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?"
"Why, don't you know yet?" she bantered, giving him that secret,
fragrant, ambiguous smile.
"My little wife!" he repeated in a tense whisper. And as he said it, he
felt in his heart he would never know.