardens of the _faubourg_ her image began to
waver, and she haunted my dreams no more. And I was glad of this because
at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things
at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known,
rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth. I
resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes
where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art. I was consumed
with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to
achieve distinction. And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct
to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and
ideas, as possible. I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these
creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I
hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations. But before I was
aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an
experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman. I saw her in studios,
where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye.
I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures
satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white
teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form. I had a notion,
too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride,
disgust, and fortitude for her to appear in the body. And then things
began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity. In the space of a week
I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea.
Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost
it. Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my
days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow. You come of
inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and
magic casements, is more in your way. But I know without asking that you
will be eager to hear about the falling in love. Indeed this is the
point of the story.
The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite
possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything
about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My God!
Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen--perhaps it
is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their
climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion,
which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The
point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about
love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any
substitute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because
I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about
love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in
manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell,
as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal
Love.
Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love
with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I
have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my
emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell
me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin,
and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally
irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming
concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of
accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense,
since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal
part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class
were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I
loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using
men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal
of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many
years from examining her credentials.
That is what it amounted to. For years after I had discovered that she
thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued
to impose her personality upon me. Whenever I imagined for a moment that
I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl's
disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile.
And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of
sacrifice. I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you
demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read
of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the
illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of
literature from life. And, moreover, although we are accustomed to
assume that all young men have a natural aptitude for love, I think
myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and
thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond
tawdry intrigues and banal courtships, spurious imitations which are
exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing. And again, while
it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"--the thin
book you have so often found by my chair in the garden--that a woman is
in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it
seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling
in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we
invest with the vague splendours of our snobbish and inexperienced
imagination. A great passion demands as much knowledge and experience
and aptitude as a great idea. I would almost say it requires as much
talent as a work of art; indeed, the passion, the idea, and the work of
art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same
emotion. And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be
dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written.
And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever
encountering passion. Englishwomen especially. They are afraid of it.
They think it wicked. So they marry him. Though they suspect that he
will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know
that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him
with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned. Everything is done
to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic passion. And the act
of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering
instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the
great adventure of life!
However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was
obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting
possibilities to pass me without investigating them, I was once more in
London, in late autumn. I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it
is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic--a species of growth.
And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay
a reluctance to discover my folly. But convention was too strong for me,
and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her. And it
was at a picture-show. I remember pondering upon this accident of place
as I made my way along Bond Street in the afternoon sunshine, for I
could not help thinking of that disdainful dream-woman who posed, in my
imagination, as an authority on art. This, I suppose, was due to my
prolonged study of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which I had kept
my reading for a number of years. I remember giving up my ticket to a
sleek-haired, frock-coated individual, and passing along a corridor hung
with black velvet, against which were hung one or two large canvases in
formidable gold frames, cunningly illuminated by concealed electric
globes. A haughty creature stood by a table loaded with catalogues and
deigned to accept my shilling. And then, feeling strange and _gauche_,
as is only felt by the sea-farer ashore when he steps out of his
authentic _milieu_, I passed through into the gallery, a high, dignified
chamber full of the quiet radiance of beautiful pictures, the life-work
of a man whom I had known. I found myself regretting that fate had not
permitted me to remain in such an environment; but one cannot avoid
one's destiny, and mine is to have an essentially middle-class mind, a
_bourgeois_ mentality, which makes it impossible for me to live among
artists or people of culture for any length of time. I should say that
the reason for this is that such folk are not primarily interested in
persons but in types and ideas, whereas I am for persons. Flowers and
trees, perfumes and music, colours and children, are to me irrelevant.
But every man and woman I meet is to me a fresh problem which engages my
emotions. The talk about types is incomprehensible to me, for each fresh
individual will throw me into a trance of speculation. But only when one
has lived among clever people can one realize how tedious and monotonous
their society can be. I was thinking about the man who had painted these
pictures and how he had delighted to frighten me with his obscene
comments about women, when I saw a woman far down on the left, a woman
in an enormous hat, holding extravagant furs about her thin form, and
talking to a tall, handsome man from between her small white teeth.
For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom
I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the
dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she
had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her
identity. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she
was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one--ominous years in a woman's
life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still
struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no
longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from
toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries
of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at
once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who
had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made
our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.
But it was too late. As we drove in a swiftly moving taxi-cab through
the gay streets of West London, and on out to Richmond, where she was
staying with friends, I knew that in the end I should be free. She was
soon to be married, and in her satirical gray eyes I saw a desire to
hold me permanently in a condition of chivalrous abnegation. On these
terms I might achieve some sort of destiny without endangering her
dominion. But I felt the winds of freedom blowing from the future on my
face. I did not see then how it would come about: I did not even
imagine the long years of moody and unprofitable voyaging which lay
before me. But she saw that her own ideal of masculine modern womanhood
no longer appeared to me the supremely evocative thing she claimed it to
be, so that in time, in time, her power would depart. I can see her now,
turned slightly away from me in the cab, regarding me over her shoulder
from beneath that enormous hat, studying even then how she could keep me
true to that worn-out creed, weighing who knows what reckless plans in
her cool, clever brain....
But it was a long time! For years yet I saw her before me whenever I
thought of other women, and her disparaging, slightly satirical smile
would interpose itself and hold me back from experimenting with fresh
emotions. Even when war came and our spiritual and emotional worlds came
crashing about our ears, her power waned but did not depart. I had no
choice between this shadowy, reluctant fidelity and a descent into
regions where I had neither the means nor the temperament to prosper.
And so it went, until suddenly one day the whole thing came to an end.
You will remember how I abruptly abandoned the story upon which I was
engaged, and told you I had begun upon a tale you had told to me, the
tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter? Behold it, transmuted into
something you would never recognize, as is the way of stories when a
novelist of romantic tendencies gets at them! And what I want you to
observe is that the inspiration, as far as I am concerned, was based
upon your brief yet intensely vivid projection of your life in that dull
street in a Saloniki _faubourg_, a street so like many of ours in the
_faubourgs_ of London, stretching away into dim, dusty distances; but
unlike ours in that beyond it rose ranges of hard, sharp mountains that
looked as though they had been cut out of pasteboard, and stuck against
a sky so unreal in its uncompromising blueness that it seemed to be
aniline-dyed. And as the days passed, and the story grew, here by the
blue waters of the Gulf I suddenly realized that the spell of the
dream-woman had been broken, that behind my story of Captain Macedoine's
Daughter another story was working out--the ghost of a story if you
like--the drama of the end of an illusion. My old antagonist had met her
match at last. She tried to frighten me with her slightly satirical
smile. She invoked the innumerable memories and sentiments in which I
had been born and reared. But she had met her match. I took her by the
arm and opening the door, thrust her gently outside. And then, while you
were down there in the garden, I went on to write the tale of Captain
Macedoine's Daughter.
There is another long-drawn shriek--the train is leaving the station
next to ours--and I take a last look out upon the well-remembered view.
Across the shining waters of the Gulf the lights of the city are
glittering already against the many-coloured facades, with their marble
and cedar balconies, their bright green jalousies and gay ensigns.
Already the war-ships in the _rade_ are picked out in bright points, and
the mast-head lights are winking rapid messages to each other. The
western sky over the headland is a smoky orange with pale green and
amber above, and the moon, an incredibly slender crescent of pure
silver, hangs faintly over Mount Pagos. It is quite dark down under the
cypresses, and a smell of humid earth mingles with the perfume of the
jasmine.
Yes, I am now quite ready. No, I have left nothing behind, except
perhaps....
Well, it is for you to say.
_Bairakli._
_W. M._
CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER
CHAPTER I
None of the men sitting in deck chairs under the awning were surprised
to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H.
M. S. _Sycorax_ had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which
that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time.
This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a
genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived
in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the
Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of
western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and
only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which
they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that
to the Chief alone the eastern Mediterranean was a known and experienced
cruising ground; and when the _Sycorax_, detailed to escort convoys
through the intricacies of the AEgean Archipelago, awaited her
slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi,
in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said
he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for
Rotterdam.
The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs
which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the
little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected
Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of
each other's idiosyncrasies--another way of saying the _Sycorax_ was a
happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and
paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their
sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and
devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often
accumulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.
And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the
glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard
and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an
ambassador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way
moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had
murmured absently:
"On one occasion, I was an ambassador. I will tell you about it some
time."
"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster--Inness was an Oxford man who
had married into a wealthy merchant's family. He said "Rotterdam"
because he had once been there.
"Yes," said Spenlove. "Rotterdam for Krupp's of Essen. For three years
Krupp's took a hundred thousand tons per annum of high-grade ore out of
this little island alone. They took it in British bottoms to Rotterdam,
and from there it went by way of their interminable canals to Essen. I
know because I helped to take it. It was just about the time, too, that
Chamberlain was preaching his crusade against the evils of Germany
dumping her steel below cost price on our markets, and I was so
indignant about it that I wrote to the newspapers. I often wrote to the
newspapers in those days. I suppose we all catch the disease at some
time or other. As a rule, of course, nothing happened save that the
letter would not be printed, or else printed full of mistakes, with the
vital paragraphs omitted for 'lack of space.' This letter wasn't printed
either, but I received one in return from a fiery young member of
Parliament who had just been returned on the Protective Tariff ticket.
He asked for full details, which I sent to him. I believe he tried to
make a question of it in the House, but he ran up against the Consular
Service, and that did for him. You see, our Consul here was named
Gruenbaum.
"More than that," went on Mr. Spenlove, sitting upright in his
deck-chair and looking attentively at a near-by ventilator; "more than
that, Mr. Gruenbaum was resident concessionaire of the mining company, he
owned the pumping-plant which irrigates yonder valley, he was connected
by marriage with the Greek governor of the Island, who lives over in the
tiny capital of Ipsilon, and he, Gruenbaum, was the richest man in the
Cyclades. That was his house, that big square white barn with the three
tall windows and the outside staircase. He was a man of enormous size
and weight, and I daresay the people of the Island thought him a god. He
certainly treated them most humanely. Every widow was pensioned by him,
which was not very much after all, for they used to have precious little
use for money. You could get a bottle of wine and a great basket of
grapes and figs for a piece of soap, I remember. He built churches for
them, too, like that one perched up there on the rock above his
house--snow-white with a blue dome. You may have noticed the other day
in the wireless news that the friends of freedom in Greece polished off
a few of what were described as reactionaires. Put them up against a
wall and pumped _mannlicher_ bullets into them. One of these obstacles
to liberty was named Gruenbaum, I observed.
"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in
Gruenbaum's employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain
Macedoine. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a
very remarkable man for all that. He wasn't a captain at all, really,
you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back,
when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, passengers, and
fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed
long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day
and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to
come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and
Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money.
He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least
half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was
sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was
a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated
man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might
almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn,
clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed
passengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of
captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the
trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, 'Oh,
Captain, can we ...' something or other. The skipper was a dried-up
little shell-back who hated passengers and never came down on the
promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in buttons,
who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes
it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. 'Captain Macedoine.' When he
gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical
Louisiana nigger, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: 'All right,
sah, Captain Macedoine!' It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than
that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England,
'retired on a competency,' as he phrased it, he retired as Captain
Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.
"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest
possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to
speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laugh; but you have not been to
sea as long as I have. Such things are possible at sea. I have had a
second engineer from Sunderland, a chap named Philip, who claimed Philip
of Spain as his ancestor. There was Captain Gizzard, in my old London
employ, who had a genealogical tree which traced the old fraud's descent
from the Guiscards of Sicily. No! Captain Macedoine's illusions are
common enough, I fancy, among men. It was only that instead of trying to
master them and clear them away, he cultivated them until they grew to
monstrous proportions and he lost sight of reality altogether. Or if you
like, he was an artist, working upon himself as material, like those old
masters we read about who devoted their lives to the accomplishment of
obscure technical excellences that only the _cognoscenti_ could discover
and enjoy."
"Possibly," murmured the Surgeon, smiling in the darkness of the
evening.
"Well," said Mr. Spenlove, in a musing tone, "of course a certain
latitude of analogy is permitted in describing one man to another, if we
ever can describe him. That was how Macedoine struck me. The aim of his
art was to conceal the artist, which I understand is sound aesthetics.
And it was impossible not to admire his method, his style, if you like.
There was nothing crude in it. So far from leaving nothing to chance, he
left everything to chance. Take the case of his daughter. The brat in
those days was a god-send to him. I used to think she was merely an
invention, he was so circumstantial in his subtly shaded allusions. You
might say that if she hadn't existed, the trend of his emotional
development, the scheme on which he was engaged, would have compelled
him to invent her. As I say, I did believe at one time he had invented
her, for he was always inventing something. In some bewildering,
indefinable way, we became aware, week by week, month by month, of a
fresh touch, a new phase of Captain Macedoine. I don't pretend to know
what final frame he proposed to give to the magnificent picture he was
making. Perhaps he didn't know himself. Perhaps he had no ultimate
design. Anyhow we never had it, for as I said, the company was absorbed
and we all had to come home.
"I admit I was surprised enough when I found out, quite accidentally,
that he had married an octaroon. When I say married, I mean of course,
as far as fidelity and maintenance was concerned. He rented a cottage
out on Tchoupitoulas Street, where the mosquitoes sing loud enough to
drown conversation, and the grass grows man-high between the road and
the sidewalk. And there the woman lived a while and died. I was never in
the house, but young Strellett, the second steward, who was lost when
the _Toro_ turned over in the Yucatan channel, was married and lived
not far from Macedoine's _menage_, and I can imagine the place.
Strellett had a little three-roomed box where he lived with his big
rosy-cheeked Irish wife, and there was something very homelike about it,
for all the carpets and curtains and a good deal of the table-linen had
come from the Maracaibo Line's cabins. Sent ashore to be cleaned, you
know, and didn't get back. I dare say Macedoine's place was even more
completely furnished at the company's expense. They all did it. Perhaps
that was one of the reasons we all had to come home. That was ... yes,
more than twenty years ago.
"I'm afraid, though, there were not many of us like Macedoine. We didn't
come home to retire on a competency. New Orleans used to be what they
called 'a wide-open little town' and there were plenty of ways of
getting rid of our wages, good as they were. However, that's a detail.
We came home, except one or two youngsters who struck west and got into
Nevada mining plants or San Francisco lumber ships. I was glad to come.
I had a few shots in the locker and I went down into Hampshire to see my
people. I didn't stay as long as I intended. Who of us ever does? After
the first glow of welcome dies away, we have to depend on our personal
attractions to keep people interested. We may keep the ball rolling a
little longer if we get married or even engaged; but it is a sorry
business after all. You fellows are for ever wanting the ship to go
home. Well, you wait and see. You'll be glad to be back. When a man has
got the sea-habit, his relations always regard him as a bit of a
nuisance.
"I went to sea again. I joined a London Company which I always call now
'my old company' because I was so long with them, and have for them a
peculiar sort of cantankerous affection. They paid infernally poor
wages, they were always in a hole financially until the war made them
multi-millionaires, and their accommodation was pretty poor. But for
some reason or other men stayed with them. I believe it was because we
were working for a private firm and not for one of those gigantic
corporations without soul to be damned or body to be kicked, as the
saying is. The firm were real people to us. They came down to see the
ship in London River. Old Gannet--it was Gannet, Prawle and Co.--used to
leave a ten-pound note on the Chief's wash-stand after he'd had a yarn
and a cigar. Young Gannet, home for the holidays from Winchester
College, would come down to St. Katherine's Dock and make himself
squiffy with Madeira the skipper had brought home from the Islands.
Prawle had been an office boy when old Gannet was young, and had worked
up to a partnership and married Daisy Gannet. Smartest man on the
Baltic Exchange, they used to say. Yes, their ships were fierce, but men
stayed in them. Even now, with old Gannet dead and Prawle retired, and
the management paying poor whiskey-soaked young Gannet three thousand a
year to keep out of the office, the old skippers and chiefs are still
ploughing the ocean for them. You see, we know their ways.
"I went to sea, and kept on at it. You might say it was force of habit,
for I must admit I could have had jobs ashore in those days. Not now.
But then I could. But it grows on one, going to sea. And I was making
friends. There's nothing like a ship-mate who is a friend. The mere fact
of you or him joining another ship and sailing away is nothing. When you
meet again you take up the tale where you dropped it, years before, half
the world away. But you must be young. It is impossible to weld
friendships when the heat of youth has gone out. Interests, family ties,
danger, sorrow, all may do something, but only when you are young can
you make the friendships that nothing can destroy."
Mr. Spenlove paused, and for a moment there was no sound save the purr
of the dynamos under their feet, the soft swish and suck of the waves
flowing in and out of the under-cut marble cliffs, and the steady tramp
of the Quartermaster patrolling to and fro at the gangway. One of the
noticeable points about Spenlove was that he fitted into no standard
gauge. Neither the Surgeon nor the Oxonian could "place" him precisely,
they would confess. Nor could the more experienced lieutenants, highly
certificated gentlemen from the Liverpool to New York Ferry steamers.
With unconscious humour they "wondered such a man should go to sea." The
notion that the sea should be peopled exclusively with moral and
intellectual derelicts dies hard. The fact was, Mr. Spenlove was a
connoisseur of humanity. He seemed to have met so many types that he
unconsciously addressed himself to the fundamentals. He took the
inevitable superficial features of one's character for granted. This
made him easy to accept but difficult to understand. And so, when he
spoke of friendship and youth, the other men did not laugh. They were
silent--some with assent, some with doubt, and some, possibly, with
regret.
"I was second of one of their oldest boats for two years and Jack Evans
was mate. Jack and I became friends. I don't mean that the Mate and the
Second of that old ship went about with their arms wound round each
other's necks. We were, on the contrary, very often at each other's
throats, so to speak. Mates and second-engineers are professionally
antagonistic. We had terrific altercations over stores, for the company
patronized one of those old-fashioned ship chandlers who sent cabin,
deck, and engine stores all in one chaotic heap. Jack would get my
varnish and I would snaffle a couple of bolts of his canvas. But that
would all blow away by tea time, when we'd go ashore and spend the
evening together. Mind you, we were neither of us very good young men.
We ... well, we had some good times and some bad ones. We were shifted
together into another ship. Then Jack, who'd been nine solid years mate
in the company and was getting so angry about it that the port-captain
used to avoid him, Jack got a command. I shall never forget it. We were
lying as peaceably as you please in the top corner of the old Queens
Dock, Glasgow. It was Saturday night and all was snug for a quiet
week-end. Jack and I were in his room under the bridge having a nip,
when a telegraph-boy came clattering down the brass-edged staircase.
Jack opened the wire, read it, and then gave me a thump on the back that
nearly broke it. He was a stout, florid-faced, peppery little Welshman.
What I liked about him was his crystal-clear character. What he thought
came out like a shell out of a gun--with an explosion. 'The old thief's
given me a ship at last!' he roared. And he had to pack and get away
that night to Bristol. I went for a cab while he got his dunnage
together. And I remember now, waiting on the platform at the Union
Station for the train to move, with Jack in a corner of the compartment
drunk as a lord, and snoring.
"It was in London I met him again. We had had a collision and I was one
of the witnesses called by the company to swear our ship was innocent.
She wasn't: she wasn't: she did everything she shouldn't have done--but
no matter. We all stayed at a little hotel in the Strand, getting a
guinea a day expenses, and we all swore black was white, and the owners,
our owners, lost the case. They had already lost the ship, so we were
told to go home and wait a few weeks until they could get hold of
another one cheap. Of course most of the crowd joined other companies,
but I went off to Waterloo to inflict myself on my people in Hampshire
again. And it was at the bookstall that I saw Jack staring at the
illustrated papers and jangling the money in his pockets. He was in a
very shabby condition, I may tell you. His chin was a rich growth of
black stubble, his round protuberant brown eyes were blood-shot, and his
clothes had been slept in, I'm sure. 'Thank God it's you, Fred,' he
splutters out, for he jumped like a cat when I touched him. We went into
the bar and he told me how he had fallen on such evil days. His ship
had been away nearly a year on the west coast of South America. He
hadn't spent a pound in the whole trip. No going ashore, nobody to speak
to, nothing. And here he'd come into London River and paid off. It was
easy to see what had happened. A young hot-blooded man with three or
four hundred pounds in his pocket, and no decent friends in town. His
contempt for himself was rather amusing. 'Take me away, Fred,' he
implored. 'Take me somewhere where I shan't be tempted.'
"'The fact is,' I said, as we made for the barber shop, 'you ought to
get married, Jack.'
"'Who'd have a drunken old swab like me?' he inquired, sadly. 'You know
I've been brought up common.'
"He was very contrite, but eventually, when he had got himself spruced
up, changed his clothes and fetched his dunnage out of the terrible
little hotel near Waterloo station where he had been lured, he began to
take a less austere view of himself. He was determined, however, never
to wallow in the mire again. He was a ship-master. His plump, rosy face
grew pale and drawn at the possibilities which he had risked. He was a
typical British sailor man. Riotous living was really distasteful to
him, but he had no idea of getting rid of his money in any other way.
However, I missed that train and took him down with me to Hampshire
next day. It was one of the great deeds of my career. He fell in love
the very first week."
"But what has all this to do with Captain Macedoine and this Island of
Ipsilon?" enquired the small, precise voice of the Paymaster.
For a moment there was no reply. It was very dark under the awning now,
for the moon was still behind the cliffs. Four bells rang at the
gangway. Mr. Spenlove lit a cigarette and continued.
"Have you ever seen a sea-captain in the throes of adoration? It is an
astonishing sight. Jack was what he himself called 'open as the day.'
Mind you, I had no ulterior motive in taking my old friend down home
with me. I had no plain sisters or cousins to get settled in life. Both
plain and pretty in our family were married and gone when we arrived. We
lived, you know, just outside Threxford, a small town six miles from a
railway, tucked away in the valley of the Threxe, about ten miles from
where that small stream falls into the Channel. It was a lovely spot,
but so dreadfully quiet I could never live there very long. Over the
town hung a high hill crowned by the workhouse. You see, it was the
workhouse master's daughter Jack had fallen in love with."
"Captain Macedoine's daughter?" suggested the Paymaster.
"No, a very different person, I assure you. Madeline Hanson had been
brought up in a very secluded way. It couldn't have been otherwise. Old
Hanson occupied a somewhat dubious position in the social life of
England. A workhouse master is not the sort of man either rich or poor
want to have much to do with. He is like the hangman or jailer or
rag-and-bone man; a necessary evil. But he may be, as Hanson was, a most
respectable person. And Madeline, his only child, was brought up in
almost solitary confinement until she was twenty. I believe she went to
an aunt in Portsmouth occasionally. Anyhow it suited her. She was a
puny, flat-chested little girl, very prim and precise, and would bridle
at once when any one laughed or made a joke. I never discovered exactly
how Jack got acquainted with her. At church most likely, for he was in
full cry after respectability and went to church regularly with my old
people. I know we used to go fishing together at first, and later I
found myself going alone, for Jack was meeting his inamorata, and going
for walks. Oh, quite above board. Jack was 'open as the day.' He lost no
time in marching up the hill to the workhouse (not the first time he'd
been inside one, he assured me grimly) and informing Mr. Hanson that
Captain Evans wished to pay attention to Miss Hanson. Whether old Hanson
was a man of the world or not, I cannot say, but he certainly knew his
daughter might go a long way farther and fare worse. Jack's affair
prospered. I have often been curious to know just what they said to each
other as they prowled about the lanes in the dark. I suppose it was a
case of the attraction of opposites. For once, anyhow, in spite of
novelists, the course of true love ran smooth.
"Of course Jack had his fits of jealousy. You see, he couldn't
understand how in the world he had managed to pick such a prize without
having to shoot up the whole town. He even suspected me of having
designs on his happiness, and I suddenly realized the tremendous
difficulty of reassuring him. You know, it's a delicate business,
disclaiming all desire for a woman. If you overdo it, you rouse
suspicion at once. When I said, 'Oh, no, _I_ don't want to....' Jack was
up and prancing about the room. 'Why, do you know anything?' he
demanded. I soothed him, telling him he knew I wasn't a marrying man.
'That be d--d for a tale. _I_ wasn't either till I met Madeline.' I had
a stormy time. The contrast between Jack's volcanic temperament and the
calm, meticulous flow of his courtship was comic. I was thankful when he
was finally married and gone to Ilfrocombe for his highly respectable
honeymoon. And then, a fortnight later, I got a telegram ordering me to
join his ship, the _Manola_, at Newcastle, as chief. We were shipmates
once more.
"There now began for me an existence which is rather difficult to
describe. In cargo-boats, as no doubt you know, the skipper and chief
can easily be thrown together a good deal. Jack and I of course were.
But Jack was under the impression that I existed for the sole purpose of
listening to his rapturous idolizing of his darling wife. He wrote to
her every day, and read the letter to me afterward. She wrote to him
every day, and when we reached port and the mail came aboard, Jack would
read the gist of it to me. It was like being married oneself. He would
lie back in his deck chair on the bridge on fine evenings in the
Mediterranean and suck at his cigar, sunk in thought. And then suddenly
he would bring out some profoundly novel and original remark about
Madeline. I had Madeline for breakfast, dinner, supper, and between
meals. It was trying, but it was nothing compared with the frightful
time I put in with him the voyage the baby was born. We were in Genoa,
and he wired home every day. I would march him up town in the evening
and stand him drinks, which he swallowed without looking at them. And it
never entered his head that it was possibly less important to me than to
him. When a telegram came, 'Daughter, both doing well,' he ordered grog
for all hands, took me up town, and stood champagne to every Tom, Dick,
and Harry in the Verdi Bar. I got him down to the harbour in a carriage
and he wanted to fight me because I laughed when he told the driver that
he was going to call the baby Angelina Madeline Evans.
"He did, too. Life for me became impregnated with Madeline and Angelina
as with a domestic odour. That marvellous child haunted my hours of
leisure long before I had ever seen her. As the months and years passed,
and Jack and I fared up and down the world together, I sometimes
wondered whether we hadn't both married Madeline. Jack was a model
husband. The notion that any other woman existed, or that any other man
could love a woman as he loved Madeline, never entered his head. He was
perfectly satisfied as long as one sat and listened to him talking about
Madeline. I believe he would have urged me to go and do likewise, if he
hadn't been convinced that no more Madelines were available. I believe,
too, he thought me a bit of an ass to take him down and introduce him
instead of marrying her myself. But as you will see, she and I were not
affinities.
"So life went on, and now I am coming to the time when Captain
Macedoine's daughter comes into the thing. Oh, no, I haven't forgotten
what I was talking about. Time passed, and one voyage we left home with
Jack in an anxious frame of mind. The child was about five years old
then and she was sick. Something the matter with her throat. Jack was
like a caged bear when we got to sea. There was no wireless then, you
know. You would have thought there had never been a sick child on earth
before. 'Fred,' he would say, 'I left orders--get the best advice, best
of everything. I don't give a damn what it costs,' And he'd prance to
and fro. He never looked at the ship. If we dropped a knot below our
customary two hundred a day, he'd be in my room growling, 'Aren't we
ever goin' to get to Alexandria, Fred?' When we did get there he fled up
to the post office to get his mail--forgot all about ours of course.
'_Not yet out of danger--diphtheria_,' so ran the telegram in reply to
his own frantic message. I never had such a time in my life. He was like
a man demented. He would catch me by the shoulder and coat-collar and
glare at me out of his bulging, blood-shot brown eyes, his fat cheeks
all drawn into pouches, and stutter, 'Fred, this is the end o' me. If I
lose one I lose both. My God, I've a good mind to go home. I tell you
I'm going off my head. If I lose one I lose both. Madeline'll never live
through the loss o' the child. What shall I do, oh, what shall I do?' I
believe he used to go into his cabin, shut the door, and pester the
Almighty with his petitions. You know, they say domestic ties strengthen
a man's personality, stimulate him to ambition. I have not noticed it.
On the contrary, it has often seemed to me that married men adopt the
ethics of the jungle. Life for them is a case of the man and his mate
against the world. The jungle reverberates with their cries of rage,
jealousy, and amorous delight. What are literature and drama but the
cooerdination of these elevated cat-calls?"
"Oh, come!" murmured the Surgeon.
"Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular?
Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with
love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a
generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made
the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you,
something _had_ to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain
Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We
were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the
halls:
"_What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids,
And a nice little home of your own?_
"That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men
were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were
citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch
was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly
blow."
"Well, go on," said somebody.
"You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on
the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a
holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing
existed--for them--outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline
had been brought up to be refined, reserved, 'not like other girls.' She
silently and unconsciously laid down a narrow-gauge line along which she
and Jack were to advance through life, and Jack, who was one of those
men who are very much what their wives make them, was only too glad to
get his orders. And he, with the intuition of despair, knowing her to be
besotted with pride in their child almost beyond endurance, gobbled
hoarsely in my ear in the night watches that if one died the other would
follow, and leave him desolate.
"Well, the child didn't die. I have sometimes wondered whether it was
anything more than a sore throat. It doesn't matter. When we came home,
Angelina was on the mend, and the cable companies must have noticed a
falling off in their receipts. I was relieved. I mean in mind. Jack tore
off home for a night to see for himself. He told me afterward 'he nearly
cracked Madeline's ribs,' he was so glad to see her. Mind, he'd only
been away six weeks! Think of it, in the light of the recent years. Not
that I believed him. Women like Mrs. Evans don't get their ribs cracked.
No matter. My relief was speedily changed to grave apprehension when he
came back to the ship accompanied by wife, child, and a nurse, and
announced that he had obtained permission to take them a voyage. It was
one of the unusual points of old Gannet's employ--he allowed each
skipper and chief to take their wives one voyage per year. I had been
through it before, and disliked the prospect. I have sometimes wondered
whether old Gannet had a secret and sinister intention, for it is a fact
that you can't honestly say you know a woman until you have been to sea
with her. No woman looks her best, either physically or mentally, at
sea. Oh, of course if you are married to her as well, the case is
different. I offer no opinion. But I know of one young man at least who
broke it off after enduring a voyage with a hen-pecked captain.
"I misjudged Jack, however. Jack was his wife's slave, but he remained
in command of his ship. You see he also had been at sea with skippers'
wives in the past. 'One word, Madeline, and home you go,' came up the
ventilator as I was sitting on the bridge after tea. I was astounded. It
was a new Jack, or rather, the old fiery, original Jack. The next
sentence, in reply to some inaudible remark of Madeline's, explained
what I had thought was a quarrel. 'Well, we must have an understanding
before we sail. I know what I'm talking about, dear. I've been Mate many
a year and I never would stand the Skipper's missus interfering with the
ship's discipline.'
"I was admiring Jack for this sagacious warning when there came a squawl
from his bathroom, where the nurse-girl was washing Angelina. Mrs. Evans
rustled across, crying out instructions concerning Babs, as they called
the youngster. And then came Jack's voice exploding in amazement.
'_What's_ that gel's name, Madeline? _What'd_ you call her?' And a voice
as clear, as soft and as pure as a silver bell answered:
"'Artemisia Macedoine, Captain. That's my name.'"